Andrew Bacevich is always worth reading. For those of us who are not insiders in the military and government, every chapter after the first is wealth information.
In very general terms, Bacevich identifies the US as the sole global military power and observes that since 1990 our wars have become more frequent because the US has become progressively less tolerant of any perceived risk to what it imagines to be in its national interests. Bacevich says this began with the identification of the oil reserves in Persian Gulf as a strategically vital concern of the US and with NSC-68, which in 1950 identified freedom and order abroad as vital interests as well.
The book offers no solutions but is a serious attempt to identify the elements of the problem. The book is like a jig saw puzzle. Bacevich has filled in the edges and some larger sections and seem to invite us to try our hands at fitting a few of the pieces together ourselves.
Every story has to begin somewhere. Bacevich suggests that modern American militarism began in the Wilson Administration but he does not provide much in the way of explanation. I think that militarism has been a fixture in the US since the first indian war, the Pequot War in 1637. It is hard to think of a decade since 1700 when the US has not been involved in some kind of war or military adventure. The indian wars were almost continuous until 1890, there was the French and Indian war in the 1750s and then there was the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, the war with the Moros in the Philippine, the Boxer Rebellion and the garrisons in China, expeditions here and there in the Caribbean and adventures in Russia after WW I.
But WW I was a watershed. What limited the US to mostly small wars before 1908 was the old Militia Act of 1792. Under that act, the states retained almost complete control of its own militia and could resist calls from the federal government to participate in an unpopular war in the US and the militia could not be used at all outside of the US. This happened in New England during the War of 1812 to the point where there was talk of secession or a separate peace with Great Britain. At the same time, federal revenues were limited and the standing army was just large enough to keep the indian wars going.
The Civil War proved the militia system could work, if the states agreed it should work. The US did quickly field large armies that were reasonably well trained, led and equipped. Less than 4 months after war broke out both sides raised armies of about 30,000 men each and both sides were able put about 18,000 men each on the Bull Run battlefield on July 21, 1861. Throughout the Civil War, the regular army was a minor, almost inconsequential, part of the Union Army. During the Spanish-American War, the state governors had to allow state troops to be deployed to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
The structure of the national army of the US changed with the Militia Act of 1903 as amended in 1908. Thereafter, the militias became the National Guard, which fell under the control of the president and could be deployed outside the US. In WW I the AEF in France numbered about 1,250,000 men in November 1918 of which 200,000 were regulars or marines, 400,000 were National Guard and the rest draftees or volunteers.
This was Wilson's war and he had been preparing for it since at least 1916. WW I was not universally popular, there was resistance and the Wilson Administration was quite heavy handed in suppressing dissent in the Mid-West. It was a war of choice and it is tempting to say that had the US not become involved, the world might well have been much better off between 1920 and 1950. It was also a particularly poorly run war. Pershing seems to have been intent on getting as many Americans killed between June and November 1918 as the British and French did on the Somme and at Verdun in 1916. He was using essentially the same tactics the British and French had abandoned after July 1916.
Bacevich suggests that the core of our current difficulties is that the White House and Pentagon have too much control over how the armed forces are used. Surprisingly, Bacevich suggests that the structure of the Army of the United States that emerged after Vietnam was new as it required that every active duty brigade be augment with reserves and guardsmen before it could be deployed. However, to my eye, the National Defense Act of 1916 and Army's Order of Battle between 1920 and 1940 contemplates exactly the same sort of arrangement. The basic square division had two regular army regiments and two guard or reserve regiments. Most of the division's support functions would activated guardsmen and reserves. The shift from square to triangle divisions, and more recently to brigades, did not change that. It seems that the Army between 1950 and 1972 was different. Then, all of the active divisions and brigades were chiefly two or three draftees and enlistees with a cadre of regulars.
Bacevich offers the usual solutions, Congress is at fault, Congress should do more to stay the hands of those for whom armed intervention is a way of life. But Bacevic seems to not realize that Congress responds first to those who fund their election campaigns, then to the their party and last of all to the voters or their own conscience. Moreover, the Congress of the US is grotesquely un-representative. In most of the western democracies each popularly elected representative stands for between 100-150,000 people. Here in the US each representative stand for about 650,000 people and, on average, each senator stands for 6 million people. As a result our elections depend on money and influence peddling. And the defense industry is huge source of both. Finally, for 75 years the Supreme Court has been tilting in favor of the executive at the expense of Congress. A national political solution is simply not likely.
Perhaps the Militia Act of 1903 could be amended to provide that calling up the Guard or reserves is under the control of Congress, not the executive, and that they can be activated only by a specific vote in congress. It seems that the way things are now, Congress votes a vague authorization to use military force and then the executive, acting through the Pentagon, activates whatever reserve and guard units it pleases. Perhaps the reserve should be reduced or eliminated, except for a few very specific non-combat job descriptions.
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- Gerry HassanReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 5, 2008
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Canada on August 31, 2010
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