Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (24 page)

salute the ones who died, and the ones that gave their lives,

so we don’t have to sacrifice all the things we love …

like our chicken fried, cold beer on a Friday night,

a pair of jeans that fit just right and the radio up.
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Just as in World War II, fried food and pop music still figure as homely surrogates for American freedom. Back then, however, Americans accepted fighting for freedom as their job; today, with freedom still their birthright, they expect someone else to do the fighting.

This division of labor is no longer working, if it ever did. Sold on the basis of economy, the professional military has turned out to be a bad bargain, fiscally but also politically and morally. As a character, the warrior has proven a costly disappointment. Americans may choose to pretend otherwise, but wishful thinking won’t change the facts.

Encouraging such wishful thinking will be the institutions that benefit from existing arrangements: the national security state, the military-industrial-congressional complex, and the mushrooming private security sector. Apart from the odd military officer stricken in retirement with Smedley’s syndrome, the people who wield influence within these institutions have no incentive for seeing anything amiss.

Is the past prologue? If so, here is what Americans can look forward to: more needless wars or shadow conflicts sold by a militarized and irresponsible political elite; more wars mismanaged by an intellectually sclerotic and unimaginative senior officer corps; more wars that exact huge penalties without yielding promised outcomes, with the consequences quickly swept under the rug even as flags flutter, fighter jets swoop overhead, the band plays the “Marines’ Hymn,” and commercials tout the generosity of beer companies doing good works for “the troops.”

Averting this dismal fate will not be easy. But here’s one place to begin: repeal the three no’s that have defined the American military system since the advent of the all-volunteer force. In place of the three no’s, substitute three affirmative commitments.

Instead of
we will not change
, Americans should revert to a concept of citizenship in which privileges entail responsibilities. Among those responsibilities, one in particular stands out: an obligation to contribute to the nation’s defense when the country is at risk or when interests said to be essential to the American way of life require the use of military power.

Instead of
we will not pay
, Americans should fund their wars on a pay-as-you-go basis. Payment can take several forms. Citizens can pay higher taxes, forgo benefits, or reduce consumption. The rule of thumb should be this: any war not worth paying for is not worth fighting.

Instead of
we will not bleed
, Americans should insist upon fielding a citizen army drawn from all segments of society. The creation of the all-volunteer force reduced the importance of securing a popular buy-in as a prerequisite for military action. In Washington, this latitude fed an appetite for armed intervention. Curbing that appetite will require the restoration of popular leverage in matters relating to war. There is but one way to do this: abandon the model of the warrior-professional with his doppelgänger the private security contractor. General McChrystal’s belated discovery is correct. When it comes to war, citizens
should
have skin in the game. Only then can they expect to have any say in how (and whether) the game gets played.

How exactly might recruitment for a citizen army work? One approach is through conscription, with
all
able-bodied young men and women eligible for service but only
some
actually selected. Imagine a lottery with Natasha and Malia Obama at age eighteen having the same chance of being drafted as the manicurist’s son or the Walmart clerk’s daughter.

A less heavy-handed, broader, and more inclusive approach would be through a program of national service in which
all
able-bodied eighteen-year-olds participate, with
some
opting for the military and the rest choosing other service opportunities: preserving the environment, caring for the sick and elderly, assisting the poor and destitute, or joining the Peace Corps. Some could groom our national cemeteries. Others might work as aides in VA hospitals or staff facilities that provide shelter to homeless vets. Some national service personnel might carry assault rifles; others would empty bedpans or pass out bed linens.

Whether relying on conscription or national service to raise such a force, a two-year military term of enlistment would provide ample time to acquire and employ most soldierly skills. Crewing a tank or an artillery piece, conducting patrols or ambushes are not rocket science. Certain specialties—flying an airplane is one obvious example—require longer periods of training. Becoming a pilot, therefore, would entail a more extended period of service, undertaken voluntarily. Yet the majority of the rank and file would consist of those serving two-year terms, with a follow-on cohort taking their place as they return to civilian life.

Critics will complain that relying on a citizen army will make it difficult to sustain protracted campaigns in far-off places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Just so. It will be incumbent upon civilian and military leaders to make the case to citizen-soldiers (and their parents) for long, drawn-out, inconclusive wars in far-off places. No doubt this will pose a challenge.

Yet the mere attempt to formulate such an explanation could well open up a larger conversation about what it means to “be America” in the twenty-first century. Those committed to the proposition that the United States has succeeded Rome and Britain understandably favor warrior-professionals for imperial expeditions, conducted, of course, under less incendiary labels. The United States really has no choice in the matter, they will insist. Has not Providence itself singled out this country to play a dominant role in world affairs?

Viable alternatives to the current all-volunteer system simply do not exist, they will claim, and are inconceivable in twenty-first-century America. On this point, they will have good reason to be adamant. Change the military system and hitherto unseen (or repressed) foreign policy alternatives suddenly come into view. Being Rome or Britain no longer defines the full menu of options. Gracefully adjusting to the reality of being one great power among several—which events will oblige the United States to do in any case—becomes a possibility.

Alas, the likelihood of any such reevaluation occurring anytime soon is small. This is true not only because those wielding power in Washington oppose any change in the status quo but because the American people can’t or won’t make the effort.

Here’s why. However packaged, the three yeses all imply collective obligation. That’s something a culture in thrall to celebrities, geeks, and warriors cannot abide.

In the early 1970s, a failed war reinforced by a radical shift in culture persuaded Americans to jettison the tradition of the citizen-soldier. In creating the all-volunteer force, Richard Nixon accurately interpreted the popular will.

Forty years later, the mournful consequences of this decision continue to pile up. Not least among them is a proclivity for wars that are, if anything, even more misguided and counterproductive than Vietnam was. Yet this time around, a collective refusal even to acknowledge those consequences takes precedence over corrective action. The warriors may be brave, but the people are timid. So where courage is most needed, passivity prevails, exquisitely expressed (and sanctimoniously justified) in the omnipresent call to “support the troops.”

CODA

The American people have rarely devoted more than passing attention to their relationship with their military. In recent decades, they have ignored the subject altogether. In an earlier day, however, the issue did command the attention of at least some American soldiers. Prominent among them was George C. Marshall.

General Marshall understood that when it came to basic military policy, the central question was not whether the United States could create armed forces sufficient to protect itself and its most important interests, but whether it would do so in ways consistent with the aspirations expressed in foundational documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The real challenge, in other words, lay in harmonizing the imperatives of defense with the values of democracy.

Marshall believed such a harmonization not only possible but necessary. As army chief of staff during World War II, he personally modeled what this implied on the part of senior military officers assigned duties at the summit of power. In his own conduct, Marshall subordinated himself without reservation or complaint to civilian authority. He resolutely avoided any action carrying the slightest taint of partisanship—hence, for example, his principled refusal even to vote in national elections.
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To emphasize that his loyalty (and that of the officer corps as a whole) was to the country and not any particular individual, party, or administration, he avoided undue familiarity or false intimacy with senior civilian officials. He also insisted that those to whom he reported—the president and the secretary of war—acknowledge and respect his own authority over matters falling within the purview of the military profession. He tenaciously defended the prerogatives of the officer corps, resisting inappropriate civilian incursions into the military sphere.
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Yet determined as he was to maintain both the principle of civilian control and the status of the military profession, Marshall understood that these actions alone would not ensure a satisfactory civil-military relationship. More important than the interaction between senior officers and senior civilian officials, in his estimation, was the bond between the people and their army. Marshall believed that the two should be one, with the citizen-soldier tradition the key to ensuring this essential unity. Although devoted to the military’s professional ethic of “duty, honor, country,” Marshall insisted that the citizen-soldier—not the regular—should form the basis of the American military system, whether in times of war or peace.

With World War II still undecided, but the United States on the cusp of becoming the world’s leading power, Marshall warned against the temptation to create a standing army, its ranks filled with professionals instead of citizen-soldiers. “There are two types of organization through which the manpower of a nation may be developed,” he wrote in August 1944.

One of these is the standing army type.… This is the system of Germany and Japan. It produces highly efficient armies. But it is open to political objections.… It, therefore, has no place among the institutions of a modern democratic state based on the conception of government by the people.

The second type of military institution … is based upon the conception of a professional peace establishment (no larger than necessary to meet normal peacetime requirements) to be reinforced in time of emergency by organized units drawn from a citizen army reserve, effectively organized for this purpose in time of peace.… This is the type of army which President Washington proposed to the First Congress as one of the essential foundations of the new American Republic.… It will therefore be made the basis for all plans for a post-war peace establishment.
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In his final report as chief of staff, Marshall returned to this theme. “War has been defined by a people who have thought a lot about it—the Germans,” he wrote. The German view held that “an invincible offensive military force … could win any political argument.”

This is the doctrine Hitler carried to the verge of complete success. It is the doctrine of Japan. It is a criminal doctrine, and like other forms of crime, it has cropped up again and again since man began to live with his neighbors in communities and nations. There has long been an effort to outlaw war for exactly the same reason that man has outlawed murder. But the law prohibiting murder does not of itself prevent murder. It must be enforced. The enforcing power, however, must be maintained on a strictly democratic basis. There must not be a large standing army subject to the behest of a group of schemers. The citizen-soldier is the guarantee against such a misuse of power.
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Writing as the preeminent American exponent of genuine military professionalism, Marshall could hardly have stated his admonition in clearer terms: to abandon the tradition of the citizen-soldier, seeking to create an invincible offensive force able to win any argument, was to open the door to schemers pursuing criminal policies. Sadly, this describes what Americans have allowed to occur in our own day.

The all-volunteer force is not a blessing. It has become a blight. Americans can, of course, choose to pretend otherwise, but those choosing such a course cannot be said to love their country. Nor can they be said to care about the well-being of those sent to fight on the country’s behalf.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
. Bernard Fall recounts the fate of G. M. 100 in chapter 9 of his classic book
Street Without Joy
(Harrisburg, Pa., 1961).

2
. “G. I. Charged with CO Slaying,”
Pacific Stars & Stripes
, February 2, 1971.

3
. George W. Bush, ““President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East,” November 6, 2003,
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html
, accessed October 9, 2012.

4
. At least two additional questions also figure in determining the content of democracy.
What
is the operative meaning of freedom? And
to whom
are the privileges of freedom permitted?

1. PEOPLE’S WAR

1
. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms Speech,” January 6, 1941,
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrthefourfreedoms.htm
, accessed July 26, 2011. In concrete terms, FDR explained, this translated into “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” Yet as interpreted by the illustrator Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want” signified a happy American family gathered around a dining room table, piled high with all the bounty associated with the American tradition of Thanksgiving. By implication,
freedom
in this context meant not global free trade agreements but unfettered personal consumption.