Reviewed by Lawrence Freedman
Sunday, May 8, 2005

THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM

How Americans are Seduced by War

By Andrew J. Bacevich. Oxford Univ. 270 pp. $28

This lively book is set up as a polemic. It promises provocation by warning about America's dual obsession with pursuing military might and imposing its way of life on the rest of the world. On occasion, Andrew J. Bacevich manages an appropriately solemn and prophetic tone, and he can sound derisive -- even cross -- when describing the institutional self-interest of the armed forces, the utopianism of neoconservatives or the rhetorical excesses of evangelical Christians. But he is too much a professor, too good a historian and too understanding of the military (in which he once served) and of conservatism (to which he still has some attachment) to be an effective polemicist. Though the argument doesn't quite work, this is nonetheless a valuable account of the paradoxical consequences of the U.S. effort to recover from Vietnam.

Bacevich -- a Boston University professor, West Point alumnus and Vietnam veteran -- demonstrates a fine grasp of past debates on military matters and an ability to relate them to today's events and personalities. The initial and unsurprising response to the Vietnam debacle, he writes, was to cut back on military expenditures and commitments. But this was followed by a backlash led by determined generals, internationalist intellectuals, patriotic church leaders and right-wing politicians who took pride in military preparedness and argued that it was dangerous for America to be weak. So successful was their advocacy, suggests Bacevich, that the United States now possesses an extravagant military establishment (which Democrats have learned not to challenge) and an exaggerated belief in its worth in projecting American values around the world.

He defines this new, post-Vietnam American militarism as "a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force." This means that the nation's "strength and well-being" came to be described in terms of military preparedness and action and the fostering of military ideals. The promotion of this militaristic worldview is not the result of a conspiracy -- let alone the Bush administration's Iraq policies -- but rather the relentless promotion of its various aspects by a motley crew of preachers, patriots and politicians.

Of course, the military professionals were at the fore, but they were not particularly interested in promoting a belligerent foreign policy. Rather, they were determined to regain their standing and self-respect. The first step was to end the widely disliked Vietnam-era draft, making it possible for the general population to support the military without actually having to get involved. This shift made reservists more important because it proved hard to keep the military's numbers up solely through volunteers, who tended to be those with few alternative career choices. By making any actual fighting dependent on these reservists, the generals deliberately made it harder for the politicians to go to war.

This may seem counterintuitive, but institutionally it had its own logic. The generals did not want to be used as the national solution for all types of international problems. They wanted to dissuade civilians from using the military in a cavalier fashion. They also wanted to prevent excessive civilian interference in operational matters, for which the senior brass blamed the failure in Vietnam. The aim, therefore, was to maintain a sharp focus on the forms of warfare with which they felt most comfortable: conventional campaigns against other great powers. Big wars had the advantage of requiring lots of expensive firepower and combat-ready troops, while also being the least likely type of fighting to erupt.

By the same token, involvement in lesser conflicts was discouraged; these would not involve "proper" soldiering, could not be won through decisive battles and were likely to lose public support. The professional military -- then led by Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- was not even keen on taking on Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, a conflict that was largely fought on conventional lines and did much to restore the military's reputation.

The military, therefore, has not really been a promoter of militarism. If anything, Bacevich argues, rather than trying to impose military values on all of American society, career soldiers have celebrated their own distinctiveness as something the rest of U.S. society should admire, and they have shown no great interest in going to war.

The military's problems really began as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, thereby depriving the Pentagon of the potential enemy that could justify a massive conventional force. Instead, the operations of the 1990s were in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo -- the lesser conflicts that the military wished to avoid. The tension was summed up in then-U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright's famous question to Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" The military stayed busy after the Soviet collapse because politicians kept on finding things for them to do.

So the peculiar thing about the militarism that Bacevich deplores is that it has been promoted not by people in uniform, but by civilians who often went out of their way in their youth to avoid military service. Many (such as Ronald Reagan, who served mainly in movies) simply invoked the military as a means of rekindling patriotic myths and celebrating the troops' admirable qualities of self-sacrifice and solidarity. But the most serious forms of renewed militarism, propounded by such leaders as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz (neither of whom served), came from those who believed that America's purpose was to make the post-Cold War world a better place.

This new form of Wilsonian idealism gained energy from preventable tragedies: ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, humanitarian distress in Africa. These were not natural causes for conservatives or the military; hence the importance of the neoconservatives, who found language to make this sort of activism sound Churchillian, in contrast to the allegedly appeasing tendencies of the left. They were bolstered by professional civilian strategists, who enthused that new technologies made possible the precise, discriminate and humane use of armed force, with fewer victims all around. These arguments were popular among the Clinton administration's liberal hawks, like Albright and Richard Holbrooke. If anything, they were treated warily by the Bush administration -- prior to 9/11, that is. Al Qaeda's attack revived evangelical claims that war could have a deeply Christian purpose. During the Cold War, this was found in the struggle against atheistic communism; now the enemy was fundamentalist Islam.

Bacevich sees the roots of the surging American glorification of all things military in the country's attempts to cope with the Middle East, notably after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and a growing dependence on the region's oil. There is some truth in this, although here his reading of events is not always reliable -- notably on the Reagan administration's ill-fated early 1980s intervention in Beirut, where he downplays the significance of misguided U.S. attempts to use a humanitarian mission to force Lebanon's shaky government to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Moreover, by focusing on the internal forces driving the country toward militarism, Bacevich gives too little weight to the external events that often were actually in the saddle.

He concludes by warning against conspiracy theories and by setting unsurprising tests of utility and legitimacy for the use of military force that would not have precluded any recent operations, other than Iraq. Iraq is the book's constant subtext, but Bacevich does not offer a screed. Iraq has soured the atmosphere about America throwing its weight around, but for much of the 1990s, as he helpfully reminds us, there was as much international concern about America's reluctance to intervene as there were fears about its going too far.

When the book comes around to prescriptions, Bacevich argues for a slimmed-down military and for seeing force as a last resort. Other than that, his main objection appears to be to unilateral action -- not to combat itself. He accepts the need, "in conjunction with other nations of goodwill," to "respond with appropriate military force to wholesale violations of human rights, to instances of widespread suffering, or to looming threats endangering international peace and comity." Above all, he insists that the United States "should dispatch its legions with modest expectations regarding the likely benefits to accrue from victory coupled with a lively appreciation of the surprises and disappointments that almost inevitably flow from any armed conflict." This is wise advice, and it probably will be reinforced by the Iraq experience -- in which case the new American militarism will turn out to have been a passing phenomenon. ·

Lawrence Freedman is professor of war studies at King's College, London, and the author of several books, including "Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam" and "Deterrence."