Andrew J. Bacevich's 'Breach of Trust'

No one remembers the draft with nostalgia. Conscription was first organized to fight the Civil War, and later World Wars I and II. The Continental Congress never raised a truly national army because the states feared to lose control of their militias in it, so the veterans of the war of independence, pay owing and wounds festering, had no responsible agency to turn to. Thus the latest scandal of our republic was also its first.

Conscription was never a peacetime obligation until the Cold War put the country on a permanent war footing. Dwight Eisenhower, who presided over the emergence of what he dubbed the military-industrial complex, warned against its implications in his farewell address. If war was profitable, then the continued readiness for it was no less so, especially when R&D technology was always geared to making weapons systems — the more expensive, the better — obsolete as quickly as possible. War, in short, did not have to occur to maintain profiteering from a militarized society; it was actually preferable to avoid its messiness, and of course the possibility, no matter how remote, that it might result in defeat — or Armaggedon.

The Vietnam War changed this equation: It degraded the idea of a citizen army, virtuously participating in its country’s defense. Richard Nixon, in this as in so many other ways the author of our modern politics, abolished conscription and substituted the volunteer army of today. His goal, as Bacevich points out, was not to transform the relationship of the military to American society, but to back out of an unpopular war. Ironically, it was the much-despised General William Westmoreland who pointed out the longer-term “danger to our society” — Westy’s own words — in separating the military from society at large. But the citizen army of World War II, battered in Korea, had for all intents and purposes ceased to exist. Even without Vietnam, it was unsustainable in an imperial republic. Nixon did the only thing he could.

The new army, as Bacevich points out, had its advantages. As a profession, it had to offer a living wage, decent conditions and benefits, and a path to career advancement to both ethnic and gender minorities in its ranks. In this sense, it became a more egalitarian institution. The cost, however, was to make it a caste. Military personnel became honorary untouchables, gliding through our midst without the need of contact on either side. It was an army, but whose?

History repeats

The answer to that question came with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Their protracted length was reminiscent of the wars of the late Roman Republic. As to who controlled the army, the sticking-point of Roman politics, the answer was, finally, an emperor. In our own late republic, it is the president.

As Bacevich points out, this was not simply a matter of usurpation. It happened in collusion with the public and its representatives, who ceded the war-making power to the president. The deal was that presidents are effectively free to wage war when and as they wish with what is essentially a legionary force. When George W. Bush put Afghanistan and Iraq on a credit card, the transaction was complete. Wars would be fought with someone else’s blood and paid for with another generation’s treasure.

Since the volunteer army was enlisted from a restricted demographic pool — essentially, the poor — it was smaller than its predecessor. This determined the scope and nature of the wars it could fight (or fashion) and put a premium on outsourcing, both in terms of technology and external personnel, i.e., the contractors, who soon took over both maintenance functions and, increasingly, combat operations. By the standards of the conscript army, the modern soldier is cosseted. But he is no less expendable, as multiple tours of duty, inadequate armor, and the exploitation of National Guard reserves make clear. Above all, he (and, increasingly, she) is put at risk in so-called wars of choice, which need not be fought but certainly replenish space at Arlington Cemetery.

Who's a "hero"?

Bacevich is scathing in his description of this process as a corruption both of the military and of civil society as a whole. The net of blame is cast wide: politicians, generals, policy intellectuals, war profiteers, mass media, and the general public. There are few who are not villains in this story, and as for “heroes,” that is simply the debased term we apply to those we use as cannon fodder. It’s not only an abuse of language itself — what’s actual valor worth when even a file clerk is a “hero”? — but, of graver import. It’s an ideological blinker that suppresses debate and dissent: if all our soldiers are heroes, must not all our wars be just? The same goes, of course, for the equally ubiquitous injunction to “Support our troops.” The only permissible criticism of our wars is over the recurrent failures of the chronically underfunded Veterans Administration. In this latest episode, a truly honest and courageous soldier, Eric Shinseki, has taken the fall.

In place of “heroes,” Bacevich suggests the term “warriors.” This, he says, is not intended as a compliment, but as a way to designate our new military caste system of soldiers, who fight whenever and wherever they’re told to on the ever-shifting fronts of a global battlefield shaped by Pentagon planners. It’s a variant of the unending wars described by George Orwell in 1984, with the imperial presidency in place of Big Brother and permanent hegemony — as recently articulated in Barack Obama’s West Point speech — as its goal.

Bacevich suggests that the only way to break the vicious cycle of our war culture is by returning to a citizen army based on the concept of universal service, military or otherwise. He isn’t sanguine about the prospect, but he sees it as the only salvation for our democracy. Conscription, though, didn’t prevent us from bogging down in Korea and Vietnam or engaging in “crisis” interventions in Lebanon or the Dominican Republic. It’s too late to turn back short of a renovation of not just our military but of the civil institutions it reflects. Whether we’re up to that job will determine our fate.