On October 7th, John Arquilla, Andrew Bacevich, James Fallows, and Gary Hart, writing in The Atlantic, proposed the creation of an independent, nonpartisan investigatory commission to evaluate the military experience of the past decade. In their view, the United States is now in an era of “persistent conflict” with no end in sight in which our armed forces achieve indifferent results while costing American taxpayers exorbitant amounts. To address this they believe that the United States must extract from the military experience of the past decade insights that can provide the basis for a more effective and affordable 21st century force.
They identify several areas of investigation likely to bear fruit, among them is:
The civil-military gap. On the eve of his retirement, outgoing JCS chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, speaking on behalf of those who serve, noted that his fellow Americans “don’t know … what we have been through.” Americans don’t know because today’s military exists in splendid isolation from the rest of society — an unintended consequence of abandoning the citizen-soldier tradition four decades ago. The question deserves to be asked and studied: Does the existing All-Volunteer Force serve the nation’s best interests?
Their work is timely, thoughtful, and well worth consideration. It is encouraging to see a group of such accomplished scholars focusing on the civil-military cultural divide and recommending a serious national debate on the subject.
I think what is happening with the disconnect you describe is a real shame with serious consequences – people have such naive simple views of the military, and of military action in general. There’s a lot involved here. For starters, there is something to be said for the British practice where of age children of leaders and future leaders are drafted into the military for actual service. That said, because of the gap or disconnect, and how easily we are misled into wars, plural, we end up getting involved in these long protracted messes that are hard to end and resolve, for which the goals continually shift, and it all ends up greatly impacting our precious servicemen and women, and depleting our resources at home. This is because things always turn out to be infinitely more convoluted and complicated than our simple forecasts. It also comes back, I think, to our politics and the media which for mass consumption frames things in simple sound bit terms of black and white, not meaningful dialog; which in turn ends up something like the blind leading the blind. To be an effective military and world power, as we are and hope to remain, major politicians and spokespeople must know something of foreign issues and relations other than a nonsequitur that the far end of the Aleutians Islands are (…may be) within earshot of Russia, or similar embarrassing laughable assertions that are somehow allowed to pass for dialog.