Martin Dempsey and Chuck Hagel have publicly been vocal on the issue. Brass slow-walk sex-assault orders

President Barack Obama set a high bar for the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders in May when he delivered marching orders on sexual assault.

“We will not stop until we’ve seen this scourge, from what is the greatest military in the world, eliminated,” Obama said in a late afternoon Cabinet room meeting, flanked by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey.


Like good soldiers, Hagel and Dempsey have been busy since, writing new rules on troop harassment, checking in on progress every week and pretty much prodding everyone, civilian and enlisted, to pick up their game.

But privately, military officials also are trying to be realistic about what they can do — and the rhetoric they’re using and the policy prescriptions they’re advocating fall well below the goals set for them by their commander in chief.

( Also on POLITICO: Chain of Command Series)

“I’d say this conversation, this response, is better framed in how far can we go to mitigate this issue because eradicating it is not even in the realm of possible,” a senior Pentagon official acknowledged to POLITICO this summer.

The seeming disconnect between Obama and his top Pentagon advisers is not only not surprising, it follows a historical trend. Military leaders frequently differ from their civilian bosses on the big social issues of the time.

Harry Truman’s battles with the generals culminated in an executive order integrating African-Americans into the military. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign promise allowing gays in the military turned into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise when military brass, led by Gen. Colin Powell, balked. Obama allowed women into combat roles, ending decades of incremental change and bureaucratic foot-dragging.

With sexual assault, once again there is daylight between a president and the Pentagon’s top commanders — and, again, over how to solve a problem that the armed forces has faced for decades.

Dempsey and the military brass are urging the Senate to use caution before making some of the changes they are considering making on sexual assault as soon as this week as part of the annual defense authorization bill. Their opposition centers around a far-reaching plan from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) that would remove the chain of command from prosecuting sexual assaults and other major crimes.

( Also on POLITICO: Gillibrand to push original plan)

As the Defense Department’s first enlisted combat veteran to serve as secretary, Hagel also has advocated against rocking the boat. He’s said repeatedly that he’s open to any good ideas from Congress. But he’s also personally lobbied senators to vote against Gillibrand’s amendment, testifying this spring that he didn’t think it would be smart to eliminate the military’s command structure from the military’s justice system.

“Because it is the culture. It is the institution. It’s the people within that institution that have to fix the problem, and that’s the culture. The people are the culture. So I don’t know how you disconnect that from the accountability of command,” Hagel told the Senate Budget Committee in June.

Obama, meantime, has left plenty to the imagination, in much the same way Clinton did 20 years ago on gays in the military. The president told Hagel and Dempsey earlier this year to “leave no stone unturned” when looking at the legislative options. He’s got some of his top advisers on the issue, including Vice President Joe Biden, Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama’s chief of staff.

But Obama also has taken no public position on the Gillibrand amendment. That’s allowed him to avoid angering the generals he needs to carry out their military orders, but it’s left frustrated some of the women’s groups that twice helped elect him.

“I think he’s probably in an uncomfortable situation,” said retired Brig. Gen. Dennis McGinnis, a former Obama Defense Department appointee who supports Gillibrand’s proposal. “He’s looking for guidance from the brass and the brass is trying to let the system work itself out.”

The brass no doubt are trying to clean up the ranks from within. Hagel meets weekly for an hour with the Pentagon’s sexual assault team to hear what each of the branches is doing to tackle the problem. Dempsey, who acknowledged taking his “eye off the ball” during a decade of wars, is working the topic too.

“He’s got Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and the rest of the world to worry about, and he and I talk about this issue all the time. That’s a fundamental change compared to last year,” Army Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, Dempsey’s top legal counsel, said this fall during testimony before a congressionally chartered panel studying the issue.

But the Pentagon’s interests also are different from those of Obama and the civilians he has put in charge. Richard Socarides, a former Clinton White House aide who worked on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said that’s reason enough for the president to look elsewhere for advice.

“The military always thinks it knows what’s best when it comes to their own and at most will humor the civilian leadership by listening to their views, but thereafter pretty much they do whatever they want,” he said.

Military officials note they come at the issue from a different perspective, knowing that bad actors are serving inside a population that’s mostly young, mostly male and far away from family, friends and familiar surroundings. Inside the ranks is a macho, alcohol-filled environment where sexual assaults do happen.

The military is also a conservative institution at its core, where its way of handling a problem doesn’t even come close to the common response of political leaders more familiar with polls and election strategies.

It’s a split that “gets to the heart of how units are organized, constituted and disciplined,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and defense expert at the Brookings Institution.

“Saying an officer can’t handle sexual assault within his or her unit is akin to saying that the officer can’t handle his unit … and challenges the core notion that a commander must be responsible for all that his or her subordinates do in combat and more broadly,” O’Hanlon said.

Looking at the responses from Obama, Hagel and the Pentagon generals on the issue, O’Hanlon said he sees a “bit of a divide on the understanding of the severity of the problem.”

“Uniformed military personnel don’t tolerate sexual assault as a rule, but they also know the vast majority of personnel don’t commit such acts,” he said. “They intuitively sense what the statistics show, that this may not be more of a problem in the military than elsewhere in society. By contrast, civilians are reacting to learning about a new problem they didn’t understand before. So their instinct is to try to do something about it.”

For the military leaders aggressively fighting Gillibrand, the changes would be dramatic if the Senate adopted her proposal and Obama ultimately signed it into law.

A slate of military lawyers would have final say instead of commanders about who faces court-martial. That matters to the career brass who would be “losing power personally” long after the current administration leaves office, said Rachel VanLandingham, a former lawyer for the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps who worked as a chief legal adviser to U.S. Central Command under Dempsey and Gen. David Petraeus.

“They are commanders, who will individually and collectively have their prosecutorial power taken away in a wide swath of cases if Sen. Gillibrand’s legislation wins the day. And they and their subordinate commanders have to continue to lead troops and maintain good order and discipline the day after such change,” she said.

“Secretary Hagel isn’t losing anything, except perhaps the support of his Joint Chiefs, and isn’t leading troops — isn’t directly responsible for their lives in the way commanders such as Gen. Dempsey has been — today or tomorrow,” VanLandingham added.

Retired Maj. Gen. John Altenburg Jr., a former Army deputy Judge Advocate General, agreed that it’s the complicated implementation of the Gillibrand proposal that helps explain the difference in reaction between the White House and Pentagon military leaders.

“There’s always some daylight there,” he said. “For me, it’s explained by the fact that these are the people who have to go do it. They understand better than anybody else the implications of change and how many resources it requires to make a change.”

Denise Krepp, a retired Coast Guard officer and former Obama chief counsel at the U.S. Maritime Administration, said she’d like to see the president “take a strong stand” on Gillibrand’s amendment, though she’s also not surprised he’s stayed out of it so far in deference to the brass.

“They’re going to give him a very strong argument that any deviation would create chaos,” she said.

While Obama has avoided angering the military and parts of his political base, his continued silence has also left room for others around him to steal the spotlight.

Two of his female nominees to top military posts have already gotten stuck in the Senate because of their work on the sexual assault issue.

Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, tapped to be the No. 2 leader at the Air Force Space Command, recently opted for retirement rather than wait any longer for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) to lift a hold she placed on the nomination last spring. Helms got in McCaskill’s cross hairs for overturning a jury conviction in 2012 on a sexual assault case.

Gillibrand has also blocked Jo Ann Rooney to be undersecretary of the Navy because of written testimony she delivered to a Senate committee, indicating she’d weigh a unit’s morale among the reasons for deciding whether to prosecute a sexual assault case — not just the evidence.

Then there’s Jeh Johnson, Obama’s first-term Pentagon general counsel, now awaiting Senate confirmation to become the next Homeland Security secretary. Earlier this year, after leaving his Defense Department job but before his latest nomination, Johnson questioned the integrity of the Pentagon’s current prosecution system in an appearance on MSNBC.

“The problem, I believe, has become so pervasive, the bad behavior is so pervasive, we need to look at fundamental change in the military justice system itself,” Johnson told Rachel Maddow.

For the senators who have heard plenty from the Pentagon concerning its opposition to the amendment, they say now is the time for Obama to speak up, even if it means driving a deeper wedge with the military.

“I do believe it’d be important for the president to weigh in. He’s commander in chief, and I’m disappointed he hasn’t,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an opponent of Gillibrand’s amendment.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a prominent Gillibrand ally, said he can see parallels for Obama between sexual assault and two other Pentagon moves: ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” and opening up combat roles to women. Both faced strong resistance from the military generals, but he predicted the brass would follow Obama if he did come out in favor of Gillibrand’s amendment.

“Presidential leadership is the ultimate power when it comes to the military,” Blumenthal said. “To their credit, the military will follow the president’s lead. So there’s huge potential for the president to lead on this issue if he chooses to do so.”