THE MILITARY NEXUS, I
In one of his earliest and most frequently quoted observations upon becoming President, Ronald Reagan said that in the United States, government was not the solution to problems, it was the problem. Thereafter he made one exception: speaking of government workers, he averred that only those in the armed forces or in support thereof were truly essential.
In defining a political attitude, truth may well emerge from hyperbole; the President was again at one with his constituency. In the years of contentment there were, in fact, and as we have seen, numerous government functions that were indispensable for sustaining the mood of the voting majority. It would have been politically fatal to attack Social Security, old-age pensions, in any comprehensive way. Or publicly supported health care; accident or illness is an expensive and worrisome contingency even for the well rewarded. Support to farm income was equally favored, as was government rescue of failing financial institutions and therewith those who have entrusted their money thereto. Individuals with insured bank accounts ranging up to $100,000 have, generally speaking, more money than those who do not. If a bank is very large—too large to fail—even, or perhaps especially, the largest depositors are rescued. Socialism is deeply abhorrent in the culture of contentment but not for the financially most contented.
In summary, government may be the problem for contentment but not when well-being is in jeopardy. Even President Reagan, were he given to reflection, would have ascribed a necessary function to that which serves or sustains well-being, or, perhaps more precisely, he would have been led to do so by his advisers and staff. Adverse action here would have placed his supporters immediately and visibly at risk, and they would have become vocal in their criticism. However, in defense of Mr. Reagan it must be said that the exception he accorded the military was politically perceptive. The attitudes and interests of his constituency on this subject were especially strong and clear. And so they remain. With economic power, military power is, as we have already seen, one of the two effective pillars of foreign policy—the real as distinct from the rhetorical.
During the past half century less a few years, the most significant support to the deeply embedded position of the military establishment in the culture of contentment was the perception that it was a bulwark against Communism, this being, as noted, the most obtrusive of the seeming threats to contentment. Fear of this was deep and fundamental in the psyche of the contented. Imperiled freedom, loss of liberty, was much cited; especially acute was the threat to private property. Yet earlier, in the period immediately following the First World War, as again in the latter 1940s and the 1950s, the fear of domestic Communism assumed paranoiac proportions. The Palmer raids to round up, imprison and expel presumed foreign subversives were the earlier response; McCarthyism became the code word for the second episode. For anything so enjoyed as the life of the contented there must, as a psychological necessity, be a threatening counterforce. To enjoy life without envisaging such a possibility is seen as a careless evasion of hard reality. And there was the highest level of affirmation: Marxist scholarship over a century and more had identified the greatly privileged—the comfortable owners of property—as the Communists’ natural target. That the very majority now enjoying comfort had totally changed the situation—that there were now not a few self-regarding and exploitative capitalists but a mass of superbly satisfied successors—went largely unnoticed. After Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy, the true situation came to be realized in retrospect. Paranoia was seen to be paranoia. The threat of a Communist takeover at home—of “a conspiracy so immense”1—was seen to be ridiculous, even mentally aberrant.
Nonetheless, Communism remained a compelling cause of fear, undiminished as an international menace even as the domestic alarm subsided and became mildly absurd. Some of this concern was, as with foreign policy, recreational in character. Those presuming to experience, knowledge and authority in such matters gathered with much pleasure and no operational purpose to discuss and to agree on “the threat of Communism” in the world at large; it was not necessary that anything new or distracting be articulated. The major threat was, of course, posed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. But were we to be safe, we must resist Communism wherever it appeared in the world. This included those primitive societies that had yet to experience capitalism, even though on the authority of Marx, no less, Communism before capitalism was held to be premature and wholly implausible.
From this anxiety came the greatest of all exceptions to the general constraint on public expenditure. No politician, regardless of formal party identification, could have it said that he or she was “soft on Communism.” Given the need to avoid such calumny and aware that military power was central to an effective resistance, he or she could not safely vote against appropriations for the military establishment or its weaponry. That, in turn, was to be “soft on defense.”
The fear of Communism was also responsible for three major developments in the military power as that existed in the political economy of contentment. The first, supplementing and extending what was an already large expenditure, was a further enormous increase in military and defense spending as the constituency of contentment gained full power in the 1980s; this was the Reagan arms buildup. The second was the emergence of a largely autonomous military establishment standing above and apart from democratic control. The third was a series of foreign ventures designed ostensibly to arrest the threatening spread of Communism but with the further purpose of justifying the expanding role of the military establishment by providing a presumed enemy. The last two of these developments will be considered in the chapter that follows.
The most common of all public references to government activities in the United States during the decade of the 1980s was to the defense buildup. Expenditures in the decade increased from $143 billion in 1980 to $314 billion in 1990, in constant 1990 dollars from $206 billion to $314 billion.2 This was not in response to any new military threat; that was not even suggested. It was fully in response to the fears of the constituency of contentment that was now solidly in power.
There was, indeed, broad recognition that the nuclear arsenal being so enlarged reflected a vast, indeed numerically incredible, potential overkill. And it was known that no small part of the buildup was based on symbolism, not reality. Aged and stately battleships, many years from the shipyard, were dug out of mothballs and refurbished at considerable cost, although it was accepted that in any war of serious consequence their vulnerability would be extreme. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, commonly called Star Wars, went forward in the face of the all but universally held view of competent engineers and scientists that there was no rational reason to suppose that it would work. Such at its extreme fringes was the legacy of the fear of Communism. However, present also, as earlier indicated, were very tangible financial rewards. Expenditures for defense, like the bailing out of the banks and the savings and loan associations and unlike welfare or educational spending in the central cities, rewarded individuals—executives, scientists, engineers, political lobbyists, many weapons industry workers—who were solidly in the larger constituency of contentment.
Before going on to further consideration of the role of the military in the culture of contentment, it is necessary, however, to consider the most seriously discommoding feature of the commitment to the military, one that has been handled with no slight intelligence and even subtlety in recent years. This is the grave inconvenience for the community of contentment of personal service in the armed forces by oneself or by one’s offspring, with the further possibility of participation in combat and the associated threat of dismemberment or highly premature death. In the part of the world where life has little to offer, this is not a matter of equal relevance. It is one of the reasons, perhaps the prime reason, that armed conflict and death are so extensively the fate of the poorest people on the planet. Not remarkably, they are the most easily persuaded that the next life will be better because for many it could not be worse. To the contented, obviously, this situation does not apply. Service in the armed forces and the implied threat of actual warfare and all its dangers are therefore to be avoided. So it was in the United States in the age of contentment.
In the years of the Vietnam war, North Vietnam was, in any serious American view, remote and improbable as a Communist threat. Nonetheless, there was substantial support for the war from the then nascent community of contentment. This, however, did not extend to those with sons of military age, and notably it did not to the sons themselves, vulnerable as they were to recruitment. The universities, the prime locus of the relatively affluent young, became the center of resistance to the war and very specifically to the draft. This resistance, as the years passed and the hostilities continued, became formidable and, as regards the continued prosecution of the war, decisive. There was no similar adverse reaction from poorer youths or those of the underclass.
The obvious and, indeed, inevitable step in response was taken in 1973 with the suspension of general military conscription. It was accepted that the contented should not be forced into military service. This, with its attendant discomforts and dangers, would be reserved for those who could be attracted from less agreeable surroundings by pay, training and the general prospect for economic betterment. These promises became the theme of armed forces recruiting and were made widely familiar through television advertising, which abandoned patriotism as a plea and promised instead immediate economic advantage and subsequent advance. The anciently most unacceptable feature of the military nexus—the distinctly adverse thought and possibility of death in combat—was thus shifted from the contented to the aspiring members of the underclass and, in larger measure, to those verging thereon. This the social and economic composition of the armed forces in the age of contentment fully affirmed, although no slight effort was made to interpret the figures in the best possible way.
Thus, a survey of recruits to active service in 1987 that was based on the income of the communities whence they came3 showed markedly fewer from the age-eligible population as incomes passed the $19,600–$23,300 range.4 The number fell steadily as average incomes increased; the fewest recruits were from the highest-income communities, and they, quite possibly, were from the poorer families therein.
The youth from the higher-income areas, to the extent that they served at all, also showed an intelligent preference, aided by better education, for the Navy and Air Force, as opposed to the less pleasant and personally less safe prospect of service with the ground forces.
Seeking rather ostentatiously to put the best face on this troubling matter, the above-cited study observed that “high-income areas may be underrepresented among recruits, but they are not unrepresented. Of the 100 wealthiest ZIP-code areas, all with median family incomes exceeding $40,000 in 1979, fewer than one-quarter did not provide a single male recruit in 1987.… The roster of areas represented [by recruits] includes the Los Angeles suburbs of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, California, and the Chicago suburbs of Kenilworth, Glencoe and Winnetka, Illinois.”5 It will be thought that a representation of only one, two or a handful from an affluent community does not deny the more general escape from this unwelcome obligation. The author of the study in question is himself impelled to note that there are anecdotal poor in even the wealthiest community.
That minorities are overrepresented in the armed forces is, of course, conceded. In 1989 blacks accounted for approximately 22 percent of active-duty recruits, as compared with 14 percent of all enlistment-age youth. In the Army—the service that is, as noted, the most threatened by uncomfortable service and death in battle—the proportion was above 25 percent.6 That in the age of contentment the marked inconveniences and dangers anciently associated with military service were substantially shifted to those outside the favored community is evident.
Support to the military with its reward to those who supply it with weaponry and its discriminate call for military service is, it will be reasonably clear, in keeping with the interests of the community of contentment. But the latter is not its only source of power. There is grave error in thinking the military is accountable only to broad political and democratic decisions; under the protective cloak of democracy it is also strongly self-sustaining. This is a matter of prime importance. Nor is it a situation peculiar to the United States. In many countries, and especially in the Third World, as it is called, the military enjoys a position of independent power, and it is this that will be discussed in the next chapter.
1 The sardonic title of a book by David M. Oshinsky (New York: Free Press, 1983).
2 Economic Report of the President, February 1991.
3 Richard L. Fernandez, Social Representation in the U.S. Military (Congress of the United States: A Study of the Congressional Budget Office, October 1989), pp. 40–41. The communities were the postal ZIP-code districts for which family income figures were available from the 1980 census.
4 These were 1979 income levels as shown by the 1980 census and are expressed in 1979 dollars. See Fernandez, p. 40.
5 Fernandez, pp. 42–43.
6 In January 1991, before the outbreak of the war in the Persian Gulf, Congressman Les Aspin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the United States House of Representatives, scheduled hearings on the socioeconomic composition of the forces at risk in Saudi Arabia. Having looked into this matter, I was invited to testify. As war became imminent and then arrived, the hearings, twice scheduled, were first postponed and then canceled. The issue, it seems possible, was thought too delicate for extended (and possibly adverse) public exploration at that time. With actual hostilities at hand, the favored position of the contented could not be too blatantly discussed.