Posted on 02/08/2012 5:46:40 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As U.S. forces come home from Iraq after nine years at war, the nation is facing professional troops sufficiently bruised and isolated from American society that some defense experts whisper we may need major changes in military education and even a conscription-based national youth service program to reboot our fighting forces.
Painful reminders are everywhere of an unpopular U.S. military venture that began with grave strategic miscalculations and is ending with violence and political instability in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is openly contemptuous of his U.S. protectors, while Afghan security forces murder allied officers.
These U.S. military campaigns have cost $1.3 trillion, helped cripple the economy, extinguished 6,400 American lives, more than 150,000 Iraqi and Afghan lives and left disturbing rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among returning U.S. veterans.
The wartime shortcomings of the all-volunteer military are a legacy, in part, of the draft's end 40 years ago. There's been a growing disconnect between the American public and the U.S. armed forces.
Outgoing joint chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen declared last year that "America no longer knows its military, and the U.S. military no longer knows America."
As late as the 1980s, some 40 percent of 18-year-olds had at least one veteran parent. A recent Pew poll confirmed that only 33 percent of Americans between 18 and 25 now have a family connection with the military. Most Americans simply no longer have the same personal stake they once did in the military's actions.
The challenge facing the American military today is as much moral and ethical as budgetary and economic.
The state of constant war has exposed serious limitations in our high-tech, all-volunteer force. This force, the envy of militaries around the world, was created in the wake of Vietnam.
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economics professor, saw the military as a labor force that would respond to economic imperatives like any other: the appeal of a job, a steady salary and a secure career. Friedman's economic theory ended the unpopular draft.
Forty years later, the American people's instinctive interest in their troops' welfare has inevitably atrophied.
Tentative questions about the sustainability of the volunteer military, and the growing civilian-military cultural divide, began to surface in earnest last year.
The consensus among enlisted soldiers and officers I've spoken with recently is that the 235,000-member U.S. officer corps, the volunteer forces' engine, is in a state of professional and ethical exhaustion.
Several studies have documented the flight of junior officers from the Army and Marines since Iraq spun out of control in 2005 and 2006. Repeated deployments have left even the best officers stretched thin, overworked and often under-resourced.
Despite their tactical and technological sophistication, mid-level officers are divided over shifting strategic aims and military doctrine, wavering civilian leadership, bureaucratic rigidity and indecisive in-theater operations.
The way forward is a systematic retooling of how our professional military educates and chooses its leaders and recruits its soldiers. Contemporary U.S. officers require technical expertise in the military sciences, the traditional core of a military education. But they need an equally sophisticated grasp of international relations, political history, legal systems, languages and foreign cultures.
The military's emphasis should be on rigorous graduate studies for commissioned officers and ongoing education for noncommissioned officers and senior leaders that meet the standards of the best civilian universities. Officer selection should broadly reflect American society, rather than discourage recruitment from among the nation's economic and social elites.
To reduce the military's isolation from civilian life, the Pentagon should begin by deeply cutting manpower and supporting renewed conscription in the form of a three-year mandatory national service program (including civilian energy, education, infrastructure, environmental and urban service options) for all Americans between 18 and 25, with special benefits for military service.
A well-designed national service program is not a comprehensive prescription for what ails the U.S. military. It is not a return to the draft. But it would restore a needed sense of civic responsibility among young Americans. It would supply manpower demands during wartime and replace most private contractors with responsible enlisted troops.
Most important, it would reconnect our standing military forces with the restraining influence and support of the American people.
I say BS
The Warrior Spirit Lives in Every American Soldier.
TURN IT LOOSE !! I repeat, TURN IT LOOSE !!
BS
I think the all volunteer military works best when they aren’t perpetually at war.
I say, the editors are clueless.
Literally, tyranny.
As a draftee myself, I have always thought that young men should definitely have the draft hanging over them when they got out of high school, just like I did in 1965. I think it makes better citizens out of them. It certainly did of me.
Conscription or the draft is just another tax. Taxed enough already?
I was on the draft board in the 1990’s, but, of course, we didn’t draft anyone. Although there was some talk of drafting physicians at the start of Desert Storm.
And while this former infantry officer's blood boils when he reads the editorials from jack-asses who never served about how we can afford to reduce our ground forces because their noses are up Obama's bunghole, I go back to this quote from Fehrenbach:
“You may fly over land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it, and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”
Fancy drones don't change this reality. But since few people read real history anymore, we are doomed to repeat our mistake.
For what we are doing, Fehrenbach would argue for professionals. And by the way, the purported former SS Officer turned French Foreign Legionaire who wrote The Devil's Guard said the same thing about Vietnam.
Blaming the country's economic woes on military expenditure is simplistic nonsense. These are world-wide issues, as a glance at Europe, Africa, and most of Asia reveals instantly. Moreover, the idea that a drafted military will be somehow more efficient runs counter to history; it will be the opposite.
The really insidious argument in all of this is the suggestion that a military populated by voters' sons and daughters (as if the current one is populated by anyone else) will encourage the latter to avoid military engagements. Has it ever done so? Shall we cite Korea and Vietnam as examples? At what point were the voters ever consulted about these engagements anyway? Are they ever?
I hear a lot of this from aging liberals who regard the popular dissent against Vietnam to have been somehow healthy for the country and the world in general, and who would like to relive their highly edited memories of a halcyon age. Let us remind them of the result - a military that really was derided, ridiculed, and marginalized, whose members were blamed for all the horrors of war and held in systematic contempt by media and popular culture. That was a drafted military. That was how the country treated a drafted military. I was there and I swore never to let that happen again. And it hasn't, and it won't so long as I have a voice.
To many of us, being drafted was the easy way out. Only 2 years and no real risk then of going to war. We knew those who enlisted were likely going to Vietnam. We stepped up while others stepped aside or ran away.
This editorial is a disservice to the brave and selfless. It dismisses their spirit and their sacrifice. Our career military should be there because of a calling, not a draft.
The consensus among enlisted soldiers and officers I’ve spoken with recently is that the 235,000-member U.S. officer corps, the volunteer forces’ engine, is in a state of professional and ethical exhaustion.
A rambling editiorial that was obviously written by somebody who never served. I particularly like the crocodile tears for the returning servicemen “isolated from society.” I also wonder where the author is going with “changing the way the military choses its leaders”?
As a nation, we used to have a broad spectrum of our young men join because they saw service as their duty. That changed years ago and the remaining gutsy bunch we have now are getting lonely and tired.
The military should NEVER take anyone who does not want to be there.
It should also avoid any conflicts that it cannot conduct full scale.
Or over resources that are already organic and available to itself.
“conscription-based national youth service program”
Blue Shirts for Obama, anyone?
ps. After our brave gay warriors start serving in the trenches and showers, no problem!/sarc
Well, I can tell you I didn’t see much warrior spirit in the uniformed unwed mothers that filled Little Creek Amphib Base, Fort Eustis, Fort Story, Fort Devens, Fort Bragg, etc. It would be good to get a few Romney and Sununu boys in uniform.
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