Return to the ideals of Jefferson

William Astore is a retired military officer and also taught at the Air Force Academy. He has some profound things to say about our military and our attitude toward it. His article is based on two quotes from Jefferson that appear on the walls of West Point:

• "The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace." 
• "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be." 

Here are some of his concluding remarks:

Can we connect this behavior to the faults of the service academies? Careerism. Parochialism. Technocratic tendencies. Elitism. A focus on image rather than on substance. Lots of busywork and far too much praise for our ascetic warrior-heroes, results be damned. A tendency to close ranks rather than take responsibility. Buck-passing, not bucking the system. The urge to get those golden slots on graduation and the desire for golden parachutes into a lucrative world of corporate boards and consultancies after "retirement," not to speak of those glowing appearances as military experts on major TV and cable networks.
America's military academies are supposed to be educating and developing leaders of character. If they're not doing that, why have them? America's senior military leaders are supposed to be winning wars, not losing them. (Please feel free to name one recent victory by the U.S. military that hasn't been of the Pyrrhic variety.) So why do we idolize them? And why do we fail to hold them accountable?

These are more than rhetorical questions. They cut to the heart of an American culture that celebrates its military cadets as its finest young citizens, a culture that lauds its generals even as they fail to accept responsibility for wars that end not in victory but - well, come to think of it, they just never end.

The way forward: I don't have to point the way because Thomas Jefferson already did. Just read his quotations in the West Point library: we need to become a peace-loving nation again; we need to act as if war were our last resort, not our first impulse; we need to recognize that war is corrosive to democracy and that the more military power is exercised the weaker we grow as a democratic society.

Jefferson's wisdom, enshrined at West Point, shouldn't be entombed there. We need a new generation of cadets - and a few renegade generals of my generation as well - who want to serve us by not going to war, who know that a military is a burden to democracy even when victorious, and especially when it's not. Otherwise, we're in trouble in ways we haven't yet begun to imagine.