 |
| Image: USO - Hampton Roads and Central Virginia |
"THE ATLANTIC"
"The
military can’t set its own goals, can’t determine its own budget
or which ideals it fights and dies for, and can’t decide how its
losses will be honored, dishonored, or appropriated after the fact.
So
while America as a whole chooses to express its love for its military
in gooey, substance-free displays, our military waits, perhaps
hopelessly, for a coherent national policy that takes the country’s
wars seriously."
________________________________________________
"If the courage of young men and women in battle truly does depend on the nature and quality of our civic society, we should be very worried. We should expect to see a sickness spreading from our public life and into the hearts of the men and women who continue to risk their lives on behalf of a distracted nation.
And when we look closely, that is exactly what we see: a sickness that all the ritualistic displays of support for our troops at sporting events and Veterans Day celebrations, and in the halls of Congress, can’t cure.
Our military is a major part of who we are as a
country; it is the force that has undergirded the post–World War II
international order. Being an American means being deeply implicated
in that, for good or for ill. But as Wellman’s response to his war
suggests, the solution to our current dead end doesn’t lie within
the military itself.
The military can’t set its own goals, can’t
determine its own budget or which ideals it fights and dies for, and
can’t decide how its losses will be honored, dishonored, or
appropriated after the fact. So while America as a whole chooses to
express its love for its military in gooey, substance-free displays,
our military waits, perhaps hopelessly, for a coherent national
policy that takes the country’s wars seriously.
What would such a thing look like?
It would probably look like rescinding the
open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force and making the
president regularly go before Congress to explain where and why he
was putting troops in harm’s way, what resources the mission
required, and what the terms of success were.
It would look like every member of Congress
carrying out his or her constitutionally mandated duty to provide
oversight of our military adventures by debating and then voting on
that plan.
It would look like average Americans taking
part in that debate, and scorning anyone who tried to tell them they
couldn’t. It would look like average Americans rolling their eyes
in disgust when our leaders tell us we’re not at war while American
troops are risking their lives overseas, or claim that Americans must
support the wars their country engages in if they want to support the
troops, or when a press secretary argues that anyone who questions
the success of a military raid in which a service member died “owes
an apology” to that fallen soldier.
It would look like our politicians letting the
fallen rest in peace, rather than propping up their corpses for
political cover. And when service members die overseas in unexpected
places, such as the four killed in Niger last year, it would look
like us eschewing the easy symbolic debates about whether our
president is disrespecting our troops by inartfully offering
condolences or whether liberals are disrespecting our troops by
seizing upon those inartful condolences for political gain. It would
look like us instead having a longer and harder conversation about
the mission we are asking soldiers to perform, and whether we are
doing them the honor of making sure it’s achievable.
In short, it would look like Americans as a
whole doling out a lot fewer cheap, sentimental displays of love for
our troops, and doubling down on something closer to Gunny Maxwell’s
“tough love”—a love that means zeroing in on our country’s
faults and failures.
if we don’t, then at some point the
bottom will drop out. Morale is a hard thing to measure, but plenty
of indicators suggest that it’s been falling. Ninety-one percent of
troops called their quality of life good or excellent in a survey
done by the Military Times back in 2009, when the
downturn in violence in Iraq and a new strategy in Afghanistan still
held out a promise of victory; by 2014 that had fallen to only 56
percent, with intentions to reenlist dropping from 72 to 63 percent.
Recruiting is also down. For the past three
decades, the military has generally accepted about 60 percent of
applicants. In recent years that figure has been closer to 70 percent
and is climbing. And the active-duty force is getting worn out. When
I was in, I was impressed to meet guys with five deployments under
their belts. Now I meet guys who have done eight, or nine, or 10.
The situation is particularly bad within the
Special Operations community. Last year Special Operations Command
deployed troops to 149 countries; some operators cycled in and out of
deployments at what General Raymond Thomas called the “unsustainable”
pace of six months overseas, six months at home. I recently met an
Army ranger who’d done seven deployments. He was on a stateside
duty, and told me that when he and his wife realized that he’d be
home for two years straight, it freaked them out a bit. They loved
each other, and had three kids, but had never spent two solid years
together without one of them going on a deployment. This is too much
to ask, especially for ongoing wars with no end in sight.
Theresa Whelan, the principal deputy assistant
secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security,
recently told the House Armed Services Committee that the Special
Operations community has “had to eat our young … [and] mortgaged
our future” to keep going.
Day by day, that mortgaged future creeps
closer. When it arrives, who is going to sign up for a vague and
hopeless mission? How do you motivate men and women to fight and die
for a cause many of them don’t believe in, and whose purpose they
can’t articulate? What happens to the bonds between men and women
in combat, and to the bonds between soldiers and the citizenry for
whom they fight, when we fail as a nation to treat our wars as a
collective responsibility, rather than the special mission of a
self-selected few?
Without a political leadership that articulates
and argues for a mission and objective worth dying for, it’s no
surprise that soldiers sometimes stop caring about the mission
altogether. A sergeant who deployed to the Korengal Valley, in
Afghanistan, told me that by the end of his deployment, he had
purposely adopted a defensive posture, sacrificing mission for safety
at every opportunity he could.
This is reminiscent of what one officer said of
the later stages of the Vietnam War: “The gung-ho attitude that
made our soldiers so effective in 1966, ’67, was replaced by the
will to survive.” It’s not that those troops lacked courage, but
that the ends shifted. “We fought for each other,” I’ve heard
plenty of veterans claim about their time in service, and no wonder.
If your country won’t even resource the wars
with what its own generals say is necessary for long-term success,
what else is there to fight for? But if you think the mission your
country keeps sending you on is pointless or impossible and that
you’re only deploying to protect your brothers and sisters in arms
from danger, then it’s not the Taliban or al-Qaeda or isis that’s
trying to kill you, it’s America."
