http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=289&MId=14
On Forgetting the Obvious by Robert D. Kaplan
this article appears in THE AMERICAN INTEREST
about the author Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The
Atlantic and the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National
Security at the United States Naval Academy. This article is adapted from
his book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air,
at Sea, and on the Ground to be published in September by Random House.
next article
Some truths are so obvious that to mention them in polite company seems
either pointless or rude. What is left unstated, however, can with time be
forgotten. Both of these observations apply today to the American way of
war. It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a
society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is
worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious
as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.
Remembering will help us in several ways. First, it will show us that the
greatest asymmetry in our struggle with radical Islam is not one of arms or
organization or even of ideology in any simple sense, but one of morale in
the deepest sense. Second, it will provide an insight into the state of
civil-military relations in our own country, which is a growing problem many
of us refuse to acknowledge. And third, it will show us why some kinds of
wars-"in-between" wars, I call them-have become inherently difficult for the
United States to fight and win.
Believing
If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with
the present clarified by the great works of the past. For over four years
now I have been traveling much of the world in the company of U.S. soldiers,
marines, sailors and airmen. Upon a halt in my travels, I re-read both The
Art of War by the 6th-century BCE Chinese court minister Sun-Tzu and On War
by the early 19th-century Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. What struck
me straight away, thanks to my recent travels-in-arms, was not what either
author said, but what both assumed. Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe-in
their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they
are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and
they never do.
What is obvious, however, is left unstated not because it is insignificant,
but because it is too significant: War is a fact of the human social
condition neither man wishes were so. Sun-Tzu, concerned with war on the
highest strategic level, affirms that the greatest warrior is one who
calculates so well that he never needs to fight. Clausewitz, interested more
in the operational level, allows that war takes precedence only after other
forms of politics have failed. Both oppose militarism, but accept the
reality of war, and from that acceptance reason that any policy lacking
martial vigor-any policy that fails to communicate a warrior spirit-only
makes war more likely. That is why Sun-Tzu only respects a leader "who plans
and calculates like a hungry man", who sanctions every manner of deceit
provided it is necessary to gain strategic advantage, who is never swayed by
public opinion, and "who advances without any thought of winning personal
fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment" if he judges it to be in
the interest of his army and his state.11. See The Book of War, comprising
Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, translated by Roger T. Ames (1993), and Carl von
Clausewitz's On War, translated by O.J. Matthijs Jolles (1943) (Modern
Library, 2000). See also, Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership
Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2001), Chapter IV. Clausewitz is no
less committed:
In affairs so dangerous as war, false ideas proceeding from kindness of
heart are precisely the worst. . . . The fact that slaughter is a horrifying
spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse
for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later
someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.
The logic of both men is grounded in patriotic commitment and the personal
experience of what that commitment does to men and nations. Sun-Tzu was
likely a court minister during the chaos of the Warring States 2,300 years
ago, prior to the relative stability of Han rule. (Sun-Tzu may never have
existed, however, and his book may represent the accumulated wisdom of many
people.) Clausewitz was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who served with
both the Prussian and Russian armies against the French. What stands out in
The Art of War and On War, even more than the incisiveness of their
analyses, is the character of the writers themselves: Both would avoid war
if they could, but become warriors because they cannot.
Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz could rise to the level of theory only because they
had absorbed practice. So I could only grasp their meaning after living
beside junior officers and senior NCOs whose logic, like theirs, flowed from
patriotism and personal commitment. Now, patriotism, we have heard, is the
last refuge of the scoundrel. It can be that when patriotism is
misappropriated by those who have little loyalty to place, and who therefore
lack any accountability for their words or their views. It is easy, after
all, to be in favor of this or that cause, or against some other ones, if
one has no real stake in the outcome. But while some patriots are
scoundrels, the vast majority are more trustworthy than those who are not,
precisely because they do accept a stake in outcomes. And they do so most
often because patriotism overlaps with what, for lack of a better phrase, is
a kind of moral hardiness, by which I mean an attitude of serious engagement
concerning right and wrong behavior. I saw this in one American soldier,
marine, sailor and airman after another. Two of Joseph Conrad's characters
best illustrate such moral hardiness and its opposite.
Captain MacWhirr is the protagonist in Conrad's 1902 short story "Typhoon."
The son of a Belfast grocer, MacWhirr is a man of few words and little
imagination, a man so taciturn that his chief mate says of him: "There are
feelings that this man simply hasn't got. . . . You might just as well try
to make a bedpost understand." As Captain MacWhirr's steamer, Nan-Shan, sets
out for the coast of China to return Chinese coolies to their homes, a great
storm is brewing in the Formosa Channel. But what would terrify most other
men, MacWhirr accepts matter-of-factly.
A few hours into the voyage, his ship is in chaos. The wind alone has such a
"disintegrating" force, Conrad writes, that it "isolates" every man on board
from every other. The mates panic, the coolies riot, and the Nan-Shan nearly
splits apart. As for MacWhirr, rather than sail miles off course to get
around the storm, he quietly decides to plow straight into it, like a
platoon leader charging straight into an ambush. "Facing it-always facing
it", he mumbles, "that's the way to get through." So it is that this
ordinary, yet still very extraordinary man saves the ship because, as Conrad
strongly suggests, he believes deeply in his moral duty to the shipping
company and to the men serving under him. Once the storm is past, rather
than sleep or even remove his boots, he makes sure that every Chinese coolie
gets his proper wages. MacWhirr is not clever. He is not even minimally
well-spoken. But his abiding faith results in an iron certainty about
himself for which words are quite beside the point.
As MacWhirr is not the type to be afraid, so too during the worst of times
in Iraq, one officer after another, commissioned and non-commissioned,
communicated to me a fierce conviction. Take the MacWhirr-like Sgt. Major
Dennis Zavodsky of Mapleton, Oregon, who remarked at a Thanksgiving service
in Mosul that the Pilgrims during their first winter in the New World
experienced a casualty rate that would render any combat unit ineffective.
"This country isn't a quitter", he said. "It doesn't withdraw. It doesn't
give in." Stubbornness, inspired by faith, was the rule among those I was
privileged to accompany. And I do not mean just or even mainly conventional
religious faith. Quite a few of those I met despised "the Bible thumpers." I
mean simply the moral stamina of a MacWhirr-a quality of character that
tends to march with the bumps and bruises of an often dangerous, usually
uncertain working-class existence.
But there are also the Martin Decouds of this world, the brilliant sneerers
who analyze everything into oblivion. Martin Decoud is a character in
Nostromo, Conrad's 1904 novel about an imaginary Latin American country,
Costaguana, in the throes of upheaval. Decoud has studied law in Paris,
dabbles in literature, writes political commentary and all-in-all, as Conrad
explains, is an "idle boulevardier." Decoud speaks much, but acts only when
he is faced with a political crisis that impinges on his own welfare. Yet
when he finds himself alone on an island off Costaguana, he gives in to
despair, even though he has been assured of rescue. The "brilliant"
journalist Decoud, the "spoiled darling" of his family, "was not fit to
grapple with himself single-handed." Despite Decoud's virtuoso conversation
and commentary, in a crisis, Conrad tells us, he "believed in nothing."
Decoud doesn't represent any particular philosophical position or point of
view; he is there to remind us that cleverness should not be confused with
character.
Alas, in the unpredictable fog and Clausewitzian "friction" of war, to
believe in something is more important than to be blessed by mere logic, or
to have the ability for talented argument-even more important than the
marvelous gear one carries. "Faith is the great strategic factor that
unbelieving faculties and bureaucracies ignore", retired Army Lt. Colonel
Ralph Peters wrote in the Weekly Standard in February 2006. This is not a
new idea, of course, just an obvious but too often forgotten one. It
suggests particularly that we have forgotten Dostoyevsky, who wrote in The
Brothers Karamazov that the signal flaw of the upper classes is that they
"want to base justice on reason alone", not on any deeper belief system
absent which everything can be rationalized, so that the will of a society
to fight and survive withers away.
Peters fears that Islamic revolutionaries believe in themselves more than we
believe in ourselves. Terrorists do not fear the Pentagon's much touted
"network-centric warfare", he writes, because they have mastered it for a
fraction of a cent on the dollar, "achieving greater relative effects with
the Internet, cell phones, and cheap airline tickets" than have all of our
military technologies. Our trillion-dollar arsenal, he notes, cannot produce
an instrument of war as effective as the suicide bomber-"the breakthrough
weapon of our time." If not Dostoyevsky, Kipling would have understood this.
In the poem "Arithmetic on the Frontier" Kipling writes that as the
hillsides of eastern Afghanistan teem with "home-bred" troops brought from
England at "vast expense of time and steam", the odds remain "on the cheaper
man", the native fighter. The suicide bomber is Kipling's "cheaper man"
incarnate.
This breakthrough weapon is a product of fanatical belief-of a different
sort than Captain MacWhirr's, but of belief nonetheless. Jihad as practiced,
not as theorized, places more emphasis on the "mystical dimension" of
sacrifice than on any tactical or strategic objective. Jihad is most often
an act of individual exultation rather than of collective action, observes
Olivier Roy in The Failure of Political Islam (1994). It is "an affair
between the believer and God and not between the believer and his enemy.
There is no obligation to obtain a result. Hence the demonstrative, even
exhibitionist, aspects of the attacks."
The suicide bomber is the distilled essence of jihad, the result of an age
when the electronic media provides an unprecedented platform for
exhibitionism. Clausewitz's rules of war do not apply here, for he could not
have conceived of the modern media, whose members tend to be as avowedly
secular as suicide bombers are devout. Without any evident stabilizing
belief system, the global media's spiritual void has been partially filled
by a resentment against the United States-the embodiment of unruly
modernization and raw political and military power that the global citizens
of the media detest. And so it is that the video camera-"that insatiable
accomplice of the terrorist", in Peters' words-becomes the "cheap negation"
of American military technology.
Even as we narrow our own view of warfare's acceptable parameters, trying to
harm as few civilians as possible in successful operations, our enemies
amplify the concept of total war: They kill tens, or hundreds, or
occasionally thousands of civilians in order to undermine the morale of
millions. The killing of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001 might have
temporarily awakened a warrior spirit in American democracy, but such a
spirit is hard to sustain in the crucible of an ambiguous conflict. In Iraq,
a country of 26 million people through which more than a million American
troops have passed, the loss of a few Americans and three dozen-or-so Iraqis
daily in suicide bombs is enough to demoralize a homefront 7,000 miles away.
A non-warrior democracy with a limited appetite for casualties is probably a
good thing in terms of putting the breaks on a directionless war strategy.
That does not change the fact, however, that Americans as a people are ever
further removed from any semblance of a warrior spirit as we grow
increasingly prosperous and our political elite grows increasingly secular.
Holding or not holding a place for warriors in our midst is not just a
matter of faith as we normally think of it, or even moral hardiness as I
have described it. It is also a matter of collective self-regard or, put
more conventionally, where and how solidly the boundaries of political
community are drawn. It is about nationalism-nationalism of a kind that is
going out of fashion among the American elite.
In Fire in the East (1999), an analysis of the dawning of the "second
nuclear age", Yale University professor Paul Bracken has drawn attention to
the ascent of blood-and-soil nationalism in Asia. In discussing the
acquisition of nuclear technology by China, Iran, India, Pakistan and other
powers on the Asian continent, he writes:
The link to nationalism makes the second nuclear age even harder for the
West to comprehend. Nationalism is not viewed kindly in the West these days.
It is seen as nonsensical, a throwback, and, it is hoped, a dying force in
the world. The notion that the Chinese or Indians could conduct foreign
policy on the assumption of their own national superiority goes against
nearly every important trend in American and West European thought.
Bracken observes that successful nuclear tests in places like India and
Pakistan "set off public euphoria-literally, people danced in the streets."
It was an "emotional embrace of a technology Westerners have been taught to
loathe and abhor." Americans forget how in the 1950s the atomic bomb "was an
important source of American pride", so we should not "be surprised that
Asian countries today feel the same way." Bracken thus warns:
In focusing on whether the West can keep its lead in technology, the United
States is asking the wrong question. It overlooks the military advantages
that accrue to societies with a less fastidious approach to violence.
In such a world, the real threat to our national security may be our own
lack of faith in ourselves, meaning not just faith in a God who has a
special care for America, but faith in the American national enterprise
itself, in whatever form. This lack of faith in turn leads to an
overdependence on ever more antiseptic military technology. But our near
obsession with finding ways to kill others at no risk to our own troops is a
sign of strength in our eyes alone. To faithful or merely nationalist
enemies, it is a sign of weakness, even cowardice.
Dividing
Never-say-die faith, accompanied by old-fashioned nationalism, is alive in
America. It is a match for the most fanatical suicide bombers anywhere, but
with few exceptions, that faith is confined to our finest combat infantry
units-and to specific sections of the country and socio-economic strata from
which these "warriors" (as they like to call themselves) hail. They are not
characteristic of a country in many ways hurtling rapidly in the opposite
direction. This is not the 1950s, when Americans felt a certain relief in
possessing "the bomb." Fifty years later, most Americans feel a certain
relief in never having to even hear about "the bomb."
Faith is about struggle, about having confidence precisely when the odds are
the worst. Faith is the capacity to believe in what is simultaneously
necessary but improbable. That kind of faith is receding in America among a
social and economic class increasingly motivated by universal values:
caring, for example, about the suffering of famine victims abroad as much as
for hurricane victims at home. Universal values are a good in and of
themselves, and they are not the opposite of faith. But they should never be
confused with it. You may care to the point of tears about suffering
humankind without having the will to actually fight (let alone inconvenience
yourself) for those concerns. Thus, universal values may pose an existential
challenge to national security when accompanied by a loss of faith in one's
own political values and projects.
The loss of a warrior mentality and the rise of universal values seem to be
features of all stable, Western-style middle-class democracies. Witness our
situation. The Army Reserve is desperate for officers, yet there is little
urge among American elites to volunteer. Thus our military takes on more of
a regional caste. The British Army may have been drawn from the dregs of
society, but its officers were the country's political elite. Not so ours,
which has little to do with the business of soldiering and is socially
disconnected from what guards us in our sleep. According to Marine Maj.
General Michael Lehnert, nine Princeton graduates in the class of 2006
entered the military, compared to 400 in 1956, when there was a draft. Some
Ivy League schools had no one enter the military last year. Only one member
of the Stanford graduating class had a parent in the military.
Nor do our top schools encourage recruitment. In fact, they often actively
discourage it, as may be reckoned by the number of elite campuses from which
ROTC is banned. Many people, especially academics and intellectuals, have a
visceral distrust of units like Army Special Forces. They are more
comfortable with regular citizen armies that seem to better represent
democracy. But other than a professional warrior class or a reinstituted
draft, what is available to a democracy whose upper stratum has a constantly
diminishing commitment to military values?
Here is the crux of our civil-military divide: As American society grows
more socially distant from its own military, American warrior consciousness
is further intensifying within the combat arms community itself. The
identities of each of the four armed services gradually grow less distinct.
Rather than Army green, Air Force blue or Navy khaki, the slow but
inexorable trend is toward purple, the color of jointness. The services have
not yet lost their individual cultures, but operations both big and small
are more and more integrated affairs. As each year goes by, interaction
between the services deepens. The Air Force, with its once cushy, corporate
ways, is becoming more hardened and austere like the Army, even as the Big
Army becomes more small-unit oriented like the Marine Corps. The Big Navy,
with its new emphasis on small ships to meet the demands of littoral combat,
is becoming more unconventional and powered-down, also like the Marines.
Without a draft or a revitalized Reserve and National Guard that ties the
military closer to civilian society, in the decades ahead American troops
may become less soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen, and more purple
warriors-in essence a guild in which the profession of combat-arms is passed
down from father to son. It is striking how many troops I know whose parents
and other relatives had also been in the service, especially among the units
whose members face the highest level of personal risk. Contrast this with
the fact that, at the 2006 Stanford commencement ceremony, Maj. General
Lehnert, whose son was the lone graduating student from a military family,
was struck by how many of the other parents had never even met a member of
the military before he introduced himself.
Army-Marine Corps joint sniper training in Djibouti
A citizen army is composed of conscripts from all classes and parts of the
country in roughly equal proportion. But a volunteer military is necessarily
dominated by those regions with an old-fashioned fighting ethos: the South
and the adjacent Bible Belts of the southern Midwest and Great Plains.
Marine and Army infantry units, and in particular Army Special Forces
A-teams, manifest a proclivity for volunteers from the states of the former
Confederacy, as well as Irish and Hispanics from poorer, more culturally
conservative sections of coastal cities. In sum, the American military has
become in some respects a higher-quality version of what it was on the eve
of World War II. The Greatest Generation may have come from all walks of
life and all regions of the country, but when it got to boot camp its
trainers were professional soldiers, often with Southern accents, intent on
doing their thirty years.
The Southern soldier of today is different, even if they have strikingly
similar names. Take Army Special Forces Major Robert E. Lee, Jr., of Mobile,
Alabama, whom I met in the Philippines in 2003. Major Lee named his son
"Stonewall", but he also worked as a church-based volunteer in a poor,
African-American section of Wichita, Kansas. "It was my first real exposure
to blacks, I mean not from afar", he told me. "It was a year of learning,
day after day, that folks are just folks." He is not unusual. It is a
commonplace among observers of the American military that race relations in
the barracks are better than in American society at large.
Yet even such an encouraging evolution constitutes another sign of the
emergence of a separate American warrior caste. It is not just in war zones
that soldiers bond with one another. They do so at bases within the United
States, too, where troops and their families usually live separately from
civilian communities close-by, and the short-duty rotation makes it hard for
the inhabitants of the base to develop ties outside it. Spending months upon
months with American troops, I entered a social world where friendships
stretched across units and racial lines more than across military-civilian
ones, and homefront references were to forts and bases, not cities, towns or
states.
Liberal democratic societies have commonly been defended by conservative
military establishments whose members may lack the social graces of the
cosmopolitan classes they protect. Such a conservative American military now
has a particularly thankless task, however. Much of what it does abroad is
guarding sea lanes and training troops of fledgling democracies, helping
essentially to provide the security armature for an emerging global
civilization. But the more that civilization evolves-with its own mass
media, non-governmental organizations and professional class-the less credit
and sympathy it grants to the American troops who at times risk their lives
for it. Irony is stock-and-trade for sophisticated wit, of course. But it
cannot forever obscure the contradiction between the functions of an
effective warrior class and the unwillingness of those functions'
beneficiaries to support its warriors. I cannot remember how many times a
soldier or marine told me that we don't want to be pitied as victims, but
respected as fighters. That respect is not abundant, which brings us to an
especially sharp practical edge of what our forgetfulness has wrought.
Fighting "In-Between"
The military historian James Stokesbury's A Short History of the Korean War
argues that middle-class democracies fight two kinds of wars well: little
wars fought by professional warriors that garner little media attention, and
big wars that may rouse the whole country, in spite of itself, into a
patriotic fervor. The small footprint deployments I have covered in recent
years are a variation of these little wars, as are the many discreet
intelligence operations and raids that various branches of the U.S. national
security apparatus continue to carry out around the globe. A very big war we
have not experienced lately, which is all to the good, even if-perhaps
especially if-you truly follow Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz.
The problem, as Stokesbury explains, arises not with little or big wars, but
with middle-sized ones, of which the public is very much aware thanks to the
24-hour news cycle, but is nevertheless confused as to its goals. These
"in-between" wars are bloody affairs in which we are forced to place a high
value on the individual because of our universal values, even as the enemy
does not. Abu Ghraib, which showed America at its worst, does not register
in terms of barbarity compared to what the enemy was doing on a daily basis
in Iraq at the very same time. But because "in-between" wars lack the
context provided by clear stakes and personal commitment, the average
citizen is more easily knocked off a moral balance by a media culture whose
avocation is not to inform but to win market share.
In big, good-versus-evil wars, on the other hand, the homefront feels itself
a part of the fighting machine. In little wars it does not, but in those
cases it doesn't matter that the public doesn't feel itself to be at war,
because it is largely ignorant of such military operations in the first
place. It is the "in between" war that creates the worst combination for a
non-warrior democracy: one in which the public is keenly aware of the worst
details, yet has no context in which to assimilate them and is otherwise
unaffected.
Stokesbury's example of a middle-sized war is Korea, but his point also
applies to Vietnam and Iraq. The Powell Doctrine, in which then-Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell advised that the United States should not get
involved in a war without overwhelming force, a near-certainty of victory
and a clear exit strategy, seems overly self-constraining to many. But if
one views the Powell Doctrine as a way to avoid middle-sized wars (or little
wars that through miscalculation can become middle-sized ones), it makes
very good sense for the needs of a non-warrior democracy like ours. Powell
understood that in these wars the lack of a broad-based warrior mentality is
clearly a disadvantage.
The problem, though, is that it often isn't clear what will become a
middle-sized war and what won't. The Powell Doctrine was used by many a
realist as an argument not to get involved in Bosnia in the 1990s. But we
inserted troops anyway, and it did not turn out to be a messy, bloody
"in-between" war. The gradual stabilization of the former Yugoslavia and the
expansion of NATO to the Black Sea suggest that the Balkan interventions of
1995 and 1999 were in the nation's interest. On the other hand, few if any
of those who supported the March 2003 invasion of Iraq expected it to become
a middle-sized war that would go on for years. Simply never to get involved
anywhere, except in the smallest deployments, or in bigger ones without the
absolute certainty of a clean victory, invites defeat by an abdication from
the responsibility that comes with power. Alas, the Powell Doctrine is wise
for some important purposes, but unavailing for others.
One way to parse the problems of "in-between" wars is to get help from
others. Great Britain employed others to help it fight Napoleon, and it
maintained an elite navy rather than a vast and financially debilitating
national army. We do this, too, after a fashion. Our training missions
around the world are designed to bring indigenous forces up to the level
where they can fight on their own. The U.S. Pacific Command, among other
combatant commands, is obsessed with military multilateralism. Even such a
primacist as President Bush attempted to build a military coalition of major
nations for invading Iraq before he did so with the palpable help of only
Great Britain.
And Iraq was the exception. The American way of war is, by and large, one of
coalitions. This is even true, or will become true, for sea power. For more
than six decades we have been the near-hegemonic successor to the Royal
Navy, but in coming decades we will likely have no choice but to gradually
cede oceanic space to the rising Indian and Chinese navies with whom, more
often than not, we will hope to cooperate. We may still have to fight
middle-sized wars, and we may need larger, more lethal and more flexible
forces with which to do so. But we will strive, above all, not to fight such
wars alone and far from home at a time when American military dominance is
almost certain to erode, if only because the balance of interests-not to
speak of faith and nationalism-is at least as important as the balance of
power.
Despite globalization, national militaries will not diminish in importance,
at least for some decades. On the contrary, they could in some cases grow in
significance compared to other forms of human organization. The
"technologies of wealth and war have always been closely connected", Bracken
warns. "Missile and bomb tests . . . biological warfare programs, and . . .
chemical weapons" have been to a significant degree since the early 1990s
"the products of a prosperous, liberalizing Asia."
Indeed, the political-military map of Eurasia-one third of the earth's
landmass-is changing radically. Europe is decreasingly a serious military
power. Its own peoples see their respective militaries not as defenders of
their homelands, but as civil servants in uniforms. A revitalized, more
expeditionary NATO might mitigate this situation, but the overall trend will
more likely see Europe devote itself to peacekeeping and disaster-response
roles.
While Europe slowly recedes as a military factor, a chain of Asian
countries-Israel, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, China and North Korea, to
name a few-have assembled nuclear or chemical stockpiles, aided by ballistic
missile delivery systems in more and more cases. The key element in judging
the future of national militaries, however, will not be their order of
battle or their weaponry. It will be the civilian-military relationship in
each particular country. As we have seen, the rise of non-Western militaries
will be sustained by the rise of non-Western nationalisms and beliefs. As
for the West, it is divided. European civilians take little pride in their
standing armies; in America, however, civilians still do. Iraq, in this
respect, has not been like Vietnam. While Americans may have turned against
the Iraq war, they have not turned against the troops there. If anything, in
recent years, they have grown more appreciative of them. The upshot is that
America has a first-class, professional military that is respected even if
it is not reflective of society.
But to see that America's circumstances are not as bad as those of the
European Union is not the point. The point is to remember what we have
forgotten. A military will not continue to fight and fight well for a
society that could be losing faith in itself, even if that society doffs its
cap now and again to its warrior class.
One man who has not forgotten is Air Force Colonel Robert Wheeler, a combat
pilot I met with his B-2 squadron on Guam. Wheeler exemplifies the modern
American officer: a Midwesterner with an engineering degree from the
University of Wisconsin and post-graduate degrees, including a master of
arts in strategic studies from the Naval War College. Wheeler, who has
participated in several wars over the course of three administrations and
also served as senior adviser to the U.S. Mission for the Vienna-based
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, put the matter like
this: "Decadence" is the essential condition of "a society which believes it
has evolved to the point where it will never have to go to war." By
eliminating war as a possibility, "it has nothing left to fight and
sacrifice for, and thus no longer wants to make a difference."
It is in precisely such a situation that historical memory becomes lost, and
forgetfulness obscures the obvious. When pleasure and convenience become
values in and of themselves, false ends displace necessary means. It is as
Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz said: While a good society should certainly never
want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will
not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never
have to fight.
The United States is still far from being a decadent country. And you cannot
blame the American public from becoming disenchanted with a war that has
gone on for so long and been so badly handled. The question is, in what
direction-relative to our current and future adversaries-are we headed?
Argue the question as we may, one thing is clear: We're fated to find out.
1. See The Book of War, comprising Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, translated by
Roger T. Ames (1993), and Carl von Clausewitz's On War, translated by O.J.
Matthijs Jolles (1943) (Modern Library, 2000). See also, Robert D. Kaplan,
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2001),
Chapter IV.
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