Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (10 page)

With that, DADT’s days were numbered. Much as Nixon had done once he had decided to jettison the draft, the Pentagon made a show of deliberation, in this instance by “consulting” the troops.
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(On genuinely important matters like whether to go to war, no one has ever much cared about opinion in the ranks.) When the troops ventured no objection, the stage was set to end DADT, which following congressional action and with presidential approval finally became defunct on September 20, 2011. In the intervening eighteen years, the Pentagon had discharged approximately 14,500 servicemen and servicewomen under its provisions.
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For gay rights proponents, DADT’s demise signified a notable victory. For the military itself, it turned out to be a nonevent.
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Months later, Mullen’s successor as JCS chairman, army General Martin Dempsey, could discern no “negative effect on good order or discipline.” On the sexual orientation front, all appeared quiet. Asked why the prospect of gays serving openly had once elicited such fierce opposition from senior officers, Dempsey cited bias reinforced by ignorance. “What were we afraid of is [what] we didn’t know.”
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IN STEP

However belatedly, the army, along with the rest of the armed services, had once again bowed to the prevailing normative winds, much as it had already done on race and gender. Still, the Pentagon’s capitulation on DADT had its own special significance. In this instance, the viability of the all-volunteer force was never really at stake. In practice, the army and the other services do not need gays any more than they need Ivy Leaguers—the numbers involved are not large enough to make a decisive difference. Nor was striking sexual orientation from the criteria determining eligibility for military service going to induce droves of gays to enlist, thereby making life easy for recruiting sergeants. Just as female soldiers didn’t turn the army pink, so allowing gays to serve openly is unlikely to produce a mauve-tinted military. Fort Bragg or Fort Benning won’t be replacing San Francisco’s Castro district or Key West as favored gay watering holes anytime soon.

Yet the no-big-deal attitude that the Pentagon projected as it dismantled DADT concealed a very big deal indeed. Here, as far as relations between the army and society were concerned, the Long Sixties reached their denouement. The civil-military antagonisms to which that turbulent era gave rise, compounded by Vietnam and expressed most fiercely in opposition to the draft, were now finally laid to rest. Over the course of four decades, largely for reasons of self-preservation, the army had adapted itself to social and cultural changes that the 1960s had wrought. An institution that in 1971 had seemed badly out of step with society was by 2011 in lockstep on the defining social issues of the day. On matters related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, the army had caught up with the rest of the country and appeared none the worse for wear.

Now, in direct response to DADT’s repeal, institutions where the trinity of race, gender, and sexuality had become most deeply enshrined offered the military an olive branch of sorts. The result, expressed by the highly publicized decision of (some) elite universities to end ROTC’s Vietnam-induced exile from campus, may not have qualified as genuine reconciliation. But as an armistice that served the interests of all parties, it seemed likely to hold indefinitely.

Providing the foundation for that armistice was a new civil-military bargain. Harvard president Drew Faust accurately captured its essence. “The repeal of DADT,” she announced approvingly, “affirms American ideals of equal opportunity and underscores the importance of the right to military service as a fundamental dimension of citizenship.”
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At Harvard, as at other elite colleges and universities, few students were clamoring to exercise any such right. Still, to validate and affirm its existence, Faust promised that, after a decades-long absence, ROTC would be returning to Harvard. With the Pentagon having tacitly acknowledged a universal right to serve, Harvard would not abridge that right.

As Faust’s formulation suggests, individual choice had now fully eclipsed state power as the principal determinant of who will defend the country. The end of conscription had shorn the state of its authority to
compel
service. The evolving identity of the all-volunteer force, culminating in the abandonment of DADT, progressively curtailed the state’s authority to
deny
individuals the option of serving, except on narrowly drawn grounds of mental or physical ability.
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The conversion of military service from collective obligation to personal preference was now complete and irrevocable. With that, an army that in the 1960s had been politically radioactive became politically inert—of no more importance in national domestic politics than the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Forest Service.

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SEARCHING FOR DRAGONS TO SLAY

By accommodating demands for social and cultural change, the army succeeded in restoring its legitimacy in the eyes of American society. That achievement, however, came at a cost, even if few observers contemplated the implications. By no stretch of the imagination did the all-volunteer army qualify as—or seek to be—an army of the people. Now culturally in step, it was content to march alongside, but at arm’s length from, the rest of American society. At the time, this arrangement suited most Americans just fine.

For military leaders, such a distance had its benefits. In matters relating to war’s actual conduct, the officer corps continued to exercise at least nominal authority. Drew Faust might instruct the military on how to treat gays and lesbians, but when it came to preparing and organizing to fight she deferred to those with stars on their shoulders. Deciding how to train American infantrymen remained the business of army officers at Fort Benning, not academics in Harvard Yard.

Social and cultural accommodation also helped restore a sense of discipline within the ranks. With time, the internal divisions that had wracked the army as Vietnam wound down—blacks versus whites, dopers versus drinkers, lifers versus short-timers—healed. The collective dissent and overt challenges to authority that prompted flummoxed commanders to host “rap sessions” or add “soul food” to mess hall menus dissipated. By the end of the twentieth century, the Vietnam-era afflictions besieging the army had largely washed out of the system. The chain of command was once again just that.

These achievements—legitimacy restored and discipline reasserted—ensured the viability of the all-volunteer force. Indeed, they made any alternative to such a military essentially unimaginable. Transitioning from the draft to this new arrangement had not occurred without missteps. Yet as with the memory of a bad hangover following a night of excess, the urge to move on, suppressing any recollection of past embarrassments, was overwhelming.

The army proved less adept at accommodating—or even understanding—a second revolution, a geopolitical one touched off by the passing of the Cold War. For decades, the standoff between opposing superpowers had provided the lens through which Americans, elites and ordinary people alike, interpreted international politics. Soviet power and the ambitions ascribed to Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev had served as an all-purpose rationale for the vast national security apparatus created in the wake of World War II. Prior to 1945, the United States had shied away from maintaining a large, permanent military establishment. Except in times of actual hostilities, popular reluctance to support an army worthy of the name had been particularly acute. After 1945, however, this changed. Americans convinced themselves that the challenge posed by the Soviet Union and the forces of global communism left them with no choice but to field an immense warfighting establishment, including large ground forces geared for combat. For nearly a half century, standing ready to fight the Soviet hordes had provided the United States Army with its overarching raison d’être.

After years lost wandering in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, the army’s preoccupation with the Red Army returned with a vengeance. By the 1980s, the last vestiges of “Elvis’s army”—the draftee force that had deployed to Southeast Asia—had disappeared.
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In its place there emerged “Abe’s army,” its cigar-chomping patron saint General Creighton Abrams. Successor to William Westmoreland as U.S. commander in Vietnam and then as army chief of staff, Abrams died prematurely in 1974, with the army he loved still very much trying to regain its footing. Yet a generation of true-believing disciples carried on his work, fired by a common determination to exorcise the demons of Vietnam.

The overall aim, unspoken but widely understood, was for the officer corps to reclaim control of the army’s destiny. With that in mind, Abe’s disciples intended to fight only those wars mattering enough to attract the nation’s full backing. This consideration determined the army’s organization. Furthermore, they intended to fight only wars that conformed to their conception of what war itself should be, with victory once more the aim. This consideration shaped operational doctrine.

No more getting hung out to dry. No more serving as the plaything of meddling civilian officials. No more long, drawn-out inconclusive conflicts. This describes Abe’s vision, which became the army’s as a whole. The place that held the prospect of fulfilling that vision was not some Third World country but Europe, where Abe himself had first won plaudits as a hard-charging armored force commander during World War II and where Russians, rather than their Asian “proxies,” would be the foe.

Creating Abe’s army entailed a collaborative effort involving many hands. Among the collaborators, none possessed greater value than the Soviet Union itself. Abe’s army needed the Red Army, the more fearsome the better. For an officer corps committed to avoiding any recurrence of Vietnam, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies provided an invaluable “other.” Preparing to fight Russians was a gift that promised never to stop giving, the ready-made answer to every question essential to institutional recovery and continued health. An expansionist Soviet empire, its mighty legions armed to the teeth with a massive arsenal of modern weapons, was just what the doctor ordered.
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Unfortunately, the Soviets proved unwilling to keep up their end of the arrangement. Reliably obdurate for decades, over the course of the 1980s they became disconcertingly amenable. A decade of progressive threat deflation ensued, with the Kremlin embracing liberalizing reforms, signing treaties to reduce nuclear weapons stocks, and announcing huge unilateral cuts—five hundred thousand troops—to its Eastern Europe garrisons. In 1989, the Soviets stood passively by as the Berlin Wall fell, with German unification following shortly thereafter. In 1991, the Warsaw Pact, paramount symbol of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, dissolved. That same year, so did the Soviet Union.

For Abe’s army, the good news was the bad news: mission accomplished, without any actual fighting, no less. Now what?

The collapse of the Soviet empire presented Americans with a rare opportunity to pose first-order questions about their nation’s proper role in the world and by extension about the size, configuration, and disposition of its armed forces. As some observers saw it, with the Cold War over, the American people could rightly expect to claim a reward—a “peace dividend”—in the form of a more modest military posture and reduced military spending. After all, Europe, the central focus of Abe’s army, was now whole and free. As for the dwindling roster of communist regimes, they were either like Cuba too sclerotic to worry about or like China too economically dynamic to quarrel with.

Along with the rest of the national security apparatus, the army had a powerful interest in curbing Washington’s inclination to distribute any such dividend. For the Pentagon, peace posed a concrete and imminent threat. Generals who had slept undisturbed back when Warsaw Pact commanders had ostensibly been planning to launch World War III now fretted nervously over the prospect of their budget taking a hit. The most obvious way to deflect that prospect was to conjure up new dangers to which only Abe’s army could offer the necessary response. In Saddam Hussein, Abe’s disciples found a made-to-order helpmate.

SADDAM AND SULLY TO THE RESCUE

Responsibility for formulating a definition of purpose to replace the Cold War while discovering a new adversary to replace the Red Army fell primarily on the shoulders of General Gordon R. Sullivan, army chief of staff from 1991 to 1995. During his tenure as the service’s most senior officer, Sullivan wrote, or allowed to appear under his name, a series of essays in official journals, most prominently
Military Review
, published at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. These articles, along with the writings of Sullivan’s three-star and four-star contemporaries, record the army’s response to the passing of the Cold War.

In a memoir, Sullivan recalled watching the fall of the Berlin Wall, as broadcast by CNN. “It was momentous. It was as if we were IBM contemplating the first Apple computer, or General Motors the first Volkswagen or Toyota.”
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The comparisons were revealing. IBM had been producing computers for decades before Steve Jobs unveiled his first creation. It would continue to do so for decades to come. Much the same could be said about General Motors as it confronted the challenge posed by cheap, high-quality imports. GM was not going to quit making cars, but preserving its standing in that business meant adapting to new conditions.

So, too, with the army after the Cold War. Its leaders spoke in terms of revolutionary upheaval while actually pursuing a course of incremental adaptation. The aim of adaptation was fundamentally conservative: to preserve the army’s status within the national security establishment and its standing in the eyes of society, or as Sullivan put it, “to take the best army in the world and make it the best army in a different world.”
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