The Atlantic and The Military

The January/February issue of The Atlantic has a lot to say about the inadequacies of our military. James Fallows talks about the dangers inherent in the separation of the military and the people. Robert Scales criticizes our failures to provide adequate guns to infantrymen. And Joseph Epstein tells us how important being drafted was to him and can be to our country.

Fallows has a fairly long article, but definitely worth reading in its entirety. His basic point is that we are so separated from our soldiers that we no longer evaluate their successes and failures as we did for just about every 20th century war. Fallows places great emphasis on the word "chickenhawk", which describes a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age.

To quote Fallows: "Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do. Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war."

Leaving the question of the draft alone for now, one of the primary problems we have is that our politicians use the Pentagon budget to bring federal contracts and money to their districts. There is no attempt at analyzing the use of the money or whether the district and the nation might be better off without spending money this way. For example, much of the budget is spent on high tech weapons which may or may not work some day (vide the F-35) and we ignore such basics as providing proper guns to infantrymen.

Fallows thinks a start on rectifying the problem is to adopt three of the recommendations of a group chaired by Gary Hart which was appointed by Obama in 2011:

Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions. Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities. Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.

Scales, a retired major general, speaks of the vast superiority of the AK-47 to the M-14 used by our troops. Epstein gives his personal experience as a draftee to describe the personal beenfits that the draft provided him.