Book Review: The Unmooring of American Military Power

• Date: 01 July 2019
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Jessica D. Blankshain
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18758670
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Armed Forces & Society
2019, Vol. 45(3) 582-586
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2018
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Maddow, R. (2012). The Unmooring of American Military Power. New York, NY: Crown. 288 pp.
$25 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0307460998.
Reviewed by: Jessica D. Blankshain, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18758670
In Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Rachel Maddow—yes, that
Rachel Maddow—looks at the modern American national security establishment
and asks how did we get here? While not a work of academic social science, this
reviewer suggests the book is nonetheless a useful resource for scholars. Maddow’s
thesis is that America has become a nation too comfortable with war. She argues that
the use of American military power, and the outlay of money to fund the national
security establishment, has developed its own momentum without the American
public noticing. Maddow traces the roots of this development to two key trends:
first, the separation of the American public from the costs of war, and second, the
shift in war-making power from the legislative to the executive branch. As Maddow
writes, “This book is about how and why we’ve drifted” from the Founders’ efforts,
in building the new U.S. government, to constrain military adventurism. “It wasn’t
inevitable. And it’s fixable” (p. 8).
The book unfolds in roughly chronological order. Maddow begins by asserting
that the constraints the Founders put in place were largely successful through World
War II: “When the United States went to war, the entire United States went to war.
And no nation’s military demobilized with such verve and velocity when the fight-
ing was over” (p. 10). Maddow argues that this “Jeffersonian prudence” (p. 10)
began to crack when President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to call up the National
Guard and Reserves to fight in Vietnam, avoiding the need to ask Congress and the
American people to fully support the conflict. She writes that this decision “tore
the military from the heart of the country, and it tore the country from the heart of
the military” (p. 17). Maddow does not explicitly address the draft’s failure...