A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

More troops=more war

This is a few days old but still worth noting. Andrew Bacevich laments the bipartisan consensus among all the leading presidential candidates for expanding the size of the military. The problem, Bacevich says, is that “[a]ny politician who thinks that the chief lesson to be drawn from the last five years is that we need more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks has learned nothing.”

The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush’s conception of waging an open-ended global “war” to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and “liberate” — will not reverse that failure. More meddling will evoke more hatred.

Instead Bacevich advocates a policy of “containment” toward the virulent strain of Islamic radicalism that gives rise to terrorism: “The alternative to transformation is not surrender but quarantine.”

I think the point here is that a bigger military will create a nearly irresistible urge to use it. If it’s not used to invade the Middle East in a wrong-headed attempt to install Jeffersonian democracy, it will be used for the various “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” wars dreamed up by progressives. After all, as Madeline Albright put it to Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

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3 responses to “More troops=more war”

  1. architecture of aggression?

    I largely agree with Bacevich here, but I think that it might be hasty to argue, categorically, that a bigger military means more war. The small, Lefty draft movement has precisely the opposite intuition: they suspect that a massive draft would solidify a pacifist resistance, reasoning that the more voters who are either in the military or have children therein, the more likely that there would be a majority vote to stop the war. It might be interesting to see whether the world’s largest militaries, whether as a function of the nation’s population or in sheer numbers, have been more or less likely to be used.

    It might be argued that–even assuming that a large war machine does not make a nation more likely to wage war–a large, idle military is still a wasteful place over which to direct budgetary resources. A fair point, but let’s not forget that the military has been a means of distributing budgetary resources to poor and minority Americans for a long time. And while I have no idea whether it is efficient, it is an old saw that military training instills some sort of respect for law, provides (at the very least) a technical and (often after service) an academic education, and exposes those within it to a greater world. It’s also an easy sell to old guard conservatives who are paranoid about a “welfare state.” Heck, I might actually support a larger military if there were more stringent practices with respect to war declaration, foreign intervention, etc. and an increase in non-tactical per soldier expenditures such as salary, post-service education grants, etc..

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  2. gaius sempronius gracchus

    After all, as Madeline Albright put it to Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    This brilliant refugee from Central Europe who influenced Clinton into an interventionist policy in the Balkans (are our troops still there?) would have laughed out loud if told the purpose of that ‘superb military’ was to defend the United States.
    You know, literally to defend the actual territory of the United States.

    The purpose of the US military has never been to do that, as anyone who knows the least bit about American military and/or diplomatic history can see.

    So you are right, Lee. A larger military will enable further interventions and ease the path toward them.

    But you write as though people were not seeing that, and were blundering innocently and ignorantly toward an unforeseen and unintended risk of more war.

    Given our history, the outlook of our ruling class, and the continuing domination of American policy by the military-industrial complex, that hardly seems likely, though, eh?

    On the contrary, the reason for proposing a larger military is precisely to enable further, future interventions. That is exactly what all these folks have in mind.

    The US isn’t going to be getting out of the Middle East. It just isn’t on the cards. We’re going to get in deeper.

    As American as cherry pie.

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  3. gaius sempronius gracchus

    PS. Liberals and Democrats who say starting up the draft would diminish the likelihood of further wars are fools or liars out to dupe other fools into going along with a war-enabling policy.

    And perhaps they do it partly in hope of getting the kind of alternate, non-military service requirement Dodd is talking about, and that liberals have dreamed of for decades, put into law.

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