[Mb-hair] Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

[Michael Butler]

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2334

We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President, wearing
a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed
on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the
virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands at the point of a missile. As
Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts it: "Increasingly, the president
uses speeches to troops to praise American ideals and send a signal to other
nations the administration is targeting for democratic change."

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized ways
of signaling "change" that are even blunter. We already have, for instance,
hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small, spread around the
world, but never enough, never deeply enough embedded in the former
borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy heartlands of our planet. The
military budget soars; planning for high-tech weaponry for the near (and
distant) future -- like the Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule
capable of delivering "conventional" munitions anywhere on the planet within
2 hours and due to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business
in Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American way
of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism,
American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, The New American
Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be critical reading no
matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate,
Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard
and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in
Berlin, it has special resonance.

Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a
journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right.
And I continue to view the remedies proferred by mainstream liberalism with
skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream
conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies,
is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign
policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a
response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as
authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to
coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the
mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional
conservatives who define the problem."

I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism and
military-basing policy, The Sorrows of Empire. Bacevich's The New American
Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by --
and found themselves in thrall to -- military power and the idea of global
military supremacy, should be placed right beside it in any library. Below,
you'll find the first of two long excerpts (slightly adapated) from the
book, and posted with the kind permission of the author and of his
publisher, Oxford University Press. This one offers Bacevitch's thoughts on
the ways in which, since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized,
a process to which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added
momentum. On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation
neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.

Bacevich's book carefully lays out and analyzes the various influences that
have fed into the creation and sustenance of the new American militarism
over the last decades. It would have been easy enough to create a 4-part or
6-part Tomdispatch series from the book. Bacevich is, for instance,
fascinating on evangelical Christianity (and its less than war-like earlier
history) as well as on the ways in which the military, after the Vietnam
debacle, rebuilt itself as a genuine imperial force, separated from the
American people and with an ethos "more akin to that of the French Foreign
Legion" -- a force prepared for war without end. But for that, and much
else, you'll have to turn to the book itself. Tom

    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 U.S. response to the events
of 9/11 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, U.S. 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 to 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 U.S. policy and to 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 U.S. 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 U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest
ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve
large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] 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
ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields,
cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that
give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. 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 U.S.
Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S.
Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the
Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army --
which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some five thousand
aircraft.

    All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the
present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger
than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American
defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the combined defense
budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S.
enemies.16 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 Reagan era.
According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget
will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent -- 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 U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Navy's future, "sea
supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant
theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of course,
the U.S. 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
U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 9/11 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 Aesthetic of War

    Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the
appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the third
indication of advancing militarism.

    The old twentieth-century aesthetic 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 twenty-first 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 twentieth
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 twenty-first 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 aesthetic
respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic
interpreters of twentieth-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 a perhaps 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 U.S. 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 aesthetic 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 hardworking, and they went about their business with poise
and élan." A writer for Rolling Stone 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 explainedŠ 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 twenty-first century a
different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place
where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybodyŠ 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 serveŠ 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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.N.
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 $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure
advertised as "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. 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 Œemergency' 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 Œplan' for peace is the loaded pistol."

    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.

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, copyright ©
2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the author and Oxford
University Press, Inc.
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posted April 20, 2005 at 1:20 pm
     
             
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