/Published on Thursday, April 21, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2334> /
*The Normalization of War*
*by Andrew J. Bacevich *
At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The
skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment
from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and
conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.
The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like
aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that
might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing
military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global
military
superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one
striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the
absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.
For example, when Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, ran
for
the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George W.
Bush's
national security policies in terms of tactics rather than first
principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S.
response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long "global war on
terror." It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry's
ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been "extraordinarily
mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted." Kerry faulted Bush because, in his
view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked "the preparation and hardware they
needed to fight as effectively as they could." Bush was expecting too
few soldiers to do too much with too little. Declaring that "keeping
our
military strong and keeping our troops as safe as they can be should
be
our highest priority," Kerry promised if elected to fix these
deficiencies. Americans could count on a President Kerry to expand the
armed forces and to improve their ability to fight.
Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable. It
was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense and
had no intention of departing from the prevailing national security
consensus.
Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take
as
a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good,
evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might
as
the key to creating an international order that accommodates American
values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has
been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting
that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its
self-image as the military power nonpareil
*How Much Is Enough?*
This new American militarism manifests itself in several different
ways.
It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration of
America's present-day military establishment.
Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in
Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed
services
according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and
proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large and
powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat,
policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the
passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately
out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in
1945.
Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for
its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is
committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities
far
in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of
adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative
expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even
America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and
operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the
once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the
battle
fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a
Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons
fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed
above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an
essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps
possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force --
and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an
integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the
U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in
uniform,
the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British
Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually
called
the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of
some
five thousand aircraft.
All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably,
the
present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent
larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002,
American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the
/combined/ defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising
the roster of U.S. enemies.16 Indeed, by some calculations, the United
States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world
together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.
Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between
the
United States and all other nations will expand further still in the
years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost
Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during
the
Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by
2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent --
despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer
competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits
little
comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply
taken
for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful
context within which Americans might consider the question "How much
is
enough?"
On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do?
Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent
parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The
primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is
global
power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of
American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the
world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only
slightly.
That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the
United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in
several
dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in all --
rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these
countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security
needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists,
U.S.
forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training,
exercising,
planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in some cases
less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city
street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the
mission of "shaping" the international environment, members of the
political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a
common
understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to
restrain,
inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any
correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed
forces
on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other
has remained for the most part a taboo subject.
*The Quest for Military Dominion*
The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects
the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services,
dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to
scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the
services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and
any
hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence
of
falling behind.
Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future, "sea
supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to
distant
theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of
course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global
preeminence;
the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical
enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of this study
express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can achieve
ever
greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to enjoy
"overwhelming precision firepower," "pervasive surveillance," and
"dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea, land,
air, space or cyberspace." In this study and in virtually all others,
political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition that
supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of "defense" are
left
begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this quest for
military dominion takes on galactic proportions. Acknowledging that
the
United States enjoys "superiority in many aspects of space
capability,"
a senior defense official nonetheless complains that "we don't have
space dominance and we don't have space supremacy." Since outer space
is
"the ultimate high ground," which the United States must control, he
urges immediate action to correct this deficiency. When it comes to
military power, mere superiority will not suffice.
The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased
propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of
war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-
called
Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican
and
Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the
prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent
of
the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of
force
has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945
through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant
six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become
almost
annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just
Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi
Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military
interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser
actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks
against
obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq
throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen
GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines.
Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become
nothing short of frenetic.
As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -
-
perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers
the
latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on
the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent
condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly
acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror
as
a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq
implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.
In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended
to
treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our
own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President *****
Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward,
dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to
see
coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners,
the
assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces
next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States
consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked,
the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense
and
stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the
prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons
even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing
war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of
militarization
has advanced.
*The New Aesthetic of War*
Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the
appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the
third
indication of advancing militarism.
The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism,
brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as
depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque,
and
Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that
aesthetic, in the latter case with films like /Apocalypse Now/,
/Platoon/, and /Full Metal Jacket/.
The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The
first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern
war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike.
The
second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an
inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their
very
nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to
challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted
armies
as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity and collective
purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive,
liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such
notions as preposterous.
But by the turn of the twenty-first century, a new image of war had
emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a
counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that
war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass
armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare,
an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of
high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with
"smart" weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the
creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming
surgical,
frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was "coercive
diplomacy" -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill but to
persuade. By the end of the twentieth century, Michael Ignatieff of
Harvard University concluded, war had become "a spectacle." It had
transformed itself into a kind of "spectator sport," one offering "the
added thrill that it is real for someone, but not, happily, for the
spectator." Even for the participants, fighting no longer implied the
prospect of dying for some abstract cause, since the very notion of
"sacrifice in battle had become implausible or ironic."
Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of "the hoary
dictums about the fog and friction" that had traditionally made
warfare
such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed General Tommy
Franks, could expect to enjoy "the kind of Olympian perspective that
Homer had given his gods."
In short, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning
postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the
accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined --
and
amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected
to
retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an
aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and
artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were
thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right
circumstances,
for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an
attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as
the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the
spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand
pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the
ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one observer noted with
approval, "public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang technology of the U.S.
military" had become "almost boyish." Reinforcing this enthusiasm was
the expectation that the great majority of Americans could count on
being able to enjoy this new type of war from a safe distance.
*The Moral Superiority of the Soldier*
This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost
in
the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth
manifestation of the new American militarism.
Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public
attitudes
toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services
first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the
media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the
military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their
pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the
right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful
that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral
collapse
console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a
repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue.
Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency
to
elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of
all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and
women
of the armed services, gushed /Newsweek/ in the aftermath of Operation
Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
They
were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their
business with poise and élan." A writer for /Rolling Stone/ reported
after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that "the
Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had
imagined"; it was instead "the sort of America he always pictured when
he explained… his best hopes for the country."
According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed
services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably
couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the twenty-first
century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States
military
was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where
everybody… looked out for each other. A place where people --
intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what
drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings."
Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of
us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs
advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military
historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in
battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson,
the
armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite
cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans
continued to flourish.
Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral
superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, "two-thirds [of
those polled] said they think military members have higher moral
standards than the nation they serve… Once in the military, many said,
members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality." Such
attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little
uncomfortable. Noting with regret that "the armed forces are no longer
representative of the people they serve," retired admiral Stanley
Arthur
has expressed concern that "more and more, enlisted as well as
officers
are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society
they serve." Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are "not healthy in an
armed force serving a democracy."
In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become
obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of
failing
to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the
political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this
dynamic,
shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those
members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from
Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly
anti-military Left.
In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from
extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations.
"What's the point of having this superb military that you're always
talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of General Colin Powell,
"if
we can't use it?" As Albright's Question famously attests, when it
comes
to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho.
Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at
least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant
to
question claims of military expertise.
Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of
the
1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to
match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the
troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using
the
armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness
military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent
calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused
and persecuted come from the militant Left. In the present moment,
writes Michael Ignatieff, "empire has become a precondition for
democracy." Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the
United States to "use imperial power to strengthen respect for
self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed
people
who deserve to rule them for themselves."
*The President as Warlord*
Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming
military
adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown
accustomed
to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against President
Bush's
planned intervention filled the streets of many American cities. The
prospect of the United States launching a preventive war without the
sanction of the U.N. Security Council produced the largest outpouring
of
public protest that the country had seen since the Vietnam War. Yet
the
response of the political classes to this phenomenon was essentially
to
ignore it. No politician of national stature offered himself or
herself
as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the
slightest prospects of winning high national office was willing to
risk
being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was
ordering
into harm's way. When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who
denounced George W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully
authorized him to invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians,
opposition
to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or
the
very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.
More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling
himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The
staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in
the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier /USS Abraham
Lincoln/, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval
aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew
-- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie
/Top Gun/, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom
Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply
mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own
and
made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short order,
the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer offered for
$39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised as "Elite
Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator."
Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to
pass
in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills
wrote, "men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency' without a
foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history
as
"a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing,
and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent
condition of the United States." And "the only accepted ‘plan' for
peace
is the loaded pistol."
/Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and
Director
of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A
graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in
history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy
in
Berlin. He is the author of several books, including the just
published
The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195173384/commondreams-
20/ref=nosim>./
© 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich
###
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0421-25.htm
--
rot13
apatriot #1, atheist #1417,
Chief EAC prophet
Jason Gastrich is praying for me on 8 January 2009
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pk1956/
Apatriotism Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apatriotism
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
-Mencken
.
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