Americans notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster too colossal to ignore … [there is] an evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war; while the majority of citizens purport to revere its members even as they ignore or profit from their service …
—Andrew J. Baceviche, Vietnam Veteran, Professor Internal Relations, Boston College
Edward Gibbon said much the same thing in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon makes it clear that Rome succumbed to the barbarians due to a gradual decay of civic virtues among its citizens. He makes a special point of focusing on the outsourcing of the inherent duties to defend the empire as the beginning of the decline, ending with the fall of Rome as that abrogation of responsibility became institutionalized. What Gibbons documents was that within a period of sixty years not one general of the Roman Army and not one ground commander of any legion was from a family of wealth, privilege, or influence, even though these were the citizens who most benefitted from Roman power.
The military officers and, in growing numbers, the soldiers themselves were from the nations that Rome had subdued decades before. The Visigoths, the Gauls, the Germans, and the Huns gradually became the Romans who eventually did the fighting and eventually offered up Roman security out at the borders of the Roman Empire. Neither the nation detached from its army, nor the army detached from the nation, would survive.
As a people and as a nation, we have never endorsed the idea of a large freestanding army. It was Richard Nixon, angered with the growing resistance to our war in Vietnam, who supported and then promoted the idea of just such a volunteer army.
In a democracy, that old adage that “war is too important to be left to the generals” can become a two-edged sword. Politicians can be as foolish as any general, and faced with a population that is not involved or doesn’t care that much about what is happening, can cause as much damage to a nation as any jingoistic military commander or field marshal.
Add to that mix of potential political or military hubris a volunteer army, removed from an unconcerned or uninformed electorate, pushed on by an imperial government or military establishment, and you have the ingredients for a national disaster; specifically, the implementing of narrow, self-serving decisions leading to ever-more widening unexpected and terrible consequences.
Indeed, it was to by-pass public scrutiny and possible opposition that the French Government, along with its military in 1831, formed the Foreign Legion so that they could send troops around the world, including Spain, Mexico, the African Colonies, Indochina, and Algeria, without having the French population become involved or even begin to think about their wars.
Our Revolutionary War has been our model. It has been the Citizen’s Army we turn to in times of danger. Common sense has led us to believe that in times of real and actual danger, everyone must be involved, and a standing army simply would never offer up enough “boots on the ground” to win our battles, much less go on to win our wars.
Yet over these last decades we have become content to let such an army fight our battles, both out of sight and out of mind, under the foolish assumption that their will be no real individual or collective price to pay for it. We may not be Rome yet, but it is beginning to seem that way to the units that we keep deploying again and again, as well as their families and loved ones, while all the rest of us go shopping.
But it wasn’t only two savvy Presidents, beat up by an anti-war movement energized by an unpopular draft, who clearly understood (from the most recently released White House tapes) that Vietnam was not going well and that we had to get out. A few of those generals who had served as company grade officers in World War II and Korea understood that a large part of that discontent and eventual antagonism to the war was that the country had grown disenchanted with the reasons we were fighting, coupled to a draft that was viewed as undemocratic and blatantly unfair.
The issue was never whether we should have a professional military. The country had decided that much in the 1850s with the establishment of West Point and Annapolis as training grounds for our officers. The question was who would pull the triggers and how the country would become committed to our future wars.
Among those generals trying to get it right was Creighton Abrams, who replaced General William Westmoreland as Commander of Military Forces Vietnam in late 1968. Abrams rethought the whole issue of public war and private commitment. Tough, crusty, and gruff, Abrams’ concerns were quite different from both Johnson’s and Nixon’s, who wanted to get rid of a problem. Abrams simply wanted to get it right.
Abrams eventually came to view Vietnam as a war being fought by an army cut off from the population it served. What Abrams saw was that by 1969 the majority of combat units in Vietnam were made up mostly of minorities. He understood the inequality in all this and realized that this kind of smoldering demographic, barely working in a country at peace, could not work in a country involved in a deadly war that was going badly.
He became convinced that it was the separation of those who serve from those being served that had opened up the country to divisiveness, and the military to a conflict that had not been well thought out and, without public support, was ultimately doomed to failure. Abrams understood that the Vietnam draft had skewed conscription to the poor and disenfranchised, and away from those in positions of power, prestige, wealth, and privilege. He was aware of the long history of inequities in conscription, going back to the Civil War and Congress’s 1863 legislation that allowed draftees to hire substitutes, paying a $300 fee to the government in order to avoid the whole conscription process. There was nothing so egregious or as flagrant as a $300 exception going on during the Vietnam War, but by the time Abrams took command of our troops there were no end to those same kinds of exemptions. There were undergraduate deferments and graduate school deferments. There were deferments for enlistment in the National Guard and Reserve units. There were medical deferments if you were connected enough to have a medical specialist document that you did have a certain degree of scoliosis or flat feet, whether you did indeed have asthma as a child rather than a chronic cough, or were so severely nearsighted that it was barely correctable by eyeglasses.
The three most famous cases of deferment during the Vietnam War years were those of two future presidents and a vice-president. George W. Bush spent his time during the war within the continental United States as a member of the Texas Air National Guard and Bill Clinton spent the war years with his own educational deferments at Georgetown and then at Oxford under the auspices of a Rhodes scholarship. Vice President Dick Cheney received five deferments during the Vietnam years, famously remarking that he had “other, more important things to do” at the time.
Abrams saw all this privilege as operationally hopeless and both politically dangerous and philosophically unsound. In response to this “privilege gap” and to make sure that it never happened again, Abrams’ idea was for the country to maintain a small but competent volunteer army that would act as a powerful rapid deployment force to handle any fairly large-scale emergency. The plan was that for any prolonged conflict you could throw in the National Guard and Reserve units, giving America an immediate, quick, and abiding interest in any administration’s continued pursuit of enlarging the military conflict. The idea was simple enough—calling up the Guard was sure to ensure a vigorous and lively national debate that would either end the conflict or legitimize and democratize the military effort by leading to the next obvious step, the establishment of a draft in order to continue the war.
Conceptually Abrams’ plan was simple enough and there were many in the military, battered by the multiple failures of Vietnam, who went along with the idea. For anything more than a police action, the citizens of the country would become engaged through the activation and overseas deployment of their own state’s National Guard and Reserve units, with a national discussion on reinstituting a draft sure to follow.
But it didn’t turn out that way. By 9/11, we had a different kind of government, a different kind of army and apparently a different kind of country. There had been the success of Desert Storm I, and the Bush administration, with the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, was quite willing to let a small volunteer army, along with the addition of National Guard units to fill in the gaps, do the fighting. It would take Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” for the country to look the other way when the caskets and wounded started to come home, and when more and more of those same units started being redeployed back into the war zones again and again. All the while believing that people who had been at each other’s throats for centuries would suddenly embrace American-style democracy and welcome American troops as liberators. But it is the blindness or indifference of letting so few try to do so much while the rest of us went shopping that is the real tragedy.
Yet, even after a decade of fighting, with the volunteer army stretched to the limit and more and more reserve forces being deployed multiple times, no one is complaining, or even talking, of sharing the burden by instituting or considering a draft.
In 2006, Donald Rumsfeld, was asked by a relative of a deployed National Guard member why there were so many multiple deployments of Guard units, and why the National Guard troops were on operational duty, including foot patrols and setting up road blocks in the most dangerous districts and regions of Iraq. Unrepentant, unremorseful, and definitely annoyed, Rumsfeld answered dismissively, “The National Guard members knew what they were signing up for.”
Well, not quite. Those Minnesota National Guard troops that I knew, many in their late thirties and early forties, some even in their fifties, had signed up for crowd control at celebrations, snow removal during blizzards, saving their neighbors during floods, and two weeks each summer at Camp Ripley swapping new stories with old friends. They had not signed up to kick in doors in the roughest neighborhoods in the world or drive down roads waiting to be blown up. Some 38 percent of all our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been and still are National Guard and Reservists. General Abrams would be surprised, maybe even astonished, but certainly disappointed that ten years into a war, the burden is on the military and not a generally involved and committed civilian population.
Colonel Harry G. Summers, in his book On Strategy, an analysis of the Vietnam War, wrote about the failures of the military in Vietnam that ring as true and as applicable today as when he wrote these sentences about a military some forty years ago:
Throughout the 1960s the military were torn between the commitment to civilian supremacy inculcated through generations of service and their premonition of disaster, between trying to make a new system work and rebelling against it. They were demoralized by the order to procure weapons in which they did not believe and by the necessity of fighting a war whose purpose proved to be increasingly elusive. A new breed of military officer emerged: men who learned the new jargon, who could present the systems analysis arguments so much in vogue, more articulate than the older generations and more skilled in bureaucratic maneuvering. On some levels it eased civilian-military relationships; on a deeper level, it deprived the policy process of the simpler, cruder, but perhaps more relevant assessments which in the final analysis are needed when issues are reduced to a test of arms...
General Abrams died in 1974, having been given half his wish. We do have a small but powerful volunteer force, but the National Guard and Reserves are not supplementing the volunteer regular forces, they have been integrated into the force structure itself.
The air wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard flying C-130 has had multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fill in the gaps that an understaffed regular Air Force cannot supply. It is clear that our national amnesia has allowed a country of almost 300 million to allow fewer than 0.5 percent of the population, along with more than 300,000 women, to take on the whole burdens of what should be our fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the last few decades economists have talked about the growing disparities between the rich and the poor in this country, the gentrification of American cities into the “haves” and “have-nots,” along with the crumbling of the middle class and the growing gap between those with wealth and power and those without either. It is just this issue of class that Josiah Bunting III, a Vietnam veteran, novelist, and current president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, addressed in his article “Class Warfare” published in The American Scholar. Bunting laments and warns about the loss of any sense of national duty and national service that has been swept aside by privilege and indifference. Bunting is unabashedly direct in his criticism of the nation’s elite:
The business of war has become increasingly remote from a particular segment (the wealthy and the privileged) of the American people.
Bunting takes the issue of class further up the social ladder than most have been willing to go:
The war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) … like Korea and Vietnam… has splintered away from the conscious concern of most of those in whose behalf it is said to be prosecuted.
He points out that those killed and wounded are no longer the children of those who lead this country, or, as Bunting writes:
Those who control its resources and institutions, dictate its tastes and opinions, and are blessed most abundantly with the country’s bounty, or feed most lavishly upon its expensive entertainments and its treasures.”
Bunting presents the record of one of this country’s most prestigious but unnamed boarding schools. During World War I, 40 of its 400 students served in the military. During World War II, the number was 60. There were 10 during the Korean conflict, 5 for the ten years of the Vietnam War, and so far, none in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The 1956 Princeton graduating class sent a little less than half of its 900 graduates into the military, some as volunteers, some drafted within two years of graduation. In 2004, that same university sent 9 out of a class of 1,100. Today’s Marines, patrolling the streets of Fallujah and the villages in Helmand Province, have the same attitudes, abilities, courage, and esprit de corps as the Marines of World War I and II, but today those prep school boys and Princeton graduates who had made up a significant part of those earlier units are missing. In 2007, the school sent almost 80 percent of its graduation class, not to Baghdad or Kandahar Province, but to Wall Street.
Bunting makes clear that the abandonment of a Citizen Army is the main cause for the national anesthesia concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He points out that none of this is good for the country, the military, or our democracy. He ends his article with a statement written by George Washington at the end of his presidency:
It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal service, to the defense of it.
But Washington was not the only Commander-in-Chief who believed in Universal Service. The French General, Maurice De Saxe, who over a two-week period of illness in 1732 wrote down his views on war and a Citizen Army that was eventually published in his book, Thoughts on the Art of War. The book became to the military officers of the Eighteenth Century what Clausewitiz’s On War was to become to the colonels and generals of the Nineteenth and Twentieth. Saxe’s view on conscription, or the draft, in the chapter titled “On the Manner of Raising Troops” had clearly caught Washington’s attention.
Would it not be better to establish by law that everyman, of whatever condition, was obliged to serve his prince and his country for five years? This law could not be objected to, because it is natural and because it is just that citizens exert themselves for the defense of the State. Choosing those between 20 and 30 years of age would result in no inconvenience—these are the years of license, where the young search for fortune, wander the country and are of no benefit to their parents. There would be no public desolation, as one would be sure that after the five years having passed, the young would be returned to their families. This method of raising troops would supply an inexhaustible fund of good recruits, not subject to desertion and by extension, cause it to be seen a duty and an honor to do one’s part. But for success, it must be that no one of any condition be exempted, to be severe on this point, to be unmoving on its application to the rich and noble will ensure that none will complain. Those who have served their time will look with contempt on the Law’s detractors and insensibly, it will become an honor to serve. The poor working man will be consoled by the example of the rich, the rich will dare not complain upon seeing the noble serve. Arms is an honorable profession. How many princes have borne arms. And how many officers have I seen serve in the ranks rather than live in indolence. It is only their weaknesses that make some view such a law as harsh.
Washington wrote his farewell speech 250 years ago, but the warning, if not the concern, is as real today as it was in 1793. Not to have some kind of personal involvement and even risk in issues of war and peace is to allow a kind of recklessness to enter those discussions that does not serve any real national purpose and is sure to end in both public confusion and personal tragedy.
These are the kinds of decisions that lead to what have been called “political wars,” wars that are not fought for national security, but wars that are put into place for political or policy reasons rather than out of any real necessity. These political wars, usually trumpeted by policy hacks, offer only vague reasons for committing our armed forces, where any kind of winning is always hard to define and ultimate victory presented as some kind of distant far-off illusion. Because there is ultimately nothing important at risk, these are the wars that the politicians can offer up as wars that can be fought on the cheap. While real wars of necessity end in military victory or military failure, political wars usually end by everyone simply losing interest. Eventually, the tedium and casualties and the loss of treasure become too great to ignore, and the wars are simply abandoned and closed down while everyone pretends it wasn’t that important. Or that none of it ever really mattered much anyway.
All of this simply walking away with nothing in hand makes the sacrifice of our troops and their families even harder to understand and much harder to accept.
It may be that in war or peace, the best way to focus the mind is to expose everyone’s brain to real dangers. In the final analysis that may be the only way to make sure that wishful thinking is not replacing reality.
What is sure is that if there were a draft, all of America would know what John Witmer, author of Sisters in Arms: A Father Remembers, didn’t know, and unfortunately, had to learn through a very steep and very tragic learning curve.
Mr. Witmer had no idea of the real dangers his daughters would face when they joined his state’s National Guard. Like so many other Americans, he had no idea that hundreds of thousands of U.S. women had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2001. Like so many Americans, Witmer understood little about the military, less about our wars, and even less about who was doing the actual fighting. Witmer was certain that he, his wife, and their three daughters had nothing to fear when the girls joined the Guard. He assumed that the daughters, even when deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, would not be put at risk. He was sure that as women, particularly women in the National Guard, they would be assigned to clerical work, doing typing and filing or to process, in and out, different pieces of equipment. It proved to be a fateful and fatal misunderstanding, one that he and his wife would have to live with forever. It never occurred to the Witmers that the girls were not clerk-typists sitting in an office but combat soldiers going out on combat raids and convoy protection missions.
One of John’s daughters, the youngest, was manning a 50-caliber machine gun in the turret of an armored personnel carrier when she was hit by a sniper’s round. The autopsy report that Mr. Witmer obtained some eleven months after her death stated that the bullet had entered her chest, passing directly through her heart, killing her instantly. What surprised him as he researched the facts surrounding his daughter’s death was that the three other armored vehicles in the convoy all had women in the turrets manning the machine guns. Every automatic weapon in the three armored vehicles protecting the trucks in the convoy were manned by female soldiers. The inconvenient truth about Iraq and Afghanistan is that, without a draft, we have an army that cannot survive, much less fight, without women on the battlefield.
Women currently make up 20 percent of the 1.9 million troops that have been deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan and that percentage increases every month. That is our army now. And these are the soldiers our political leaders, and the country, have put in harm’s way. But, as Bunting points out, these warriors are not their own daughters any more then they are their own sons.
If there were a draft, America, as well as the John Witmers, would have known that we have already deployed over a quarter of a million women to run the most dangerous roads in the world. They would know that more women have been killed and wounded in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, then in all our other wars combined.
It would be known too, that those women who become amputees by losing an upper extremity are forced to choose hooks because most women in the military are less then 120 pounds and cannot carry the twenty-pound weight of the newest servomagnetically-operated upper extremity prosthetic mechanical arms.
If there were a draft, Americans would know about women like Dawn Halfaker, a West Point graduate, who was severely wounded when an RPG came through the windshield of her Humvee, taking off the right arm of the platoon leader in the front seat and then continuing on through the vehicle, taking off her right arm at the shoulder. If that RPG had exploded, Dawn and everyone else in that Humvee would have been killed. Dawn spent a year at Walter Reed and today manages to deal with the ongoing phantom pain of her absent arm by exercising twice a day, using her own endogenous endorphin release to replace those doses of Percocet and Vicoden that had left her so groggy and at times so incoherent that she couldn’t function. Years after her injury, she has basically made it on her own with the grit, determination, and toughness of a West Point graduate and a born athlete, along with the help of a few good friends.
If there were a draft, the country would surely know about Leigh Ann Hester, she would be a national hero. Sergeant Hester is the only woman to receive the Silver Star for valor since the Second World War. Sgt. Hester, at the age of twenty-three, and a handful of other Kentucky National Guardsmen fought off thirty insurgents armed with assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades after the insurgents had attacked a supply column they were guarding. Hester, with one other Guardsman, killed twenty-seven of the insurgents, saving the column from destruction.
Sgt. Hester was a member of the 617 Military Police Company of the Kentucky National Guard. Before the Kentucky National Guard had been sent to Iraq, the unit’s most dangerous duty had been crowd control at the Kentucky Derby.
It is not only that the last Administration never allowed photographs of caskets coming home, and ordered the planes flying the wounded into Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to land only at night, or that the President never went to funerals of military personnel, or that the number of medals handed out for bravery are decidedly fewer in these wars than in any of our other wars. It is as if giving out medals for bravery might indicate that these wars are as ferocious and deadly as any of our other wars.
And that the real dangers of those we put in harm’s way are decidedly greater than politically acknowledged or militarily reported. And all the sleight-of-hand appears to be going on as our newest President calls the escalating war in Afghanistan a War of Necessity. Well, if it is a necessity then we should all be involved and all begin to pay.
A surgeon stationed at the 24th Surgical Hospital in Balad in 2005 made a clearer statement about our latest War of Necessity:
There is no one with a lawn service who knows anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan.