Good job
Flawed thoughts on war
Oxford University Press, $28
by James S. Robbins
Andrew J. Bacevich promises that his new book will be about "misleading and dangerous conceptions of war, soldiers, and military institutions." Sure enough, his earnest tome is full of them.
War has become an unhealthy obsession for American society says Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who is now a professor at Boston University. In "The New American Militarism," he argues that a combination of Wilsonian foreign policy and dominant military strength have seduced us. The result is a rising tide of militarism on both left and right that is leading to financial and spiritual ruin
Unfortunately for Bacevich, who poses as a kind of cultural conservative even though he has written recently for the New Left Review, his argument rapidly breaks down. He portrays today's all-volunteer force as a symptom of militarism, preferring instead the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s when "citizenship and military service remained intimately connected." Does he really believe that conscription during the Cold War was less militaristic than present-day voluntarism?
Another alleged symptom of militarism is the lack of service records among many of our politicians. Bacevich argues that decision makers who "opted out" of service are less sensitive to the sacrifices of war, and thus more willing to use force. Perhaps that makes intuitive sense to Bacevich, but he can't prove that this phenomenon exists because there's no clear evidence for it. So he satisfies himself by calling it a "paradox" and moves on. By his reasoning, our society would be less militaristic if our politicians were retired generals and admirals. In jabbing at the president's landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, Bacevich says Bush sought to become the "first warrior President." (Hello, George Washington?)
The defense budget is another sore point for Bacevich He notes that military spending is currently 12 percent larger than the inflation-adjusted average during the Cold War. He takes this as proof of a wasteful obsession - a reckless willingness to spend more even as threats decline. That is one way of looking at it. A better way, however, is to analyze defense spending as a percentage of GDP. In 2003, the United States spent 3.7 percent of GDP on the military. The average per year from 1949-1989 was 7.6 percent, more than double today's rate. Combined with higher operations tempo, it indicates not that our country has grown more preoccupied with wielding global power, but more efficient at it.
In one of the most puzzling sections of "The New American Militarism," Bacevich castigates the armed services for their emphasis on "dominance," which the Defense Department defines as having enough power to act freely on the battlefield. "When it comes to military power," he chides, "mere superiority will not suffice." No, but dominance sure is nice - even for the losers. Bacevich ignores the fact that overwhelming power saves lives. It is not only an effective deterrent, but if we do go to war, we have the capability of finishing the conflict swiftly and with fewer casualties on both sides. Bacevich denounces the brutality of 20th-century warfare, such as the grinding trench combat of World War I, but that is precisely what today's military leaders have sought to avoid, and very successfully.
Bacevich also frets over the United States spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined. So how much of our edge must we give up? Perhaps he would be happy if our potential foes evened the balance by spending more. By this logic, more North Korean nukes, more Syrian scuds, more Iranian rockets, more Venezuelan fighter jets, and more Chinese troops would make the world a safer place.
Throughout the book, Bacevich ignores important distinctions between the Clinton and Bush years and seeks commonalities that strain credulity. He makes light of the sterile technocratic defense ethos of the 1990s without drawing the obvious conclusion that it was this impression of moral weakness that emboldened Osama bin Laden to bring his war to the American homeland. He also refuses to acknowledge that by the time al-Qaida did strike, the United States had a new leader who didn't shrink from using overwhelming force against our enemies. It is perhaps worth noting that in 2001, Bacevich was warning National Review readers that the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a terrible failure. "Caution and half-heartedness - not boldness, not ferocity - have been this campaign's signature characteristics," he wrote, adopting a rather militaristic tone. About a week later, the Taliban regime fell.
Bacevich's solutions to the new militarism are about what you would expect. He calls for more self-restraint when crises erupt, increased congressional involvement in security policy, reduced defense spending, and emphasis on non-military means of coercion such as economic sanctions (which, in the case of Iraq, succeeded mainly at making Saddam Hussein and U.N. appeasers wealthy). But these rather moderate fixes address a problem that exists only in Bacevich's imagination. The U.S. military is active today more by necessity than choice. We live in a time of global instability, due in large measure to our victory in the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet Union. Bacevich's fundamental concern is less with the military than America's inherited position of global leadership.
Well, why shouldn't the United States be the dominant military power in the world? Who better?
James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council.
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/22//opinion/books%20and%20culture//85books18robbins.txt