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Andy Bacevich is a bulldog, a thinker who goes
his own way confidently and fearlessly, and who probably angers as
many readers as he convinces. He is also, for my money, the most
interesting military scholar on the scene today: a Vietnam veteran,
a hard-nosed commander of U.S. armored forced in the Fulda Gap in
the 1980s, and a self-professed conservative who has emerged as a
bitter critic of contemporary U.S. military policy. His last book,
American Empire (2002), took on a number of the most
treasured clichés in U.S. foreign policy. While the vast majority of
Americans see their country as a force for good in the world, one
that is slow to anger and always acts benignly, Bacevich painted us
as an empire, the heir to ancient Rome and nineteenth-century
Britain, with a foreign policy based far more on strategic
considerations than on principles like democracy or human rights.
Recognizing that fact may be painful to our self-image, he argued,
but it was the only way to bring rational analysis to bear on our
current international problems. Slogans and clichés about America’s
good intentions—useful for domestic consumption—make it difficult,
if not impossible, to understand “why they hate us.” In fact,
Bacevich argued, the reason they hate us is quite simple: most
people in the world reject the notion of perpetual American
dominance.
The New American Militarism has the same
virtues as American Empire: a clearly stated thesis,
excellent and forceful writing, and an author unafraid to wade into
some very troubled waters. In recent years, he argues, Americans
have fallen prey to “misleading and dangerous conceptions of war,
soldiers, and military institutions.” They have come to support
increasing levels of military intervention abroad in support of an
impossibly open-ended mission: to remake the entire world in
America’s liberal and democratic image. They have become, in one of
his many memorable turns of phrase, “Wilsonians under arms,” and
this improbable marriage of militarism and utopian vision has become
the distinguishing feature of our foreign policy.
While partisans on the left tend to blame the
current administration for the problem, Bacevich digs much deeper.
There is a huge coalition of interests and elites who have given
birth to and sustained the new militarism, he argues. It started
within the officer corps, which came out of Vietnam determined to
revive and reform an army broken by long years of guerrilla war. In
the following fifteen years, commanders purified the force of its
malcontents, armed it with new high-tech weaponry, and supplied it
with a new warfighting doctrine called AirLand Battle. Ostensibly
designed to defend NATO against a Soviet attack (an eventuality that
Bacevich finds very unlikely), AirLand Battle was in fact a way for
the army to get back to the honorable business of planning
big-battalion engagements and away from politics and political war
altogether.
Behind all these reforms was not a desire to wage
war more effectively, but to avoid future campaigns even remotely
similar to Vietnam, indeed, to avoid war altogether if possible. The
prophet of military reform, General Creighton Abrams, made this
point explicitly with his Total Force Doctrine, which made it nearly
impossible for future administrations to go to war without calling
up the reserves. It was an idea designed not only to avoid future
Vietnams, but to tilt the balance in civil-military relations away
from elected civilians and toward uniformed officers. Other moves
followed: the Weinberger Doctrine of 1984, which told civilian
leaders what sort of wars they could and could not fight, and the
Powell Doctrine of 1991, which told them that they could not start a
war at all unless they already had an exit strategy in place, a
patent absurdity. In the wake of the nearly bloodless victory in
Operation Desert Storm, the “two MRC doctrine” was put in place: the
notion that the U.S. had to be ready to fight two “major regional
contingencies”—large-scale conventional wars, in other
words—anywhere in the world at once. With no real threats on the
horizon, it was a way for the military to keep funding as high, or
higher, than it had been when we faced off with the Soviets. Despite
the rhetoric, there never really was a “peace dividend” from our
victory in the Cold War.
Unfortunately for the military, Desert Storm
proved to be a two-edged sword. In the following years, the army
relived the experiences of the German Wehrmacht and the Israeli
Defense Force. Its dominance on the operational level made it more
and more attractive to civilian leaders seeking to solve all sorts
of foreign policy problems: persecution of the Kurds, breakdown of
civil society in Somalia, and finally a war on terrorism that may be
unwinnable by conventional military means. Such intractable problems
take decades to solve through politics and diplomacy; now it seemed
they might disappear within days through just the right application
of military force and advanced weaponry. The officer corps found
that it was no longer master in its own house, but subject to an
unending list of demands and deployments ordered by an increasingly
militant cadre of civilian officials. One tends to think of George
W. Bush in this context, but of course it was Bill Clinton who led
the way, sending U.S. troops into Haiti and the Balkans and hurling
cruise missiles like Zeus on all and sundry during his eight years
in office.
At least four other interest groups have
contributed to the new militarism, and Bacevich gives each one its
due. Neo-conservatives literally see no limits or constraints on the
U.S. use of force. While some Americans supported the Iraq War and
others opposed it, only the neocons rhapsodized about it. In fact,
“finishing the job” begun in 1991 and toppling Saddam Hussein had
long been an obsession with them. Likewise, popular culture in the
1980s began to exhibit a pro-military tilt that was quite unusual
for left-leaning Hollywood. Films like An Officer and a Gentleman,
Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Top Gun gave the
American public a new vision of war and soldiers: neat, clean, sexy,
and even fun. Evangelical Protestants played a key role. Still
viewing America as John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” they were
imbued with a number of bedrock ideas that had the force of dogma.
They were anti-Communist, profoundly pro-Israel, and strongly
anti-Islamic. They can thus be counted on to support hikes in
military spending and to back almost any war fought by a Republican
administration. Finally, there is the huge establishment of civilian
analysts grouped in think-tanks like RAND. Albert Wohlstetter, for
example, was the guru of “precision munitions,” weapons that
promised ever higher levels of military effectiveness with smaller
and smaller force levels. Andrew Marshall is another name relatively
unknown to the general public. He was the one who sold the concepts
of “the revolution in military affairs” (RMA) and “information
warfare” to the Department of Defense. Others made their own
contributions, coining irresistible catch-phrases like “full
spectrum dominance,” “virtual war,” and, of course, “shock and awe.”
All of them helped to make military force seem more and more
desirable as a first option.
What, then, is to be done? Bacevich ends The
New American Militarism with no less than ten specific
recommendations. His most trenchant one is for a reconnection of the
army with the nation that it defends, a revival of the “citizen
soldier” concept. With the army now an all-volunteer force that
tends to see itself as superior to a materialist and corrupt
society, and with few if any of the policymaking elite sending their
sons and daughters off to war, he sees little to distinguish
contemporary U.S. forces from past armies of empire. Increasingly,
it has become an imperial constabulary, divorced from U.S. civilian
society, but “armed with just the right touch when it comes to
meting out fear, violence, and money to pacify those classified in
former days as wogs.”
There are no doubt many who will read The New
American Militarism and shout “Amen!” Equal numbers may wail and
gnash their teeth. Some, unhappily, may even call Bacevich a traitor
for refusing to “back the troops” in Iraq. One suspects, however,
that his point in writing a book like this is precisely to elicit
strong reaction, stir things up, and stimulate informed
conversation. To be sure, there are numerous arguable points in this
book. Such works always run the danger of being outdated by the time
they hit the shelf. To give the most obvious example, Bacevich
thinks that the current war in Iraq is a bad idea, a leap into
pre-emptive war making that carries with it far more dangers than
benefits. He may well be right, but then again, he may well be
wrong. Elections have been held in Iraq that may well mark the birth
of a new era of democracy in the Middle East. Time will tell. In the
meantime, read this stimulating book. Agree with it, argue with it,
but engage yourself with the issues it raises. In the dangerous
twenty-first century, issues of foreign policy and war are too
important to be left to the political parties.
Eastern Michigan University
rcitino@emich.edu
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