Rosa Brooks, How Everything became War and the Military became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (2016) — a book review

25 October 2016

An easy to read overview — of the militarization of all things American

Rosa Brooks' How Everything became War and the Military became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (Simon & Schuster, 2016) is best suited to:

(a) readers who have little familiarity with the US military

(b) older people who wonder how it is that the United States has become a perennially war-making nation

and

(c) thoughtful types who are curious how the Feds managed to mangle one existing law after another, so as to justify committing one obvious illegality after another.

Rosa Brooks' background

Wikipedia summarizes Professor Brooks' background better than her publisher does:

From April 2009 to July 2011, [Rosa Brooks] served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, and in May 2010 she also became Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy, running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues.

At the Pentagon her portfolio included both rule of law and human rights issues and global engagement, strategic communication, and she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service for her work.

She is the former director of Yale Law School's human rights program, and she has taught at both Yale and at Harvard.

She has also been a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

She is married to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Mouer, an Army Special Forces officer.

Perpetual war, the author indicates, is costly in a wide variety of often unseen ways

Brooks notes that:

Fort Carson [Colorado] — which lost more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other Army post in the country — also had a "Fallen Heroes Family Center" and a "Wounded Warrior Transition Barracks."

On Fort Carson, everyone knew that endless war comes with endless costs.

Permit me to skip the part — where Brooks (or I) prove that the US is at perpetual war

People attracted to How Everything became War will already have noticed that the United States has been fighting one self-initiated war after another — for seemingly ever.

If you do not accept that premise, then this is probably not the best book to make the point.

Andrew Bacevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016) would be a better place to start.

Brooks' theme

When people use confused legal terminology regarding war, they entirely lose track of ethics:

Americans increasingly treat the military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken.

Unlike any other part of the government, the U.S. military can be relied to go where it's told and do what it's asked — or die trying.

[W]hen war becomes the norm, rather than the exception, both morality and law begin to lose their guiding force.

If we can't tell whether a particular situation counts as "war," we can't figure out which rules apply. And if we don't know which rules apply, we don't know when the deliberate killing of other human beings is permitted . . . and when killing constitutes simple murder. We don't know if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.

We don't know when it's acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial, and when due process is required before detention is permissible.

We don't know if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.

Ultimately, we lose our collective ability to place meaningful constraints on power and violence.

Unconstrained, Brooks says, is where we are now.

We flout every aspect of the Geneva Conventions on dubious grounds. Whatever we want to do, we do. Nobody and no social principle is safe. And eventually someone is going to turn the precedents that we created against us.

How did over this over-the-top militarization happen?

Two basic responses to 9/11 were possible:

If the 9/11 attacks were a crime, they trigger law enforcement rules that place substantial constraints on the state's ability to monitor, search, detain, and use lethal force against individuals.

If the 9/11 attacks were part of an armed conflict or initiated an armed conflict, they trigger the law of war, which places far fewer constraints on the state's use of coercion and lethal force.

Brooks' implied view — and mine (even on 9/11) — are that we would have been much better off starting at the crime end and making modifications to the process. Instead, we began at the war pole and did willy-nilly whatever our violent propensities encouraged us to do.

Law exists to restrain our base natures. Getting rid of it at the outset of our Global War on Terror was, arguably, a morally and strategically bad idea.

Note

It was, I think, disproportionate to:

(i) kill hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people

and

(ii) spend 1 trillion dollars

(iii) avenge the deaths of the roughly 3,000 Americans.

The result has been a Greater Middle East in deadly turmoil. No end to the violence is in sight.

A more police-oriented, self-defensive, terrorist-managing philosophy might have avoided such a lunatic outcome. There is such a thing as being too self-important, vengeful and security seeking.

Brooks appears to be inclined toward the same conclusion. Given her split allegiances, however, she lets us make that inference without fully stating it.

Negative — the book is mildly disjointed

How Everything became War is divided into somewhat disconnected and occasionally meandering chapters. Some of these have unrevealing names like — Lawyers with Guns, What We've Made It, and An Optimistic Enterprise.

Each chapter addresses a different aspect of the problem posed by rampant militarization. Readers looking for a coherently presented, rigidly on point argument may be slightly disappointed. Brooks has to wander a bit to drag illustrative thematic pieces into her net.

I found the book exceedingly well written. It requires no specialized knowledge. It stays away from the silly jargon that characterize so many books written by academics. Non-lawyers will have no difficulty instantly grasping Brooks' legal examples.

Brooks' most critically important observation

We could choose a less deadly, less human rights-stripping way to proceed:

If we live today in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, it is partly because far too many top decision makers have spent the last fifteen years playing the fame of law, instead of the game of life.

For lawyers, the game of law is safe and rule-bound: he who hews to the law can do no wrong. Whatever is not prohibited is permitted, we reason: if indefinite detention and mass surveillance aren't clearly illegal, they must be legal. If U.S. targeted killings are not manifestly unlawful, they must be lawful, and if they're lawful, they needn't keep us up at night, dreaming of dead and broken bodies.

When you leave the game of law for the game of life, you're thrown back into the messy world of policy and morality. Suddenly you have to argue about right and wrong, good and evil, fear and hope, cruelty and compassion.

The modern law of war is hardly sacred.

We don't have to accept a world in which the globe is a battlefield in a boundary-less war that can never end, and law has lost any ability to guide or constrain us.

We should be asking . . . What kind of world do we want to live in — and how do we get from here to there?

Hallelujah — proper footnotes

Footnote numbers appear beside the sentence they refer to. The notes themselves are located in the back of the book. They are complete.

As someone trained to appreciate proper science, medical, and legal writing, I was happy. Brooks has struck an exemplary blow against the constant deterioration of American publishing standards. Bless her.

How Everything became War is highly recommended

Anyone interested in this subject will appreciate Rosa Brooks' easily read, balanced and not at all simplistic effort.

PeteFree.com

Rosa Brooks, How Everything became War and the Military became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (2016) — a book review