Those Who Have Borne the Battle (36 page)

The “Weinberger Doctrine” had evolved from a series of military discussions over the previous decade. General Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded General Westmoreland as the senior commanding officer in Vietnam, had been resolute in insisting that the army could not be sent into battle again without a clear mission, without political support, and without the military means required to complete the mission.

There were critics of these cautious prerequisites as well. George Shultz, who served as secretary of state along with Weinberger in the Reagan cabinet, described it as “the Vietnam syndrome in spades, carried to an absurd level, and a compete abdication of the duties of leadership,” due to its foreclosing “situations where a discrete assertion of power is needed or appropriate for limited purposes.” James Schlesinger, who had served as secretary of defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford, was critical of “the emerging belief that the United States must fight only popular, winnable wars.”
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In his recent analysis of the army's intellectual traditions, Brian McAllister Linn describes the doctrine as the “propensity to view war as an engineering project in which the skilled application of the correct principles could achieve a predictable outcome.”
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Major David Petraeus wrote in 1989, “In spite of occasional tough talk, when the commitment of American troops has hung in the balance, only rarely has any senior military leader been as aggressive as the most aggressive civilian advisers.”
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General Colin Powell shared the Abrams-Weinberger view, and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush and President Clinton and the planner of Operation Desert Storm, he articulated a “Powell Doctrine” that built upon that of Weinberger. When Madeleine Albright was serving as ambassador to the United Nations, she was with Chairman Powell at a White House meeting regarding the use of troops in Bosnia, and he was being cautious about any engagement there under the prevailing circumstances. Ambassador Albright asked, “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?”
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Petraeus in a 1989 essay quoted from General Bruce Palmer, “Vietnam was, of course, another limited war . . . and in a sense was an extension of the Korean War. But Vietnam shook the morale of our fighting men to a far greater degree than did Korea. It left our military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged.”
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The wars that followed 9/11 would reflect this post-Vietnam attitude.

 

 

The army in the 1970s became absorbed in the task of addressing another political consequence of the Vietnam War. They needed to fill the enlisted ranks without a draft system. The political coalition of the late 1960s and 1970s that supported an end to the draft represented most of the positions on the spectrum. Activist liberals believed that the draft only provided cannon fodder for war, and activist conservatives believed that it was an important example of a government having the inappropriate power to coerce service. Antiwar Democrats saw the draft as a symbol of the Vietnam War, and Republicans, pro- or antiwar, believed that the draft had been the catalyst for much of the protest. Richard Nixon had promised to end the draft during the 1968 election campaign, and as president, he aggressively followed up on the pledge.

The ensuing debate about the all-volunteer force focused on war and politics and on free choices in a free society. It was framed by a growing demographic fact: due to rapid population growth, even in wartime the military did not require the service of all age-eligible young men. Determining how to select those who would serve—and, conversely, how to determine those who would be excluded or deferred—could only result in claims of unfairness. During the Vietnam War, the military required fewer than half of the eligible men. Which half would it be?
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The libertarian free-market economist Milton Friedman was an influential voice in the argument for choice, as was the young economist Martin Anderson, who served in the Nixon White House. The military, especially the army, was nervous about the prospects of ending the draft. They were still fighting a war when this discussion was going on, and they realized that in 1970, even among their enlistees, half of their “volunteers” were draft induced. The army also recognized that very few
volunteers signed up for the infantry. And they surely needed this combat force.
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Former secretary of defense Thomas Gates chaired a special commission that President Nixon established, and in February 1970 they unanimously recommended an all-volunteer force to take effect in sixteen months. Their language bridged the counterculture insistence upon freedom with the principle of libertarianism and the conservative value of market choice. They argued, “Clearly, not all persons are equally suited for military service—some are simply not qualified. When not all our citizens can serve, and only a small minority are needed, a voluntary decision to serve is the best answer, morally and practically, to the question of who should serve.”
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Implementation of the all-volunteer force did not require any congressional action because the existing Selective Service law was due to expire in 1971. In fact, the Nixon administration sought a two-year extension of the current draft law in order to have ample time to move to the new system. In 1973 the draft was history—as, not coincidentally, was American combat engagement in Vietnam. Americans would no longer confront the images of the unwilling and the reluctant marching off to combat in an unpopular war. This Vietnam shadow was shortened.

It was the end of an era. The United States had maintained the draft essentially from 1940 to 1973. This included many years of a “peacetime” draft, unprecedented in American history. In 1969, 45 percent of the adult male population was veterans. As military historian Richard Kohn noted, in those years, “Young men pursued education, chose careers, married, became fathers, and ordered their lives in countless ways either to serve or to avoid service in the armed forces.”
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This huge force in shaping life decisions and their timing would no longer be a factor with the all-volunteer army. On the other hand, from a military perspective, political scientist and commentator Eliot Cohen argued that the citizen-soldier concept was increasingly “archaic, even quaint,” in defining the modern army. Masses in the field were not significant factors in modern warfare, as they had been in the Civil War and the two world wars.
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The military services were not enthused about the short-term problems of recruiting this new force. Even the air force, Marine Corps, and
navy, whose ranks were largely sustained by volunteers, knew that a looming draft had encouraged young men to enlist. Most military professionals surely preferred volunteers who wished to serve as opposed to draftees who resisted service. However, they had to be concerned about numbers—and at least some senior military leaders also recognized the political vulnerability of not having in uniform representative citizen soldiers. Such a cross-section of society presumably resulted in greater political understanding of and support for military missions. Perceived mercenaries would not generate such support—and in this regard, although perhaps for practical more than philosophical reasons, the military was more in tune with the founding debates than were those who sought to brush off all of the burdens associated with Vietnam. Recently retired general William Westmoreland told the
New York Times
in 1973, “I deplore the prospect of our military forces not representing a cross-section of our society.”
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The army was successful in securing approval of the “total force” concept as part of the restructuring. No longer would reservists and National Guard members be exempted from being called to active duty, as they largely had been in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson had recognized that their mobilization was more of a political liability than was the draft. The army understood this as well and therefore pressed for the total-force concept so that there would be a political “trip wire” that would cause civilian leaders to be more cautious about dispatching troops to military action.

In 1970 General Westmoreland, then the army chief of staff, while unenthused about the end of the draft in the midst of a war, also recognized that this was not a military choice. He insisted that the army prepare for recruiting and retaining volunteers. This meant a fundamental assessment of traditional practices to instill discipline as well as standard military lifestyle standards. Some old army veterans were appalled at the new army.
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In the midst of the transition, the army struggled to meet recruitment goals and to maintain standards. Early on, volunteers were able to select where they would serve. “Unit of Choice/Assignment of Choice” options provided wide opportunities. Very few young volunteers selected the infantry or related combat units.
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Therefore, by 1973 the army provided enlistment bonuses of twenty-five hundred dollars for those who signed
up for combat units. This helped to meet goals by 1974, but it did not accomplish all of the quality standards. The army worked hard and imaginatively to strengthen its ranks.

Within a few years, they were largely successful. In 1980 only 54 percent of army recruits had graduated from high school. By 1987 this figure was at 91 percent, and in 1992 it reached 98 percent. This new army reached out aggressively to enlist women and promised its recruits that as soldiers, they would be empowered to “Be All You Can Be.” Pregnant women were allowed to remain in the army, and all units except those that were directly combat assigned were open to women. It was not their father's army—nor was it presumably the Vietnam army.
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By 1980 most American politicians had come to embrace active-duty military and veterans. There was little of the Vietnam-era distancing from the military, and in fact there was a general recognition that it was time to reconcile with the Vietnam veterans. Ronald Reagan in 1980 described Vietnam as a “noble cause” in which the troops “came home without a victory not because they'd been defeated, but because they'd been denied permission to win.”
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If President Reagan was a little more cautious in the next few years about using the “noble cause” language, he did not back away from fully supporting those who were serving in the military—and those who had served. He particularly reached out to Vietnam veterans. Seeking to empower the military for any showdown with Russia, he increased defense spending by 34 percent in his first term. He insisted, “Defense is not a budget issue. You spend what you need.”
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Ronald Reagan may have set a new tone; he had many others joining him. Andrew Bacevich wrote, “Present-day observers might still argue the relative merits of Reagan's legacy for subsequent U.S. military policy. With regard to the political benefits that he accrued from identifying his own cause with that of ‘the troops,' no room for argument exists. Reagan showed that in post-Vietnam America genuflecting before soldiers and playing to the pro-military instincts of the electorate wins votes.” And, Bacevich added, “No one did more to affirm the Californian's military mythology and to perpetuate the use of soldiers as props than did Bill Clinton.”
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Ironically, with the armed forces growing smaller and representing less of a cross-section of America, politicians on both sides of the aisle increasingly celebrated military service. The only political risk seemed to be allowing the other party to seem more supportive. This resulted in escalating claims and promises. There was a general rhetorical conflation of the all-volunteer forces with the citizen soldiers so that there was little distinction between them. In popular culture, Americans seemed to accept a direct relationship between the minutemen at Concord, the GIs at Normandy, and the young professionals of Operation Desert Storm. No one pointed to the fundamental difference: the regular forces massed for Desert Storm were no longer a group of temporarily mobilized, presumably representative “citizen soldiers.”

It was not only defense spending that became a protected budget category. Spending on veterans programs was, if anything, more politically sacrosanct. The post-Vietnam programs of support for veterans were comprehensive—and they were expensive. Neither of which presumes their adequacy in meeting the needs of veterans. But clearly, American policy by the 1980s had come a long way from the public attitudes of the pre–World War II years that assumed little public obligation for discharged veterans who appeared healthy.

The Veterans Administration entered the twenty-first century, even before the wars of the first decade of the century, as one of the largest agencies in the federal government. In 1989 it had become a cabinet-level department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, when President George H. W. Bush pointed out that veterans' interests belonged at the cabinet table with the president. In 1940 the VA was smaller than the War Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of the Treasury. In 2000 the department was the largest federal agency outside of the Defense Department. More than 20 percent of the nondefense federal personnel worked for the VA at the turn of the century.

Veterans Affairs was an agency that was largely politically immunized from cost-cutting initiatives and was the focus of criticism and congressional investigation only when it appeared to fail veterans. There were more than 25 million veterans in the United States in 2000, and they
were a politically consequential group—even as they were declining as a percentage of the population. Opinion polling in the 1980s and 1990s consistently showed public opposition to any reductions in veterans' budgets. For example, when President Reagan moved to cut the federal budget deficit, an
ABC News
–
Washington Post
poll revealed that 81 percent disapproved of any reductions in veterans programs. In 1989 Harris reported that 86 percent would prefer cuts in defense spending rather than veteran spending. In the spring of 2001, a Pew poll revealed that only 3 percent of respondents favored a reduction in spending on veterans programs. The positive view of veterans coincided with a renewed confidence in the professionalism and skill of the military.