Someone Else's Army
What I think must be unprecedented about the war in Iraq is how disconnected from it most Americans seem to be. While the problems--both political and military--of the conscript army the United States fielded through the Vietnam War are well known and not to be dismissed, I think that this current conflict, the first sustained military deployment since the shift, is bringing to light a whole new set of difficulties. These issues don't pertain to the performance of the armed forces so much as the relationship of the military to society.

So I was glad to see Stanford professor David Kennedy's op-ed in Monday's New York Times, just as an indication that somebody else is thinking about this:

...the United States today has a military force that is extraordinarily lean and lethal, even while it is increasingly separated from the civil society on whose behalf it fights. This is worrisome - for reasons that go well beyond unmet recruiting targets.

One troubling aspect is obvious. By some reckonings, the Pentagon's budget is greater than the military expenditures of all other nations combined. It buys an arsenal of precision weapons for highly trained troops who can lay down a coercive footprint in the world larger and more intimidating than anything history has known. Our leaders tell us that our armed forces seek only just goals, and at the end of the day will be understood as exerting a benign influence. Yet that perspective may not come so easily to those on the receiving end of that supposedly beneficent violence.

But the modern military's disjunction from American society is even more disturbing. Since the time of the ancient Greeks through the American Revolutionary War and well into the 20th century, the obligation to bear arms and the privileges of citizenship have been intimately linked. It was for the sake of that link between service and a full place in society that the founders were so invested in militias and so worried about standing armies, which Samuel Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."
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...thanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call the "revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is, proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.

The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve.

I have a few friends with siblings in the military. None, to my knowledge, have yet been called to serve in Iraq. A few kids I grew up with did pursue careers in the armed forces; I guess one or more of them might have gone or are still there. But what I know about the war, I know from news and second- or third-hand accounts, and it usually all comes with an agenda.

I guess it's possible that the remove from which we perceive the war has contributed to the positive development on the left of opposing the policy but not those charged with carrying it out. No returnee from Iraq is likely to be ostracized or demonized as some Vietnam veterans were. But the isolation of the military community--the veterans and their families--from the larger body politic poses all manner of problems that nobody is yet grappling with. Kennedy nails arguably the biggest when he writes that a wholly professionalized military is "a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly feared was the greatest danger of standing armies."

Related to this notion is the fact that, without any generalized call for service or sacrifice, the American public now looks at decisions of war and peace as abstractions more similar to low-income housing or agriculture subsidy policy, directly important to a small chunk of the population but not immediately salient for the rest of us. The immorality of engaging in combat without risk--a different kind of "asymmetrical warfare," in which one civilian population, like Iraq's, risks death and disruption every day while the other grouses about high gas prices--is Kennedy's final point, as he rightly deplores a political state of affairs in which "civilian society's deep and durable consent to the resort to arms" is no longer needed:

[I]t cannot be wise for a democracy to let such an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy - like dealing out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy.

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's business.