To be sure, we hire what I call the modern American mercenary army internally (unlike the hated Hessians that King George III employed in trying to extinguish the American Revolution). But it is nonetheless an all-volunteer force that signs up for some mighty dangerous work primarily for wages and benefits, a compensation package that may not always be commensurate with the dangers in store, as current recruiting problems testify. Now I am emphatically not impugning either the idealism or the patriotism of those who serve today. I happen to believe that the profession of arms is a noble calling. And I see no shame whatsoever in wage labor. But the factremains that we have evolved a force that is extraordinarily lean, mean and lethal-and that has an unprecedented asymmetrical relation both to the world around us and to our own society. Now let me explain what it is about that compound asymmetry that I find worrisome.
First, the relation of the U.S. military to the rest of the world: By some reckonings, the United States‘ military budget is greater than the military expenditures of all other nations combined. That money buys an arsenal of smart, precision weapons and the skilled operators to fire them that can lay down a coercive footprint in the world larger and more intimidating than anything history has ever seen. Now, we believe that our armed forces seek only just goals and at the end of the day will be understood as exerting a benign influence. But that perspective may not come so easily to those who find themselves on the receiving end of that supposedly beneficent violence. Here, surely, is why so many people, even our sister societies in Europe and North America, regard us with wariness and apprehension.
B ut t he se c o nd e l e me nt o f w ha t I ’ v e c a l l e d t he “c o mpo und asymmetry”of America‘s military relationship to the world and to society, the second element of this compound asymmetry is even more troubling. It concerns the military’s place in the larger context of American society itself- and here the historical comparison with the World War II era comes into especially sharp and telling focus. From the inauguration of the draft in 1940 through the second world War‘s end just 60 years ago in 1945, the United States put some 16 million men and several thousand women into uniform. What’s more, it mobilized the economic, social and psychological resources of the society down to the last factory and railcar and victory garden. World War II was a“total war.”It compelled the mass participation of all citizens and the commitment of virtually all the society‘s energies to secure the ultimate victory.
But thanks to something called the“revolution in military affairs,” a product of the last decade and a half that has wedded the achievements of the newest electronic and information technologies to the destructive purposes of history’s second-oldest profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is proportionate to population about 4 percent-1/25th-of the size of the force that fought in World War II. What‘s more, in the behemoth11 trillion American economy, the fruits of which we all enjoy, the total military budget is now less than 4 percent of gross domestic product. In World War II it was more than 40 percent-a greater than tenfold difference in the relative incidence of the military’s claim on the society‘s overall resources.
Now the implications of this seem to me to be pretty clear: History’s most deadly and destructive military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so-that force and that situation puts at risk very few of its sons and daughters, and only those who go willingly into harm‘s way. Our society neither asks nor requires any significant material deprivations on the part of the citizens in whose name that force is ultimately being deployed.
I believe this is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the Founders correctly feared was among the greatest danger of standing armies-a danger that in their day was made manifest in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Jefferson said of Bonaparte that he“Transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm. Some will use this as a lesson against the practicability of republican government.”Said Jefferson,“I read it as a lesson against the danger of standing armies.”
I recognize that some, perhaps many, of you may find it offensive to call today’s armed forces a“mercenary army,”and I repeat that I am in no way impugning the motives or the loyalties of those who are currentlyserving. But they are surely not the members of the citizen army that we fielded two generations ago-drawn from all ranks of society, without respect to background or privilege or education, and an army mobilized on such a scale that civilian society‘s deep and durable consent to the shaping and the use of that force was absolutely necessary. Leaving questions of equity aside, I for one cannot believe that it is healthy for democracy to let such an important function-the application of military force-to grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy-like dealing out death and destruction to others and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than those that could be accomplished by the slower and more vexatious business of diplomacy. And the life of a robust democratic society should be, in some measure at least, a strenuous life, one that makes demands on its citizens, especially when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death.
