Honestly, I think our country is doing pretty well in supporting our troops abroad without having ration books to remind us in our daily lives that we are at war. Our people certainly think highly of our military. This article is just silly in its solutions to a so-called civilian-military divide.
Let's start with their assessment that our leaders don't serve:
For nearly two generations, no American has been obligated to join up, and few do. Less than 0.5 percent of the population serves in the armed forces, compared with more than 12 percent during World War II. Even fewer of the privileged and powerful shoulder arms. In 1975, 70 percent of members of Congress had some military service; today, just 20 percent do, and only a handful of their children are in uniform.
I'm no math major, but if 20 members of the 538 people in Congress served in uniform, that's 3.7% Now correct me if I'm wrong, but if 0.5% of the population serves in the military, isn't Congress doing okay? Sure, that 0.5% is for those currently serving in uniform versus those who have ever served for the Congressional percentage, so maybe that is where the slacking comes in. With 23.4 million veterans out of a population of 315.9 million people, the veteran population is 7.4%
So okay, members of Congress are half as likely as the average person to have served in the military. You'd have to adjust this somewhat I'm sure, since you don't have to be a citizen to be a veteran but you have to be an American citizen to be in Congress, pulling the Congressional veteran rate down.
Also, 10% of veterans are female while 19% of Congressional delegates are female. Just with having more females in Congress than in the veteran population will reduce the overall service record of Congress compared to the general population.
So the service statistics cited in the article are skewed to make the service problem worse than it is. Is it significant that Congress has at least half the rate of military experience as the general population? I'm not so sure it is that significant. Perhaps if the Congressional experience was a tenth of the general public's experience that would be too low.
As for a separation from the public, if you assume each veteran has two parents, 1.2 siblings, and 2.2 children, then over 126 million Americans have some close relationship with someone who has served in the military. Sure, there will be overlap with family traditions of service; and while parents for older veterans shouldn't be in there, I don't count grandchildren or even close friends.
Excuse me for saying this, but if you don't know someone who has served in the military, maybe your social circle is a little inbred? Hey, maybe our left shouldn't assume soldiers are stupid failures who can't make it in the civilian world and are all potential war criminals one bomb blast away from committing atrocities? Hmm?
I just don't see the civilian-military divide. Just look at the attention our military gets on Memorial Day, on the 4th of July, and on Veterans Day. You want civilian-military divide, go back to pre-World War I when the military was looked down and and had lots of immigrants (an entire corps in Grant's army was German speaking!).
As for the old slam that the enlisted ranks are recruited from the lower socio-economic classes, this is not really true but will not die as a belief in some quarters. The military doesn't want dummies. It might have made for tight military-civilian relations when the military needed lots of cannon fodder, no matter what their brain power, but are you really eager for that "solution?"
There's some drivel about how the military fights that I won't bother with. It's word-count filler, as far as I can tell. I expect more from one of our generals.
The authors note that we've deployed the military 144 times in the 40 years since we ended the draft in 1973, but only 19 times in the 27 years of 1946 to 1973, as if the public cares less about volunteers than draftees--when the wealthy and better educated could legally evade the draft. But the prior period included 11 years of war (Korea and Vietnam) where about 95,000 military personnel died. Compare that to about 7,300 dead in the volunteer era, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. So explain to me again how we are more casual with the lives of volunteer soldiers?
We'd also be less likely to send troops to smaller fights when we had major wars to fight like Korea and Vietnam. And the volunteer era includes 24 post-Cold War years when the need to focus on the Soviet threat ended, making it easier to send troops abroad without weakening the central fight.
But let's move on to their actual proposed solutions to this terrible non-problem.
One, a draft:
Let’s start with a draft lottery. Americans neither need nor want a vast conscript force, but a lottery that populated part of the ranks with draftees would reintroduce the notion of service as civic obligation. The lottery could be activated when volunteer recruitments fell short, and weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled Americans, providing an incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters.
What!? We haven't fallen short in recruiting even during war. And if we had a shortfall of a few thousand we'd fill it with a national draft less likely to select an individual than a lottery ticket would have the chance of being a winner? That's stupid. And expensive. And irrelevant.
Next!
The Pentagon could also restore the so-called Total Force Doctrine, which shaped the early years of the all-volunteer force but was later dismantled. It called for a large-scale call-up of the Reserves and National Guard at the start of any large, long deployment.
How large do these authors want mobilization to be? Even with just 60,000 fighting in Afghanistan, we have 55,000 reservists mobilized right now! I don't know how to break it to these authors, but we require a large-scale call-up right now!
Surely, their suggestions get better, won't they?
Congress must also take on a larger role in war-making. Its last formal declarations of war were during World War II. It’s high time to revisit the recommendation, made in 2008 by the bipartisan National War Powers Commission, to replace the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires notification of Congress after the president orders military action, with a mandate that the president consult with Congress before resorting to force.
Huh. Before both the Afghanistan War and before the Iraq War, Congress authorized those wars. So their solution doesn't seem to address the problem they claim exists. Or do they think prior authorization only counts if we call in the soon-to-be enemy ambassador, slap him across the face with white gloves, read from a friggin' scroll unfurled before them, and utter the magic words, "we declare war!"?
And just for laughs, for the Libya War there was neither a Congressional authorization nor a post-conflict initiation compliance with the War Powers Act. But we need a new law involving Congress in addition to the Constitution and the War Powers Act?
Let's move on:
Congress should also insist that wars be paid for in real time. Levying special taxes, rather than borrowing, to finance “special appropriations” would compel the body politic to bear the fiscal burden — and encourage citizens to consider war-making a political choice they were involved in, not a fait accompli they must accept.
World War II--that Golden Era of tight military-civilian relations--couldn't have been fought at all under those rules. And what we fight for benefits future generations. That's why we borrow money to build roads and other capital expenditures--why should the generation that builds something have to pay for something that future generations will also use?
Maybe non-defense expenditures could be cut for the duration, eh? Maybe no more federal employee paid conferences for a start. Surely there are other luxury expenditures we can put off until V Whatever Day?
But hey, the authors wrap it up strong!
Other measures to strengthen citizen engagement with the military should include decreased reliance on contractors for noncombat tasks, so that the true size of the force would be more transparent; integrating veteran and civilian hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, which would let civilians see war’s wounded firsthand; and shrinking self-contained residential neighborhoods on domestic military bases, so that more service members could pray, play and educate their children alongside their fellow Americans. Schools, the media and organs of popular culture also have a duty to help promote civic vigilance.
Anti-contractor bias is just silly. Why should hiring people who for the most part don't fight--and who are cheaper in the long run--hurt our public's appreciation for those who fight in uniform? Large numbers of uniformed service personnel are an artifact of the draft era when cheap soldiers could do jobs that in the past would have been done by contractors. We're going back to traditional practices here. Good grief, World War II is not our entire military tradition as much as you might wish it to be.
Integrating civilian and veteran hospitals would reduce the care for veterans who have wounds, injuries, and diseases that are rare in the civilian world. Far more numerous civilians would swamp the veterans, and veteran care would suffer. This shows respect for the military?
As for integrating civilian and military neighborhoods, military neighborhoods oddly enough cluster around military bases--which are mostly in the south. Unless we forcibly relocate the Upper West Side to Augusta, Georgia, for example, this is nonsense on stilts.
But hey, if one suggestion is that our media--including reporters--should finally get a clue about military operations, military history, and the people who join the military, I'm all in for that.
God, I'm exhausted. Arggghhhh!!! This was the biggest load of dross I've read all month. And that says something in a world that includes Tom Friedman.
There, I'm in the proper frame of mind to hate on Chicago as the Red Wings take to the ice in a few minutes. So I'll thank Eikenberry and Kennedy for that kindness.
UPDATE: I'm thinking the civilian-federal gap might be a greater problem.
UPDATE: Oh, and I'm grateful to our military that I don't feel the crushing fear of being at war every day. But perhaps we'll get lucky and experience Boston bombings more frequently to increase that good feeling of being at war along with our military.
UPDATE: This got to me during the Iraq War. Many opponents of the war decried that civilians didn't "feel" the war. They did that not to close civilian-military ties but to burden civilians so they'd turn against the troops at war, and so hasten our defeat in the war. Our military is strong enough to insulate us from much of the direct burdens of war in our own neighborhoods. That's a good thing.
