Summary: Now the wars have ended (although some Americans continue to fight abroad) we move to the next and equally difficult phase — retrospective and learning. Too many Americans seek to skip this — looking forward in ignorance rather than gaining something from our past. Here we look at a new article by James Fallow, one of the few exceptions. It’s a long deep look at our wars, the US military, and its relationship to America. (1st of 2 posts today)
“The Tragedy of the American Military“
By James Fallows
The Atlantic, January/February 2015
“The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.”
James Fallows’ does some of the best long-form journalism of anyone today. It covers so many subjects (ten thousand words) with so many contradictory cross-currents that it defies easy analysis. Much of it I agree with. However Fallow’s core message is pernicious and his recommendations are almost irrelevant to the problems he so well describes. It points us in the wrong direction to understand and solve our problems.
He opens with description of a speech by Obama in mid-September at Central Command HQ in Florida (transcript here):
If any of my fellow travelers at O’Hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. And why would they? This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.
Fallows’ article has received lavish praise from many in the military, active duty and veterans. What would their reaction have been if Obama had criticized the military for the many reasons Fallows (rightly) points to? How many in the military would have said “thanks, boss”? What does Fallows expect us to do after hearing a speech about the military? Although the US faces rivals and foes, as always, today’s threats are small compared to those of the past century. Also, the level of global violence has been dropping for generations. We should turn our attention from war and the military to the other important concerns.
The remainder of the article gives the same message, in different forms.
I’m not aware of any midterm race for the House or Senate in which matters of war and peace — as opposed to immigration, Obamacare, voting rights, tax rates, the Ebola scare — were first-tier campaign issues on either side …
After 13 years our war-madness has faded! Oddly, Fallows doesn’t agree. His following analysis is quite backwards.
This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military … has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not …. At the end of World War II, nearly 10% of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty … Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings … The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply … the distance between today’s stateside America and its always-at-war expeditionary troops is extraordinary.
The aberration in US history is not today, but our militarization during WWII and the Cold War. Until then America had a small military except during relatively brief wars (the Civil War was only 5 years). With few external threats (similar to today), we considered that appropriate. Nor was there an idyllic military-civilian relationship. Our policies for using them was often just as daft in the past as it is today; the public knew little of the military and had no respect for it.
“Fear, fatigue, poor rations and little appreciation from his countrymen — that was the lot of the US Soldier whose job it was to enforce the nation’s arrogant and often muddleheaded Indian policies.”
— Opening sentence to the The Soldiers volume in the Time-Life series “The Old West” (1973)
Fallows then goes to his primary message.
… they {us, the public} lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as they would any other institution’s.
His paints the US citizenry as knowledgeable and engaged in public policy. But as Fallows himself wrote in 2011, “the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress.” Of all aspects of public policy, present or past, the public is probably least qualified to decide on military and geopolitical affairs — whether a veteran or not.
For two decades after World War II, the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection.
Fallows makes this point repeatedly, as if this hyper-militarized period should be our standard. Perhaps he has it backwards, and we should shrink the military (as are almost all other nations with large military forces), ratchet back our bellicose foreign policy, and think less about the military. For 150 years the military survived as a largely ignored sliver of America; we might take a few steps back to that norm.
If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going.
Fallows provides zero evidence for this serious charge. Nor does he say what we should have done. Should we all have enlisted? Perhaps as in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, only vets should vote. The public supported everything: the troops, more military funding (the various shortfalls were the military’s fault, such as in healthcare and veterans’ services), even the wars — until they were revealed as based on lies and incompetently run.
Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules.
Fallows repeats this charge about relative “mindshare” several times in different ways, never with the evidence.
But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now.
This is misleading on several levels. First, do members of the military (active or vet) solicit and value civilian advice? If we chose to exercise more active control over the military, who would most strongly oppose us? Second, the wars were not run on “autopilot”, but supported by one of the most intense propaganda barrages since Vietnam (with senior generals, active and retired, in starring roles). Third, do our rulers often listen to us? One of the public’s strongest policy recommendations for decades has been to limit immigration, yet we’ve had almost wide open borders for generations (until 9/11 and high unemployment forced change).
Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win.
While correct, he omits to mention that we believed this after 9-11 because the military said so. We had COIN, our tech, and scholar-soldiers like General Petraeus and John Nagl (Lt Colonel, US Army, retired). In hindsight he’s right; we should not have believed. The logical conclusion of Fallows’ reasoning here and in the remaining 8 thousand words (most of which I agree with) points to a defect in our political system. What fix does he recommend? Perhaps a Leftist-like distrust of the military and its endless wars. Plus a draft, to spread the burden (an obvious response to Fallows’ insights about our narrow participation with the military). No; instead he serves us weak tea.
What might that mean, in specific? Here is a start. In the private report prepared for President Obama more than three years ago, Gary Hart’s working group laid out prescriptions on a range of operational practices … Three of the recommendations were about the way the country as a whole should engage with its armed forces. They were:
Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. …
Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities.
Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.
The first is probably futile (we could cross the Atlantic on the collected reports of government commissions). As is the second; no bureaucratic schema can handle the ever-changing kaleidoscope of geopolitics (there is already a clear legal process). The third relies on the President’s ability to change things by force of will (a codicil to Matthew Yglesias’ Green Lantern theory of geopolitics).
Fallows provides a confused but gripping description of our dysfunctional military (the majority of his analysis is excellent), but the framing and diagnosis are flawed and he chokes when it comes to the cures. It’s a start to a long debate we must have to prevent more lost wars.
Other posts in this series: why does America keep losing?
These matters are more extensively discussed in the previous posts in this series.
- Are we chickenhawks and so bear the responsibility for our lost wars since 9/11?
- Does America have the best military in the world?
- Is victory impossible in modern wars? Or just not possible for us?
- Why we lose so many wars, and how we can win — a summary at Martin van Creveld’s website.
- A powerful new article shows why we lose so many wars: FAILure to learn.
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts Military and strategic theory – and practice and Our military, and our national defense strategy, and especially these about the skill and integrity of our senior military leaders:
- The Core Competence of America’s Military Leaders.
- The moral courage of our senior generals, or their lack of it.
- Obama vs. the Generals.
- Careerism and Psychopathy in the US Military leadership, GI Wilson (Colonel, USMC, retired).
- Rolling Stone releases Colonel Davis’ blockbuster report about Afghanistan – and our senior generals!
Now that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have ended in failure…
…Fallows recommends a tighter engagement of the public with the military. I am skeptical that would have created stronger oversight, or that we could have overcome the plans of our military leaders. Perhaps we need less engagement with the military, more respect for our generals — and more sympathy for those that do the fighting. Here’s the origin of the “What you mean ‘we’, Kemosable?” joke, in Mad Magazine, issue 38 in 1958. There’s a lesson here.
