Afghanistan, the Volunteer Military, and the United States’ Lost Integrity

04 January 2011

Cutting our national heart out — inaction in the face of moral wrong

Afghanistan. Where civilian America’s integrity went to die.

Killing people in absurd geopolitical endeavors is wrong, according to historical American standards. Yet in Afghanistan, the American public has left our volunteer military (and the collateral damage that it cannot help but do in defending itself) completely on its own.

Very few of us examine the idiotic premises that led to the war.

Fewer still question the leaders who continue to insist that tactics — masquerading as strategy — comprise intelligent planning.

How did this lack of public involvement happen?

A military draft is one way to brake the military-industrial complex that thrives on war

It is easy not to care about war, when there is no chance that one will have to serve in it.

After our ill-advised interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I argued that the military draft be reinstituted. With a universal draft in place, we would be more careful with each other’s (and other nation’s) lives.

There’s nothing like the risk of one’s own death (or maiming) to focus attention on the usually questionable morality of killing.

However, those who thrive on war, including the military’s higher ranks, oppose the draft

Civilians’ stay-at-home guilt substitutes praising other people’s military courage for a more objectively observed whole-picture truth.

It has been easy to laud the volunteer armed services, while simultaneously disregarding the Services’ own contribution to the narrowly selfish interests of the military-industrial complex. The complex exists to make money and advance careers — without necessarily paying attention geopolitical accuracy or ethics.

Consequently, the military-industrial complex opposes the draft. What would it feed on, if a wider range of citizens did not want to provide it with their lives?

It is better in the war industry’s mind, to draw upon volunteer warriors who remain separate from the public at large. Like Spartans in a non-Spartan state.

The public’s not gonna miss a few dead or dismembered Spartans. Right?

This divorce (between the public and the military) is a point that columnist Richard Cohen made today

Richard Cohen’s column noted today that the all-volunteer military allowed the United States to carry on two distant wars, without an apathetic public directly acquainting itself with war’s price.

In addition to the Spartan/non-Spartan disconnect problem, Cohen observed that:

The other problem is that the military has become something of a priesthood.

It is virtually worshipped for its admirable qualities while its less admirable ones are hardly mentioned or known. It has such standing that it is awfully hard for mere civilians - including the commander in chief - to question it.

We kill coldly, for reasons of policy . . . Nothing personal. But revenge comes back hot and furious. It's personal, and we no longer remember why.

The Great Afghanistan Reassessment has come and gone and, outside of certain circles, no one much paid attention.

In this respect, the United States has become like Rome or the British Empire, able to fight nonessential wars with a professional military in places like Iraq.

Ultimately, this will drain us financially and, in a sense, spiritually as well.

Perspective is important — courage is not the same as organizational brain and efficiency

Though I repeatedly draw attention to the sacrifices of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, I do not consider the military itself to be an especially competent or insightful group of organizations. Columnist Cohen, a Vietnam vet, feels the same way.

The Services routinely tolerate abuses, stupidities, and brainless wastes that the government and civilian enterprises I have been involved with would literally not tolerate for even one week.

Ironically, the military (generically) is the first place one can go to see an almost complete lack of effective organizational supervision in action.

Retired Army Colonel Peter Mansoor made a similar qualitative point in a recent book review:

Anti-intellectualism and an unwillingness to read and learn from history broadly characterize both the United States and Israeli . . . . The lack of intellectual rigor in U.S. and Israeli professional military educational institutions is a symptom of this culture . . . .

By the beginning of the last decade, the U.S. military’s long-standing reliance on technological solutions to tactical and operational challenges had left it with a dearth of strategic thinking . . . .

In the absence of an organizational culture that valued intellectual creativity, the twenty-first-century U.S. Army operated, conceptually speaking, much like the early-twentieth-century German army — a tactically brilliant force that lost two world wars because it failed to think strategically.

Having studied thousands of pages of military officer training materials myself, I can only agree. My review left me tearing my hair out at their almost uniform inanity.

As a group, the essays, treatises, and videos (always written and reviewed by high-ranking officers) would make even a reasonably talented 11^th-grader blush with embarrassment for turning out such an execrable effort. I’m not exaggerating.

The ungoverned American military-industrial complex is humanity’s enemy

President-General Eisenhower was correct to warn about the rise of the self-interested military-industrial complex. Ungoverned, it is a witless death-dealing parasite.

C. J. Chivers presented a subtle example of the complex’s wrong-headedness in a Foreign Affairs essay this month. Writing about U.S. Marines in Afghanistan being attacked with surplus military arms, he wrote:

As a modern military force either accumulates far more small arms than it needs or updates and replaces its obsolete models, its government passes much of its old stock on to the global arms market . . . .

[W]here they are often hastily handed out with little accountability or control, even when issued by governments — such as the United States — that portray themselves as well organized and upstanding.

The mass distribution of modern military arms and the availability of surplus standardized ammunition have made many insurgencies harder to unravel and helped place whole swaths of many countries outside any government’s control . . . .

You see the irony. We send our sons and daughters out to be killed by weapons the military-industrial complex sold (with our complicity) to make (or save) a few bucks.

As citizens we might argue that the military-industrial complex is not “us.” But that does not excuse a democracy from being responsible for the complex’s excesses. Or for the deaths it inflicts on our youth. Deaths, which objectively seen, are the result of their parents’ and grandparents’ actions and not their own.

Bad karma rolling nastily down the generations.

Ethics and war

It is our collective responsibility as a nation to look out for our young. And, as well, not to endanger the lives of other nations’ peoples, who are not and never have been our enemies.

In this regard, one cannot expect young adults to yet have the wisdom that their elders accumulated over a lifetime. Their voluntarism is not generally well informed.

We do not have a soundly evaluated right to think that a volunteer warrior culture is necessarily a well-reasoned and geopolitically mature one.

Therefore, in Afghanistan, two Commanders in Chief have failed these volunteer warriors, their collateral Afghan victims, and us.

And today, in our public’s continued silence regarding Afghanistan — and an unrestrained American militarism generally — we, too, fail these young warriors and the world.

Revenge is a Biblical and Koranic concept — the karma of action and inaction will haunt us

Richard Cohen’s warning is important:

[R]evenge comes back hot and furious. It's personal, and we no longer remember why.

In any reasonable ethical framework:

It is morally reprehensible to kill people for bad reasons.

It is evolutionarily worse to kill our own people for stupid reasons and not care.

And it is unforgivable to be so divorced from other people’s suffering, as to forget why we killed (or maimed) whom we did.

Unavoidable moral conclusion

Indifferent death-dealing is a soul-sin under any one of the world’s major religions or systems of ethics.

Public indifference to the United States’ purposeless war-making has to end — if we are to retain our right to call ourselves ethically sound Americans.

PeteFree.com

Afghanistan, the Volunteer Military, and the United States’ Lost Integrity