(HOST) As members of the Vermont National Guard come home from the latest deployment to Afghanistan, commentator Bill Mares reflects on what is beginning to feel like a state of perpetual war – and reaches an unsettling conclusion.
(MARES) Not long ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech which decried the growing disconnect between the general population and the volunteer soldiers, who have been fighting the longest large-scale military operations in our history. He said that for most Americans the wars remain an abstraction.
His solution was to ask that more universities bring back ROTC to train more officers.
I agree with him; furthermore, I believe that that this remoteness of the military is both a cause and effect in the ever-growing militarization of our foreign policy. It has led to a state where, as the saying goes, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
In the last year we have seen the surge in Afghanistan and a deepening military involvement inside Pakistan. We’re sending naval ships into the Yellow Sea to rattle the North Korean cage. We’re squeezing the Chinese in the South China Sea. Yemen threatens to be another battleground. And all this comes against a background drum roll to "Bomb Iran!"
In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the military budget has been sacrosanct. Both political parties are complicit in this, for they often see defense spending as a big boost to local economies. And some of the loudest voices in a fragmented media equate patriotism with a kind of chauvinistic militancy.
We have more than 700 military bases ringing the globe. Do they really make us any safer? But which President or Congress would dare dismantle them?
Psychologically speaking, whereas in past wars Americans learned to fear specific enemies, today we have conditioned ourselves to live a general, ill-defined state of fear.
The "Global War on Terror" promises to have us at war forever. General David Petraeus himself has said that Afghanistan "…is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives."
Furthermore, today’s wars are cheap! They require us to spend only 2% of our Gross National Product, compared to 36% during World War Two. "The army is at war, but the country is not," says David Kennedy, the Stanford University historian.
What to do? Well, I say, follow Gates’s logic to the end and reinstate the draft.
Make ALL subject to military (or civilian) service. Wars on this scale are not games for Presidents and Congress to play while the rest of us party on with American Idol and the National Football League or throw tantrums over airport pat-downs.
Andrew Bacevich is a Boston University professor and Vietnam veteran who lost a son to a roadside bomb in Iraq. "The draft," he wrote recently, "offers a more equitable distribution of sacrifice in war time. No longer will rural Americans, people of color, recent immigrants, and members of the working class fill the ranks of the armed forces in disproportionate numbers. With conscription, the children of the political elite and of the well-to-do will once again bear their fair share of the load."