Endless War--Andrew Bacevich

West Point graduate, a real Vietnam veteran and professor of international affairs at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich has been warning about America's foreign over-reach for nearly a decade. In August, his book "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" will be published and no doubt it will reinforce his strong belief that long wars are antithetical to democracy and ruinous to the military.

Today, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post "Endless War, a Recipe for Four-Star Arrogance", which lays out the deeper issues behind the whole Rolling Stone McChrystal flap. Earlier in the week Frank Schaeffer, a father of a Marine and co-founder of the Religious Right, published a warning on Huffngton Post both to the progressive community and to Americans at large that our all-volunteer military has become a separate culture than our own and is susceptible to the noxious calls from our radical right. He also criticised Democrats and progressives for not taking seriously the separate concerns and responsibilities of our fighting men and women. And then Pepe Escobar weighed in with a humorous piece "Mr. McChrystal. He Dead", which portrayed the sacked general as the Kurtz figure in Apocalypse Now played by Marlon Brando.

A few weeks ago, Barney Frank hosted a panel at the House comprised of Democrats and conservatives on how to cut the military budget over time by about $1 trillion. What I found most interesting were the comments by Lawrence Korb, who was involved in creating the all-volunteer army. He recalled the situation of the Vietnam War and the decision to create an all-volunteer army was for the expressed purpose of not repeating a prolonged conflict. The all-volunteer army was not created to wage war ceaselessly and wherever whim decided.

The idea of the all-volunteer army was to create the best fighting force in the world--which it is. But the dangers of that appear everyday. This week the California National Guard held a conference in San Francisco on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the purpose of educating the public of its pandemic occurence within the community of returning veterans. An important side issue was to encourage lobbying for the National Guard to receive mental health benefits, which they currently lack. On the topside, the Washington Post published an article today raising concerns about the rapid turnover in generals throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars claiming their preparation is inadequate for fighting such prolonged conflicts.

Earlier this week I ranted about COIN, the counter-insurgency doctrine which is based on past failures and requires substantial civilian in-put, which is not available either in terms of capable talent or the financial resources. Supporters point to the success of the Surge in Iraq, which enabled us to create the conditions for our withdrawal but not on its failure to generate any genuine political reconciliation among the Iraqis. One of the key components for the Surge, as candidate Barack Obama pointed out, was the Sunni Awakening, which rejected the insurgents. As we have given over military control to the Iraqis, almost all the Sunni leaders of this group have been assassinated by the government. Today, the Iraqi government still has not resolved the issue of forming the next government after elections months ago.

General McChrystal in his Rolling Stone debut criticized Vice President Biden's proposal for fighting on the border of Afghanistan and the nearby Northern Frontier of Pakistan with the aim of eradicating Al Qaeda there. McChrystal called it a recipe for "Chaosistan". But today's admission by CIA director Leon Panetta that there only exists 50-100 Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan today raises again the issue whether Biden was right. The escalation of the war in Afghanistan has triggered for the first time the Taliban becoming directly involved in training terrorist wannabes against the United States as witnessed the recently convicted Times Square bomber. Are we not creating the situation for permanent blowback from this war?

Back to Andrew Bacevich. he writes that prolonged conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. "Not the least among these values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics." Over the past two weeks, there have been several articles, most notably in the Los Angeles Times, concerning the peer pressure in the military academies on cadets to become Republicans. Bacevich claims that the whole McChrystal incident should set off alarms--that the military professional ethic is eroding , evident in the disrespect for senior civilians.

Bacevich quotes General George C. Marshall that "A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War." That was supposedly the genius of creating an all-volunteer force--a standing army, one that is only tenuously linked to American society. Once the Cold War ended, both Republicans and Democrats expressed a greater willingness to intervene abroad. From the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, there was little to complain about. The costs appeared negligible--the miniscule casualties in the first Gulf War attest to this. So the role for everyone was simply to cheer and say "We respect your service."

So, with the abandonment of the Doctrine of Deterence for one of pre-emptive war, we entered what Don Rumseld called the "Long War", which is supposed to last 40 years. Remember when the reporter asked Dick Cheney about the polls showing dissastisfaction with the Iraq War. He said,"So what?" The Long War is exclusively the property of the "troops" and not the American people. As Bacevich writes," To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed confict without end." As George W. Bush told the Amercan people after 9/11 "Go shopping". The war doesn't involve you.

The problem with this is that soldiers and their familes are left holding the bag. To have the National Guard on perpetual rotation to foreign war zones is obscene. At the same time, the current use of regular service men and women violates everything we know about the appropriate combat periods needed to forestall combat fatigue and more dramatic mental illnesses. In the Vietnam conflict, the British studied American troop deployment and found that our soldiers spent three times the amount in combat recommended by specialists. I can only imagined what it is today.

Bacevich warns that the circumstances of today's military in the United States breeds praetorianism, "warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend.' "Team America" as these officers called themselves, believe they are holding out against " a sea of stupidity and corruption". There is a pandemic "culture of contempt" for those not in uniform. The problem, according to Bacevich,isn't any threat to the constitutional order but the creation of generation after generation of officers like this.

What Bacevich sees as the real danger is, like in Vietnam, the military cracked from the bottom up. The damage took decades to repair and with a military that has demonstrated remarkable durability for the past decade shows signs of coming undone at the top. "The officer corps is losing its bearings."

Bacevich calls on the American people to reclaim ownership of the military. He believes the soldiers need a respite and citizens should insist Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or the country should actually become a country "at war" with all that implies for civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities.

But to quote from other writings of Bacevich, only the officers at colonel level or equivalent can sound the alarms up the ladder. It seems to me the contempt by McChrystal was not in his remarks about Obama, Biden and McCain but rather in his original plan for Afghanistan which required 150,000 additional troops and some $1 trillion more in spending. Only someone truly removed from political reality and the situation of the American society today could have had the hubris to propose such a plan.

The other issue has to do with the development of the endless lists of strategic threats to the United States. We've gone from WMDs, terrorism, narco-terrorism,cyber terrorism, global warming and now, according to Admiral Mullen, the national debt. At the same time, our total national security expenditure is twice the amount of what we paid at the height of the Cold War and equivalent to all the national security expenditure of the entire earth combined. So how much will real security cost? Are we to respond to every imaginable threat national security types can conjure up? Isn't the social and economic well-being of the American people a consideration of national security and stability? And if we face a real threat, will our armed forces be too hollowed out to respond?

I will return to this issue in another post. Parallel to Bacevich's concerns are those raised by former foreign service officers about the need to integrate economics, diplomacy and development into our considerations of national security. While the military carries the burden, our diplomatic service has been eviscerated in recent years through deliberate neglect, which triggered a wave of retirements, and the atrophy of our other tools to deal with these conflicts.