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THE NEW
AMERICAN MILITARISM
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 US response to the events of September
11, 2001, 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, US 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 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 US policy
and 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 US
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 US military
establishment dwarfing that of even America's
closest ally. Thus, whereas the US Navy maintains
and operates a total of 12 large attack aircraft
carriers, the once-vaunted 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 97,000
tons fully loaded, longer than three [US] football
fields, cruising at a speed above 30 knots, and
powered by nuclear reactors that give it an
essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the
US 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 US Air Force.
Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in
uniform, the US Marine Corps is half again as
large as the entire British army - and the
Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually
called the US Army - which in turn also operates
its own "air force" of some 5,000 aircraft.
All of these massive and redundant
capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day
Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12%
larger than the average defense budget of the Cold
War era. In 2002, American defense spending
exceeded by a factor of 25 the combined defense
budgets of the seven "rogue states" then
comprising the roster of US enemies. 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 Ronald Reagan era
(1981-1989). According to the Pentagon's announced
long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed
the Cold War average by 23% - 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 US 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, US 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
US 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 US
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 US Navy's future, "sea
supremacy beginning at our shorelines and
extending outward to distant theaters is a
necessary condition for the defense of the US". Of
course, the US 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 US 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 US
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 US 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 US 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 US 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 September 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
esthetic of war
Reinforcing this heightened
predilection for arms has been the appearance in
recent years of a new esthetic of war. This is the
third indication of advancing militarism.
The old 20th-century esthetic 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 21st 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 20th 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 21st
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 esthetic respectability, even
palatability, that the literary and artistic
interpreters of 20th-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
perhaps a 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 US 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 esthetic 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 hard-working, and they went about
their business with poise and elan." A writer for
Rolling Stone magazine 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 21st 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 US
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 US 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 UN 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 US$39.99 a Bush-lookalike
military action figure advertised as "Elite Force
Aviator: George W Bush - US 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".
Monday: Role of the
second-generation neo-cons
Andrew J
Bacevich is
professor of international relations and director
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. This article
is a slightly adapted excerpt from that book, and
is used by permission of Tomdispatch, of the author,
and of Oxford University Press Inc.
(Copyright 2005 Andrew J Bacevich.) |
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