The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

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American Militarism: Costs and Consequences

Tuesday, 05 March 2013 09:34 By Melvin Goodman, City Lights Books | Book Excerpt

(Image: City Lights Publishers)A veteran of the intelligence services, including twenty fours years at the CIA, Goodman offers an informed insight into how a bloated military actually endangers the United States.

"Mel Goodman has spent the last few decades telling us what's gone wrong with American intelligence and the American military, and now, in National Insecurity, he tells us what we must do to change the way the system works, and how to fix it. Goodman is not only telling us how to save wasted billions--he is also telling us how to save ourselves." -- Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

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The following excerpt is the introduction to "National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism":

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy . . . she is the champion and vindicator only of her own. —John Quincy Adams

We have to recognize that no matter how great our strength, we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. No one nation . . . can or should expect any special privilege which harms any other nation. Unless we are all willing to pay that price, no organization for world peace can accomplish its purpose. And what a reasonable price that is! —President Harry S. Truman

We in the United States have created a land of illusion. We have the world's best medical facilities, but also its highest medical costs, and we still lack genuine universal health care coverage. Our costs for entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security are out of control, but we are unwilling to discuss reform. Our corporations and the wealthy classes pay the lowest taxes in the industrial world, but we adamantly oppose raising tax rates that could alleviate one-quarter to one-third of our deficit problem. We have the most expensive and lethal military force in the world, but we face no existential threat; nonetheless, liberals and conservatives alike declare the defense budget sacrosanct. A reasonable reduction in the amount of money we spend on defense would enable us to reduce our debt and invest in the peaceful progress and development of a civilian economy.

The United States has the most secure geopolitical environment of any major nation, but sustains a defense budget that equals the combined budgets of the rest of the world. Cuts in the defense budget over the next five years, announced in January 2012, were extremely modest, amounting to a minuscule

1 percent real cut when factoring in inflation. The cuts in Army and Marine personnel over a five-year period ending in 2017 will leave these services larger than they were in 2005. The mere lowering of recruitment quotas and the retirement of officers and noncommissioned officers will cover the modest reduction of the 92,000 troops.

Those who criticize even these modest reductions fail to recognize that, over the past two decades, the Cold War has ended and the greatest strategic threat to the United States—the Soviet Union—has dissolved. Nevertheless, we barricade ourselves behind a national missile defense, fight wars in which no vital national security interests are at stake, and post hundreds of thousands of troops overseas. U.S. nuclear forces, which have no utilitarian value, remain the same, although President Obama persistently claims to support arms control and disarmament. The United States has become that militarized nation that President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned against in his farewell address more than fifty years ago.

The United States lacks a strategic vision for a world without an enemy, and it continues to spend far more on defense, homeland security, and intelligence than the rest of the world combined. We are the only nation in the world that deploys its military primarily to support foreign policy rather than to defend our borders and people. U.S. corporations dominate the sales of military equipment, selling extremely sophisticated weapons to countries such as Saudi Arabia that have the hard currency to pay for them but lack the skill to use them. We have more than 700 military bases and facilities around the world; few other countries have any. We can deploy eleven aircraft carriers; among our rivals only China even plans to deploy one—and that is a revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier, a carryover from the ancient Soviet inventory.

U.S. militarization, reliance on the military to pursue foreign policy objectives better achieved by other means, has continued to expand since the end of the Cold War, when we might have expected and experienced a peace dividend. Military expansion during the Cold War, especially during peaks in the U.S. arms buildup against the Soviets and during the Vietnam War, at least had as its rationale the spectre of an aggressive Soviet Union. The administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, facing no existential threat, have given the Pentagon an unprecedented position of power and influence, including huge increases in defense spending and a dominant voice in the making of national security and foreign policies. The key contributions to the Pentagon's enhanced role have been President Bush's doctrine of preemptive attack and the permanent War on Terror, or the Long War; the misuse of power in Iraq; and President Obama's initial expansion of the war in Afghanistan. The Bush and Obama administrations have made sure that military figures dominate national security positions, and both administrations have failed to use the tools of diplomacy to deal effectively with foreign policy conflicts in the Middle East or with Iran or North Korea.

The roots of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy lie in the year 1947, with the beginning of the Cold War. Passage of the National Security Act in 1947 made the U.S. armed forces an inherent part of national security policy in peacetime. Previously, the Pentagon had rarely asserted itself in the policy process, even in wartime. Military influence grew over the next four decades, leading to the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, commonly referred to as the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the "principal military adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense."

One of the consequences of U.S. militarization and unilateralism has been an unwillingness to join international agreements and conventions designed to foster moderate actions in the global community. The United States, for example, joined the so-called "rogue states" (Algeria, China, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan) in opposing creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which extended the scope of international law and provided a means of bringing the world's worst human rights violators, such as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, to justice. Every member state of the European Union, including all of America's NATO allies, favored the ICC, as did President Clinton initially. Clinton ultimately deferred to the Pentagon and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who argued that the Court would expose U.S. soldiers to international justice. This was a red herring, as the member states of the ICC have the right to try any of their own citizens charged with international crimes in their own courts, which is exactly what the United States has done in the past. Thus, as with the creation of the League of Nations in 1919, a major step forward in international law was taken without the endorsement and participation of the United States, which had prided itself on its support of international justice since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

The United States has also been out of step with the global effort to ban the use of landmines, an effort that political conservatives and the Pentagon have opposed because of U.S. deployment of landmines near the border between North and South Korea. Although anti-personnel mines have killed and maimed thousands of civilians, including children, all over the world—Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and elsewhere—the marginal advantage of their deployment in South Korea has been used to justify U.S. refusal to adhere to the convention. Not even the possibility of warmer relations between the two Koreas has led the United States to take a new position on the issue.

Since the 9/11 attacks of 2001, the United States, using the pretense of a global war on terror, has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and has used military force in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. It is no surprise that we now find ourselves overcommitted in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, which has become an "arc of crisis" for the United States. President George W. Bush helped to create this arc with his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although President Obama has undertaken military disengagement in both countries, he has widened covert action throughout the area as the Pentagon and the CIA conduct assassination programs against insurgents and terrorists. The United States may be closing down the arrogantly named "Camp Victory" in Iraq, but it is building secret facilities in Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Seychelles, and the Arabia Peninsula (presumably in Yemen or the United Arab Emirates) as bases for Predator and Reaper drone aircraft. These drones have been used against targets in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, according to State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy group.

In addition to drone bases, U.S. secret facilities support special operations against dozens of countries from South America to Central Asia. Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and CIA personnel operate out of them. Military personnel are deployed throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and the Pentagon and the Department of State are training special forces from dozens of countries in the art of counterinsurgency. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has been reporting for several years that the United States is conducting special operations in Iran, and the Wall Street Journal has reported that Pentagon and CIA teams are conducting covert operations to stop the smuggling of Iranian arms into Iraq. Such operations contribute to the increase in anti-Americanism throughout the region.

U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 has brought a new dimension to the national security state: the increase in largely unaccountable security contractors, such as the notorious Blackwater (now brandishing the benign corporate name of Academi LLC), and consulting agencies that act as intermediaries between the federal government and defense contractors. They operate without any apparent code of conduct, and the uncontrolled violence of Xe, another of Blackwater's incarnations, is well known. Working with these contractors has involved huge payments to consulting agencies managed by former administration officials such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, directors of homeland security Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, and CIA director Michael Hayden.

More than one-third of the personnel in the intelligence community are private contractors, with the relatively new Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence relying most extensively on them. Private contracts now consume 70 percent of the intelligence budget, and private contractors represent more than half of the employees at the new National Counterterrorism Center. The overwhelming U.S. presence in Iraq is largely contractual, and in 2011, for the first time, deaths among contractors in Afghanistan exceeded fatalities of U.S. soldiers and military personnel.

The U.S. reliance on military force has damaged U.S. national interests at a time when the world is facing severe economic stress. The Iraq and Afghan Wars have been costly in terms of blood and treasure, and they have not made America more secure. The war on terror has created more terrorists than it has eliminated, and the war is expanding in the Persian Gulf and Africa, particularly in Yemen and Somalia. The United States is no longer seen as a beacon of liberty to the world, but as an imperialistic bully with little respect for international law. The economic costs of our emphasis on the military have been enormous, coming at a time of necessary constraint for U.S. expenditures and investment policy.

As the military expands, the Department of State declines, losing resources and influence; it is no longer able to provide robust diplomatic alternatives to militarization. During the crucial decision-making in 2009 to determine troop levels in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton merely echoed the positions taken by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, making no effort to question the strategic and geopolitical implications of a wider war in Southwest Asia. The budget of the Department of Defense, exceeding levels reached during the worst days of the Cold War, needs to be significantly constrained. The United States devotes little attention to one of the greatest losses in wartime, the civilian casualties that have taken place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan over the past decade. As General Tommy R. Franks infamously said during the first years of the Afghan War, "We don't do body counts." In view of the scale of destruction that has taken place at the hands of the U.S. military, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, we certainly should. The United States prefers to ignore the loss of civilian life as it does the destruction of the civilian economy, let alone schools, infrastructure, and even hospitals. The U.S. military failed to understand that the lack of security provided to civilians in Iraq led to greater success and recruitment for militias and insurgent groups. The lack of U.S. understanding of Afghan opposition to midnight raids and house-to-house searches has compromised Washington's relations with the government of Hamid Karzai. The U.S. killing of two dozen Pakistani soldiers in November 2011 and the belated unwillingness to apologize exposed a cavalier attitude toward loss of human life and further damaged the troubled U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

It is past time to hold a national debate on the role and purpose of U.S. power in today's global environment. It is time to define a new international policy that recognizes the constraints and limitations of military power. A good start would be to heed the arguments of realists such as Dean Acheson and George Kennan, who opposed extended military involvements. Over the past four decades, the United States has deployed large numbers of forces to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan with no gains for national security and huge setbacks to U.S. interests. We must understand how the United States reached the point of willingness to expand its national security interests to all areas on the globe. There are no national security interests, let alone vital interests, in areas that we have invaded and occupied for the past fifty years: twelve years in Vietnam; eight in Iraq, where the U.S. military withdrawal is mostly complete; and more than a decade in Afghanistan, where a modest withdrawal has begun.

Nevertheless, Admiral William H. McRaven, the commander of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), is pressing for a larger role for his elite units and more personal autonomy to position his forces in troubled areas. McRaven, who oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, wants to deploy 12,000 special forces around the world at all times to strike terrorist targets and rescue hostages. The Command has doubled in size since 2001, currently at a level of 66,000 military and civilian personnel, and its budget has more than doubled, from $4.2 billion to $10.5 billion. Greater authority for SOCOM would reduce the influence of the State Department in dealing with difficult political situations as well as the authority of the Pentagon's regional commanders. The heightened secrecy would complicate the problem of congressional oversight.

Exaggeration of the threat has been a critical component in the militarization of national security policy. Such exaggeration fostered the huge strategic buildup during the Cold War, the unprecedented peacetime buildup by the Reagan administration, and massive increases in defense spending during the Bush II administration. In an effort to assure their own self-preservation, according to Harvard professor Daniel Yergin, nations often "push the subjective boundaries of security outward to more and more areas, to encompass more and more geography and more and more problems." This often leads to a paradox—an expanded perception of threat rather than a greater sense of security. The United States has created such an environment. We now view each example of terrorist activity as an existential threat, and we are in the process of exaggerating the threat of China.

The global war on terror is the latest example of the use of unilateral and hegemonic power, described by British theorist Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. Burke was concerned with the British exercise of such power. The sovereign state came fully into its own in the seventeenth century, signaled by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended Europe's religious wars and saw the final breakup of a universally Catholic Europe. No longer were territories ruled by multiple jurisdictions of empire, nationality, fiefdom, church, and holy orders, united by common language and common religion. A new system was established, consisting of separate and exclusive sovereignties. Each nation had its own economy, society, laws, established borders, national church, bureaucracy—and the armed forces to protect them.

At the end of the eighteenth century, however, England, whose navy "ruled" the seas, could dream of establishing English hegemony, a Pax Britannica of English law and English economics for Indian, Hottentot, and Irishman alike. It could look to a future of English economics and an English language spoken around the world. The vision of American superiority and hegemony advocated by the proponents of unilateralism and exceptionalism in the wake of the Cold War is little different than the dreams of Englishmen over two hundred years ago.

In fact, the world has never before seen a disparity of military power comparable to that now existing between the United States and the rest of the world. According to Paul Kennedy, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Pax Britannica was "run on the cheap," particularly compared to the hugely expensive U.S. arsenal.6 The British army in the nineteenth century was much smaller than the armies of Europe, and the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies combined. Today, the U.S. Navy is superior to the naval fleets of the entire global community; its aviation and power projection capabilities are beyond comparison. Kennedy observes that there has never been a military hegemony to match that of the United States. After all, he points out, "Charlemagne's empire was merely Western European in its reach." The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but it competed with a great empire in Persia and an even larger one in China.

Military Power from Bush I to Obama

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the post–Cold War era began, the unilateralists initially lost momentum. But three leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon (Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, his longtime aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Pentagon intellectual leader Paul Wolfowitz) authored their "Defense Policy Guidance," recommending unilateralism as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. These men did not want to return to the arms control and disarmament table, and they wanted no cuts in the defense budget. Along with U.S. intelligence and defense planners, they had been unprepared for the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet empire, and they wanted to justify continued huge defense expenditures. Written after the extremely short and destructive Gulf War against Iraq, the "Guidance" advocated permanent U.S. dominance by preventing the rise of any potentially hostile power. It defended the preemptive use of force against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, which became the ostensible justification for U.S. preemption against Iraq in 2003. Ironically, the Desert Storm war in 1991 had destroyed Iraq's capability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein had not restored it.

When then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) read the "Guidance," he was appalled, denouncing it as a prescription for a Pax Americana. The Cheney-Libby-Wolfowitz document advocated a reversal of the bipartisan moderation and multilateralism endorsed by U.S. administrations since the end of World War II. Throughout the post-war period, the United States had made numerous efforts to pioneer a system of world diplomacy, including the United Nations, that looked to increased cooperation among nations along a broad front of peacekeeping and political-economic cooperation. The United States fostered a peaceful, viable Western Europe, which helped prevent the spread of Soviet-sponsored communism and encouraged efforts to provide a democratic life for its citizens. Economic aid was used to increase the stability of such vulnerable nations as Greece and Turkey, and a rich tapestry of international law was sponsored to protect human rights. Finally, both Democratic and Republican administrations endorsed and participated in a series of arms control agreements that were designed to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons, limit the number of nuclear powers, and create an international and verifiable arms control regime.

The objectives and policies of the neoconservatives challenged all these goals. Fortunately, the "Guidance" was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, provoking a backlash and prompting President George H.W. Bush, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker to mothball it. Various right-wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Project for the New American Century kept alive the ideological premises of unilateralism and preemptive attack, however. These groups had been impatient with the Cold War's "rules of the game," which had deterred the United States and the Soviet Union from aggressive moves that risked confrontation. With the exception of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Soviet Union had avoided steps that might cause confrontation with the United States. The United States, even when it resorted to the use of military power, as in the Vietnam War, has avoided gratuitous provocations aimed at the Kremlin.

The policies and personnel of the Project for a New American Century were central to the "Bush Doctrine," which marked a departure from the practices of every post–Cold War president, including George W. Bush's own father. The neoconservatives of his administration, particularly Vice President Cheney and Department of Defense figures Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Steve Cambone (along with Richard Perle from the department's advisory group), wanted the United States to exploit its political-economic-military superiority to expand its influence. While the 9/11 attacks and the false charges of weapons of mass destruction became the pretexts for the use of force in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have pursued the war even without terrorist attacks against the United States. The increase in military, security, and intelligence spending had begun even before 9/11: The objective was creation of unquestioned U.S. military preeminence that could not be challenged by any nation or group of nations. The group never determined how to turn military power into political influence, however. Meanwhile, the U.S. military has become a liability in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and the influence of U.S. diplomacy has declined.

Frustration with the policies of the Clinton administration had led neoconservatives and influential members of the defense community to form the Project for a New American Century in 1997. The Project was the natural heir of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Committee on the Present Danger, which were formed in the 1970s to challenge the foreign policies of the Carter administration, particularly the president's commitment to arms control, disarmament, and conflict resolution in the Third World. The Bush I administration had frustrated the neoconservatives, but the Clinton administration drove them to distraction. President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore supported international cooperation on climate change and controlling AIDS; humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping in the Balkans; nation-building; and the creation of the International Criminal Court. All of these were anathema to Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz. Clinton's policies were called "globaloney" for their reputed failure to deal with the new realities of power in the post–Cold War world.

The Project for a New American Century sponsored a letter to President Clinton in January 1998 declaring that "we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. We urge you to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the United States and our allies around the world." The "threat" that the group referred to was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which, in fact, no longer existed. The signers of the letter included major players in the administrations of both Bush I and Bush II: Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Perle, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. A year earlier, the right-wing Center for Security Policy had drafted a statement endorsing the deployment of a national missile defense. Again, major Bush players signed the statement, including Rumsfeld and Cheney. The Center gathered politicians and defense executives together in a way that President Eisenhower had anticipated in his warning about the military-industrial complex more than fifty years earlier.

The New American Century and the Center for National Security were buttressed by a collection of right-wing groups and think tanks committed to the militarization of policy and the use of military power. The failure of the use of force in Iraq and Afghanistan over a ten-year period has done nothing to mitigate the exhortations of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose members regularly write op-eds for major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Their style is coercive, dismissive, and arrogant in describing both a world where U.S. force prevails, and a United States where military power is the measure of our health and global sway. They dismiss multilateralism and international law in favor of aggressive unilateralism and U.S. economic dominance.

Even liberal organizations are attracted to these policies. The Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and their scholars—Michael O'Hanlon and Robert Kagan, respectively—have advocated the use of military power in Iraq and Afghanistan. All are opposed to reduced defense spending. In his most recent book, Kagan argued that "when American power declines, the institutions and norms American power supports will decline too." He contends that Americans have "developed a degree of satisfaction in their special role" overseas, and suggests that the silent prayer offered during the seventh-inning stretch of baseball games reflects pride in the nation's role "around the world."

The election of President George W. Bush was a welcome relief to the neoconservative community. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were unwilling to permit the facts on the ground to block their goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Although Bush campaigned on the basis of moderation in foreign policy, multilateralism, and the so-called "new world order," he and Cheney moved quickly to establish a "wartime presidency." He campaigned on the basis of a modest buildup of the defense establishment, but doubled the defense budget during his presidency. Bush appointed only one moderate, Colin Powell, to a key position, but the general-statesman was thoroughly ignored by the neoconservatives who dominated Bush's presidency. While the administrations of Bush I and Bill Clinton were wary of the use of force, Bush II relished brandishing military symbols and took advantage of every opportunity to define himself as a "wartime president." His memoir notes his regret over the fulsome use of military language such as "bring 'em on," "mission accomplished," and "dead or alive," but offers no regret about the actual use of force.

Members of right-wing groups became key players in the administration of George W. Bush, occupying the positions of vice president, secretary of defense, and UN ambassador; they also were key staffers at the National Security Council and the Department of Defense. Right-wingers played key roles in the intelligence community, where ideologues such as Congressman Porter Goss became director of central intelligence. When the CIA refused to distort the intelligence to suit the conclusion the Bush administration was seeking, the Office of Special Plans was created at the Pentagon under associates of Cheney such as Douglas Feith, William Luti, and Abram Shulsky with the task of making the case for war against Iraq.

President Bush enunciated his doctrine of preemptive war in Iraq and, by declaring a counterproductive "war on terror," assured that the Pentagon would be the leading policy agency in combating terrorism around the world. His policy of unilateralism, proclaimed at West Point in 2002, marked a radical turn in U.S. foreign policy. President Bush ineffectually relied on saber-rattling against the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. He abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of deterrence since 1972, and he funded a national missile defense system that is not workable but remains the largest line item for a weapons system in the current defense budget. The Bush administration's politicization of the intelligence community reached its nadir in 2002, when the CIA prepared the specious National Intelligence Estimate that was used to justify the war against Iraq.

Even before the end of the Cold War, there had been an unfortunate tendency for U.S. presidents, in their first year in office, to use military or paramilitary power as an instrument of policy, perhaps to prove their mettle. President John F. Kennedy used the CIA against Cuba (the infamous Bay of Pigs), an operation that backfired and tarnished his administration. President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965, although, in his campaign the previous year, he had argued against sending American boys to fight an Asian war. President Nixon escalated the war in Vietnam and fought a secret war in Cambodia. President Gerald Ford used force in response to the seizure of a U.S. freighter, although the crew had already been released. There were more U.S. forces killed and wounded in that action than there were crew members of the merchant ship, the Mayaguez. And the intelligence community sent the rescue team to an obscure island rather than to the mainland, where the crew had been held. President Jimmy Carter actually avoided the use of military force until his last year in office. Even in the wake of 9/11, when George Bush and Dick Cheney significantly increased the defense budget, Senator Lieberman argued that the additional funds were "not nearly enough to meet the military's essential needs for procurement and transformation." Senator Lieberman was the classic reincarnation of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), liberal on domestic social issues but far to the right on national security and defense issues. The Lieberman link to the politics of Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina has been a powerful force on behalf of the military-industrial complex for two decades.

President George H.W. Bush made no one happy during his stewardship of U.S. national security policy. Liberals believed that he could have taken better advantage of the end of the Cold War to address inflated defense spending and unnecessary U.S. deployments abroad. Neoconservatives believed that he did not expand the defense budget sufficiently and was absurdly dovish in not occupying Iraq and driving Saddam Hussein from power. Secretary of Defense Cheney was sympathetic with the policies of the neoconservatives and, by the time he joined the administration of George W. Bush as vice president, he was a full-fledged war hawk supporting not only wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, but military action against the nuclear facilities of Syria and Iran.

At his last State of the Union address in 1992, Bush senior seemed to provide an endorsement of President Eisenhower's farewell address when he urged that the collapse of the Soviet Union be used to "accelerate" cuts in defense spending as well as increased domestic spending. In many ways, Bush was a traditional fiscal conservative who was not in favor of great increases in defense spending. Secretary of Defense Cheney was sympathetic with this position, but, after his employment by the defense contractor Halliburton in the 1990s, he returned to government in order to open the floodgates of defense spending. If Bush's successor, President Clinton, had followed the pace of the Bush defense cuts, defense spending would have been cut by 30 percent since George H.W. Bush took office.

Copyright 2013 by Melvin Goodman. Not to be reproduced with permission of the author or City Lights Books.

Support Truthout's mission. "National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism," is yours with a minimum donation to Truthout of $30 (which includes shipping and handling) or a monthly donation of $15. Click here.

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Melvin Goodman

Melvin Goodman is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. He was division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1986. He was a senior analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department from 1974 to 1976. He was an intelligence adviser to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in Vienna and Washington. He is co-author of The Wars of Edvard Shevardnadze (2nd edition, 2001), The Phantom Defense, America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion (2001); Bush League Diplomacy; How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk (2004); Failure of Intelligence: the Decline and Fall of the CIA (2008). (From Center for International Policy)

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What Has US Militarism Wrought?

March 4, 2013

Exclusive: A half century ago, President Eisenhower warned the American people about the “unwarranted influence” of a Military-Industrial Complex, but that influence still managed to pervade U.S. politics and policies. In a new book, ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman takes stock of those changes, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

Most Americans get the gist of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the influence of the “military-industrial complex,” how money and jobs would tie congressmen to the interests of arms manufacturers in their districts. But there are other less obvious, though equally insidious, ways militarism has distorted the Republic.

Since World War II, even institutions that were supposed to provide some check on this power of military spending have been corrupted – from the U.S. press corps to academic scholars to analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency. The money from militarism has seeped far downstream from actual arms manufacturing.

In recent decades, pro-military propaganda often has won out over journalism; military-contractor-funded think tanks have overwhelmed honest research; and pro-military government officials have beaten down the professional CIA analysts who were supposed to provide objective information to the President and his top advisers.

This dangerous phenomenon is the topic of National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism  by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman. It is a book from the point of view of an insider who experienced many of the key moments of this spasmodic lurch from a civilian Republic to a militaristic Empire. Goodman provides both an overview and a dissection of the crisis.

In Goodman’s account, there were many crossroads where the United States could have headed off in a less militaristic direction. But time and again the cumulative pressure from the hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending pushed decision-makers down a path toward more militarism.

At various junctions, some politicians beginning with Eisenhower pushed back against the pressures but typically succumbed to propaganda proclaiming a new foreign threat or accusing an officeholder of unmanly weakness. Politicians often responded by supporting some new war or larding on more military spending.

Tough-guy-ism also prevailed in the national news media where journalists and columnists feared being labeled “anti-American” or “soft” on some foreign adversary. The major Washington think tanks, even ones thought to be left of center, “hired-up” with hardliners to avoid the marginalizing label, “liberal.”

This drift toward militarism grew stronger as the memories of World War II grew dimmer. As Goodman noted, Eisenhower took pride in ending the Korean War and avoiding subsequent hot wars during his presidency, although he did dabble in covert operations sponsored by the new CIA. He used these dangerous tools to oust leaders like Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Nevertheless, as Goodman wrote, Eisenhower reflected on his eight years as President by saying, “the United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground during my administration. We kept the peace.”

Shrinking from Pentagon Pressure

Subsequent presidents couldn’t match Eisenhower’s claim about keeping the peace or preventing the deaths of soldiers, but some did press for arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, often bucking the desires of Pentagon brass. Eisenhower’s four successors – John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford – also struggled with the consequences of carelessly entering and painfully departing the Vietnam War.

Then, after a brief post-war respite in the 1970s, the political pressure was on again to invest more in the U.S. military. Jimmy Carter began the build-up in part to counter criticism of his “weakness,” but he still fell in Election 1980 to the more belligerent Ronald Reagan.

With Reagan’s presidency, the post-Vietnam skepticism about the use of force – the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” lingering inside the U.S. news media and in parts of Congress – was routed. Reagan made militarism seem like fun again, whether through proxy support of right-wing “freedom fighters” or quick-and-easy military actions like the invasion of Grenada.

Goodman’s insights in his book are most significant for this era of Reagan’s rise (from the mid-to-late 1970s through the 1980s), a time when the final checks and balances on American militarism were giving way and when Goodman watched from his front-row seat as a senior CIA analyst responsible for assessing the Soviet threat.

Goodman traced the early stages of politicizing the CIA’s analysis to President Nixon’s appointment of James Schlesinger to head the agency in early 1973 amid the deepening Watergate scandal. Nixon also had grown disaffected from the CIA because of its critical views on the Vietnam War.

According to Goodman, “Schlesinger put nothing in writing, but he assembled the Agency’s Soviet experts and warned them, ‘This agency is going to stop fucking Richard Nixon.’ I was one of those Soviet analysts. Schlesinger’s objective was to rein in the CIA, which had produced analysis that challenged Nixon’s policy on Vietnam.” [National Insecurity, p. 245]

Perverting Intelligence

After Nixon’s Watergate-related resignation – and with Election 1976 looming – President Ford found himself under increasing pressure from the Republican Right, especially from the insurgent candidacy of California Gov. Ronald Reagan. So, Ford looked for ways to accommodate the Right’s desire for a tougher anti-Soviet stance.

The opportunity presented itself when an ad hoc group of right-wing and neoconservative intellectuals demanded access to the CIA’s raw intelligence on Soviet military capabilities with the idea of writing their own analysis.

CIA Director William Colby opposed the idea, understanding that it would apply political pressure on the CIA analysts who were supposed to give the President and other senior officials an objective assessment of global threats. However, Ford himself was under intense political pressure and thus turned to former Republican National Chairman George H.W. Bush to replace Colby as CIA director. Goodman recalled:

“Colby would not allow a clearly polemical group, led by Harvard professor Richard Pipes and referred to as Team B, to hijack the production of intelligence estimates. Bush had no qualms about doing so. Ford removed Colby, and Pipes – with the help of [White House Chief of Staff Dick] Cheney and [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld – named a team of right-wing academics and former government officials to draft their own intelligence estimates on Soviet military power. …

“Team B predicted a series of Soviet weapons developments that never occurred. These included directed energy weapons, mobile ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] systems, and anti-satellite capabilities. Pipes’s team concluded (falsely) that the Soviet Union rejected nuclear parity, was bent on fighting and winning a nuclear war, and was radically increasing its military spending.” [p. 247]

Though Team B’s assessment was wildly off the mark, it had the predictable political impact on CIA analysts, who recognized that their careers would be damaged if they insisted on detecting the deepening cracks in the Soviet economic system and Moscow’s weakening military clout.

“Having seen the writing on the wall, the CIA team known as Team A exaggerated its own assessments of Soviet military spending and Soviet military technology,” Goodman wrote. [p. 248]

The consequences of these exaggerations would be profound and long-lasting. Before leaving office in 1977, CIA Director Bush embraced the hyped-up judgment on Soviet might and the alarmist estimate impinged on President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to rein in the military budget as well as undercutting his efforts at arms control.

Reagan’s Buildup

After Reagan crushed Carter in Election 1980, these extreme assessments became the basis for a major U.S. arms buildup. Inside the CIA, a new generation of careerists also recognized that they could advance themselves by endorsing the bogus estimates. For instance, Goodman noted that the CIA’s ambitious young deputy director, Robert Gates, “used this worst-case analysis in a series of speeches in the 1980s to ingratiate himself with the Reagan administration. … [p. 247]

“In the 1980s, … CIA director [William] Casey and deputy director Gates … conducted their own public campaign to exaggerate Soviet capabilities and justify greater U.S. spending on President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ program. … [p. 253]

“It took a decade for the CIA to correct the record and lower those inflated estimates. But the damage had been done. The Reagan administration used these inflated estimates of Soviet military power to garner a trillion and a half dollars in defense spending in the 1980s. These vast expenditures were directed against a Soviet military threat that was greatly exaggerated and a Soviet Union that was in decline.” [p. 248]

When the Soviet bloc began falling apart in the late 1980s, Gates and other CIA bigwigs continued to miss this historic development because they were essentially programmed to ignore intelligence on Moscow’s weaknesses. However, when the reality could no longer be denied, they and other right-wingers simply adjusted the narrative and declared that Reagan’s military buildup and his other aggressive strategies had brought the Soviets to their knees.

Thus, the Reagan Legacy was manufactured. Instead of accepting the truth, that the Soviets had been on a long trajectory of decline – attributable in large part to their inefficient economic system and U.S. technological advances around the space program in the 1960s – and that the Reagan team had lied about the Soviet reality to justify massive new military spending, the Right had a simple storyline: Reagan told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” and, presto, the Cold War was over.

The “Reagan won the Cold War” judgment is pretty much Official Washington’s conventional wisdom today, although as Goodman wrote: “Reagan is falsely credited with bringing down the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War, but in truth the Reagan administration, with the support of disinformation from Casey and Gates, inflated the Soviet threat and then claimed false credit for its demise.” [p. 285]

Inviting the Afghan Mess

The politicizing of intelligence had other negative consequences. For instance, amid Reagan’s hyped-up alarms about the Soviet Union, the United States and Saudi Arabia funneled billions of dollars in military aid to Islamic fundamentalists fighting a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.

To get the supplies into Afghanistan, the Reagan administration also had to appease the Pakistani Islamic dictatorship in part by demanding that CIA analysts look the other way on Pakistan’s development of a nuclear bomb and to keep what information the CIA had away from members of Congress.

“In 1986,” Goodman wrote, “CIA deputy director Gates issued an ultimatum that there would be no reporting on Pakistani nuclear activities in the National Intelligence Daily, the CIA product that was sent to the Senate and House intelligence committees.” [p. 255]

The results of Reagan’s Afghan operation included Pakistan becoming a nuclear-weapons state (arguably the most dangerous fact in today’s world) and Afghanistan falling under the control of the Taliban (which hosted fellow Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terror organization).

But the Reagan worship that followed the Cold War largely drove the course of events over the last two decades in both Republican and Democratic administrations. For instance, Goodman’s National Insecurity is sharply critical of President Bill Clinton’s lack of a strategic vision that might have enabled the United States to move from Cold War paranoia to a much less militarized position in the world.

“President Clinton simply paid insufficient attention to foreign policy,” Goodman wrote, “and was too ready to read public opinion polls before acting. … As a result, President Clinton left no legacy in foreign policy or national security policy.” [p. 141]

Rather than chart a path toward a more peaceful future, Clinton tended to bow to military hardliners. “Clinton became the first president to fail to stand up to the Pentagon on a major arms control treaty, when he refused to challenge the Pentagon’s opposition to the CTBT,” Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, wrote Goodman. [p. 128]

Return of the Neocons

Clinton’s eight years of drift were followed by a return of the neocons under George W. Bush and – after the 9/11 attacks – a new surge in military spending to fight Bush’s “global war on terror” and to finish off old adversaries like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The neocons, who had cut their political teeth on exaggerating the Soviet menace in the 1970s and 1980s, returned to their old tricks, hyping the threat from Iraq in 2002-2003. They were again aided and abetted by career-oriented officials at the CIA, including the malleable director George Tenet who offered little resistance to more politicization.

Goodman wrote: “When the CIA’s director, George Tenet, made his infamous remark [in December 2002] that it would be a ‘slam dunk’ to provide intelligence to justify going to war, he was referring to the president’s demands for intelligence to take to the American people and the international community regarding the need for war, not to support for the Bush administration’s decision regarding the use of force against Iraq. The decision to invade was made long before the intelligence was in; Bush was merely seeking intelligence to rationalize the case for war.” [p. 151]

Even CIA officials with greater integrity – the likes of senior intelligence analyst Paul. R. Pillar – bent to White House demands. Goodman wrote, “Pillar finally conceded in a PBS Frontline documentary that he was directly responsible for militarizing intelligence for the Bush administration. In the documentary, broadcast in June 2006, Pillar said that the White Paper [justifying the Iraq invasion] was ‘clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes … to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public.’” [p. 173]

Goodman added: “The bottom line on the militarization of intelligence was that the Bush administration cherry-picked the intelligence it wanted, whether it was bogus intelligence on Niger’s uranium industry or unsubstantiated intelligence on Saddam’s links to bin Laden.” [p. 179]

Obama’s Failure

But neither Bush’s violations of international law nor the political corruption from excessive militarism were confronted when Barack Obama became president in 2009.

Obama failed “to address the moral issues he inherited from the Bush administration,” Goodman wrote, adding that Obama’s “unwillingness to explore the conduct of torture and abuse is arguably the president’s greatest failure, because it ignored the criminality of the recent past as well as domestic and international law, and perhaps insured that a future president would resort to such practices.” [p. 231]

Obama even kept on Bush’s military high command, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had emerged from retirement in 2006 as nearly everyone in Washington forgot his deeply checkered past.

Goodman wrote: “The Defense Department in the hands of Bob Gates became more self-aggrandizing in its accumulation of power and influence. When Obama, unwilling to roil the waters, took the unusual and unprecedented step of retaining his predecessor’s secretary of defense, it appeared that the country would not soon disentangle itself from a decade of irresponsible governance.” [p. 191]

Gates repeatedly undercut the inexperienced Obama, such as when Gates refused the President’s request for exit options on the Afghan War and instead only provided proposals for escalating the conflict and adopting a long-term counterinsurgency strategy. Gates’s insubordination continued through his farewell tour in 2011.

As Goodman noted, Gates “took hardline positions against a full withdrawal from Iraq; against beginning the withdrawal from Afghanistan; against significantly reducing the defense budget; and against reforming the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition process. In his last week, he traveled to Baghdad and Kabul, where he contradicted President Obama’s positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.” [p. 201]

So, more than two decades after the disappearance of the Soviet Union – and a decade after George W. Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq – the military-industrial complex is alive and well, still operating much as Eisenhower warned it would:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. …

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Goodman’s book, National Insecurity, represents a valuable summation of how that “misplaced power” has indeed persisted. Beyond his prescriptions for finally curbing the money that feeds the military-industrial complex, Goodman also recommends a national recognition that the United States must finally see itself realistically as part of the community of nations, not as a self-directed policeman.

“The United States must abandon its notion of ‘exceptionalism,’ which has led this country to gratuitously deploy military forces overseas to advance U.S. values,” Goodman wrote. [p.367]

That recommendation – along with the book’s other observations – carry substantial weight coming from a former senior CIA analyst, an insider who witnessed first-hand how the military-industrial complex corrupted the Republic.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/04/what-has-us-militarism-wrought/

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 10:20am, April 20, 2005.
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We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands at the point of a missile. As Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts it: "Increasingly, the president uses speeches to troops to praise American ideals and send a signal to other nations the administration is targeting for democratic change."

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized ways of signaling "change" that are even blunter. We already have, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small, spread around the world, but never enough, never deeply enough embedded in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy heartlands of our planet. The military budget soars; planning for high-tech weaponry for the near (and distant) future -- like the Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule capable of delivering "conventional" munitions anywhere on the planet within 2 hours and due to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business in Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.

Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proferred by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."

I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism and military-basing policy, The Sorrows of Empire. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by -- and found themselves in thrall to -- military power and the idea of global military supremacy, should be placed right beside it in any library. Below, you'll find the first of two long excerpts (slightly adapated) from the book, and posted with the kind permission of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University Press. This one offers Bacevitch's thoughts on the ways in which, since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized, a process to which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added momentum. On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.

Bacevich's book carefully lays out and analyzes the various influences that have fed into the creation and sustenance of the new American militarism over the last decades. It would have been easy enough to create a 4-part or 6-part Tomdispatch series from the book. Bacevich is, for instance, fascinating on evangelical Christianity (and its less than war-like earlier history) as well as on the ways in which the military, after the Vietnam debacle, rebuilt itself as a genuine imperial force, separated from the American people and with an ethos "more akin to that of the French Foreign Legion" -- a force prepared for war without end. But for that, and much else, you'll have to turn to the book itself. Tom

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 Dick 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 �lan." 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.

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, copyright � 2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the author and Oxford University Press, Inc.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2334/

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

by Andrew Bacevich

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"Though one can quibble with many aspects of Bacevich's retelling, he does his due diligence when it comes to the origin and spread of ideas, acknowledging his own biases and taking care to avoid constructing strawmen....Unfortunately, this deftness does not extend to Bacevich's reading of geopolitics." Reihan Salam, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In this provocative new book, Andrew Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of Americans, conservatives and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology — of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values. This perilous union, Bacevich argues, commits Americans to a futile enterprise, turning the US into a crusader state with a self-proclaimed mission of driving history to its final destination: the world-wide embrace of the American way of life. This mindset invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of US policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy. As it alienates others, it will leave the United States increasingly isolated. It will end in bankruptcy, moral as well as economic, and in abject failure.

The New American Militarism examines the origins and implications of this misguided enterprise. The author shows how American militarism emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War. Various groups in American society — soldiers, politicians on the make, intellectuals, strategists, Christian evangelicals, even purveyors of pop culture — came to see the revival of military power and the celebration of military values as the antidote to all the ills besetting the country as a consequence of Vietnam and the 1960s. The upshot, acutely evident in the aftermath of 9/11, has been a revival of vast ambitions and certainty, this time married to a pronounced affinity for the sword.

Bacevich urges us to restore a sense of realism and a sense of proportion to US policy. He proposes, in short, to bring American purposes and American methods — especially with regard to the role of the military — back into harmony with the nation's founding ideals.

Synopsis:

In this provocative new book, Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of Americans, conservatives and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology — of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values.

Synopsis:

In this provocative book, Andrew Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of Americans, conservatives, and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology--of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values. This mindset, the author warns, invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy. As it alienates others, it will leave the United States increasingly isolated. It will end in bankruptcy, moral as well as economic, and in abject failure.

With The New American Militarism, which has been updated with a new Afterword, Bacevich examines the origins and implications of this misguided enterprise. He shows how American militarism emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War. Various groups in American society--soldiers, politicians on the make, intellectuals, strategists, Christian evangelicals, even purveyors of pop culture--came to see the revival of military power and the celebration of military values as the antidote to all the ills besetting the country as a consequence of Vietnam and the 1960s. The upshot, acutely evident in the aftermath of 9/11, has been a revival of vast ambitions and certainty, this time married to a pronounced affinity for the sword. Bacevich urges us to restore a sense of realism and a sense of proportion to U.S. policy. He proposes, in short, to bring American purposes and American methods--especially with regard to the role of the military--back into harmony with the nation's founding ideals.

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About the Author

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of History and 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 American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.

http://www.powells.com/biblio?inkey=1-9780195173383-8

Book Title:	The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
	Author:		Andrew J. Bacevich
	Published:		New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
	Price:		$18.48 (hardcover)
	Pages:		Pp. x, 270.
	Reviewer:		Edward A. Olsen
	Affiliation:		Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California
	This book review appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of The Independent Review

As Andrew Bacevich notes in the introductory section of The New American Militarism, most critics of militarism's influence on U.S. foreign and defense policy have their roots in the progressive or center-left portions of the ideological spectrum. Bacevich's roots clearly are in the traditional conservative to libertarian end of that spectrum. A graduate of West Point, he earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University. After a military career, he became a professor at Boston University. This background reinforces his credibility in critiquing how and why militarism became a major factor shaping U.S. policy. The author also of a previous, well-received book, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Bacevich has become an established critic of U.S. policy. His excellent analysis of American militarism reinforces that stature.

The essence of his views is encapsulated by statements at the beginning and end of the book: "Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power" (p. 1); and "America will surely share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize" (p. 225). After referring to "America's marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends," Bacevich declares that his goal is to examine "the origins and implications of this union and [to propose] its annulment" (p. 3). As a devout Roman Catholic, he avoids the term divorce, but in this case an annulment would be a de facto divorce. For conservatives who might be uneasy about this objective, Bacevich sets the tone for the book by quoting James Madison: "Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." He then states, "The purpose of this book is to invite Americans to consider the relevance of Madison's warning to our own time and circumstances" (p. 7). Thus, Bacevich seeks to refocus Americans' attention on how the United States has gone astray from its founders' principles.

Despite the title's emphasis on "new American militarism," most of the book deals with how and why "present-day American militarism has deep roots in the American past" (p. 5) by assessing that history and its policy implications then and now. The successive chapters provide provocatively conveyed insights into various aspects of that long-term evolution. Bacevich sets the stage with a critique of Wilsonian interventionism and its legacy to date. This analysis is balanced in its criticism of various administrations. At the core of its salience for militarism are observations about "the demise of the ancient American tradition of the citizen-soldier" (p. 26) and the claim that "the outsourcing of defense to a professional military elite, the erosion of civilian control—distorts if it does not altogether nullify important elements of the American birthright" (p. 32). Against that background, Bacevich carefully analyzes how the cultivation of military professionalism, an inadvertent by-product of Wilsonianism, assumed self-regenerating momentum. This discussion contains many insights drawn from Bacevich's background in both military and policy analysis. Readers who lack any military background should benefit from it, but some may find it arcane if they fail to grasp its nuances.

The chapter titled "Left, Right, Left" will have much broader appeal to all but the neoconservatives whom it thoroughly eval‎uates and whose flawed conservative credentials it closely examines. Bacevich contends that neoconservatives "laid the intellectual foundation of the new American militarism" (p. 72), and he analyzes the elements of that foundation and how they evolved from the views of dissenting leftists to those of supposed conservatives. In assessing these pseudoconservative issues, he skillfully critiques the roles of the Weekly Standard, many of its prominent writers, "the fellow-traveling American Enterprise Institute," and "the agitprop of the Project for the New American Century" (p. 89).

Genuine conservatives will enjoy the following two chapters less. One chapter deals with the legacy of Ronald Reagan's role in "conjuring up the myths that nurtured and sustain present-day American militarism" (p. 99) and how that legacy helped shape successive administrations. As controversial as that analysis will be in some circles, the other chapter's focus on the religious right's alleged roles in reinforcing the values behind militarism will be even more provocative. Bacevich maintains that "militant evangelicals imparted religious sanction to the militarization of U.S. policy and helped imbue the resulting military activism with an aura of moral legitimacy" (p. 124). The content and title of this chapter, "Onward" (as in "onward Christian soldiers"), is likely to make it the most controversial in the book among today's Republican base.

The chapter titled "War Club" is much less likely than "Onward" to provoke controversy, but it does deal with a sensitive issue: the institutionalization of the doctrines that foster militarism in the current Bush administration. Bacevich examines the analysts in academe and think tanks, especially RAND, who contributed to what became a quest for a perpetual "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) designed to keep the United States poised for deterrence in ways that eventually led to the Bush doctrine's focus on military preemption. At the core of this development was an evolving "national-security elite" that Bacevich labels a "priesthood." (p. 151). Although the purposes behind the RMA concept can have merit, it proved to have troubling implications. As Bacevich states, "although the Revolution in Military Affairs offered a way of reconceptualizing warfare, its importance extended well beyond that sphere. In fact, the RMA was one expression‎ of a larger effort to formulate a new vision of the world itself and of America's proper place in (and astride) that world" (p. 170). In short, he concludes, "the priesthood had turned out to be a war club" (p. 174).

Bacevich explores how U.S. policies toward the Middle East over several decades have been shaped and distorted by oil and by radical Muslim reactions, including terrorism, in response to those policies. In this context, he refers to the Cold War as "what it really was: World War III" and to the post–9/11 war on terrorism as "World War IV" (p. 175). Although many readers will disagree with that analytical categorization because of its reliance on a neocon perspective, Bacevich uses that paradigm to provide insights into where and how presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush have used interventionist policies to impose American objectives on the Middle East, based on U.S. dependency on petroleum stability and U.S. ties with Israel, in order to transform countries that were not in harmony with U.S. interests. In one of his blunter assessments, Bacevich states: "Bush and members of his inner circle conceived of this [aggressive interventionism] as a great crusade" (p. 202) in part because "they had drunk deeply of the waters that sustained the new American militarism" (p. 203).

In concluding, Bacevich expounds on ten principles that can reduce U.S. tendencies toward militarism: pay attention to the nation's founders, bolster the separation of powers, treat the use of armed force solely as a last resort, strengthen U.S. self-sufficiency, emphasize national defense, control defense spending, use more soft power, emphasize citizen-soldiers, use the National Guard and reserves properly, and improve U.S. civil-military relations. Were the United States to pursue these goals, including greater reliance on civilian education for U.S. military officers, Americans would benefit from the demilitarization of U.S. policy and the U.S. role in world affairs. These recommendations are sound. If implemented, they would reduce militarism sharply within U.S. society and in U.S. policymaking and help to stop the policy shift toward the maintenance of a de facto empire.

As I noted earlier, a number of liberal-progressive analysts have criticized militarism in the United States. However, Bacevich's criticism and recommendations, voiced by a conservative with military credentials, are important for people across the entire U.S. spectrum to read and heed. Liberals may be pleasantly surprised. Although some conservatives may be taken aback, they too will benefit, as will anyone in the civilian or military departments of the U.S. government regardless of his ideological inclinations.

Edward A. Olsen
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California

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