In the last couple of weeks before the tenth anniversary of what we in the U.S. now universally refer to as "nine-eleven," it's only natural that we look back on the intervening years to assess our security posture. Everybody is producing articles on it, including a current series in the Washington Post. I was struck by today's installment, which touts "an era of endless war" as the Pentagon's assessment not just of the past decade, but of our future.
Certainly the nature of the threat to U.S. security is changing. We learned that from Vietnam, but didn't really move to reflect it in our strategy until much more recently. But to predict endless war depends on our underlying assumptions and biases about our interests in two important respects:
First, the built-in bias of an all-pro military force. The current predictions arise, interestingly, about a generation after we abandoned conscription. By now, senior military leaders and planners have never experienced anything but an all-volunteer force. That has its advantages, and I've discussed its disadvantages on many occasions before, but to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I'm not saying it's conscious deception; in fact it derives from earnest professional competence, to seek to plan for every eventuality. However, let's not base our security strategy solely on the advice of a phalanx of professionals whose job is to see things in terms of endless war. Or as it's been said before: "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military." [This World-War-One quote is variously attributed to Briand or Clemenceau.]
Second, our historical tendency to deceive ourselves about the nature of our interests and how we respond to threats. Since at least WWII, political leaders have recognized the power of motivating a population to support war by defining it, not in terms of U.S. interests, but in the framework of the greater good. This usually means that we are told we're fighting for democracy, or to support democracy, or to "bring democracy" to some other nation. Occasionally it's actually true, but it gets badly stretched when the target country has little or no democratic experience. It works as a motivator for the cannon fodder, but it seems those who make policy too often abandon their sense of reality and come to believe it themselves.
The upshot of the two above points is that political leaders have found it considerably easier to lead the country into war (and by corollary, much harder to get us out of it!). If we define our interests realistically we have far less reason to perceive the future in terms of "endless war."
This post has become too long; in the next, I'll elaborate.
Comments