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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA How drone war became the American
Way By Tom Engelhardt
In the American mind, if Apple made
weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those
remotely piloted planes getting such great press
here. They have generally been greeted as if they
were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.
When the first American drone assassins
burst onto the global stage early in the last
decade, they caught most of us by surprise,
especially because they seemed to come out of
nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever
since, they've been touted in the media as the
shiniest presents under the American Christmas
tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems
when it comes to
evildoers lurking in the global badlands.
And can you blame Americans for their love
affair with the drone? Who wouldn't be wowed by
the most technologically advanced, futuristic,
no-pain-all-gain weapon around?
Here's the
thing, though: put drones in a more familiar
context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they
should have been eerily familiar. If, for
instance, they were car factories, they would seem
so much less exotic to us.
Think about it:
What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory,
it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes
significant training, with robotics and a degraded
version of the same job outsourced elsewhere. In
this case, the "offshore" location that job headed
for wasn't China or Mexico, but a military base in
the US, where a guy with a joystick, trained in a
hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is
"piloting" that plane. And given our experience
with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the US,
who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011,
the US Air Force was already training more drone
"pilots" than actual fighter and bomber pilots
combined?
That's one way drones are
something other than the futuristic sci-fi wonders
we imagine them to be. But there's another way
that drones have been heading for the American
"homeland" for four decades, and it has next to
nothing to do with technology, advanced or
otherwise.
In a sense, drone war might be
thought of as the most natural form of war for the
All Volunteer Military. To understand why that's
so, we need to head back to a crucial decision
implemented just as the Vietnam war was ending.
Disarming the amateurs, demobilizing
the citizenry It's true that, in the wake
of grinding wars that have also been debacles -
the Afghan version of which has entered its 11th
year - the US military is in ratty shape. Its
equipment needs refurbishing and its troops are
worn down. The stress of endlessly repeated tours
of duty in war zones, brain injuries and other
wounds caused by the roadside bombs that have
often replaced a visible enemy on the
"battlefield," suicide rates that can't be
staunched, rising sexual violence within the
military, increasing crime rates around military
bases, and all the other strains and pains of
unending war have taken their toll.
Still,
ours remains an intact, unrebellious, professional
military. If you really want to see a force on its
last legs, you need to leave the post-9/11 years
behind and go back to the Vietnam era. In 1971, in
Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D Heinl, Jr,
author of a definitive history of the Marine
Corps, wrote of "widespread conditions among
American forces in Vietnam that have only been
exceeded in this century by the French Army's
Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the
Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917."
The US military in Vietnam and at bases in
the US and around world was essentially at the
edge of rebellion. Disaffection with an
increasingly unpopular war on the Asian mainland,
rejected by ever more Americans and emphatically
protested at home, had infected the military,
which was, after all, made up significantly of
draftees.
Desertion rates were rising, as
was drug use. In the field, "search and evade" (a
mocking, descriptive accurate replacement for
"search and destroy") operations were becoming
commonplace. "Fraggings" - attacks on unpopular
officers or NCOs - had doubled. ("Word of the
deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop
movies or in bivouacs of certain units.") And
according to Col Heinl, there were then as many as
144 antiwar "underground newspapers" published by
or aimed at soldiers. At the moment when he wrote,
in fact, the antiwar movement in the US was being
spearheaded by a rising tide of disaffected
Vietnam veterans speaking out against their war
and the way they had fought it.
In this
fashion, an American citizen's army, a draft
military, had reached its limits and was voting
with its feet against an imperial war. This was
democracy in action transferred to the battlefield
and the military base. And it was deeply
disturbing to the US high command, which had, by
then, lost faith in the future possibilities of a
draft army. In fact, faced with ever more
ill-disciplined troops, the military's top
commanders had clearly concluded: never again!
So on the very day the Paris Peace Accords
were signed in January 1973, officially signaling
the end of US involvement in Vietnam (though not
quite its actual end), president Richard Nixon
also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an
admission of the obvious: war, American-style, as
it had been practiced since World War II, had lost
its hold on young minds.
There was no
question that US military and civilian leaders
intended, at that moment, to sever war and
war-making from an aroused citizenry. In that
sense, they glimpsed something of the future they
meant to shape, but even they couldn't have
guessed just where American war would be heading.
Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, for
instance, actually thought he was curbing the
future rashness of civilian leaders by - as Andrew
Bacevich explained in his book The New American
Militarism - "making the active army
operationally dependent on the reserves". In this
way, no future president could commit the country
to a significant war "without first taking the
politically sensitive and economically costly step
of calling up America's 'weekend warriors'".
Abrams was wrong, of course, though he
ensured that, decades hence, the reserves, too,
would suffer the pain of disastrous wars once
again fought on the Eurasian mainland. Still,
whatever the generals and the civilian leaders
didn't know about the effects of their acts then,
the founding of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) may
have been the single most important decision made
by Washington in the post-Vietnam era of the
foreshortened American Century.
Today, few
enough even remember that moment and far fewer
have considered its import. Yet, historically
speaking, that 1973 severing of war from the
populace might be said to have ended an almost
two-century-old democratic experiment in fusing
the mobilized citizen and the mobilized state in
wartime. It had begun with the levee en masse
during the French Revolution, which sent roused
citizens to the front to save the republic and
spread their democratic fervor abroad. Behind them
stood a mobilized population ready to sacrifice
anything for the republic (and all too soon, of
course, the empire).
It turned out,
however, that the drafted citizen had his limits
and so, almost 200 years later, another aroused
citizenry and its soldiers, home front and war
front, were to be pacified, to be put out to
pasture, while the empire's wars were to be left
to the professionals. An era was ending, even if
no one noticed. (As a result, if you're in the
mood to indulge in irony, citizen's war would be
left to the guerrillas of the world, which in our
era has largely meant to fundamentalist religious
sects.)
Just calling in the professionals
and ushering out the amateurs wasn't enough,
though, to make the decision truly momentous.
Another choice had to be married to it. The
debacle that was Vietnam - or what, as the 1970s
progressed, began to be called "the Vietnam
Syndrome" (as if the American people had been
struck by some crippling psychic disease) - could
have sent Washington, and so the nation, off on
another course entirely.
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