Tradition abandoned.

• Author: Bacevich, A.J.
• Position: US military forces

America's Military in a New Era

Overlooked by the general public, resolutely ignored by policy elites, misconstrued by those few scholars who attend to its study, the relationship between the United States military and American society clamors for attention. Despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise, we have a serious problem on our hands.

At first blush, this may seem an exaggeration. After all, the polls in recent years rank the military at or near the top of major institutions that Americans trust and respect. Such polls are misleading. They mislead because popularity at the level of mass politics counts for little within the precincts of elite politics where national security policy is made. Indeed, attributing great weight to public opinion may exacerbate civil-military problems by conveying to the officer corps an inflated view of its status and political clout.

That contentiousness, disharmony, and pervasive mistrust characterize present-day American civil-military relations at the elite level is all too clear. A bill of particulars would include the following evidence: the overt disrespect to which active duty military officers subjected President Bill Clinton after he took office; the controversy generated by the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - especially pronounced while General Colin Powell served as JCS chairman - in circumscribing or pre-emptively vetoing policy options; the near rebellion in the ranks, apparently condoned by senior uniformed officers, over the issue of gays in the military; the refusal of the military to assign accountability for failure (except by passing the buck upward), spectacularly evident in the aftermath of Mogadishu and the Dhahran bombing; the recent army scandal over widespread sexual harassment in its training centers; and above all, Tailhook, with its lingering and poisonous fallout culminating, however obliquely, in the suicide of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda.

Such incidents have given rise to a spate of articles pointing to a burgeoning "crisis" in civil-military relations.(1) Published analysis has included loose speculation that the American military may be careening "out of control." Featuring titles such as "Welcome to the Junta" or "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", these efforts to assess the current state of U.S. civil-military relations have portrayed the issue chiefly in terms of an ominous erosion of military subordination to civilian authority. Yet none of these efforts has put civil-military relations on the national political agenda. Few informed observers can imagine circumstances in which American soldiers might directly threaten the republic. Most military officers, meanwhile, consider the entire line of argument to be deeply insulting. To suggest that the institutions they serve might mount a constitutional challenge is, in their eyes, to impugn their own personal loyalty and patriotism.

Indeed, the more lurid the forecast and the more provocative the language, the easier it has been to dismiss the entire subject. If anything, the well-intentioned efforts of members of the "out of control/coup over the horizon" school have proven counterproductive. However inadvertently, they have foreclosed serious public consideration of civil-military relations, and reinforced the popular inclination to consign such matters to that realm in which myth is served neat, undiluted by facts. No coup? No problem, and no further discussion required.

A Revealing Episode

Yet the alarmists are correct in suggesting that Americans can ill-afford to take healthy civil-military relations for granted. Paradoxically, their failure stems not from an excess of imagination but a dearth of it. In advancing the case for more attention to civil-military relations, they have spent themselves in a futile attempt to resuscitate a paradigm - the uniformed military as a threat to the constitutional order that has long since breathed its last. In doing so they have missed other, more important kinds of evidence that something is fundamentally amiss. Take this example: General gets dissed by White House staffer(2); outraged at the affront, military officers instantly leak incident to the press, triggering a furor; to make amends, President invites general to go jogging; general next surfaces escorting First Lady to State of the Union address, where he is lauded as new drug czar; during re-election campaign, President cites general as proof positive of his administration's vigorous opposition to illegal drugs.

What are Americans to make of President Clinton's deft deployment of General Barry McCaffrey to shore up a vulnerable political flank? Should they be troubled by the unseemly exploitation of a highly decorated career officer for blatantly partisan purposes? Does it matter that the Clinton administration remains, by all indications, oblivious to the implications of politicizing the military? These are questions to which the alarmists give short shrift.

Yet beyond those questions is one larger still: Who manipulated whom? Skillfully orchestrated by Pentagon apparatchiks, the public humiliation of Clinton's staff at the very outset of his term signaled unmistakably the dangers awaiting the White House if it failed to treat the military and its views with appropriate respect. The deference subsequently accorded General McCaffrey is only one indication that Clinton got the message. Perhaps more than any other incident, the McCaffrey episode established the parameters of the President's relationship with an officer corps that viewed him and his entourage with ill-concealed antipathy.

Viewed in that light, the episode suggests that the real problem in civil-military relations is not that the military might jump its traces, but that the boundaries between the civilian and military camps - delineating prerogatives and responsibilities, protecting certain practices and proscribing others - have lost much of their salience. Indeed, among civilian elites and in the officer corps as a whole, awareness that such boundaries ought to exist is itself fast disappearing. In addition to the McCaffrey episode, the egregious Republican effort during the 1996 convention in San Diego to identify the GOP as the "pro-military" party provides the most noteworthy recent example of civilians violating previously recognized norms of civil-military behavior.

Worse, the blurring of civil-military distinctions once widely recognized and respected is manifesting itself precisely at a time when American military policies have been cut loose from the moorings to which they were traditionally tethered. Two points highlight this disjunction. The first concerns the role of military power in enabling the United States to fulfill what are now commonly called its "global responsibilities." The second relates to the size and character of America's post-Cold War military establishment.

In the heady days after the Persian Gulf War, when the extent of the American conventional military dominance first became fully evident, expectations that the mere display of great military power might enable the United States to preside over the creation of a "New World Order" were commonplace. But Americans had hardly finished congratulating themselves on their desert victory when events gave lie to those expectations. The ordeal of the Kurds in northern Iraq forced the first, abrupt departure from the triumphal script. Interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia, a war scare with North Korea, confrontation with China in the Taiwan Straits, and recurring clashes with Saddam Hussein followed in short order, making clear that the use of armed might rather than its possession had emerged as a staple of American post-Cold War policy.

If the tempo of activity has been unexpectedly brisk, the immense military capacity maintained to undertake such activities on a global scale is altogether without precedent in American history. This is the second major departure from the traditional pattern of civil-military relations. The fact that the United States has chosen to retain a large and powerful standing military force in...