The Atlantic has a rather depressing article on The Tragedy of the American Military. Here’s the kernel of the story: the knee-jerk idolatry of the military by the American public is leading to a decline in its effectiveness and to wasteful expenditure of human lives.
If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.
Another interesting point: we’re mostly out of touch with the reality of the military, and despite the fact that we spend ludicrous amounts of money on it, many of us lack any real contact with the human beings sucked into it.
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
That’s something I hadn’t considered before, and I wonder if that disconnect is also a matter of class. I have a son in the army, and many nephews who have served or are serving; all of my uncles served in the army or the navy (my father enlisted, but was quickly mustered right back out for medical issues); my grandfather was in the Army Corps of Engineers. I suspect that it’s the working poor who are most likely to enlist, creating another reason for misuse of the military — the wealthy who make the decisions do not have a personal stake in any war, other than the profits they gain from their investments in military contractors.
As in Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” (guess which album. *smirk*):
Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side.
I’m an Army veteran &, like PZ, have several relatives who have served in the military, including my dad & a brother. Thanks to James Fallows for an excellent job of articulating something I’ve thought about a lot, but have been unable to express as well as he does.
People always bring up the number of active duty military members as 1.4 million and then the 850k reservists as the final numbers on people with experience with the military. I find that a bit disingenuous since it is only a snapshot of people who are currently in. It does not include those who have already served, which is actually 21.8 million (http://www.census.gov/library/infographics/veterans.html). It is fairly likely for ordinary citizens to know someone who has served, much more so than someone currently serving.
I myself was in the military and anecdotally, I agree with the assessment that most are from a working class background. I can’t think of anyone I met while I was in who had an upper class background. Part of that is the incentive for joining – job training, payment for education, and work experience, none of which has all that much appeal to someone who already has money and connections.
Furthermore, the military puts restrictions on how much money a military member can earn or have and still be allowed to join and then disallows members from staying in if they somehow exceed that number (like winning the lottery, having good investments, or a generous inheritance). This is claimed to be so that members will not be swayed in their loyalty by their own money. I cannot find the regulation that covers this right now, though I distinctly remember it being explained to me when I joined.
Sounds like an argument for universal mandatory service. I’m not sure that’s the right answer, but just imagine if everyone were required to do a two year term of military service and there were no way for your family connections, wealth, and power to get you out of your two years or swing you into a cushy position (a tall order, I know). You have to wonder if we’d so glibly commit our troops to senseless wars, or if there’d be some actual consequences for an administration that was shown to have lied repeatedly to justify a war if the Tagg Romneys of the world were among the casualties.
The U.S. military is just as effective as ever. It’s the expectations about how victory will change things that’s the problem. As we’ve seen in Iraq, winning isn’t everything and in fact is nothing if there can be no peace because of unresolved issues that lead to further conflict. The U.S. succeeded in deposing Saddam Hussein and the Sunni elite that ruled Iraq, but creating the conditions for a stable, peaceful Iraq were not achieved.
David Wilford, I think you are using “effective” in a strange way. The U.S. military is indeed very effective at blowing stuff up and killing people, but the intervention in Iraq was an utter, abject, unalloyed failure. It did nothing to advance the national interest or that of people anywhere, including Iraq; cost $1.5 trillion (at least) and probably has resulted in the premature deaths of more than 1 million people, and millions of refugees. How exactly is that effective?
the knee-jerk idolatry of the military by the American public
The military-industrial-congressional complex isn’t helping, either. They are consistently preferring to spend money on useless crap like the F-35, Osprey, and Littoral fighting ship, rather than training and maintaining the troops. And the command structure is increasingly top-heavy.
cervantes @ 6:
I think it’s clear from the context that by “effective” I mean militarily effective. That doesn’t necessarily translate into politically effective, as we’ve seen in Iraq and elsewhere. But there’s no doubt that just as in the Gulf War the U.S. military’s capabilities to fight and defeat an opponent’s military forces are still intact.
A big part of the problem is that the military is no longer just the military. It is the military-industrial complex, in which big companies make big money by selling products and services to the military. Big companies also donate big bucks to the candidates that keep feeding the machine.
We have the best government money can buy, and military contractors buy a lot of it.
As we’ve seen in Iraq, winning isn’t everything
News flash: the US didn’t “win” in Iraq. They won a few battles but the Rumsfeld doctrine (“just enough troops to ensure eventual defeat!”) finally proved its worth.
There was “universal military service” act put forward in 2001 (and for a couple years after) , that mandated basic training and a military-approved history course for everybody. Conscientious objectors would be exempt from arms training, but nothing else.
That sort of summarizes my problem with universal service. It seems like a great tool to instill a habit of compliance.
Though I’m less and less sure how different that would be from the way things are today…
The divide between rich and poor is probably best given by the example of Mitt Romney’s sons – none of whom have served
Meanwhile, Austria doesn’t need a military, but recently voted to keep the draft so the supply of job-destroying forced labor (civilian service) wouldn’t dry up. What happens? Right now the military’s budget is being cut to oblivion.
Wait, wait, I’m confused. Is your plan to correct this problem to put more people in the military? Forgive me if I don’t get your point, but it sounds a lot like people are advocating mandatory service in the military, as a way to make the military seem less important to national affairs, operate more effectively, and receive less funding. If that’s the case, sorry, I think those of you who are saying this have lost your minds. Mandatory service would increase the military budget — and military/”security” spending is now around 60% of the discretionary budget, actually more because of post-budget spending bills — and would make the military a larger organization demanding more “loyalty”. Furthermore, since military training has a noted tendency to make people conform, it would probably make a lot more people into mindless right-wing authoritarians. It’s a terrible idea.
Mind you, I don’t have any particular plan in mind to try and stop the idiocy which is American military policy, but I can recognize that that idea isn’t going to work. (I don’t know how to perform brain surgery, either, but if the “surgeon” walks in with a pickaxe and starts swinging, I can tell they’re not going to succeed, either.)
Sorry friend, but terrible idea. The poor and middle class will get conscripted and the wealthy and powerful will make sure their kids can evade it. There is simply no other way it could possibly play out. Look at GWB in Vietnam. There’s always a way around it.
I think what would be better would be to wind down our ridiculous level of spending on the military and end some of our foreign adventures that no longer make sense (Guantanamo anyone?)
If you have a whole lot of shiny new hammers lying around, you tend to want to use them. If you just have the one, you tend might find a better tool for the job.
Marcus Ranum @ 10:
Part of the Bush administration’s selling the Iraq war to the U.S. public was to emphasize that once Saddam Hussein was toppled everything would just naturally fall into place. So when Gen. Erin Shinseki stated before the war that more troops would be needed to control the country, the White House came down on him like a ton of bricks because they were desperate to maintain the pretense that it would be easy, lest the American public get cold feet. Hence, the keeping of the U.S. military force to a minimal size, so it could be justified as easy-peasy and therefore worth doing. ::cough::
WTF.
1) :-) Eric.
2) “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want”, said Rumsfeld. So “you” went to war with the army Sgt. Rummy wanted, not the army Gen. Shinseki wanted. The rest is history.
There was “universal military service” act put forward in 2001 (and for a couple years after) , that mandated basic training and a military-approved history course for everybody.
You can just betcha the police state would not like that one tiny little bit. Military training is not what you want people to have, when you’re in the process of vastly increasing inequality at all levels of society.
David M. @ 18:
1. Thanks for the correction!
2. Considering it was a war of the U.S.’s choosing, Rumsfeld’s ridiculous line should have been considered a huge red flag with respect to going to war. Yes, raising a larger force would have made a war in Iraq a much costlier proposition, and the Bush White House emphatically did not want that derailing a war they’s already decided on at least by the spring of 2002. That it’s ended up being a far more costly war anyway isn’t a surprise to anyone who had a clue.
That’s an interesting concern that I hadn’t considered before. What is the long term effect of basic training? I’ve certainly seen people come out of it very different from when they went in, and not in a good way, but that’s anecdotal and short term.
Whose plan? I think I’m the only one even hinting at it, and I thought I made it clear it wasn’t actually my plan.
Of course, I also specified that this would have to be made unavoidable and that that’s a pretty tall order, at best. I also said that the quotes from the article sound like an argument for mandatory service, they do. And I also said “I’m not sure that’s the right answer, but just imagine…”
I appreciate criticism of the idea, but I’d like to point out that it’s more than a bit of a “modest proposal” than a serious policy suggestion. Of course, I don’t think it’s any more likely that this would ever happen, let alone in a way that would be equitable than, say,
Alteredstory @ 11:
Isn’t that already taken care of in the State of Texas history textbook standards? ::rimshot::
I roll my eyes every time I hear this ‘failure’ argument. The war on
Iraqthe American taxpayer has been a spectacular success. As others have pointed out it has made at least 1.5 Trillion in sweet profit for those who own the Congress. There’s just something about human nature that we can lose something then think of it as having ceased to exist. Your tax money doesn’t go into a hole in the ground, it goes into someone’s pocket.Re “universal military service”: Some of us conscientiously object to war and will refuse to serve in the military. Of course, you could require universal service without it being military service. In fact, that’s what was done in the past and I did my two years, just not in the army. That opens a door to avoid service, of course, but then there will be always be ways for the rich and/or well connected to skirt these requirements, such as George W. Bush and George Romney. It’s unquestionable that poor and working class people carry the brunt of this burden. That was true during the Vietnam War when there was a draft, a random lottery, etc. If governance of the military and its uses is the problem perhaps we should focus on the governance end rather than service requirements. I doubt that inducting a larger segment of the population into the military will fix the problem.
Although I wasn’t a huge fan of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, I do give him major kudos for not committing Canada to the “coalition of the willing” that went into Iraq. I can hear the phone call he had with Dubya:
W: Hey Gene? How about you send some of your fine dogsled infantry with us into Eye Rack?
JC: Sorry, Jorge. I have my own fight here, dealing with the problems of universal ‘elt care.
W: Oh come on now, be neighbourly. I’ll invite you down for barbecue next week.
JC: Jorge, Canada has no interest in changing regimes in Iraq at this time, but we wish you well.
W: Gol’ dangit, Gene! I’m throwing a huge party in the sandbox over there, and I can’t get anyone to go! Except, you know, Poland. And Tonga.
JC: I have to answer to my electorate, Jorge.
W: Your who?
The idea that universal military service and downsizing are incompatible I think isn’t necessarily correct. But we’ll get to that in a second.
@erichoug — the thing is, many relatively wealthy people got school deferments, but it’s important to remember that the modern draft was set up to prevent that — it wasn’t always successful, but it went a long way. Even so you are correct, by its nature a school deferment was (especially in 1965) more available to people with money. I should point out that it is no accident that the biggest antiwar demonstrations were all at public schools — UC Berkeley was arguably the most famous, but places like UW Madison (in a state that was pretty reliably conservative), Texas, MSU and U of M… the list goes on. The Harvard and Yale kids didn’t get on the bandwagon until 1970 at least.
Anyhow, my thought is that universal service helps to diversify the military, and in previous wars it did just that. One of the things about WW II, for example, or Korea, even, was that many people knew someone who had served or done so themselves, even in relatively upper-crust sectors of the population. It’s very interesting to read accounts of the 1950s and 1960s when the percentage of people who had some direct connection with the armed services was quite high. It even made it into fictional tropes. (See: any film noir, which almost always involved someone who was once in the army).
The all-volunteer force has the problem of self-selection. That is, why are you joining the Army? People have already pointed out the reasons it will skew to working class people. Absent a draft, that also means that when you need more soldiers– as happened in Iraq — you start taking people you’d never have considered before. Example: neo-nazis were once essentially barred from military service, but that was relaxed considerably to make recruitment targets.
Something else that I thought of: a lot of people think that the reporters in Vietnam were a bunch of hippies and anti-military liberals, but that was far from the case. Malcolm Browne, for one, served in Korea, and so did Neil Sheehan (a Harvard grad BTW). That meant they were closely connected with the men they were covering in a way that many reporters today are not. At a minimum they could gain a kind of trust that is harder to do for people that haven’t served. That in turn meant that they could get the kinds of stories that have proven much harder to do nowadays. (The military has certainly learned a lot about how to control the press). A guy who did some time as an infantryman will, I think, have a better idea how to get around that and thereby inform the public.
In a less esoteric vein, though, the thing about the last coupe of wars is precisely that an all-volunteer military means it’s easier to keep them going. As long as a big chunk of the population never has to experience the fighting, that works, from a political standpoint. I’d argue it’s the very reason the military was willing to accept the end of conscription — they were bright enough to see that a permanent class of people from which soldiers would be drawn without affecting any elites was a fantastic idea, because it blunts political criticism.
Downsizing the military budget by a lot would go a long way; that isn’t incompatible with universal service. After all we still had it the last time there was a real cut in military spending (the late 1940s).
Fun fact: who was the last president to tell off his general who publicly disagreed with him? Truman. I cannot imagine any president doing the same thing now. (Generals have come and gone but so far their “suggestions” of ever expanding military involvement have not been rebuffed, whereas Truman told MacArthur that the idea of invading China was simply stupid and he wasn’t having it).
Oh please. US military is ineffective? Not enough people serve so they push for unwinnable wars? How about comparing US’ professional military with a conscription army of, say, Israel or Russia? Countries that pride themselves on being in an endless war and having a population so insanely right-wing it’d make Sean Hannity blush. Those countries aren’t exactly renown for being military effective or having an active discussion on the role of the army.
Marcus Ranum #19
You’ve gotta be joking. Have you never heard of Fascism?
gussnarp #21
I have my own experience, but that’s pretty much the definition of “anecdotal”. Anyway, the purpose of all and any military training, from how to charge to how march in an empty field, is to train the soldier to be an organic part of a group and to follow orders without question. Since humanity had thousands of years to perfect this training, I’d say that modern commander know very well how to promote conformity.
Also, I’d like to point out again that conscription correlates nicely with right-wing countries (map).
@jesse, gussnarp, et al:
So, you think that if the military were either staffed by everyone (in turn), or a random selection of “everyone”, this would generate disapproval of misuse of the military, and thus politicians would stop misusing the military? Do I have that right?
That didn’t stop Vietnam from happening. And at the time we had a press corps which did more than just echo press releases from the military, which is what they do now, so the public actually had a marginally better chance of knowing what was going on.
For that matter, sending the bankers and stock brokers who crashed the economy in 2008 had, for months into 2009, a 90+% approval rating. It still polls well above 60%. It isn’t going to happen. You guys have this idea that one of the two big parties — probably the Democrats — will go anti-war if there is support.
Ain’t gonna happen. The Democrats differ from the Republicans in actual practice — as opposed to rhetoric — only in that they will lie to the voters about whether they’re going to support this kind of crap. The Democrats had the presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress for two years from 2008 to 2010, and did nothing about the banks, less than nothing about Iraq (remember the “surge”? And of course Obama was desperately trying to negotiate to extend our stay beyond Bush’s 2011 deadline), in fact did nothing positive on any major issue, instead spent most of that time giving us a health insurance bill which guarantees a 20% profit to the insurance companies — while carefully avoiding any mention of single payer, and deliberately stripping a public option out with the excuse that they wanted Republicans to vote for it, which of course was a wasted effort even if it were genuine, which it wasn’t. The Democrats are a large part of the problem, because they convince people that they are trying to solve problems when they exist to keep the problems from going away. The Republicans aren’t any better, but at least they are honest about being in favor of the things which are wrong. As long as we have Democrats and Republicans in charge of the federal government, we will continue to have bad foreign policy, bad budgeting, and an out-of-control military.
As a career military officer (ROTC) and “beneficiary” of the post-Gulf-War “Peace Dividend”, I’m always amused when civilians come back around to the same issues that we (the younger officers) struggled with during the Carter, Reagan, and George II administrations. In no particular order:
We don’t need a military draft, and certainly not in peacetime (for some value of that term — the operative word in “cold war” is not “cold”). Putting firearms in the hands of poorly trained draftees is not a recipe for military effectiveness; it is a recipe for My Lai, and the real shock is that we’ve had so few such incidents. I would not be averse to a national-service requirement to hold elective office, so long as there were significant non-military alternatives that fell within that national service… and that it is not a report-on-your-18th-birthday sort of thing, but something that welcomes service from those with more life experience, too (like a 50-ish doctor giving two years of service in Appalachia, or a Wall Street trader spending three years teaching middle/high-school math in rural Alabama, or an experienced road-construction foreman teaching proper safety and construction techniques in Guatemala for the Peace Corps).
More to the point, we don’t need military academies any longer, at least not as they are constituted. They’re not as good as their reputations at either producing effective officers or at providing education to officer candidates, and they create a clubbishness/cliqueishness that is at best counterproductive. At worst, they provide a capitive audience for certain kinds of indoctrination bordering on brainwashing (the evangelical BS at the Air Force Academy is less than coincidental when one also maps the location of the Focus-on-Everyone-Else’s-Family empire…), a culture of harassment as a training method that spills over into other parts of officer-candidates’ lives (the sexual harassment at all of the academies is a very ugly tip of a very ugly iceberg), and a dubious problem with the equivalent of “scholarship athletes.” There’s a place for academies as three-to-six-month follow-ons for those who’ve earned their commissions already through ROTC or OTS/OCS… but a monastical existence for four highly impressionable years doesn’t do much to prepare one to lead an enlisted force that has not had that same experience, almost certainly comes from a different social class, and definitely comes from an (on average) far lower level of academic achievement prior to 18… especially given the academic achievement that is necessary for basic military success today (even just weapon care!).
Last, a note regarding comment 3 above: It’s a myth. There is not now, and has not been since 1976 at latest, any such regulation regarding US military members having “too much money.” There has certainly been some active discouragement of recruiting from upper-class elements, but that has been as much a cultural thing as anything else. I personally know of one lottery winner and one McZorgle’s winner from the 1980s who remained on active duty thereafter all the way to retirement; I knew/know several “captains of industry” (not necessarily in the military-industrial complex) who were mere scions on active duty with waaaaaaaaay more money than my squadron’s operations budget. Now, prior to DOPMA’s passage in 1980, there was an assumption that officers (in particular) who had “too much” money would remove themselves to the Reserves pronto, but that was a purely cultural-pressure sort of thing.
Gee, ya think? Of course, if we actually did a cost-benefit analysis, or looked at the military through the cold, hard, lens of reality, we’d chuck the entire lot and spend the money and human effort on something useful and worthwhile instead.
That ain’t news. That’s been the principal composition of pretty much every military anywhere ever.
The U.S. left has developed some very odd verbal tics in regards to the military. I’ve noticed that on most liberal boards, a post that merely mentions in passing that the poster had served in the military is immediately followed with a “thank you for your service” post, and a deferential tone for the rest of the thread’s history. It’s strange to an outsider, much in the same way the constant repetition of the U.S. pledge of allegiance by schoolchildren is.
For an excellent book-length treatment of this subject by former colonel and now BU professor Andrew Bacevich, check out “Breach of Trust.”
I haave had this thought now ever since the early 70’s.
The War’s we get into have cost a tremendous amount of money that mostly end up as long term debt. The current one (both of them as one) as someone said cost more than 1.4 trillion dollars it will be years before a real cost is ever truly estimated there are many ways to categorize things to include or exclude depending on what your objectives are. I would also add that the same is also true for the death toll.
It looks like we are having about the same success today as we experienced in Vietnam, now could it have been any worse in the end if we had just spent some very large percent of the money spent on war directly in the countries we were fighting in. Hell I doubt we would have any worse results if we had just flew low over the whole country and dropped the cash out of planes, though I am pretty sure a better and more equitable way could be designed to distribute the money with no more graft then we have had doing it the way we usually do it.
the added benefit would be a very much reduced death toll
uncle frogy
This happens for the same reason we don’t have a decent media in the US.
The media was hammered for decades with the charge that they were “liberal” so they got to the point where they were too deferential to bullshit in order to appear “balanced.”
In the same way, liberals were slammed for decades by stories that every single returning Vietnam vet was spit on and called a baby-killer upon returning home, so around Gulf War I liberals all decided to kiss ass with the “support our troops!” slogan so they wouldn’t be called unpatriotic and veteran-hating anymore.
Many magnetic car ribbon/flag manufacturers profited handsomely as a result.
The people in charge also made deliberate use of this separation between the public and the military.
Wilford touched part of the problem in his post #5. He just didn’t go far enough. It is not just the expectations of how victory will change things but also a deliberately ignored process of how to achieve those expectation and what is needed in the form of resources.
The people in charge did not want to break the separation between the public and military so they ignored and/or smeared people who performed such assessments coming to the conclusion that not enough resources and the wrong ones were provided. Why? Because the goals set would have required the reinstatement of the draft, which would have forcefully pushed the military and the costs (in/on lives) onto the public. The last thing the people in power wanted was another variation of the Vietnam protests. And to this point they have succeeded in that.
#27 AlexanderZ
Hmm. If you mean right-wing as in RWA (locally conservative), it seems to me that little things like no China are a big hole in that thesis. If you mean some non-local version of right, then I think the thesis doesn’t make much sense.
In either case, I’d point out that only a few years ago, Germany had conscription – and we’re certainly no right-wing country under either definition.
Neither is Norway.
Without looking at more examples, it looks to me that your correlation isn’t particularly convincing.
#29 Jaws
Heinlein?
I always thought that was one of his more awful ideas … and I would qualify, having done my German conscription (in the Air Force). (We were a well-mixed family. Eldest to youngest, conscription, sister, volunteered, objected. And father from the “white generation” (when after the war there was no military to serve in).)
If the mean stay of people in the military is 4 years, and the average life expectancy is 100, and at any given time 1% of the American public is in the military, then approximately 25% of Americans will, at some point in their life, serve in the military. If you approximate the sex difference in the military as all men and no women, then approximately 50% of men will serve in the military at some point in their life.
These numbers are, of course, very rough. But it shows that simply looking at the people serving at one single point in time isn’t all that meaningful. Quite a lot of people do serve at one point or another.
Canada’s military has been effectively all volunteer for its entire history. Conscription was introduced in World War 1 over strong opposition in Quebec. Although 124,588 men were conscripted, only 24,132 actually were sent to France before war’s end. In World War 2 conscription was again controversial, with most Quebeckers once more opposed, and as a result only 2400 some conscripts actually saw combat in Europe. I doubt any government would consider the idea now, even our current militaristic Conservative one.
I suspect the utility of conscripts for many modern military roles is questionable. By the time you get them fully trained the end of their term of service is near. Even a mere rifleman these days needs more technical knowledge and training that just putting him through enough basic training to know which end of a rifle is which, and how to march.
36: Heinlein (in Starship Troopers) went much too far, and would have required “national service” for not just elective office, but a startling smorgasbord of other jobs… many of which should be qualifying as “national service” themselves. I’m not saying there are no pitfalls; I’m just saying that the combination of a broad-enough conception of “national service” and a narrow-enough limitation on “national service is a qualifier” might be useful. One thing that it will be rather effective at — at least after a generation — is dealing with the “chickenhawk” problem noted at the top of this topic (and, unfortunately, I knew and interacted with a fair number of them).
On whether universal military service would make people more compliant: It often has the opposite effect. The thing that turned me against war, militarism, and authoritarianism more than anything else was my time in the military. It had the same effect on many of my Army buddies — and we were “Regular Army.” The draftees I knew had even worse attitudes than we had.
Really, sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t try to sell Rafales war-planes to the US instead of trying to woo emergent countries like Brazil or India: they’re expensive, they’re notoriously hard to pilot, their sales sustain the sybaritic lifestyle of the notoriously inept Dassault heirs, in other words, they’re the perfect doodads to add to the US military collection of overpriced doodads.
***
Indeed: when France still had mandatory service, it was virtually impossible to evade service through one’s parents clout, but a few military bases existed as cushy hideouts for the rich kids and sons of bureaucrats (that’s how former president Sarkozy ended being Khomeini’s house guard during his service), which reached the same end result while preserving appearances.
Your map doesn’t support that for any value of “right-wing” I can think of. Can you clarify what you mean by it?
What about the threat from Liechtenstein?
Could be because that was never the mission – you really will believe anything the elite tell you, won’t you David? I bet you thought there were WDMs there. As kevinalexander@23 points out, it made a lot of money for a considerable number of already-rich people, and ensured that the Iraqi army will need American equipment and training for many years. Mind you, some of the other objectives (permanent military bases, control of Iraqi oil) were not achieved.
To paraphrase Jefferson, crooked banker outflex standing armies any day of the week.
This is all very similar to what happened in Ancient Greece.
Athens, being a democracy, had to vote on going to war. BUT few of those doing the voting had to fight: the heavy infantry had to be relatively wealthy to afford hoplite gear, the cavalry had to be wealthier yet, and warships were provided by the wealthiest citizens. The majority of citizens were not rich enough to afford any of this, but they still benefitted from successful wars while building Athens’ empire. The majority of voters could see no risk to themselves and saw great benefits from war so Athens became the most belligerent of the Greek states. The US has been at war almost continuously for many decades now.
This contrasts with Sparta, which is usually seen as warlike. The lower classes had no say and so the people making decisions were those who would suffer if a war went badly. This resulted in Sparta trying its best to avoid conflict unless directly threatened. A common method was to plead that there was a religious reason that they couldn’t go war at the moment – this was the reason they could send only a token force to Thermopylae. The Spartans were individually great and enthusiastic warriors but the state itself was far less belligerent than Athens.
As several people have pointed out, a draft is a daft idea these days from a purely military point of view – to win a war, you need professionals, not a huge heap of cannon fodder fresh out of basic training.
Whoa, that sounds like the American argument for arming the whole populace lest a dictator take over – and that’s an argument from ignorance of Saddam.
But the citizens were uninformed and vengeful, much as if they had watched too much Faux Noise.
In an absolute monarchy, only a single person needs to understand what they’re doing. In an aristocracy or oligarchy, only the elite need to understand what they’re doing. In a democracy, more than half of the whole population need to understand what they’re doing…
While we’re in the business of modest proposals, a new one occurred to me today listening to an old story about Ukraine earlier in it’s struggles with Russia/Russian separatists/whatever you want to call it having had to have a fund raising drive for its military.
So maybe that’s what we really need. Forget whether military service is voluntary or compulsory, let’s make military funding voluntary rather than compulsory. That would change things considerably, I expect.
gussnarp:
Hmm, that would mean lower taxes, thus more freedom, but fewer foreigners would also be killed…. So I don’t know. It’s a toss-up. Conservatives would be so excited about something or another that they’ll start running around frantically in every direction, probably leading to a collision. We don’t know what might happen when they annihilate one another.
This article in the Atlantic is much needed. I have long thought that the US military has now been partly transformed into a social welfare program acceptable to conservatives (i.e. Republicans). In the past, the positive economic impact and social mobility that military service had on lower and middle class individuals was admirable (e.g. the access to higher education enabled by the GI Bill). But now it seems that whole military-industrial system has been subverted with the endless manufactured wars and aggressive foreign policy into a major part of the US domestic social/economic policy.
khms #36, Nick Gotts #42
Okay, look at it from a different angle. Suppose you were a functional democracy, how likely were you to be a draft country and how likely a non-draft country? It seems to me that only a small percentage of functional democracies (i.e. countries who don’t hold grossly fabricated elections and aren’t a thinly veiled one-party system that like to pretend to be a democracy) do have conscription, while the other countries have more of a fifty-fifty spread.
I’m changing the wording to “democracy” because what I consider right or left wing is more suited to the Thunderdome (where I’ve touched on the subject with Nick Grotts) than here. In any case here is a list of democracies that do have draft (tell me if I missed anyone):
*Israel and Turkey – both are proud ethnocracies, so they’re out.
*Moldova can barely called a functional democracy and its government still act in a very Soviet manner.
*South American countries – pretty much the same situation as Moldova. Either there is a civil war like in Mexico, or a country is still reforming after a military Junta. Not exactly a beacon of progressive thought.
*Switzerland – also know as European Bangladesh. The country that allowed women’s suffrage in 1971 and continues to be one of, if not the most, xenophobic country in western Europe is right-wing by any standard. I wouldn’t count it for anything, but if you want you can still see it as a proper democracy.
*Ukraine and Georgia – Seriously?
In the end the list includes: Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Taiwan, South Korea and Germany. You can add the Swiss, Moldova and some South American countries if you’re feeling generous, but you’d still get a small percentage and it’ll only serve to prove that the only way to maintain the absence of reverse correlation between democracies and draft is to include countries that 30 years ago were still totalitarian or despotic regimes.
Nick Gotts #44
The moon landing was an inside job!!2!
PZ’s comment about the working poor is right on the money. I have been extremely fortunate during my military service and have enjoyed many, many benefits because of it. My heart goes out to the people who served and are unable to enjoy those benefits because they didn’t have the education, background or privilege I have had or worse, because they were hurt or killed. Not to mention the people who have died and aren’t even able to vote in the country that sent them to fight.
A lack of understanding of how the military functions, what it can and cannot do effectively, and the combination of mysticism (the military has magical powers to do anything anywhere) and the exaggeration of TV and movies ( A mix of the military as being hopeless buffoons/or bloodthirsty maniacs joyously/sadistically relishing destruction and death.) means most Americans have no realistic idea of what the military is.
In example: The reality is that you could spin a globe and randomly stick a pin in it, and given ten to twelve hours, the US military could arrange for several thousand pounds of explosives to go off within ten feet or so of those exact coordinates. If specified ahead of time you could pick the exact time and they could get the package there +/- a couple of seconds. International borders, weather, time of day, depth or altitude (within certain limits) are not an obstacle. We have been perfecting this capability for sixty years now and we are really good at it.
That said, there are frightfully few missions likely to yield a beneficial effect using that capability. And even where it might the benefit is startlingly easy to thwart. If the bomb is going to Hollywood and Vine at any specific time, and the person or vehicle you are trying to hit is ten minutes late, the whole mission is a bust. Precision strikes demand detailed and reliable information. There are many people alive today because a vehicle got a flat, got delayed in traffic, or someone stopped to pick up a loaf of bread. Every strengths has a limit.
Limits: Nobody is any good at nation building. Nobody is any good at standing up a motivated and professional army dedicated to protecting a non-sectarian nation and upholding the rule of law if the nation didn’t already have such an army. Nobody can effectively walk into a civil war and bring peace if both, all, parties don’t already want peace. Nobody can bring peace to a ethnic/tribal/religious/racial conflicts that has been smoldering for decades, if not hundreds of years.
The military excels at destroying things and people that you can point at. Take a picture of a building and they can make it disappear. Take a picture of a tank and tell them exactly where it will be in twelve hours and they will convert it into scrap metal for you.
They also excel at meeting logistical challenges. We can get several tons of explosives, or pretty much anything else, anywhere on earth in a very short amount of time and get it there on time and on target. For the military it is a simple logistical problem. A matter of arranging suitable transportation and support of that transportation.
Lets say you have ten or twenty thousand people starving and dehydrated on a remote mountain. Give the air force a call and given a shockingly short amount of time they can be dropping supplies by the ton. Do you need hospitals to help fight an outbreak of a deadly disease, call the army. They can have a fully equipped hospital, worthy of any modern hospital, set up in a few days.
It would help if people didn’t consider knowledge of military capabilities, weapons, tactics and strategy to be tainted knowledge. It would help if people understood the basics. I spend hours explaining to people with no previous desire to understand the military exactly what a “no-fly zone” meant. All of them thought that it was as simple as drawing a line on a map and that nobody would get hurt. I explained that a no-fly zone couldn’t be established until the coalition has complete air superiority. That means that all effective air defenses have to be defeated, destroyed or forced to retreat across the line. It means that all potentially opposing air forces have to be defeated or driven off out of range. Those tasks are complex, difficult, costly and they typically, unless the adversary is very cooperative, involve blowing stuff up and/or killing people.
Of course, you can’t blame the civilian population. A good number of congressmen, people with easy access to military advice, thought that it would be bloodless and easy, that we could just draw a line and declare it so. The ones that knew better don’t fare much better because they are casually and reflexively called warmongers and worse.
Nick Gotts @ 44:
Please, at least try to read all the comments before saying something foolish next time. (Hint: see comment #16. The comment #20. You won’t even have to read between the lines on that one to get a clue about my opinion about Dubya’s stupid war.)
We did actually see citizens of a country saw no to a military this year. Switzerland had decided in 2011 to replace its fleet of Northrop F5E Tiger II jet fighters with Saab Gripens. But in May of this year 53 percent of voters voted against the purchase in a referendum. Can you imagine the howls of indignation if such a vote was even proposed in the US, let alone if the anti-purchase forces won?
It should be noted that the Swiss ended up being a bit embarrassed in the past year or so when it became public that the Swiss fighter fleet normally operates only during weekday business hours.