Campaign medals are for campaigns, not small-scale operations

On June 30, Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, introduced the Iranian Campaign Medal Act to recognize the recent U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. According to Gonzales, this medal would recognize “our troops deployed to Iran under President Trump’s decisive leadership,” specifically for service on June 22. According to one cosponsor, the medal is intended to apply to “not just the pilots [but] also the maintenance, planning, operational, and support personnel” involved.

While Gonzales’s desire to recognize military service is commendable, he is misinformed about the type of medal that is appropriate for Operation Midnight Hammer, as well as the process of approving it. Gonzales is a retired Navy master chief petty officer and apparently earned campaign medals for service in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so he should know that campaign medals are not intended for short-term operations like Midnight Hammer. Even if he does not know this offhand, he or members of his staff are certainly capable of referencing the Defense Department’s manual of military decorations and awards prior to introducing legislation.

The criteria for campaign medals are clearly spelled out in the DOD awards manual: “deployed participation in large-scale or long-duration combat operations.” Shorter operations, like Midnight Hammer, which occurred on only one day, objectively fall short of this threshold. Operations like Midnight Hammer are recognized by expeditionary medals, which require “deployed participation in small-scale and/or short-duration combat operations or military operations where there is an imminent threat of hostilities.”

Further, the manual makes clear that campaign medals are normally established by executive order, although some recent campaign medals have been authorized by public law.

The DOD awards manual states that in cases of combat operations that are not prolonged or large scale, the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal (AFEM) should be considered. Awarding this medal does not preclude creating a campaign medal at a future date, should short-term operations later “evolve into large-scale or long-duration conflicts.” The AFEM requires a determination by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “significant numbers” of service members were participants, and is intended for cases where service members “encounter foreign armed opposition, or are otherwise placed … in such position that … hostile action by foreign armed forces was imminent even though it did not materialize.” Thus, if the AFEM is approved for Midnight Hammer, it would probably recognize only aircrew who were engaged in actual combat operations or duty deemed equally hazardous.

The AFEM would likely not be awarded to support personnel who were not physically present on the combat mission, but this would be equally true for a campaign medal, which requires service members to be “deployed to the geographic areas where the combat is actually occurring.” However, support personnel might be eligible for other decorations.

A review of prior operations that merited only the AFEM also supports the argument that a campaign medal is inappropriate for Midnight Hammer. For example, operations in Lebanon from 1983-1987, Grenada in 1983 (Urgent Fury), Panama from 1989-1990 (Just Cause), Bosnia from 1992-1998 (Joint Endeavor and Joint Guard) and Somalia from 1992-1995 (Restore Hope and United Shield) were all recognized with the AFEM rather than a campaign medal. Several of these operations involved combat, and all were of a greater duration than Midnight Hammer.

Perhaps the closest analog to Midnight Hammer is Operation El Dorado Canyon, the Reagan administration’s long-range aircraft strike at so-called “terrorist centers” in Libya in April 1986, a response to the bombings of a TWA flight and a discotheque in West Berlin. El Dorado Canyon appropriately merited an AFEM, despite encountering greater resistance than Midnight Hammer; one U.S. Air Force F-111 Aardvark was shot down and the crew was killed.

Certainly, an executive order could create an Iranian Campaign Medal, with or without congressional involvement. But this would be unprecedented and throw the existing service medal framework into disarray, contradicting existing regulations and creating a paradox where a short operation has a campaign medal, and yet far more prolonged or larger-scale operations lack the same recognition. This is not a situation where there is an absence of service medals to appropriately recognize a combat deployment; the appropriate medal is simply not the one Gonzales proposed.

Dwight S. Mears is a retired Army major with a military background in aviation, military intelligence and strategic planning. He was commissioned from West Point as an aviation officer and flew and commanded in helicopter and airplane units, and subsequently was selected to return to West Point as a history professor. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a J.D. from Lewis & Clark Law School. He is the author of “The Medal of Honor: The Evolution of America’s Highest Military Decoration.”