Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

The kind of professionalism the military leadership had in mind was never actually achieved during the Korean War or, for that matter, the Vietnam War primarily because the men asked to do the fighting were mostly conscripts. The inequities of conscription, combined with high levels of casualties among those unable to evade the draft, destroyed much of the pride in being a member of the armed forces. Officers understood this and devoted themselves to furthering their own careers—getting their “tickets punched,” as the phrase went. During the Vietnam years in particular, the military began to employ increasingly rapid cycles of rotation in and out of the war zone to prevent disaffection and even mutiny. Korea and Vietnam did not come close to producing the casualty levels of World War II, but because our soldiers were still fundamentally civilians and did not understand the purposes of these wars, they and their families often became disillusioned or even deeply alienated.

The Korean War had a military participation ratio of 3.8 percent, Vietnam 4.3 percent. There were 33,651 American deaths in Korea, and 47,369 in Vietnam. Nonbattle deaths for the Korean War are unknown; they number 10,799 for Vietnam. Some 2.7 million Americans served in Vietnam, of whom 304,000 were wounded in action and over 75,000 were permanently disabled by their injuries. As of Memorial Day 1996, there were 58,202 names of the dead engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. Approximately 1,300 men are still listed as missing in action. 33Both wars were intensely unpopular, and the presidency was won three times by promises to bring them to an end—Eisenhower in the Korean era, and Johnson and Nixon in the Vietnam years (though both men proceeded to expand the war once elected).

When it became apparent during Vietnam that the military draft was being administered in an inequitable manner—university students were exempted while the weight of forced military service fell disproportionately on minorities and those with insufficient means to avoid it—the government chose to abolish the draft rather than apply it equitably. Ever since, service in the armed forces has been entirely voluntary and has become a route of social mobility for those to whom other channels of advancement are often blocked, much as was the case in the former Imperial Japanese Army during the 1930s, where city dwellers were commonly deferred from conscription “for health reasons” and the military was seen as a way out of the impoverished countryside. In the U.S. Army in 1997, 41 percent of enlisted personnel were nonwhite (a subject to which I shall return).

In addition to ending the draft and so turning the military into a strictly “professional” force, Vietnam contributed to the advance of militarism, counterintuitively, exactly because the United States lost the war. This defeat, deeply disillusioning to America’s leadership elites, set off a never-concluded debate about the “lessons” to be learned from it. 34For a newly ascendant far right, Vietnam became a just war that the left wing had not had the will or courage to win. Whether they truly believed this or not, rightist political leaders came to some quite specific conclusions. As Christian Appy observes, “For Reagan and Bush [then Reagan’s vice president], the central lesson of Vietnam was not that foreign policy had to be more democratic, but the opposite: it had to become ever more the province of national security managers who operated without the close scrutiny of the media, the oversight of Congress, or accountability to an involved public.” 35The result has been the emergence of a coterie of professional militarists who classify everything they do as secret and who have been appointed to senior positions throughout the executive branch.

Not all of these militarists wear uniforms. The historian Alfred Vagts defines “civilian militarism” as the “interference and intervention of civilian leaders in fields left to the professionals by habit and tradition.” Its effects are often anything but benign. In general, civilian militarism leads “to an intensification of the horrors of warfare. [In World War II, for example,] civilians not only... anticipated war more eagerly than the professionals, but played a principal part in making combat, when it came, more absolute, more terrible than was the current military wont or habit.” 36Civilians are driven more by ideology than professionals, and when working with the military, they often feel the need to display a warrior’s culture, which they take to mean iron-fisted ruthlessness, since they are innocent of genuine combat. This effect was particularly marked in the second Iraq war of 2003, when many ideologically committed civilians staffing the Department of Defense, without the experience of military service, no less of warfare, dictated strategies, force levels, and war aims to the generals and admirals. Older, experienced senior officers denigrated them as “chicken hawks.” 37This prominent role for civilian militarists was an unintended consequence of the Vietnam War.

During Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) often opposed the decisions of President Lyndon Johnson. They wanted a wider war than the president did, even at the risk of a nuclear war with China. As a historian of the JCS, H. R. McMaster, explains: “The president and [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara shifted responsibility for real planning away from the JCS to ad hoc committees composed principally of civilian analysts and attorneys, whose main goal was to obtain a consensus consistent with the president’s pursuit of the middle ground between disengagement and war. ... As American involvement in the war escalated, Johnson’s vulnerability to disaffected senior military officers increased because he was purposely deceiving the Congress and the public about the nature of the American military effort in Vietnam.” 38

The old and well-institutionalized American division of labor between elected officials and military professionals who advised elected officials and then executed their policies was dismantled, never to be recreated. During the Reagan administration, an ever-burgeoning array of amateur strategists and star-wars enthusiasts came to occupy the White House and sought to place their allies in positions of authority in the Pentagon. The result was the development of a kind of military opportunism at the heart of government, with military men paying court to the pet schemes of inexperienced politicians and preparing for lucrative postretirement positions in the arms industry or military think tanks. Top military leaders began to say what they thought their political superiors wanted to hear, while covertly protecting the interests of their individual services or of their minifiefdoms within those services. 39The military establishment increasingly became a gigantic cartel, operated to benefit the four principal services—the army, navy, Marine Corps, and air force—much the way the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) functions to maintain the profits of each of its members. Shares of the defense budget for each service have not varied by more than 2 percent over the past twenty-five years, during which time the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States fought quite varied wars in Panama, Kuwait, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Military needs did not dictate this stability.

During the 1990s and in the opening years of the twenty-first century, lobbyists and representatives of groups wanting to face off against nations like China that might pose future challenges to American hegemony took charge of virtually all politicomilitary policy. 40They often sought to purge the government of experts who stood in their way, and the influence of the State Department notably withered. For example, Kurt M. Campbell, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Clinton administration, notes approvingly that China policy has increasingly been taken over by a new “‘strategic class’—that collection of academics, commentators and policymakers whose ideas help define the national interest.” He says that this new crop of military experts, of which he is a charter civilian member, is likely not to know much about China but instead to have “a background in strategic studies or international relations” and to be particularly watchful “for signs of China’s capacity for menace.” 41These are the attitudes not of prudent foreign policy thinkers but of militarists.