Those Who Have Borne the Battle (42 page)

There is a history lesson that does point to another danger lurking in the current considerations of America's military role. In the Introduction I quoted Secretary Gates's quip than any secretary of defense who recommends sending a major land army into Asia or the Middle East needs to “have his head examined” first. Good advice. But the only option may be to pull back to a Weinberger Doctrine of only fighting the wars that we are strategically prepared to fight. And these would not employ counterinsurgency tactics. Of course, countries do not always get to select their wars—even if they can perhaps be more selective than the United States has sometimes been.

There was for some forty-five years after World War II an American consensus, more or less, about the dangers and threats of the world. The danger came from communist expansionist ideology, and the threat came from the Soviet Union. In those years there was a slogan that “politics stops at the water's edge.” It really didn't, as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon could affirm. But there nonetheless were some shared assumptions. It is not obvious what those are today. In specific
cases, especially proactive wars, all of these objectives, including protecting US interests, how to do this, and what the appropriate “interests” are, can be matters for debate. Political figures today often seem to prefer debate to consensus.

The other compromise that evolved out of the revolutionary generation was that military mobilization would depend upon a militia of citizen soldiers. If this concept had more military shortcomings than most admitted, it had a clear resonance with American concepts of democracy and citizen responsibility. And in fact for the major mobilizations in American history, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, the force in the field was composed of citizen soldiers—Americans who temporarily served and were not members of a standing, continuing military. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were also fought by citizen soldiers, largely drafted and mobilized for these wars. In these two wars the combat forces were not as demographically representative as the two world wars, but they may have been as representative as, or even more representative than, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War armies.

Since the draft ended in 1973, the military has been composed of volunteers. These are not demographically representative, but more to the point here, absent a draft there is no longer the “trip wire” effect that proponents believed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century militia and the twentieth-century draft provided. The “total force” concept that had been part of the all-volunteer force calculated that the calling up of reserve and National Guard units would have this same effect. Historically, while the draft and calling up of these units functioned less as a prior restraint on military action than the advocates argued, there is little doubt that widespread mobilization and casualties did introduce some greater political caution in any war plan. It was hard politically to ignore wars when large numbers of citizens have been called to uniform.

Over the past decade, some have proposed a return to the draft in order to introduce a political check on American military activities. The argument has been that if the sons and the daughters of the rich and the powerful, including members of Congress, were subject to being called up in order to fight these wars, there would be fewer wars. This may well be the case. My problem with this position is quite fundamental: if our
decision makers and agenda shapers would be reluctant to send our young to war only if their own children could be involved, we have a more basic problem to address.

There is no doubt that receiving letters from the front—or, in these current wars, cell phone calls, e-mails, text messages, or Skype contacts—personalizes war. And there is little doubt that most Americans in positions of influence or affluence have little if any personal contacts with the war zone. They are not alone in this regard.

Fewer Americans than ever before during wartime know someone in the military or in the war zones. Knowing someone who is there crisply focuses the mind on the distant conflict. Family members of those serving in the wars describe it as having a stake in military decisions: “a ‘stake' that stares back at them from their beloved child's boot camp graduation photograph.”
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I recall a few years ago talking to the father of a young man who was in the army in Iraq. He said waking up every morning early and realizing your son is likely on patrol in an area they called Death Valley is not conducive to going back to sleep.

Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, while in office, spoke out on their concerns about the military's not being representative. At the West Point Commencement in 2011, Admiral Mullen worried about “a people uninformed about what they are asking the military to endure.” He acknowledged that the military was not “representative of the population” and described the military “as a small force, rightly volunteers, and less than 1 percent of the population, scattered about the country due to base closings, and frequent and lengthy deployments.” He worried about the “fairly insular” world of the armed forces.
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At Duke University in the fall of 2010, Secretary Gates said that the worst fears at the time of the adoption of the all-volunteer force had not come to pass. The military was not composed of the poor and the uneducated. It was largely working class and middle class in background and was the “most educated” in American history. But he acknowledged that it was still not representative of the larger public. The inclination to serve was “most pronounced” among those who grew up around those who have served or are serving. The military came disproportionately from the
South and the Mountain West, from small towns and rural areas around the country. And “the percentage of the force from the Northeast, the West Coast, and major cities continues to decline.” He pointed out that the military's own recruiting patterns and placement of bases and installations affected this pattern. The secretary warned that our society “should not ignore the broader, long-term consequences of waging these protracted military campaigns employing—and re-employing—such a small portion of our society in the effort.” Secretary Gates noted that there was a “narrow sliver” of the population that was serving and that “those attending and graduating from our nation's most selective and academically demanding universities” were not represented.
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There is little likelihood that a new draft law would secure the political support it would require. And there is quite frankly little need for a draft in terms of meeting personnel needs of the military today. The armed forces will sometimes scramble to meet enlistment goals, but generally they do meet them, and with some very impressive young men and women. Right now less than half of 1 percent of the US population is in the military. And looking at the younger population, less than 3 percent of the fifteen-to-twenty-four age group is in the military. Consequently, there is little likelihood that more than a small fraction of young Americans would be drafted to serve unless there is a significant expansion of the military forces.
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An expanded military perhaps would be a far better way to carry out these wars than the current imposition of multiple deployments, but there is virtually no possibility of that significant expansion of force happening in the current fiscal environment. If there were no deferments or other exclusions for a reinstituted draft, the lottery or other device would be random. It might result in a more demographically representative military, but it is hard to project such a small force as providing the political “trip wire.”

It is my sense that the military might as well be filled by young men and women who choose to be there. But let us understand that this results in exactly the sort of politically distant, unrepresentative, professional military that the founders of the Republic feared. Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen are not alone in their concerns about this. Retired army
officer and critic of American militarism Andrew Bacevich concludes that current military and civilian leaders are “careful to genuflect before the historic achievements of the citizen-soldier,” even as they “nurture a warrior class largely divorced from the society it serves.”
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More political leaders need to think about these possibilities and the consequences.

Perhaps as a consequence of the unrepresentative nature of the young people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely as a companion of it in terms of understanding the political reaction to these wars, is the fact that the media have largely ignored them in recent years. One might ask, what would happen if you gave a war, or several wars, and no one came? It is an interesting question. It is also an insensitive and flippant one, since of course there are those who are coming to these wars—and are being invited back for return appearances, sometimes several. It is not flippant but critical to note just how these wars have dropped out of American consciousness. There are fewer and fewer news correspondents in the war zones—budget cuts in news organizations have resulted in these being vulnerable expenses.

Stories about the wars are often less about combat, as engagement with the enemy is largely conducted through insurgent ambushes, sniper fire, and detonation of high explosives. There are few firefights to describe and virtually no traditional combat to narrate. News stories have come to be more about the human interest—or human tragedy—of war. These reports do serve to humanize the conflict and make real the sacrifice, but they are not providing full-time narratives of the nature of the wars. There is little doubt that this reduction in coverage responds to a reduction in interest on the part of the American public, and it is hard not to assume that it also feeds the declining interest.

In the off-year elections of 2010, only 7 percent of Americans thought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were major issues. Very, very few candidates in that election for the Senate or the House of Representatives campaigned on a major platform of expanding or ending these wars or on the nature, the cost, or the conduct of them. The economy dominated. Of course, all of the candidates promised to “support the troops.” But this sort of “support” is often vacuous and may be downright harmful. The potential for harm comes from the reflexive and automatic assent to military requests
or appropriations, demonstrating the further abdication of civilian leadership and control.

The number and percentage of veterans serving in Congress is lower now than it has been in seventy years—about one-fifth of the 2011–2013 Congress are veterans.
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As recently as 1990, more than half of the members of Congress were veterans. George H. W. Bush was the last president to have served in the active-duty military—and he was a genuine combat hero of World War II. Interestingly, in the five presidential elections from 1992 to 2008, the war veterans lost. George H. W. Bush, Robert Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain had all served in war. The men who defeated them, with the exception of George W. Bush's enlistment in the Air National Guard, had not been in the service. This does not suggest that wartime service is a negative factor in elections—but while each of these elections was different, it surely would imply that war veterans have not been positively advantaged.

Although some commentators may believe that electing fewer veterans will result in less support for the military and for veterans, I think that the opposite will be the case. Nonveterans are more likely to assent to recommendations from the Pentagon and from Veterans Affairs—letting the military guide its own future. This is not necessarily good.

Veterans have traditionally been more comfortable asking hard questions about military and veterans matters. Hard questions should be a part of governance. Veterans, even those who were enlisted men or women, may be particularly eager and even enjoy questioning those with gold braid on their caps or uniforms. Nonveterans are a bit intimidated about all of this—and surely do not want to be vulnerable to a charge of not supporting the troops. In his hard-hitting 2008 critique of the failure of the military leadership, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote, “Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.”
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For politicians, supporting the “troops” has generally involved an inclusive embrace that has also included veterans. I have already discussed the firm support for veterans, which has been a congressional principle since the end of World War II. As we noted in the previous chapter, this
did not immediately extend to support for the GI Bill that was introduced in 2007 by Senator Jim Webb. As the
Washington Post
revealed in February 2007, it did not include providing the type of comprehensive medical support that many veterans required. The
Post
described shocking conditions at Walter Reed: “While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.”
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There was a national outcry over the details of the
Post
story—rodents and vermin and mold and little supervision or support in outpatient lodgings that were more warehouses than medical facilities. Members of Congress went beyond outcry to rhetorical high dudgeon. The problems at Walter Reed and elsewhere were not primarily those of medical neglect as much as medical incapacity. No one had planned for the sheer volume and complex nature of casualties that would result from these extended wars. Of course, this was because no one had planned for these extended wars. There is little record of anyone in 2001 or 2003 even inquiring about the possibility of extended wars, with the exception of General Eric Shinseki's muted challenge. Despite this, I have been impressed by the caring and the commitment in the military hospitals, from military and civilian, medical and nonmedical personnel. They all extend themselves to care for the wounded veterans. And they often do not have the space or the personnel to do this as well as they wish.