Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through
the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press,
Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other
institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the
military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed
very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public
expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military.
About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and
only 7 percent in Congress.
Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic
imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong,
have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after
conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that
America cared how we were doing?
We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about
his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine
Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he
told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was
useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to
invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty
to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to
serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s
work.”
Ours is the best-equipped
fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive.
By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better
trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No
decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but
respectful of them and grateful for what they do.
Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern,
worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles
only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can
agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J.
Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total
cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress
was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the
White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign
for telling
The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might
be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has
spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years.
Politicians say that national security is their first and most sacred
duty, but they do not act as if this is so. The most recent defense
budget passed the House Armed Services Committee by a vote of 61 to
zero, with similarly one-sided debate before the vote. This is the same
House of Representatives that cannot pass a long-term Highway Trust Fund
bill that both parties support. “The lionization of military officials
by politicians is remarkable and dangerous,” a retired Air Force colonel
named Tom Ruby, who now writes on organizational culture, told me. He
and others said that this deference was one reason so little serious
oversight of the military took place.
T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has a doctorate in
modern history from Oxford, told me that instead of applying critical
judgment to military programs, or even regarding national defense as any
kind of sacred duty, politicians have come to view it simply as a teat.
“Many on Capitol Hill see the Pentagon with admirable simplicity,” he
said: “It is a way of directing tax money to selected districts. It’s
part of what they were elected to do.”
For the complete report: The Tragedy of the American Military - The Atlantic
