Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Is perpetual war our future?
By Andrew Bacevich
political, and moral problems produced by relying on a small professional
force, a draft seems to offer one obvious way to alleviate those problems.
For those who worry that the existing army is overextended, conscription
provides a mechanism for expansion. Triple the size of the army - in essence
restoring the structure that existed during much of the Cold War - and the
personnel shortages that constrain the prosecution of ground campaigns will
disappear. Sustaining the military commitment to Iraq for ten or twenty
years, or even a century as Senator John McCain and many neo-conservatives are
willing to contemplate, then becomes a viable proposition.
War planners will no longer find themselves obliged to give short shrift to
Contingency A (Afghanistan) in order to support Contingency B (Iraq). The
concept of "surge" will take on a whole new meaning with the Pentagon able to
dispatch not a measly 30,000 reinforcements to Iraq or another few thousand to
Afghanistan, but 100,000 or more additional troops wherever they might be
needed. Was the problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom too few "boots on the
ground" for occupation and reconstruction? Reconstitute the draft, and that
problem goes away.
Creating a mass army might even permit the United States to resuscitate the
Weinberger-Powell Doctrine with its emphasis on "overwhelming force".
For those distressed by the absence of a politically meaningful anti-war
movement despite the Iraq War's manifest unpopularity, the appeal of
conscription differs somewhat. Some political activists look to an Iraq-era
draft to do what the Vietnam-era draft did: animate large-scale protest, alter
the political dynamic, and eventually shut down any conflict that lacks
widespread popular support. The prospect of involuntary service will pry the
kids out of the shopping malls and send them into the streets. It will prod the
parents of draft-eligible offspring to see politics as something other than a
mechanism for doling out entitlements. As a consequence, members of Congress
keen to retain their seats will define their wartime responsibilities as
something more than simply rubber-stamping spending bills proposed by the White
House. In this way, a draft could reinvigorate American democracy, restore the
governmental system of checks and balances, and constrain the warmongers
inhabiting the executive branch.
For those moved by moral considerations, a draft promises to ensure a more
equitable distribution of sacrifice in war time. No longer will rural
Americans, people of color, recent immigrants, and members of the working class
fill the ranks of the armed forces in disproportionate numbers. With
conscription, the children of the political elite and of the well-to-do will
once again bear their fair share of the load. Those reaping the benefits of the
American way of life will contribute to its defense, helping to garrison the
more distant precincts of empire. Perhaps even the editorial staffs of the
Weekly Standard, National Review, and the New Republic might have the
opportunity to serve, a salutary prospect given the propensity of those
magazines to argue on behalf of military intervention.
Reconfigure the armed services to fight "small wars"; empower the generals;
reconnect soldiering to citizenship - on the surface each of these has a
certain appeal. But upon closer examination, each also has large defects. They
are the wrong lessons to take from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Drawing the right lessons
If gearing up to fight "small wars", deferring to the brass, and scrapping the
All-Volunteer Force are the wrong lessons to be drawn from our recent military
experience, then what are the right ones?
The events of the recent past offer several lessons that illuminate these
questions. The first concerns the nature of war. Iraq and Afghanistan remind us
that war is not subject to reinvention, whatever Bush and Pentagon proponents
of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs may contend.
War's essential nature is fixed, permanent, intractable, and irrepressible.
War's constant companions are uncertainty and risk. "War is the realm of
chance," wrote the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz nearly two centuries
ago. "No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such
incessant and varied dealings with this intruder ... " - a judgment that the
invention of the computer, the Internet, and precision-guided munitions has
done nothing to overturn.
So the first lesson to be taken away from the Bush administration's two
military adventures is simply this: War remains today what it has always been -
elusive, untamed, costly, difficult to control, fraught with surprise, and sure
to give rise to unexpected consequences. Only the truly demented will imagine
otherwise.
The second lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan derives from the first. As has been
the case throughout history, the utility of armed force remains finite. Even in
the information age, to the extent that force "works", it does so with respect
to a limited range of contingencies.
Although diehard supporters of the "war on terror" will insist otherwise,
events in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated definitively that further
reliance on coercive methods will not enable the United States to achieve its
objectives. Whether the actual aim is to democratize the Islamic world or
subdue it, the military "option" is not the answer.
The Bush Doctrine itself provides the basis for a third lesson. For centuries,
the Western moral tradition has categorically rejected the concept of
preventive war. The events of 9/11 convinced some that this tradition no longer
applied: old constraints had to give way. Yet our actual experience with
preventive war suggests that, even setting moral considerations aside, to
launch a war today to eliminate a danger that might pose a threat at some
future date is just plain stupid. It doesn't work.
History has repeatedly demonstrated the irrationality of preventive war. If the
world needed a further demonstration, Bush provided it. Iraq shows us why the
Bush Doctrine was a bad idea in the first place and why its abrogation has
become essential. For principled guidance in determining when the use of force
is appropriate, the country should conform to the just war tradition - not only
because that tradition is consistent with our professed moral values, but also
because its provisions provide an eminently useful guide for sound statecraft.
Finally, there is a fourth lesson, relating to the formulation of strategy. The
results of US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that in the upper echelons
of the government and among the senior ranks of the officer corps, this has
become a lost art.
Since the end of the Cold War, the tendency among civilians - with Bush a prime
example - has been to confuse strategy with ideology. The president's freedom
agenda, which supposedly provided a blueprint for how to prosecute the "war on
terror", expressed grandiose aspirations without serious effort to assess the
means required to achieve them. Meanwhile, ever since the Vietnam War ended,
the tendency among military officers has been to confuse strategy with
operations.
Here we come face-to-face with the essential dilemma with which the United
States has unsuccessfully wrestled since the Soviets deprived us of a
stabilizing adversary. The political elite that ought to bear the chief
responsibility for crafting grand strategy instead nurses fantasies of either
achieving permanent global hegemony or remaking the world in America's image.
Meanwhile, the military elite that could puncture those fantasies and help
restore a modicum of realism to US policy fixates on campaigns and battles,
with generalship largely a business of organizing and coordinating materiel.
The four lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan boil down to this: Events have exposed
as illusory American pretensions to having mastered war. Even today, war is
hardly more subject to human control than the tides or the weather. Simply
trying harder - investing ever larger sums in even more advanced technology,
devising novel techniques, or even improving the quality of American
generalship - will not enable the United States to evade that reality.
As measured by results achieved, the performance of the military since the end
of the Cold War and especially since 9/11 has been unimpressive. This
indifferent record of success leads some observers to argue that we need a
bigger army or a different army.
But the problem lies less with the army that we have - a very fine one, which
every citizen should wish to preserve - than with the requirements that we have
imposed on our soldiers. Rather than expanding or reconfiguring that army, we
need to treat it with the respect that it deserves. That means protecting it
from further abuse of the sort that it has endured since 2001.
America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller - that is, more modest -
foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with
their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to
which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in
the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions.
When it comes to supporting the troops, here lies the essence of a citizen's
obligation.
Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at
Boston University, retired from the US Army with the rank of colonel. This
piece is adapted from his new book,
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism(Metropolitan
Books, 2008). He is also the author of The New American Militarism, among
other books.
From the book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by
Andrew Bacevich, Copyright 2008 by Andrew Bacevich. Reprinted by arrangement
with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights
Reserved.
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