Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

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Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

 

We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President,

wearing a " jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in

Chief' printed on his right front, " to address vast assemblages of

American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands

at the point of a missile. As Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts

it: " Increasingly, the president uses speeches to troops to praise

American ideals and send a signal to other nations the administration

is targeting for democratic change. "

 

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized

ways of signaling " change " that are even blunter. We already have, for

instance, hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small,

spread around the world, but never enough, never deeply enough

embedded in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy

heartlands of our planet. The military budget soars; planning for

high-tech weaponry for the near (and distant) future -- like the

Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule capable of delivering

" conventional " munitions anywhere on the planet within 2 hours and due

to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business in

Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American

way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

 

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on

militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published,

The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be

critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a

West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such

magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former

Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.

 

Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a

journey. He writes that he still situates himself " culturally on the

right. And I continue to view the remedies proferred by mainstream

liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for

mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration

and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a

buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the

barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies:

these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this

score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by

the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional

liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the

problem. "

 

I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism

and military-basing policy, The Sorrows of Empire. Bacevich's The New

American Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become

enthralled by -- and found themselves in thrall to -- military power

and the idea of global military supremacy, should be placed right

beside it in any library. Below, you'll find the first of two long

excerpts (slightly adapated) from the book, and posted with the kind

permission of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University

Press. This one offers Bacevitch's thoughts on the ways in which,

since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized, a process to

which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added momentum.

On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation

neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.

 

Bacevich's book carefully lays out and analyzes the various influences

that have fed into the creation and sustenance of the new American

militarism over the last decades. It would have been easy enough to

create a 4-part or 6-part Tomdispatch series from the book. Bacevich

is, for instance, fascinating on evangelical Christianity (and its

less than war-like earlier history) as well as on the ways in which

the military, after the Vietnam debacle, rebuilt itself as a genuine

imperial force, separated from the American people and with an ethos

" more akin to that of the French Foreign Legion " -- a force prepared

for war without end. But for that, and much else, you'll have to turn

to the book itself. Tom

 

The Normalization of War

By Andrew J. Bacevich

 

At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power.

The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American

experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals

and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.

 

The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless,

Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any

consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered

whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating

permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American

principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward

militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political

figure of genuine stature.

 

For example, when Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts,

ran for the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George

W. Bush's national security policies in terms of tactics rather than

first principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the

U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long " global war

on terror. " It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew

Kerry's ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been

" extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted. " Kerry faulted

Bush because, in his view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked " the preparation

and hardware they needed to fight as effectively as they could. " Bush

was expecting too few soldiers to do too much with too little.

Declaring that " keeping our military strong and keeping our troops as

safe as they can be should be our highest priority, " Kerry promised if

elected to fix these deficiencies. Americans could count on a

President Kerry to expand the armed forces and to improve their

ability to fight.

 

Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable.

It was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense

and had no intention of departing from the prevailing national

security consensus.

 

Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today

take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified

good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed

might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates

American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter

century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies

suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with

its self-image as the military power nonpareil

 

How Much Is Enough?

 

This new American militarism manifests itself in several different

ways. It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration

of America's present-day military establishment.

 

Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders

in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed

services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave

and proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large

and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat,

policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the

passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately

out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in 1945.

 

Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power

for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and

is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military

capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or

combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative

and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment

dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S.

Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft

carriers, the once-vaunted [british] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in

all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely

comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven

thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields,

cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear

reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today,

the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the

entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even

larger " air forces, " one an integral part of the Navy and the other

officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of

numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half

again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a

second, even larger " army " actually called the U.S. Army -- which in

turn also operates its own " air force " of some five thousand aircraft.

 

All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money.

Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is

12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era.

In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five

the combined defense budgets of the seven " rogue states " then

comprising the roster of U.S. enemies.16 Indeed, by some calculations,

the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the

world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.

 

Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending

between the United States and all other nations will expand further

still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget

will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it

was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced

long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average

by 23 percent -- despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a

so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem,

it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press.

It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer

exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider

the question " How much is enough? "

 

On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do?

Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent

parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The

primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is

global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters

of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the

world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.

 

That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the

United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in

several dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in

all -- rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these

countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security

needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists,

U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training,

exercising, planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in

some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop

on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned

itself the mission of " shaping " the international environment, members

of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached

a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to

restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends.

Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of

forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United

States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.

 

The Quest for Military Dominion

 

The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also

affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed

services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure

from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities.

Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely

adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of

supremacy as evidence of falling behind.

 

Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future,

" sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to

distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S. "

Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global

preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency

of radical enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of

this study express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can

achieve ever greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to

enjoy " overwhelming precision firepower, " " pervasive surveillance, "

and " dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea,

land, air, space or cyberspace. " In this study and in virtually all

others, political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition

that supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of " defense "

are left begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this

quest for military dominion takes on galactic proportions.

Acknowledging that the United States enjoys " superiority in many

aspects of space capability, " a senior defense official nonetheless

complains that " we don't have space dominance and we don't have space

supremacy. " Since outer space is " the ultimate high ground, " which the

United States must control, he urges immediate action to correct this

deficiency. When it comes to military power, mere superiority will not

suffice.

 

The new American militarism also manifests itself through an

increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the

normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably

while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body

politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed

with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action

abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however,

self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared.

During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale

U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of

the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The

brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow

of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of

Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that

count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill

Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in

obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late

1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to

Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the

tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of

frenetic.

 

As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed

to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning

newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some

crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a

seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration

has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign

against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in

promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.

 

In former times American policymakers treated (or at least

pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had

failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice

President Dick Cheney) that force " makes your diplomacy more effective

going forward, dealing with other problems. " Policymakers have

increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among

American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever

and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the

result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As

President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that " this

country must go on the offense and stay on the offense. " The American

public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable

end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United

States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows

clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.

 

The New Aesthetic of War

 

Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the

appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the

third indication of advancing militarism.

 

The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as

barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War

I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria

Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam

reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like

Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.

 

The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths.

The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and

modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent

alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service

was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by

their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists

dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and

depicted armies as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity

and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine

progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to

reject such notions as preposterous.

 

But by the turn of the twenty-first century, a new image of war

had emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a

counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that

war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass

armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare,

an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of

high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with

" smart " weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the

creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming

surgical, frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was

" coercive diplomacy " -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill

but to persuade. By the end of the twentieth century, Michael

Ignatieff of Harvard University concluded, war had become " a

spectacle. " It had transformed itself into a kind of " spectator

sport, " one offering " the added thrill that it is real for someone,

but not, happily, for the spectator. " Even for the participants,

fighting no longer implied the prospect of dying for some abstract

cause, since the very notion of " sacrifice in battle had become

implausible or ironic. "

 

Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of " the

hoary dictums about the fog and friction " that had traditionally made

warfare such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed

General Tommy Franks, could expect to enjoy " the kind of Olympian

perspective that Homer had given his gods. "

 

In short, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning

postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the

accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined --

and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be

expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict

regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the

literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military

cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the

right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could

actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even

thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively

demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once

again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary

diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one

observer noted with approval, " public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang

technology of the U.S. military " had become " almost boyish. "

Reinforcing this enthusiasm was the expectation that the great

majority of Americans could count on being able to enjoy this new type

of war from a safe distance.

 

The Moral Superiority of the Soldier

 

This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable

boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves,

a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.

 

Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public

attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed

services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the

Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing,

confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary

of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in

uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.

Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the

brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the

armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old

fashioned virtue.

 

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a

tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the

apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America.

The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the

aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, " looked like a Norman Rockwell

painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking,

and they went about their business with poise and élan. " A writer for

Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in

military life that " the Army was not the awful thing that my

[anti-military] father had imagined " ; it was instead " the sort of

America he always pictured when he explained… his best hopes for the

country. "

 

According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the

armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who

probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the

twenty-first century a different view had taken hold. Now the United

States military was " a place where everyone tried their hardest. A

place where everybody… looked out for each other. A place where people

-- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't

what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their

feelings. " Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than

the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier.

Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the

classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something

more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained " transcendence at work. "

According to Hanson, the armed services had " somehow distilled from

the rest of us an elite cohort " in which virtues cherished by earlier

generations of Americans continued to flourish.

 

Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own

moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, " two-thirds

[of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral

standards than the nation they serve… Once in the military, many said,

members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality. " Such

attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little

uncomfortable. Noting with regret that " the armed forces are no longer

representative of the people they serve, " retired admiral Stanley

Arthur has expressed concern that " more and more, enlisted as well as

officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the

society they serve. " Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are " not

healthy in an armed force serving a democracy. "

 

In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become

obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of

failing to " support the troops. " In the realm of partisan politics,

the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this

dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension

to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a

residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a

rabidly anti-military Left.

 

In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from

extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations.

" What's the point of having this superb military that you're always

talking about, " Madeleine Albright demanded of General Colin Powell,

" if we can't use it? " As Albright's Question famously attests, when it

comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung

ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are

at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more

reluctant to question claims of military expertise.

 

Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism

of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although

hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being

one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the

potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda.

Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good.

Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to

relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant

Left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, " empire has

become a precondition for democracy. " Ignatieff, a prominent human

rights advocate, summons the United States to " use imperial power to

strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to

abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves. "

 

The President as Warlord

 

Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming

military adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown

accustomed to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion

of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against

President Bush's planned intervention filled the streets of many

American cities. The prospect of the United States launching a

preventive war without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council

produced the largest outpouring of public protest that the country had

seen since the Vietnam War. Yet the response of the political classes

to this phenomenon was essentially to ignore it. No politician of

national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's

champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects

of winning high national office was willing to risk being tagged with

not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way.

When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who denounced George

W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully authorized him to

invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians, opposition to war had

become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very

foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.

 

More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling

himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The

staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in

the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier USS Abraham

Lincoln, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval

aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew

-- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie

Top Gun, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom

Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply

mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own

and made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short

order, the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer

offered for $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised

as " Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval

Aviator. "

 

Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come

to pass in our own day. " For the first time in the nation's history, "

Mills wrote, " men in authority are talking about an `emergency'

without a foreseeable end. " While in earlier times Americans had

viewed history as " a peaceful continuum interrupted by war, " today

planning, preparing, and waging war has become " the normal state and

seemingly permanent condition of the United States. " And " the only

accepted `plan' for peace is the loaded pistol. "

 

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and of the Center for International Relations at Boston

University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a

doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the

American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several books,

including the just published The New American Militarism, How

Americans Are Seduced by War.

 

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

 

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War,

copyright © 2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the

author and Oxford University Press, Inc.