CHAPTER 2
Civil-Military Paradoxes
Rosa Brooks
Portions of this chapter draw on several columns published in Foreign Policy over the last few years. I am deeply grateful to Foreign Policy for providing me with an early venue to work through some of the ideas discussed here and to the New America Foundation and Arizona State University for providing financial support for my work.
Civil-military relations in modern America are characterized more by paradox than by consistency: ordinary Americans support the military more than ever but know less about it than ever. In Washington, senior government policymakers simultaneously overestimate the military’s capabilities and mistrust the military leadership. The US military is widely viewed as the strongest military in the history of the world, but military leaders view conventional military tools as less and less useful for dealing with the complex security threats we face today. Meanwhile, although the military itself is more professional than ever, its internal structures—from recruiting, training, and education to personnel policies—lag badly behind those in most civilian workplaces, making it difficult for the military to change from within.
These paradoxes both reflect and contribute to an underlying conundrum. In today’s world, where security challenges increasingly stem from nonstate actors, the cyber domain, the diffuse effects of climate change, and similar nontraditional sources, it is growing ever more difficult to clearly define the US military’s role and mission. We no longer have a coherent basis for distinguishing between war and “not war,” or between military force and other forms of coercion and manipulation. In such a context, we no longer know what kind of military we need, or how to draw sensible lines between civilian and military tasks and roles. The resulting confusion is a recipe for tensions between civilian and military leaders, challenges to military morale, and, in the end, poor policy decisions.
Paradox One:
Enthusiasm and Ignorance
Most Americans know roughly as much about the US military as they know about the surface of the moon. It is not that Americans dislike the military—most of us support it wholeheartedly. It is just that we do not have a clue who is in it, what it does, what it costs those who join it, or what current US military policies cost us—as a nation or as a democracy.
Manifestations of public support for the military are everywhere in post-9/11 America. Troops are treated to special discounts at chain stores and a constant barrage of “Thank you for your service!” Airlines invite military personnel to board before other passengers, schools arrange for children to send greeting cards to “wounded warriors,” and employers tout their commitment to hiring military veterans at “Hire a Hero” job fairs.
But though support for “the troops” has become a kind of American civil religion, these ritualized gestures sometimes seem only to emphasize the distance between the military and civilian society. As James Fallows noted in a 2015 Atlantic article titled “The Tragedy of the American Military,” nearly 10 percent of the US population had been in uniform by the end of World War II.[1] Today, it is quite different.[2] Speaking at Duke University in 2010, former defense secretary Robert Gates was blunt: “For a growing number of Americans,” he said, “service in the military, no matter how laudable, has become something for other people to do.”[3]
The majority of living veterans served in wars that most Americans now consider part of our history, not part of our present.[4] Not coincidentally—and despite nearly fifteen years of war—younger Americans are far less likely than older Americans to have a member of their immediate family in the military. More than 75 percent of Americans over sixty have had a member of their immediate family serve in the military, compared to 40 percent of Americans under forty, and only 33 percent of Americans under thirty.[5] Looking only at more recent periods of military service, the numbers tell a story of dwindling civilian connections to the military: in the 2014 YouGov survey population, only 19 percent of Americans said they had served themselves or had an immediate relative who served in the military after 1991, and only 15.6 percent had served or had an immediate relative serve after September 11, 2001 (CM2T 1–2).[6]
What is more, military service has largely become a hereditary profession in modern America: the children of military veterans join the military at a significantly higher rate than those without a parent who served do. The essay in this volume by James Golby, Lindsay Cohn, and Peter D. Feaver provides a thorough discussion of how a parent’s veteran status affects his or her children’s decisions about whether to join the military.
Meanwhile, base-relocation policies have isolated many military personnel and their families in a small number of US states and regions. Half of all active-duty military personnel are now stationed in only five states: California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.[7] Partly as a consequence of these policies, over the last few decades the military has become more southern, less urban, and more politically conservative than American society as a whole.
Certainly, many military personnel feel ignored or misunderstood by their civilian compatriots. In its 2012 annual survey, the Military Times found that more than 75 percent of all active-duty personnel and reservists agreed with the statement, “The military community has little in common with the rest of the country and most civilians do not understand the military.”[8] There is substantial truth to the latter clause, at least: ask the average American to describe the basic structure of the military, estimate its size and budget, guess the locations of “forward deployed” military personnel, or describe the military’s activities, and you will get a lot of sheepish shrugs. Although nearly 70 percent of all YouGov respondents claimed to be “very” or “somewhat” familiar with the military (CM1T 39), when asked to estimate the number of people currently serving in all five branches of the military, the YouGov respondents were strikingly wrong: on average, their guesses were off by some five million people. Guesses on the size of specific branches of the military, such as the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, were incorrect by hundreds of thousands of people.[9]
While a near majority of YouGov respondents say they think the military is not isolated and a substantial number are “not sure” if it is isolated (CM2T 23), majorities across all demographic groups in the YouGov survey, both military and civilian, agreed that “military culture and way of life . . . is very different from the culture and way of life of those who are not in the military” and that “the military has different values than the rest of society,” as Golby, Cohn, and Feaver observe. Speaking to West Point cadets a few years ago, Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed a similar sentiment: “Our work is appreciated, of that I am certain. There isn’t a town or a city I visit where people do not convey to me their great pride in what we do. But I fear they do not know us. I fear they do not comprehend the full weight of the burden we carry or the price we pay when we return from battle.”[10]
The price paid by those who go into battle has certainly been high: more than 7,000 American military personnel have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 30,000 have been wounded.[11] Deployments also bring countless intangible costs: damaged or broken marriages, children growing up with absent parents, and the psychological strain of separation, hardship, and danger.
Even within the military, however, these costs are unevenly distributed. In 2003, for instance, enlisted personnel in combat occupational categories (such as infantry, armor, artillery, or Special Forces) made up less than 13 percent of the active-duty force; the remaining 87 percent were in support services, public affairs, transportation jobs, medical and scientific jobs, human resources, engineering and construction, and so on.[12] By 2013, even after two lengthy wars, the percentage of enlisted personnel in combat specialties had inched up to 15 percent. For officers, the percentage held steady at 15 percent over the decade from 2003 to 2013. The percentage of personnel in combat occupations varies substantially by service, as well: 28 percent of enlisted army personnel serve in jobs classified as combat positions, for instance, compared to only 3 percent of navy enlisted personnel.[13]
To be sure, many military personnel in noncombat positions end up in combat anyway: a truck filled with supply clerks can be ambushed or hit with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) as easily as a truck full of infantrymen can. But even when deployed in combat zones, most members of the military are not tasked with fighting: instead, their jobs are to maintain vehicles, enter data into computers, write articles for the base newsletter, monitor satellite imagery, make sure the right number of Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs) have been ordered, and so on.
A solid third of military personnel have never deployed at all to the Iraq or Afghanistan theaters, though deployment rates also vary substantially by branch of service. As of 2011, the most recent year for which there are statistics available, some 27 percent of active-duty army personnel had never deployed to either of these conflicts, nor had 34 percent of navy personnel, 41 percent of air force personnel, and 39 percent of Marines.[14] Army personnel were also far more likely than personnel in any other service to have endured multiple deployments to combat theaters: 25 percent of army personnel in 2011 had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for three or more years, compared to fewer than 7 percent of sailors, airmen, or Marines. Unsurprisingly, the army has also taken the lion’s share of the casualties from these wars: of the roughly 0.6 percent of military personnel deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq who were killed in action in the decade after 9/11, more than two thirds were army soldiers, and most of the rest were Marines.[15]
Still, the sacrifices borne by all members of the military community are substantial. Even personnel who never see combat face the risk of doing so, and face a punishing and often unpredictable training and rotation schedule. Military families too must make substantial sacrifices: they are constantly uprooted, with consequent costs to friendships, children’s performance in school, and the ability of military spouses to build their own careers. War or no war, life in the military is full of difficulties and disruptions of a type born by few civilians with comparable education and income levels.
There are plenty of dangerous civilian jobs—construction workers, truckers, loggers, miners, and fishermen all have rates of fatal accidents approaching those of military personnel—but tough as these jobs are, civilians can always quit. A logger who does not like his odds can decide from one day to the next to become a realtor; a miner ordered into a situation he deems dangerous can tell the foreman to go to hell. His pay may be docked—he may be fired and face consequent economic hardship—but he will not go to prison for his refusal to risk his life.
This is not the case for service members. Yes, America has a volunteer military, but once you sign up, there is no changing your mind until you have fulfilled your service obligation. A soldier assigned to Fort Hood cannot decline the assignment because he does not think much of the Texas public schools; a financial clerk ordered to deploy to Iraq can not politely decline. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, disobeying a lawful order will land you behind bars—and desertion in wartime is still punishable by death. The Declaration of Independence tells us that all men have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but those who volunteer for military service effectively give up those rights. Once in the military, their lives belong to the nation.
Perhaps to their credit, polls suggest that a fair number of American civilians are aware of their ignorance of military matters. Golby, Cohn, and Feaver note that current polling shows a “surprisingly large increase in the number of ‘don’t know’ and ‘no opinion’ responses from nonveterans when asked about issues related to the military,” compared to responses to similar poll questions a decade and a half ago. Among nonveteran nonelites, the rate of “don’t know” and “no opinion” answers was a consistent 25 percent to 30 percent.
The diminishing percentage of Americans who serve or have family members who have served taken together with the shared military and civilian sense of being separate cultures are usually viewed as indicative of a large civilian-military “gap.” But despite distinct differences in the experience of civilians and of those within the military community, today’s military is far less different from the general public than many Americans tend to assume.
Before going further, it is useful to look at a quick snapshot of today’s military. Start with the basics, courtesy of the Department of Defense’s annual report on military demographics: there were roughly 1.4 million active-duty military personnel in fiscal year 2013, along with 843,000 reservists. The army is the largest service (it is almost as large as the navy and air force put together, though it is currently drawing down; at the end of fiscal year 2014 there were 508,000 active-duty army personnel).[16] The Marine Corps is the smallest service, with just under 190,000 active-duty personnel.[17] More than 14 percent of active-duty personnel are women, and 30 percent self-identify as members of minority populations.[18]
Today’s military is relatively mature compared to the military of the Vietnam War or World War II. The average age of active-duty personnel is 28.6 years, and more than a quarter of officers are over the age of 40. More than half of active-duty personnel are married, and 36 percent are married with children. (In contrast, only 48 percent of all US households are made up of married couples, and only a fifth of US households are made up of married couples with children.[19]) Altogether, there are roughly three million military dependents (mostly spouses and children), and roughly 30 percent of military personnel and their families live in military housing.[20]
Today’s military personnel are more likely than comparable age groups in the civilian population to have graduated from high school (with rare exceptions, military recruits must have high school degrees or General Education Development [GED] degrees to be eligible to serve). Military officers, meanwhile, are substantially better educated than civilians: only 30 percent of the overall population over age 25 have bachelor’s degrees,[21] compared to more than 80 percent of officers.
Commentators often complain that “elites” (however you choose to define them) are underrepresented within the military. In 2010, for instance, only about 1 percent of students commissioned through ROTC came from Ivy League schools.[22] But since the eight small Ivy League schools confer less than 1 percent of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States, this is not particularly telling.
Today’s military is distinctly middle class. In part, this is because military requirements render many of the nation’s poorest young people ineligible: the poorest Americans are the least likely to finish high school or gain a GED, for instance, and poverty also correlates with ill health, obesity, and the likelihood of serious run-ins with the criminal justice system, all of which are disqualifying factors for the military. Individualized data on the economic backgrounds of military personnel are not available, but several studies have looked at the income levels in the zip codes new military recruits give with their home addresses. A 2008 Heritage Foundation study found that a quarter of new recruits came from neighborhoods in the highest income quintile, with only 10 percent coming from neighborhoods in the lowest quintile.[23] A 2010 study by the National Priorities Project examined slightly different data and found a less top-heavy distribution, but the largest share of recruits came from the middle-income quintile nonetheless, with numbers in the top and bottom quintiles roughly even.[24]
People join the military for many reasons. Some people sign up because—reared on old World War II movies, or maybe just on first-person-shooter video games—they want to “go to war.” Others dislike the idea of going to war but believe that a strong military will prevent war by deterring potential adversaries and want to be part of such a deterrent force. Others still join up for reasons that do not have much to do with the nature of the military: they are attracted by the military’s excellent educational benefits and free heath care, they are looking for opportunities to travel and learn, or they simply view the military as a relatively stable job with benefits during economic hard times.
A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked post-9/11 military veterans to list the most important factors that had motivated them to join the military. Nearly 90 percent listed serving the country as an important reason for joining, and 77 percent listed educational benefits as important. Upwards of 60 percent said they wanted to “see more of the world,” and 57 percent said that learning skills for civilian jobs was an important factor. In contrast, only 27 percent said that difficulty finding a civilian job had been an important factor in the decision to join the military.[25]
That said, the military remains an important source of upward mobility for many Americans, and particularly for women and minorities. Contrary to much popular mythology about dysfunctional vets, most veterans do pretty well economically—better than comparable nonveterans. Overall, veterans are less likely than nonveterans to be unemployed, are less likely than nonveterans to live below the poverty line, and have higher median incomes than nonveterans.[26]
This doesn’t mean that specific subsets of the veteran population don’t struggle. Veterans are overrepresented among the homeless, for instance, and post-9/11 veterans have above-average unemployment rates—though this may simply reflect transition issues.[27] Transition issues are, unfortunately, common: according to the 2011 Pew survey, 44 percent of post-9/11 veterans say the transition to civilian life was difficult for them.[28]
Overall, however, post-9/11 veterans are a surprisingly contented group. Across the board, Pew found: “Veterans who served on active duty in the post-9/11 era are proud of their service (96 percent), and most (74 percent) say their military experience has helped them get ahead in life. The vast majority say their time in the military has helped them mature (93 percent), taught them how to work with others (90 percent) and helped to build self-confidence (90 percent). More than eight-in-ten (82 percent) say they would advise a young person close to them to join the military.”[29]
Given all the recent media attention to military sexual harassment and assault rates, it is worth noting two things: first, though any amount is too much, rates of sexual assault and harassment do not appear to be higher in the military than in comparable civilian settings such as universities.[30] Second, Pew found that post-9/11 female veterans were “just as likely as their male counterparts to say they have experienced the positive benefits of military service.” Seventy-nine percent of women veterans believed their military service had “helped them get ahead in life,” 87 percent said that serving in the military had built their self-confidence, and 93 percent felt the military had helped them “grow and mature as a person.”
Politics
Most people consider the military a politically conservative institution. But although a majority of surveyed military personnel self-identify as “conservative” in the much-cited annual Military Times poll, the reality is more complex. Most polls that purport to show “military opinions” suffer from various flaws. The Military Times poll, for instance, relies on voluntary responses to surveys sent by email to subscribers—and, as the editors note, a disproportionate number of the respondents are white, male, and older than average. What is more, many polls fail to differentiate between career military personnel and short-timers, or between officers and enlisted personnel.[31]
Perhaps the best recent study of military attitudes comes from Jason Dempsey, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and veteran of West Point’s social science faculty. Overall, he found that social and political attitudes of army personnel track fairly closely with the views of the civilian population. On certain issues, he found, army personnel are in fact decidedly more liberal than the general population: in 2004 (the most recent year for which he found hard data), for instance, civilians were substantially more likely than army personnel to oppose abortion under all circumstances, and large majorities of army personnel supported increasing domestic government spending on education, health care, Social Security, and environmental protection.[32] Demspey’s findings track those of other studies, which suggest that military officers “support civil liberties at significantly higher rates than . . . the general public” do; they also more strongly support stringent gun control.[33]
To a significant extent, the perception that members of the military are “right wing” is a holdover from the post-Vietnam era. In 1976, a study by the Foreign Policy Leadership Project found that only 33 percent of military officers identified with the Republican Party. But the end of the draft and the advent of the all-volunteer military dramatically changed the military’s character, making it smaller, more professionalized, and more isolated from mainstream civilian society. After Vietnam, many of those who remained in the smaller force felt “abandoned” by the civilians who had sent them to war. By 1996, the percentage of officers identifying with the Republican Party had climbed to 67 percent (the same period saw only a slight rise in Republican Party identification among civilian elites).[34]
But today, the US military is a different animal than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. The majority of senior officers continue to self-identify as conservative, but they make up only about 6 percent of the overall army population. And Dempsey’s research found that they are more conservative (and more Republican) than junior officers and dramatically more conservative than enlisted personnel, whose views tend to more closely track those of the general population. Given this, it seems likely that future studies of the officer corps will find fewer self-identified conservatives, as today’s most senior officers—who entered the military in the seventies and eighties—retire and are replaced by a new generation.
Dempsey’s most interesting finding, perhaps, is that self-selected political labels are extremely poor predictors of actual views on social, political, and economic issues. On the whole, officers’ views on specific issues ranging from abortion to government spending on social programs tended to be moderate to liberal, while the views of enlisted soldiers tended to skew liberal.
The notion that “the military” is homogeneous and inherently right wing is out of date. “On the whole, military opinions tend to parallel civilian opinions,” concludes Dempsey. “The idea that service members have a distinctly different worldview (that is, a ‘military mind’)—conservative and dramatically out of step with the rest of society—is a myth that must be constantly debunked.” Tellingly, post-9/11 veterans have only slightly more positive views of recent wars than the general population. In a 2011 survey, only 28 percent of civilians and only 34 percent of veterans said that both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq had been worth it. Asked whether “relying too much on military force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism,” the attitudes of post-9/11 veterans and the public were virtually identical, with, respectively, 51 percent and 52 percent agreeing.[35]
Geography
Many assume that military personnel are drawn disproportionately from stereotypically “red” states. It is true that the “red” South, the Southwest, and the mountain states are overrepresented within the military, while the “blue” Northeastern states are underrepresented, relative to their overall populations.[36] In and of itself, this helps account for why the military might still skew a bit conservative. But as with other assumptions about the military and politics, there is a more complicated picture lying beneath these broad-brush statements. To some extent, the demographics of military recruitment tell a story that is less about ideology than about economics, geography, and population density—and the natural tendency of people to gravitate towards the familiar and away from the unfamiliar.
Consider this: the state of California, which is hardly known for its homogeneous population or its right-wing politics, hosts the single largest concentration of active-duty military personnel in the nation. Meanwhile, the dark-blue state of Maine, which ranks forty-first in population size, sends a higher percentage of its young people into the military than any other state.[37] A simple red state/blue state model does not account for this.
The demographic makeup of today’s military is probably best understood as a product of two somewhat related phenomena: population density and the location of large military installations, which create, in effect, self-replicating military clusters. Members of the military are disproportionately likely to come from nonurban areas,[38] and, if we break out recruitment by state, states with high population densities have, on average, lower per capita military recruitment than states with low population densities. (In 2010, the ten most densely populated states produced 1.8 recruits per thousand 18- to 24-year-olds, while the ten least densely populated states produced 2.4 recruits per thousand.[39])
To some degree, this is a story of economic and cultural opportunity: an 18-year-old from sparsely populated Maine or Wyoming does not have as many options for employment or seeing the world as does an 18-year-old from more densely populated regions. But new military recruits are also likely to come from areas that already have large military populations, and for this reason decisions about where to locate large military installations are a major driver of military demographics. For complex historical reasons—including the post–Civil War occupation of the American South by federal troops and the Mexican and Indian Wars of the nineteenth century—the South and Southwest have long hosted a disproportionate share of America’s major military bases. This pattern has been exacerbated by base closure and realignment policies, which in recent decades have consolidated military bases into a relatively small number of states. Of the roughly 1.2 million active-duty service members stationed in the United States, 49 percent are stationed in only five states: California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.[40]
To a significant extent, base-location decisions create self-fulfilling prophesies: young people’s career choices are profoundly influenced by the career choices of the adults around them, so it is not surprising that those who grow up in communities with high military populations end up joining the military in higher numbers than those who grow up far from large military bases, just as the children of military personnel are themselves more likely to join the military. (This is equally true for most professions: a disproportionate number of lawyers are the children of lawyers, for instance.)
When it comes to the military, the tendency for people to follow career paths familiar to them as a result of their communities is apparent. Look at the list of the one hundred US counties that produce the highest number of military recruits each year; to a great extent, it is a list of the counties that house the largest military installations. High recruit-producing counties include, for instance, Cumberland County, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg; El Paso County, Texas, home to Fort Bliss; San Diego County, California, home to Naval Base Coronado and Naval Base San Diego; Montgomery County, Ohio, home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; Bell County, Texas, home to Fort Hood; El Paso County, Colorado, home to Fort Carson; Pierce County, Washington, home to Fort Lewis; Maricopa County, Arizona, home to Luke Air Force Base; Muscogee County, Georgia, home to Fort Benning; Honolulu County, Hawaii, home to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, and so on.[41]
If Americans want a more geographically diverse military (and a military that would arguably become more ideologically diverse as a result), there is a simple solution: redistribute military installations with an eye to equalizing recruitment across the nation’s major geographic regions. Want more liberals in the military? Put some more bases in Massachusetts, sit back, and let nature take its course. Of course, it would be expensive to move bases around to ensure a military population that is completely representative of the overall population. If we wanted more liberals in the military, for instance, we would want bases in the nation’s major urban areas, which, regardless of state, tend to be more liberal than rural areas. But just try finding thousands of square miles of unoccupied land to train in the Boston metro area. To some degree, low regional population density correlates with the presence of large military bases: with the exception of some older bases, military installations tend to be located where land is plentiful and cheap.
But it is a useful thought experiment to imagine what the military would look like with a radically different base location pattern. It is common to hear people insist that only a draft would give America a truly representative military, but this is probably not so; recruitment priorities, for instance, have a profound effect on military demographics. The military pours money into ensuring a steady stream of high-caliber minority recruits, for a simple reason: as a society, we have decided it is important to have a military that is as ethnically and racially diverse as the overall population—and, by and large, we have succeeded in making the military a diverse and hospitable place for people of all races and ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, if we are worried about urban-rural divides or ideological divides, tinkering with base-location decisions is an obvious way to make the military more geographically and ideologically representative of American society. Sure, it would cost money, just like many other important but difficult things—but if Congress made it a priority, it could be done.
In many ways—despite the end of the draft and the advent of the all-volunteer army—the US military remains extraordinarily diverse. As an institution, it has unique strengths, as well as some unique weaknesses, and it is far from homogeneous: the services vary substantially in their cultures, and the military experiences of different subgroups (minorities, women, officers, etc.) can differ very significantly from the experiences of those in other subgroups.
This suggests that the first apparent paradox I highlighted—that Americans love the military more than ever but know less about it than ever—should not automatically be viewed as a cause for concern. Arguably, this particular manifestation of a civilian-military gap is more a matter of perception than reality: though many civilians and military personnel perceive themselves as belonging to distinct and profoundly different communities, they are in fact more interconnected and less different than many might assume.[42]
Nevertheless, the question that should concern us is not whether there are distinctive differences between military and civilian communities. The question that should concern us is this: When and how do civilian-military differences make a difference? In other words, Does “the civilian-military gap” matter? In what ways does it matter, and for whom?
Admiral Michael Mullen thinks the gap matters. As he puts it, “a people uninformed about what they are asking the military to endure is a people inevitably unable to fully grasp the scope of the responsibilities our Constitution levies upon them.”[43] In a deep sense, this is surely true—but not necessarily more true for issues relating to the use of force than for any other issue. Poll after poll tells us that the American people are dismayingly ignorant across a wide range of issues. If this translates into superficial opinion formation, it is an equal opportunity cluelessness, not reserved solely for military issues.
More to the point, there is little clear evidence that reduced public knowledge of the military translates predictably and reliably into differences of opinion on important policy matters. Intuitively, it makes sense to think that those with little military knowledge will have different attitudes towards the use of force than those with more experience do, but the evidence cuts in multiple different directions. Thus, in this volume Golby, Cohn, and Feaver observe that both current and older surveys suggest that “veterans are more reluctant about the use of force but favor fewer restrictions on its employment, whereas nonveterans are supportive of more wide-ranging use, but favor greater restrictions.” Whether this has any systematic impact on US policy is anyone’s guess; as noted earlier, civilians with no military connections show attitudes towards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan similar to those of veterans.
Certainly, civilian-military gaps have not stopped military budgets from expanding since 9/11, even as budgets for most nonmilitary foreign-affairs-related government agencies and institutions (such as the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]) have been stagnant, and domestic spending on civilian social welfare programs has been slashed. After 9/11, the defense budget skyrocketed to levels not seen since the immediate post–World War II era. Today, despite current budget cuts, the defense budget remains at a historically high level, and even in this period of fiscal austerity, proposing drastic cuts to military compensation and benefits is still considered political suicide for national politicians.
Perhaps spending money on military personnel and their families makes it easier for civilians not to feel guilty about the disproportionate sacrifices they make. Before 9/11, civilian and military benefits and compensation were, on average, about the same. Today, it is different: the average member of the military is now paid more than civilian federal workers with comparable experience,[44] and members of the military and their families can also lay claim to some of America’s most generous (though arguably unsustainable) social programs. The military offers free health care to service members and their dependents, discount groceries, subsidized child care, tuition assistance that can be transferred to spouses and children, and a host of other services.
This creates numerous strange ironies: even as the post–New Deal welfare state continues its slow collapse, the military has become a substitute welfare state for a large swathe of small-town America. In a sense, the military—despite its reputation for political conservatism—has become the last outpost of “big government” paternalism in Tea-Party-dominated “red” America. On the whole, Americans seem to accept this. The YouGov survey shows that most Americans are aware of the benefits that accrue to those in the military but continue to view the military as fairer and more meritocratic than the rest of society: strong pluralities of YouGov respondents believe that the military is fairer than civilian society in terms of promotions and recognition, the opportunity to excel, and the opportunity for self-improvement (CM2T 26–28). Majorities or strong pluralities of respondents also believe that the military provides more opportunity than society does for the poor, minorities, and immigrants (CM2T 31, 33–34).
In a world in which fewer and fewer government institutions seem capable of performing with even minimal competence, Americans also consistently say they trust the military more than any other public institution: in a 2015 Gallup poll, for instance, 72 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military compared to 33 percent expressing confidence in the presidency, 32 percent expressing confidence in the Supreme Court, 31 percent with confidence in the public schools, and 23 percent with confidence in the criminal justice system. Only 8 percent of Americans expressed any confidence in Congress.[45] Little wonder, then, that Americans throw money at the military: we may not understand it, but we recognize that it is the only reasonably well-functioning public institution we have these days.
But once again: if the civilian-military gap does not seem to lead directly to different policy views, reduced financial support for the men and women in the military, or reduced confidence in the military as a public institution, why does it matter?
Paradox Two:
Mistrust and Awe
Civilian-military gaps do matter, but not in the ways we usually think they do. Lying beneath the gaps reflected in public polls are less obvious but more pernicious gaps between elite civilian political leaders and elite military leaders: a gap of knowledge and a gap of trust.
I am speaking here not of “elites” as defined in public opinion polls, but of the tiny decision-making elite that runs the nation’s capital: the few hundred people—certainly less than a thousand—who occupy senior positions in the White House’s West Wing, the Old Executive Office Building, the State Department’s 7th Floor, and the Pentagon’s E-Ring: the service chiefs and their senior deputies, the president’s top national security staff, the cabinet secretaries and their senior deputies. In Washington-speak, these are the principals and the deputies, together with a handful of influential advisors without line positions.
If there is any venue where civilians and military personnel work together side by side, day after day, it’s in Washington’s national security establishment. In theory, this constant interaction ought to breed respect and mutual understanding. In practice, it often produces the opposite: a mixture of mistrust and almost willful ignorance.
In Washington, top civilian policymakers often simultaneously mistrust the military leadership and overestimate the military’s capabilities. Too frequently, the favor is returned by military leaders, who dismiss civilians as “politicians” and are sometimes unwilling to accept their concerns as legitimate. Too many senior civilian officials know virtually nothing about the structure of military organizations, the chain of command, or the military planning process, while some senior military officers have forgotten that there are other ways to run an organization and think about problem solving.
Most fundamentally, civilian and military leaders often think of themselves and their roles in quite different ways, though the differences are generally unarticulated. Their experiences and training have led them to think differently about what it means to plan, to evaluate risk, and to define problems in the first place. As a result, they frequently talk past each other, using the same words to mean quite different things.
During my time serving in civilian jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department, I watched numerous interagency discussions devolve into exercises in mutual misunderstanding and frustration. Some of these discussions—such as Pentagon–White House squabbling over troop levels in Afghanistan and the split-the-baby outcome—were public. Others never came close to registering in the public consciousness, but rankled for those involved.[46]
Take a small but not atypical example. In the spring of 2010, a small crisis unfolded in Kyrgyzstan. Several hundred people were killed by police and ethnically aligned mobs, many more were wounded, and thousands of refugees (mostly from Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek minority population) fled their homes.[47] Within the White House, these events triggered fears of a possible ethnic cleansing campaign to come, or even genocide. At the time, I was serving as an advisor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and one day I received a call from a member of the White House’s National Security Staff (NSS). With little preamble, he told me that U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) needed to “move a surveillance drone over Kyrgyzstan, ASAP, so we can figure out what’s going on there.”
In many ways, this was a creative idea. Drones and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets have the potential to be powerful tools in human rights monitoring. The ability to watch troops or mobs or refugees move in real time, to see weapons being stockpiled or mass graves being filled, could potentially help the United States take timely and appropriate action to stop a genocide before it gets off the ground. But there was one enormous problem with my NSS colleague’s request: neither of us had any authority to order CENTCOM to immediately shift a potentially vital ISR asset from wherever it was currently being used to the skies over Kyrgyzstan.
“It’s an interesting idea,” I told him. “Has the president discussed it with [Defense] Secretary Gates?”
“We don’t have time to spin up a whole bureaucratic process,” he responded irritably. “The president doesn’t want another Rwanda. This is a top priority of his. I need you to just communicate this to CENTCOM and get this moving.”
But the chain of command does not go from a director at the NSS to an advisor to the undersecretary of defense to CENTCOM—and the military does not put drones into foreign airspace without a great deal of planning, an enormous amount of legal advice, and the right people signing off on the whole idea. Where would this drone come from? What was it doing now, and what could not be done if it was shifted to Kyrgyzstan? Which personnel would control it, from what air base in what country? Whose airspace would it fly over? What budget would support the shift? What would the political consequences be if it fell or was shot down? Exactly where would it go? What would it be looking for? Who would receive and analyze any imagery or other intelligence it gathered? How long would it stay? And so on.
My NSS colleague was incredulous. “We’re talking about, like, one drone. You’re telling me you can’t just call some colonel at CENTCOM and make this happen? Why the hell not? You guys [by which he meant the Pentagon writ large] are always stonewalling us on everything. I’m calling you from the White House. The president wants to prevent genocide in Kyrgyzstan. Whatever happened to civilian control of the military?”
He, I had to explain, was the wrong civilian.
This turned out to be a minor issue, in many ways, but the exchange was far from unusual. My White House colleague—a smart, energetic, dedicated professional—went away angry, convinced that “the military” was refusing to take atrocity-prevention issues seriously (an attitude that soured many later interagency discussions about Sudan, Libya, Syria and more).
My military colleagues reacted to the request, when I relayed it, with equal frustration: How could a senior White House official fail to understand why sensitive, expensive military assets could not instantly be moved from a war zone to foreign airspace via a simple phone call from a director at the National Security Council to a Pentagon acquaintance? If the president wanted to make this happen, he could call the defense secretary and direct him to have CENTCOM undertake such a move (though he would be unlikely to do so without plenty of discussion at lower levels first), but the chain of command cannot be accessed midway down and more or less at random. My military colleagues were insulted by what looked, to them, like civilian arrrogance and ignorance.
Some months later, similar misunderstandings plagued interagency planning on Sudan. With a referendum on South Sudanese independence in the offing, officials at the White House and the State Department were concerned about a resurgence of ethnic violence in the wake of a pro–independence vote. The Defense Department was asked—this time more formally, at the assistant secretary/deputy assistant secretary level—to produce plans for preventing or responding to mass atrocities, to “give the options” in the event of a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Once again, the response from the Pentagon’s military planners was to express polite frustration. What assumptions and constraints should guide planning? What kind of plans did the White House want? To respond to what kind of mass atrocities, against whom, and in what likely places? Respond for how long and through what means, and to what ultimate end: peace in Sudan? peace on earth? Would this mean fighting Sudanese government forces on northern Sudanese soil? going to war with a foreign (and Muslim) state? If so, it was hard to imagine the president signing off on such a thing—the United States already had two ongoing wars, plus, it would be a foolish waste of scarce planning resources to plan for something that was never going to happen.
Or maybe the goals were narrower? Should the military be planning to evacuate displaced people? Where to? Should they just focus on protecting a humanitarian corridor? Where? For how long? Was the White House prepared to have boots on the ground, with the inevitable risk that events could easily spiral out of control if US troops were attacked? Did they want planning for targeted strikes designed to degrade the military capacity of the bad guys, whoever they might be? Did they even have a theory about who the bad guys would be?
The ensuing back and forth was tense and occasionally broke out into open expressions of anger and mistrust. At best, White House staff members considered their military counterparts rigid, reductionist, and unimaginative. At worst, they were convinced that the Pentagon was just being difficult—that the military “didn’t care” about Sudan or about atrocity prevention and was determined to flout the president’s wishes by stonewalling and foot dragging at every turn instead of getting down to work.
The military representatives involved in the discussions were equally exasperated. What was wrong with these civilians? Didn’t they know what they wanted? Were they too naive—or uncaring—to understand that the potential mobilization of thousands of people and millions of dollars of equipment required greater specificity in terms of assumptions, constraints, and desired end-states? Without that specificity, the range of possibilities was endless. The United States could use nuclear weapons against the Sudanese regime; the United States could withdraw all forces from Afghanistan and shift them to Sudan, or do nothing whatsoever, or do a great many things in between. But unless the president wanted to move into crisis-planning mode, ginning up serious plans for any of these options would require months, not days or weeks, and planning for all of them just was not realistic.
In a sense, this situation was a civil-military version of the chicken-and-egg problem. White House staff wanted to be able to give the president a sense of his options: In the event of mass atrocities, what was it realistic for him to consider doing? How complicated, time-consuming, risky, expensive, and effective would it be to protect a humanitarian corridor, as opposed to engaging in limited military strikes to degrade the capacity of those committing atrocities?
Without help from military planners, White House staff could not properly advise the president. But without political and strategic direction from the White House (How much money are we willing to spend? How many troops are we willing to move? What trade-offs are we willing to make in terms of other ongoing operations? What constitutes success?), military personnel could not properly advise their civilian counterparts.
Eventually, the issue got semiresolved. The White House staff was forced to get more specific; the Pentagon was forced to let go of the elaborate planning process it preferred and cough up some back-of-the-envelope assessments. Fortunately for all, the feared genocide in Sudan did not happen.
At the national level, however, the costs of the civil-military gap are real, and high. Such mutual ignorance—and such systematic cultural differences in how to think about problems and solutions—leads frequently to misunderstanding, inefficient decision making, and, too often, bad policy.
There’s an irony here: at the senior policymaking level, much of the civilian mistrust of the military derives from an exaggerated estimate of military capabilities. From the outside, the US military appears able to do magic: get the combat elements of a full division deployed overseas in a single week, see in the dark, eavesdrop on global telecommunications, and fire missiles from invisible unmanned drones that strike only designated individual targets, leaving nearby structures undamaged.
Few outsiders understand just how much time, money, and effort lies behind these astonishing capabilities (indeed, today’s military is so specialized and high-tech that even most military personnel see only a small piece of the puzzle).[48] As a result, civilian leaders often find it difficult to comprehend military claims that a particular task is too difficult, or will take longer than desired, or require more troops or other resources than expected. If your starting assumption is that the military can do anything, any pushback is apt to seem like stonewalling.
Consider a final example of high-level civil-military misunderstandings: the 2009 debate about troop levels in Afghanistan. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Senator Barack Obama had promised to “finish the job” in Afghanistan,[49] and in early 2009, the newly inaugurated president got to work. He commissioned a sweeping interagency review of US policy in Afghanistan and announced that, as an interim measure, he had authorized the deployment of an addition 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan in response to theater commander General David McKiernan’s request.
By the end of February 2009, the president had adopted the new strategic objectives recommended by his review team (led by diplomat Richard Holbrooke, former CIA official Brice Reidel, and the Pentagon’s Michele Flournoy, whom the president appointed as undersecretary of defense for policy): henceforth, that the United States would seek to disrupt terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thus degrading al Qaeda and its associates’ ability “to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” To that end, the US would promote “a more capable, accountable and effective government in Afghanistan” and “develop increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” capable of operating with “reduced U.S. assistance.”[50]
These new strategic objectives proved easier to articulate than they were to achieve. By mid-May, General McKiernan had been ousted from his position—becoming the first of several Afghanistan-theater commanders to discover just how elusive “finishing the job” would turn out to be.
McKiernan was succeeded by General Stanley McChrystal, who was in turn assigned the job of undertaking a sixty-day review of the situation in Afghanistan, with a view towards determining what changes might be needed to achieve the president’s new strategic objectives. McChrystal completed his review on schedule, but when word spread that he intended to propose a substantial troop increase—potentially as high as 70,000 to 80,000 additional troops—Pentagon officials asked that he hold off on submitting his assessment for several weeks: even the rumor of such a large troop request had sent waves of dismay through the White House. In any case, it was late summer by then, and everyone from the president on down was taking a vacation.
Much behind-the-scenes skirmishing ensued, and in mid-September, a preliminary copy of General McChrystal’s assessment was leaked to the Washington Post. Although the leaked version of the report contained no numbers, the bottom line was clear: if the United States did not pour additional resources, including troops, into Afghanistan, McChrystal warned, the likely result would be “mission failure.”[51]
Furious at the leak, which they blamed on the Pentagon, and unwilling to accept McChystal’s gloomy conclusions, senior White House staff engaged in strategic counterleaks. In their version of the story, McChrystal and the Pentagon were trying to “box in the president” by pushing tens of thousands more troops and “refusing” to consider other approaches.[52]
Eventually, a compromise was reached: 30,000 more US troops would be sent to Afghanistan. But the episode left scars. Senior White House officials suspected the military of exaggerating Afghanistan’s problems and inflating their estimates of required troop numbers, viewing the military as having a vested interest in continuing a conflict the president had vowed to end. Civilian officials felt manipulated. Less than a year later, General McChrystal was out of a job, forced to resign after a Rolling Stone profile quoted his senior aides speaking mockingly of several senior civilian officials.
Of course, the military’s take on the 2009 debate about Afghan troop levels was quite different—and it points to the real gulf between the military and its civilian leadership, a gulf that has more to do with differing perceptions of roles and missions than with the near-insubordination some White House officials suspected. As one former senior Pentagon official told me, “The [military’s] general stance is ‘We can do this, but we want you to acknowledge the mess, cost and complexity.’”[53] To many in the military, General McChrystal fell victim in 2009 to a White House unwilling to acknowledge any of these factors and equally uninterested in understanding the military’s methods, capabilities, or limits. To many military leaders, the White House appeared to be constantly demanding contradictory and impossible things but refusing to resource them.
From the Pentagon’s perspective, the White House’s refusal to accept the costs of its own ambitious Afghan strategy was either naive or hypocritical. After all, the White House had not asked General McChrystal if he thought the president’s strategy in Afghanistan was a good strategy, or if he thought long-term US interests might be better served by pursuing a radically scaled down counterterrorism mission, or even by withdrawing US forces altogether. McChrystal was instead told to address a rather narrow question: What resources were required for the existing strategy to succeed?
In response, McChrystal gave an equally narrow answer: to succeed in the mission as defined by the White House itself, many more troops would be required. If the president wanted a different answer, he needed to ask a different question. If he did not feel like sending thousands more troops, that was his prerogative—but then he needed to scale down his strategic goals.
The 2009 debate over Afghanistan troop levels both typified and further fueled the mutual mistrust between the White House and senior military officials. Senior civilian leaders often lack the time or inclination to learn more about the military. “They don’t want to take the time to go through the slide deck, or get the full briefing,” a former Pentagon official who also had White House experience told me. “They’re intimidated by the acronyms, and they don’t understand the military’s structure or planning process. Basically, they don’t want to know. They’ll never cross the river and set foot in the Pentagon.” With little comprehension of the complexities of military planning and operations, senior civilian leaders often wildly overestimate military capabilities. In consequence, military hesitation or requests for more time, information, or resources can look like foot dragging.
Meanwhile, military leaders often have only limited understanding of the political constraints within which civilian leaders must operate and can be quick to dismiss the concerns of policymakers as “shallow” or “politically driven.” Today, many senior military officials complain of feeling baffled and shut out by a White House that combines micromanagement with a near total inability to articulate coherent strategic goals. “The NSS wants to run the show, day to day and minute to minute,” one former senior military official told me, “so they have no time—they’re almost incapable of strategic thinking. It’s often just crisis du jour over there.” Meanwhile, military recommendations go unheeded because senior White House staff have come to assume that a risk-averse Pentagon exaggerates every difficulty and inflates every request for troops or money.
This assumption can turn every discussion into an antagonistic negotiation session. “Sometimes you want to tell them, this isn’t a political bargaining process,” another retired senior military official told me ruefully. “Where the military comes in high, they counter low, and we settle on an option that splits the difference. Needless to say, the right answer is not always in the middle.”
Over time, of course, the tendency to split the difference creates perverse incentives, and mutual mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. If military leaders “believe the mission truly requires 50,000 troops and 50 billion dollars but you know that the White House is going to automatically cut every number in half, you’ll come in asking for 100,000 troops and $100 billion dollars,” a Pentagon insider told me. “The military eventually starts playing the very game the White House has always suspected them of playing,” the former senior official added.
If any civil-military gap matters, it is this one. Cultural or opinion gaps between the general public and the military community worry us, but there is little evidence that they cause actual harm. The mistrust and mutual ignorance that often characterizes relations between high-level civilian and military decision makers is another story: here, misunderstandings and mistrust lead to arbitrary decisions and can do genuine harm both to the military and to US interests.
Paradox Three:
The Best Tools for the Wrong Problem
Lying at the heart of the high-level civil-military tensions described above is another paradox: the United States has what President Obama has called “the strongest military in the history of the world,”[54] but that same military seems increasingly incapable of addressing many of today’s most pressing threats.
In many ways, the US military is a victim of its own success: our conventional military dominance makes direct challenges nearly suicidal for other states, pushing adversaries towards asymmetric strategies designed to neutralize our strengths and play on our weaknesses. Thus, we handily defeated Saddam Hussein’s armies in 1991 and again in 2003—but were caught flat-footed by the rise of terrorism and insurgency inside Iraq and by the challenges of postconflict stabilization and reconstruction. In Afghanistan, CIA and Special Forces advisors plus American air power helped the Northern Alliance gain rapid victory over the Taliban—but top al Qaeda leaders slipped across the porous Pakistani border, the US occupation helped the Taliban generate new recruits, and our troops were frequently confounded by an invisible enemy that left IEDs in roadways and then melted back into the civilian population.
Conventional US military force, designed to combat the militaries of peer and near-peer states, has only limited value when it comes to many of the more distributed and complex challenges we currently face. Tanks and fighter jets cannot stop disaffected teenagers in Birmingham or Paris or Detroit from being inspired by al Qaeda or ISIS; they cannot stop ISIS from posting gruesome footage of beheaded hostages on YouTube, or halt the spread of Ebola, or prevent cyber espionage and attack.
None of this stops us from trying, however. As I noted earlier, the American public may know little about the military, but we recognize that it is the only reasonably well-functioning public institution we have these days. We do not trust Congress, and the budgets of civilian foreign policy agencies have taken a beating, along with their capabilities. Faced with problems, we send in the troops—after all, who else can we send? Unlike any other part of the government, the US military can be relied on to go where it is told and do what it is asked—or die trying.
As a result, we increasingly treat the US military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken. Terrorists and insurgents in Syria are beheading journalists and aid workers? Afghanistan’s economy is a mess? An earthquake in Japan has endangered nuclear power plants? The Egyptian military needs to be encouraged to respect democracy? Call the military. We want our military busy here at home, too, protecting us from cyber attack, patrolling New York’s Grand Central Station, stopping illegal immigration in Arizona, and putting out summer forest fires.
But we are trapped in a vicious circle: asking the military to take on more and more nontraditional tasks requires higher and higher military budgets. Higher military budgets force us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development and cut domestic social programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform as they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role in both foreign and domestic activities. This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.
If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war—and when everything looks like war, the military’s role expands.
Here’s the deep problem: we are no longer sure what a military is for. We do not know what we want our military to do and oscillate between asking it to do everything and demanding tighter but often quite arbitrary limits on its use. Asked for definitions, we end up going in circles: the military is the institution that fights wars, and wars are conflicts in which we use the military. If we can imagine “cyberwar,” cybersecurity must be a military task; if cybersecurity is a military task, then cyber attacks must be a form of warfare.
For most of recorded history, humans have sought to draw sharp lines between war and peace. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies insisted that wars should be formally “declared,” take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by elaborately uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations.
In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, including complex initiation rites preceding wars and the elaborate painting and costuming of warriors. In nineteenth-century Liberia, warriors wore special masks during raids, and war was prohibited while “bush school” was in session for boys and girls.[55] In the American Southwest, Navajo warriors literally spoke a different dialect after setting out on raids, using what they called a “twisted language” with a special vocabulary. The Navajo also sought to carefully maintain the spatial boundaries between war and nonwar: “On the way home from a raid,” noted anthropologist D.W. Murray, “a symbolic line would be drawn in the desert, the men would line up facing the enemy country, and as they sang they all turned toward home and the common language was resumed.”[56]
We modern Americans are not all that different from the Liberians or the Navajo. We prefer to think of “war” as a distinct and separate sphere, one that should not intrude into the everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games—and we prefer to relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we can simultaneously lionize and ignore. For the most part, we prefer to believe that both war and the military can be kept in tidy little boxes: war, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs, and the military an institution easily defined by its specialized, war-related functions.
We are wrong on both counts.
Two years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks shattered American illusions of safety, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army published a slender little book called Unrestricted Warfare. Historically, wrote colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, “the three indispensable ‘hardware’ elements of any war” have been “soldiers, weapons and a battlefield.”[57] This, they warned, will soon cease to be true: humans are now entering an era in which even these most basic “hardware” elements of war will be transformed beyond recognition.
In the wars of the coming decades, predicted the two Chinese officers, the “soldiers” will increasingly be computer hackers, financiers, terrorists, drug smugglers, and agents of private corporations, as well as members of organized state militaries. Their “weapons” will range from “airplanes, cannons, poison gas, bombs, [and] biochemical agents” to “computer viruses, net browsers, and financial derivative tools.” Warfare, wrote Qiao and Wang, will soon “transcend all boundaries and limits. . . . [T]he battlefield will be everywhere . . . [and] all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.”
When Unrestricted Warfare was first published in 1999, its dystopian predictions received little attention beyond a small circle of military and intelligence officials. Seen from the vantage point of today, however, the two Chinese officers look chillingly prescient. The accelerating pace of technological advances in the last few decades has enabled information, people, money, and materiel to move across national borders with unprecedented speed and ease.
These changes have created astonishing new opportunities: today, ordinary Americans can take vacations in Thailand or Botswana, invest money instantly in foreign stock exchanges, consult by email with medical specialists half a world away, or share favorite music videos with fellow fans in Berlin and Bombay. But our increasing dependence on the Internet and other forms of electronic communication also creates new vulnerabilities, as does our increasing global interconnectedness. Syrian hackers can now bring down major US media websites; terrorist ideologues in Yemen can use the Internet to disseminate bomb-making instructions to extremists in Boston or London; Mexican drug cartels can launder money through a series of nearly instantaneous electronic transactions; financial meltdowns in one market can lead to rapidly cascading crises in other markets; and everything from pollution to bioengineered viruses can be spread rapidly around the globe.
As a result, states and their traditionally organized militaries are facing more and more competition from small, decentralized, nonhierarchical organizations and networks. In 1941, it took a coordinated attack by 350 Japanese military airplanes to kill 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Six decades later, nineteen men from four different countries—armed only with box cutters—hijacked four civilian jets and caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. Nonstate actors—even one or two individuals—can increasingly compete with states when it comes to using physical force to cause large-scale death and physical injury.
What is more, the use of physical force itself has more and more competition. War, wrote the nineteenth-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, is “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”[58] But our increased interconnectedness and dependence on interlinked electronic technologies has created new means for clever actors—be they states or individuals—to achieve war’s traditional ends. Imagine a cyber attack that brought down the electrical power grid in a major population center for weeks, or a significant cyber disruption of the nation’s financial infrastructure: either could rapidly cause massive economic damage and lead, albeit indirectly, to significant death and suffering.
The 9/11 attacks made it clear that the changes described by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui did not lie off in the distant future. As the nineteen al Qaeda plotters made their unimpeded way through airport security, the era of unrestricted warfare was already well under way, though few of us knew it at the time.
The US response to the 9/11 attacks moved us still further into the era of unrestricted warfare. Just days after the attacks, the Bush administration declared that the United States was launching a “war on terror,” and that was no mere metaphor: more than a decade later, the United States still regards itself as being in an “armed conflict” with “Al Qaeda and its associates.” But just as Qiao and Wang predicted, this armed conflict bears little resemblance to what we traditionally think of as war. Our enemies wear no uniforms and are loyal to no states; many of those we consider “enemy combatants” do not even seem to be part of any organized group.
In the years since 9/11, it has grown steadily more difficult to define our enemies (the United States will not define or list al Qaeda’s “associates”). The “battlefield” keeps shifting, too: it has ranged from Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines, with forays into Syria, Mali, Nigeria, and elsewhere. What counts as a “weapon” or an “attack” in this war is also murky: the United States has detained and killed alleged terrorist planners, recruiters, and financiers working to disrupt everything with means ranging from planned bombings to cyber attacks. But when you wage war against a nameless, stateless, formless enemy—an enemy with goals as protean as its methods—how can that war ever end?
The US government has also made it clear that it views cyber threats primarily through the lens of “war.” In 2011, the White House released an “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” declaring that the United States would “respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country.”[59] In 2012, the State Department’s top lawyer announced that as a legal matter, the United States believed that “cyber activities may in certain circumstances constitute uses of force,” triggering the law of armed conflict and giving rise to a right to respond with traditional physical force.[60]
War has burst out of its old boundaries—and as the lines between “war” and “nonwar” grow blurry, the role and mission of the US military have grown similarly blurry. Today, as the US military struggles to respond to novel threats from novel quarters, its once straightforward raison d’etre—defending America from armed attack by foreign states—is no longer clear-cut. This has had a negative effect on the public’s perception of the military’s effectiveness. Some 50.6 percent of YouGov respondents believe that the military getting too involved in “non-military” affairs hurts military effectiveness (CM2T 58). Just twenty-five years ago, most US military personnel understood their role in a manner that would have been equally familiar to Alexander the Great or Ghengis Khan: the military’s job, to put it bluntly, was to “kill people and break stuff.” But today’s military has vastly expanded its sphere of activities.
American military personnel now operate in nearly every country on earth. While in some places, they “shoot, move and communicate” just as soldiers have been taught to do in basic training for generations, they also analyze lines of computer code in Virginia office buildings, build isolation wards in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, operate health clinics in rural Malaysian villages, launch agricultural reform programs and small business development projects in Africa, train Afghan judges and parliamentarians, develop television soap operas for Iraqi audiences, conduct antipiracy patrols off the Somali coast, monitor global email and telephone communications, and pilot weaponized drones from simulated airplane cockpits thousands of miles away.
These and a thousand other activities now performed by the US military are intended to “shape the battlespace,” prevent and deter future conflict, and disrupt or destroy the capabilities of potential adversaries, whomever—and wherever—they may be. Why wait passively for the next terrorist attack—or nuclear missile launched by a rogue state, or cyber attack emanating from China—when we could be eliminating the root causes of conflict by fostering economic development and good governance, building relationships, creating networks of agents and allies, collecting data, promoting “new narratives,” or striking likely future enemies before they can develop the ability to harm us?
To the military, it is all about staying “left of boom.” Imagine a timeline running from left to right, with potential calamity looming somewhere in the hazy future. “Boom” might be the IED buried under the road, a radioactive “dirty bomb,” an aerosol canister filled with a bioengineered virus, or a computer worm that shuts down the New York Stock Exchange. You always want to stay left of boom—and as the varieties of “boom” expand, the military has expanded correspondingly.
Paradox Four:
The Best and the Worst
Here’s the final paradox: the US military is today more professionalized and better educated than ever before—certainly far more healthy than most other US government institutions—but at the same time, it is increasingly hamstrung by its own organizational rigidities. The US military has increasingly been locked into a defensive crouch, semiparalyzed by interservice rivalries, dysfunctional budget politics, and personnel and acquisition systems that seem diabolically designed to discourage creativity and innovation.
Virtually every military leader understands that as an institution, the US military still lacks many of the core skills and attributes that are essential to addressing today’s security challenges—but though military leaders universally proclaim the need for flexibility, adaptability, decentralization, and creativity in today’s military personnel, our recruiting system has changed little in the last century. Similarly, military training and education remains focused primarily on skills that are relevant only in a diminishing number of situations. The acquisitions process is cumbersome, slow, and often held hostage to political considerations. Meanwhile, the military personnel system makes it difficult to bring in new skills or allow personnel to specialize, and a zero-defect internal culture rewards conformity and punishes creativity. In all, as the Defense Science Board declared in a 2010 review, “DOD’s processes are complex, time consuming, and often do not align well with the timeframes dictated by today’s operational environment.”[61]
Take just a few examples, starting with recruiting. In some ways, much has changed in recent decades: seventy years ago, the United States had a segregated military, but today people of every race, color, and creed train and fight side by side. Twenty-five years ago, women were excluded from half the occupational specialties in the army and 80 percent of Marine Corps jobs; today, women can serve in almost every military job. Just a few years ago, gay and lesbian service members risked discharge; today, they can serve openly.
But there is one thing that has changed hardly at all. Each year, the overwhelming majority of new military recruits are young and male. In that sense, the American military of 2012 still looks a great deal like the American military of the 1970s, the 1940s, the 1860s, or the 1770s. For that matter, it still looks a lot like virtually every group of warriors in virtually every society during virtually every period of human history.
For millennia, having an army full of young men made sense. As soldiers, young males have had two things going for them, historically speaking. First, they are usually stronger, on average, than any other demographic group: they can run fast and carry heavy loads. Second, they are biologically “expendable”: from a species-survival perspective, women of child-bearing age are the limiting factor in population growth. A society can lose a lot of young men without a devastating impact on overall population growth.
Today, though, these characteristics do not matter as much as they once did. Overall birthrates are much lower in modern societies than they were during earlier periods, but life expectancy is much longer. Early societies worried about sustaining their populations; today, we worry less about ensuring population growth than about over-burdening the planet’s load-bearing capacity. Simple brawn also offers far less advantage in our high-tech age. In modern warfare, brutal hand-to-hand combat is no longer the norm, and warfare is no longer a matter of sending out wave after wave of troops to overwhelm the enemy through sheer mass. Increasingly, much modern warfare involves a mixture of high-tech skills and low-tech cultural knowledge rather than “fighting” in the traditional sense.
Being young, male, and strong thus offers no particular advantage to an air force remote-drone pilot, an army financial services technician, or a “cyber warrior” assigned to the National Security Agency or Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). Even for service members in combat positions, the physical strength that young men are more likely to possess no longer offers as much of an advantage: even the most impressive musculature is no match for an IED.
I do not mean to suggest that the physical strength of soldiers has no further military relevance. Notwithstanding all our high-tech gadgets, military personnel—particularly in the infantry—often still find themselves doing things the old-fashioned way: hauling heavy equipment up a winding mountain trail or slugging it out hand to hand during a raid. The infantry, along with specialized groups such as Navy SEALs, will continue to view strength and endurance as essential to their mission. But for increasing numbers of military personnel, the marginal benefits of sheer physical strength and youth have plummeted relative to earlier eras—and this trend seems likely to continue.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of tasks we now assign to the military require quite different skills and attributes: technical experience; scientific know-how; foreign language and regional expertise; an anthropological cast of mind; media savvy; maturity and good judgment.
If military recruiting were better calibrated towards ensuring the mix of skills we need, we might make an effort to recruit far more women, greater numbers of older personnel and college graduates, and many more immigrants with vital language skills and cultural knowledge. Not everyone will have the physical strength and endurance needed for certain combat jobs, but, as noted earlier, 85 percent of military personnel serve in noncombat positions. If we truly want a military that is adequately prepared for today’s challenges, why not differentiate in recruiting and focus on ensuring a better match between recruits and the positions they will have to occupy?
We might also look for ways to make it easier for Americans to move back and forth between the military and civilian worlds. At the moment, it is virtually impossible to move laterally into and out of the military. CYBERCOM’s commander cannot decide to bring on a dozen top experts from Google for five-year stints at ranks commensurate with their experience: if a 45-year-old top technical expert at Google wanted to join the military, he would need an age waiver and would have to start as a first lieutenant (with a commensurate salary), making it impossible for him to hold positions of authority for years to come. Nor can CYBERCOM’s commander decide to send his ten brightest young officers off to work in Silicon Valley for a few years: by doing so, they would put promotions within the military at risk. As it is, many military officers fear that taking “broadening” assignments will work against them when it comes to promotion and command opportunities: despite rhetoric from senior military leaders about the value of gaining diverse experiences, it is often those who have followed the straight and narrow path who end up in top positions.[62]
The current all-or-nothing approach to military careers does not serve the nation well. It keeps talented people out of the military and makes it risky or impossible for military personnel to branch out and then return without career penalties.
Granted, there are military positions that require substantive skills that can be gained only by many years in the military itself—civilian life, no matter how rich and varied, does not tend to give people the ability to operate tanks in close formation in a combat setting while coordinating air support. But there are many other military positions for which this is far less true, particularly in technical areas and areas in which new skills are needed, be they technical or linguistic. You cannot learn combined arms maneuver in civilian life, but you can learn to be a computer programmer, a medic, an agricultural expert, or an Arabic interpreter. At the moment, the near impossibility of lateral moves between the military and civilian worlds forces an overreliance on contractors. This is one way to bring in skills but probably not the best way, and it carries with it risks of its own.
During World Wars I and II, the urgent need for officers led the military to grant temporary wartime commissions to lawyers, doctors, and others deemed to possess valuable skills; those with comparable civilian experience could enter the military at ranks commensurate with their civilian career levels. Today’s military urgently needs to experiment with similar flexible programs, both to bring in outside talent and to permit talented military personnel to gain new skills in the civilian world and then return without career penalties.
Similarly, the nature of military evaluations and promotions boards makes officers only as good as their last evaluation report; a zero-defect culture discourages risk taking and pushes out many talented officers.[63] Shifting from one occupational specialty to another is difficult, and transcending poor evaluations in one area is next to impossible, even if ratings are exceptionally high in other areas.[64] I recall a three-star general with responsibility for cyber operations lamenting that his most talented aide was likely be involuntarily separated from the army because he had a mediocre record as an infantry officer. Despite his talents in the cyber domain, even his three-star mentor could not save the young officer’s career.
Meanwhile, rigid bureaucratic rules also push out many of the military’s best and brightest. Tim Kane, the author of Bleeding Talent and a vocal critic of the military personnel system, notes that “talented senior officers [are often] badly mismatched with . . . optimal jobs because the Pentagon continue[s] to use a command-and-control personnel system right out of a Soviet playbook, rather than trusting the voluntary nature of their volunteers. Surveys reveal that the main drivers of attrition [are] not high op-tempo but frustration with the personnel bureaucracy.”[65] If you speak Korean and want to be stationed in Korea, you may find yourself posted involuntarily to Kuwait, while an Arabic speaker is sent off to Korea. Your kids may have one more year of high school and your spouse may need one more year to finish her nursing degree at the local university, but none of this matters to the military; you can still be shipped off posthaste to Germany, even though someone else might be better suited to your assignment in any case. You may be an expert in nuclear engineering, but that will not necessarily stop the military from plunking you down in a Pentagon job where you will spend your days on counterinsurgency planning.
When rigid bureaucracy drives out many talented people, you are left mainly with people who are not bothered by rigid bureaucracy—but these may not be the right people to lead the military through uncharted waters.
In a 2013 study, Stephen J. Gerras and Leonard Wong of the Army War College examined some of the reasons the military is often resistant to change and transformation. They evaluated the degree to which some of the Army’s most successful officers exhibited “openness,” which “is manifested in a strong intellectual curiosity, creativity and a comfortable relationship with novelty and variety. . . . People with low scores on openness tend to have more conventional, traditional interests, preferring familiarity over novelty. They tend to be conservative and resistant to change. . . . Leaders high in openness . . . solicit alternate points of view and are comfortable debating with those whose perspectives differ from their own. They are generally more receptive to change.”[66]
Senior military personnel did not score very high on “openness,” Gerras and Wong found: “Personality data gathered at the US Army War College from lieutenant colonel and colonel students show that the most successful officers score lower in openness than the general US population. Upon reflection, this makes sense. People with lower openness scores would probably be more inclined to join the Army in the first place. . . . To make matters worse, though, those Army War College students selected for brigade command”—a traditional indicator of success for full colonels—“score even lower than the overall Army War College average. This raises an interesting paradox: the leaders recognized and selected by the Army to serve at strategic levels—where uncertainty and complexity are the greatest—tend to have lower levels of one of the attributes most related to success at strategic level.”[67]
Overall, “[c]areers of the Department’s military personnel, active and reserve, are currently managed within a restrictive set of laws, regulations, and policies, all reinforced by culture and tradition,” notes a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Many of these laws and regulations have been in force fifty years or more. They all may have been sensible fifty years ago, but the DSB believes they certainly have the effect today of inhibiting the Department’s flexibility and adaptability, lessening its ability to use and deploy people efficiently, and ultimately wasting human capital.”[68]
It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the numerous ways in which today’s military, impressive though it is, holds itself back through anachronistic internal policies. Some of these policies are dictated by Congress, but many could be changed internally. The trouble is, the nature of the system itself creates strong disincentives for those inside to change it.
Conclusion
Today’s military is a strange sort of animal. It is at once idealized and ignored, celebrated and mistrusted. It is the most impressive public institution we have, but it is increasingly unsure of its own raison d’etre—and increasingly ill equipped, despite a wealth of internal talent and external support, to tackle today’s most pressing challenges.
If we want a military that is strong, capable, and responsive to America’s changing needs, we will need to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about the military and its role. In a world in which the contours of war and warfare are no longer clear, and many tasks assigned to the military seem increasingly “nonmilitary,” we need to consider whether we are distributing authorities and funding in a sensible way. If our political leadership is unwilling or unable to rebuild the capabilities of the civilian foreign policy sector, we need to accept that our military will probably be in the business of development, diplomacy, and governance for the long term, whether we like it or not—and we will need to adapt recruitment, training, education, and everything else along the DOTMLPF (doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership, personnel, and facilities) spectrum accordingly.
If we cannot meaningfully draw lines between “military” and civilian tasks, we need to rethink our assumptions about the nature and purpose of civilian control of the military, the relationship between civilian and military leaders, and the accountability mechanisms designed to ensure the responsible use of power. We will also need to consider how to maintain a sense of military identity and morale in a world in which roles have grown increasingly blurry.
The paradoxes characterizing modern US civil-military relations will not be easily resolved, and debates about the nature and consequences of civil-military gaps will surely continue. Some will demand that the military change to become more like civilian society; others will demand that civilian society become more like the military. Regardless, we should never forget a basic truth: love it or hate it, the US military does not exist in a vacuum but is a product of our culture and our collective decisions.
Whatever it is, it is what we have made it.
Notes
1. James Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” Atlantic, January–February 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516.
2. Sabrina Tavernise, “As Fewer Americans Serve, Growing Gap Is Found between Civilians and Military,” New York Times, November 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/us/civilian-military-gap-grows-as-fewer-americans-serve.html?_r=0.
3. Quoted in Thom Shanker, “At West Point, a Focus on Trust,” New York Times, May 21, 2011.
4. While Americans over sixty account for less than 20% of the general population, roughly half the US veteran population is over sixty. U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, “Living Veterans by Age Group/Gender, 2010–2040,” http://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/demographics/new_vetpop_model/1l_vetpop2014.xlsx.
5. Pew Research Center, “The Military-Civilian Gap: Fewer Family Connections,” November 23, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/23/the-military-civilian-gap-fewer-family-connections.
6. References to the YouGov data by question number appear in parentheses throughout this essay with the abbreviations CM1T and CM2T indicating the 2013 and 2014 surveys, respectively. The complete results are available at http://www.hoover.org/warriors-and-citizens-crosstabs-1 (CM1T) and http://www.hoover.org/warriors-and-citizens-crosstabs-2 (CM2T).
7. U.S. Dept. of Defense, “2012 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community,” http://www.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2012_Demographics_Report.pdf.
8. Military Times, Poll, 2012, http://militarytimes.com/projects/polls/2012/results/politics.
9. Compare CM1T 56–58 with U.S. Dept. of Defense, “Active Duty Military Strength by Service,” http:https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/dwp_reports.jsp.
10. Quoted in Kellie Lunney, “America’s Other 1%,” Government Executive, September 1, 2013, http://cdn.govexec.com/interstitial.html?v=2.1.1&rf=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.govexec.com%2Fmagazine%2Fbriefing%2F2013%2F09%2Famericas-other-1-percent%2F69797%2F.
11. “Iraq Coalition Military Fatalities by Year; Afghanistan Coalition Military Fatalities by Year,” http://icasualties.org/; “Iraq Coalition Casualties: U.S. Wounded Totals,” http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx.
12. “Military Enlisted Personnel by Broad Occupational Category and Branch of Military Service,” June 2003, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/mos.htm.
13. U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Military Careers: What They Do,” http://www.bls.gov/ooh/military/military-careers.htm.
14. Dave Baiocchi, “Measuring Army Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Rand Corporation, 2013, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR145/RAND_RR145.pdf.
15. Nese F. DeBruyne and Anne Leland, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” Congressional Research Service, report no. RL32492, January 2, 2015, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf.
16. “In 2015, Army Will Lose Nearly 20,000 Soldiers in Drawdown,” Army Times, December 27, 2014, http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/careers/army/2014/12/26/2015-drawdown-year-ahead/20860491.
17. Sandra I. Irwin, “Marine Corps Leaders Warn Troop Cuts May Go Too Far,” National Defense, January 15, 2015, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1714.
18. U.S. Dept. of Defense, “2013 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community,” http://www.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2013-Demographics-Report.pdf.
19. Ibid.
20. U.S. Dept. of Defense, “Military Families and Their Housing Choices,” report no. HCS80T2, by Kristie L. Bissell et al. for LMI Government Consulting, February 2010, http://www.acq.osd.mil/housing/FH%20Choices.pdf.
21. Richard Pérez-Peña, “U.S. Bachelor Degree Rate Passes Milestone,” New York Times, February 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors-degrees-at-record-level.html?_r=0.
22. Jim Michaels, “ROTCs Return to Ivy League,” USA Today, August 2, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-08-02-ROTCs-return-to-Ivy-League_n.htm.
23. Shanea Watkins and James Sherk, “Who Serves in the US Military? The Demographics of Enlisted Troops and Officers,” Heritage Foundation, August 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers.
24. National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2010,” June 2011, http://nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2011/military-recruitment-2010.
25. Pew Research Center, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era: The Military-Civilian Gap,” October 5, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/10/05/war-and-sacrifice-in-the-post-911-era.
26. U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, “Profile of Veterans, 2011,” March 2013, http://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/SpecialReports/Profile_of_Veterans_2011.pdf.
27. U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, “Profile of Sheltered Homeless Veterans,” September 2012, http://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/SpecialReports/Homeless_Veterans_2009-2010.pdf.
28. Pew Research Center, “War and Sacrifice.”
29. Ibid.
30. Rosa Brooks, “Is Sexual Assault Really an ‘Epidemic’?” Foreign Policy, July 10, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/10/is-sexual-assault-really-an-epidemic.
31. Rosa Brooks, “Red Herring: The Myth of the Republican Military Voter,” Foreign Policy, November 1, 2012, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/11/01/red-herring-2.
32. Jason K. Dempsey, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
33. See the chapter in this volume by Golby, Cohn, and Feaver.
34. See Kent Friederich, “Strange Bedfellows: The American Public and Its Military in the Aftermath of September 11th,” US Army War College Strategy Research Project, April 7, 2003, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a416089.pdf.
35. On a related note, only 34.4% of YouGov respondents strongly or somewhat supported continued military involvement in Afghanistan after 2014 (CM2T 72).
36. Heritage Foundation, “Military Enlisted Recruit-to-Population Ratios, by Region in 2007,” http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/E8F05D884C7E78E45A200DC953ED3854.gif.
37. U.S. Dept. of Defense, “2013 Demographics”; see also National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2010.”
38. Tim Kane, “The Demographics of Military Enlistment after 9/11,” November 2005, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/11/the-demographics-of-military-enlistment-after-9-11.
39. National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2010.”
40. U.S. Dept. of Defense, “2012 Demographics.”
41. National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2010.”
42. Some civilians recognize this. In the YouGov survey, 43.6 percent of respondents agreed that the US military has different values from those of the rest of American society, while 38.8 percent disagreed and 17.5 percent were unsure (CM2T 18). Similarly, only 32.5 percent of respondents agreed that the military is isolated from American society, while 46.2 percent disagreed and 21.3 percent were not sure (CM2T 23).
43. “Joint Chiefs Chair to Graduates: ‘I Fear They Do Not Know Us,’ ” CNN, May 21, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/21/new.york.mullen.military.
44. Terry Howell, “Report Compares Military and Civilian Pay,” January 27, 2011, http://militaryadvantage.military.com/2011/01/report-military-paid-more-than-federal-workers.
45. Cited in Jeffrey M. Jones, “Confidence in US Institutions Still below Historical Norms,” 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/183593/confidence-institutions-below-historical-norms.aspx.
46. See generally Rosa Brooks, “Thought Cloud,” Foreign Policy, August 8, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/08/02/thought-cloud.
47. International Committee for the Responsibility to Protect, “Crisis in Kyrgyzstan,” http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/crises/crisis-in-kyrgyzstan.
48. See, e.g., Robert Killibrew, “Rapid Deployment: The Army and American Strategy,” War on the Rocks, December 9, 2013, http://warontherocks.com/2013/12/rapid-deployment-the-army-and-american-strategy.
49. Barack Obama, “Barack Obama’s New Hampshire Primary Speech,” Transcript, New York Times, January 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
50. “White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan,” 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/Afghanistan-Pakistan_White_Paper.pdf.
51. Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,’ ” Washington Post, September 21, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092002920.html.
52. Peter Baker, “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan,” New York Times, December 5, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/world/asia/06reconstruct.html?pagewanted=all.
53. Notes on file with author for all personal interviews cited in this chapter.
54. DoD News, “Carter ‘Will Help Keep Our Military Strong,’ President Says,” February 12, 2015, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=128174.
55. See George W. Harley, Masks as Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia, 1950.
56. See George W. Harley, Masks as Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia, 1950.
57. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (1999), available at http://www.cryptome.org/cuw.htm.
58. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), available at http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/BK1ch01.html.
59. “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” May 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf.
60. Harold Hongju Koh, “International Law in Cyberspace,” September 18, 2012, http://www.state.gov/s/l/releases/remarks/197924.htm.
61. Defense Science Board, “Enhancing Adaptability of US Military Forces,” 2011, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA536755.pdf.
62. Leonard Wong, “Fashion Tips for the Field Grade,” Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army, 2009.
63. Amy Schafer, “What Stands in the Way of the Pentagon Keeping Its Best and Brightest?” July 14, 2014, Defense One, http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/07/what-stands-way-pentagon-keeping-its-best-and-brightest/88630/?oref=d-channelriver.
64. Tim Kane, “An Army of None,” Foreign Policy, January 10, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/01/10/an-army-of-none.
65. Ibid.
66. Stephen J. Gerras and Leonard Wong, “Changing Minds in the Army, Strategic Studies Institute,” October 2013, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1179.pdf.
67. Ibid.
68. Defense Science Board, “Enhancing Adaptability of U.S. Military Forces.”
