Thick, footnote-laden reports from official government bodies have played a surprisingly important role in shaping American policy and public opinion. To give a few examples from my conscious lifetime:

• The Warren Commission report in 1964, on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, argued strongly that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and without any outside guidance or collaboration. Agree, disagree (to me it's always seemed implausible, but I have no convincing other interpretation), it remains the central document for discussions of the topic.

• The Kerner Commission report in early 1968 examined the race riots of the previous few years and concluded that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." It was an immediate national bestseller. Martin Luther King said that the report was "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life." Six weeks later he was shot dead.

• The Church Committee reports of 1975 and 1976, which were technically reports of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, laid out a wide range of abuses and excesses by the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies. These included targeted assassinations of foreign leaders and widespread and previously unknown surveillance programs. Afterwards some intelligence officials claimed that their hands had been tied, etc., but it was a mammoth and necessary airing of excesses.

• The Hart-Rudman Commission in 2001, technically the Commission on U.S. National Security/21st Century, was the one that warned the incoming George W. Bush administration of the likelihood of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

• The 9/11 Commission report of 2004, technically the "Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States," was another immediate bestseller that examined the sins of omission and commission that predated the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

There have been others that made news and focused attention: the Grace Commission, the "Nation at Risk" Commission, the report on the explosino of the space shuttle Challenger, the Moynihan report, plus more early in the 20th century (e.g. this). The point is, these big, ponderous official studies are often the way the United States has dealt with big, ominous issues.

The Torture Committee report of 2014 should have the same effect. I say "should" in an exhortative rather than necessarily predictive sense, though I hope both apply. You should read this document, and you should demand changes and accountability.

Technically the report is known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.  You can read the 500+ pages of the "executive summary" and other working papers at this WaPo site or this from the NYT or elsewhere. It should—and I say this in the predictive sense—henceforth be known as the Torture Committee report.

One way to put its findings is: Whatever you thought was out of control and abusive about the all-fronts approach to the global war on terror, it was worse than that. Another way is: Whatever damage you thought the United States was doing to its own values, its standing in the world, and its system of checks and accountability, it was doing more.

Read it yourself. There is no other way to absorb the scale and relentlessness of the abuses it chronicles. And this is from the heavily "redacted" version, with working papers presumably to follow. Start reading.

The architects of America's self-destructive over-response to a shocking and unprecedented attack will always bear the responsibility for the path they set the country on. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Franks, and others including, yes, Powell will always be the ones who set America on a war it should not have fought and who embraced tactics that, in the long run, have damaged America more profoundly than the original, profoundly damaging assault did. (Before you ask, these are not convenient retrospective judgments on my part but points I was arguing at the time. For instance in 2002, in early 2004 and in late 2004, and in 2006.) Although the 2000 presidential election was more an affront to the norms of democracy, as five Supreme Court justices stepped into declare a winner, the 2004 election was more consequential for the United States internationally. By the margin of fewer than 100,000 votes in Ohio, the world's oldest democracy decided to return to power the leaders who had the Iraq war, whose results were already in ashes, and run Abu Ghraib.

Democracy depends on accountability, and accountability depends on knowledge. The Torture Committee report is potentially an enormous step forward. But only if people read it.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-more-americans-read-the-torture-committee-report-the-better-america-will-be/383621/

In the early 1970s, a young singer-songwriter named Larry Groce was launching his career in the music business. He had grown up in Texas, moved to Los Angeles, started recording albums, and in 1976 had a Top Ten hit with the novelty song "Junk Food Junkie."

After that song came out, Dick Clark invited Groce onto his American Bandstand show. You can see a clip from that below—and down at the very bottom of this item, a different clip of Groce singing the "Junk Food" song. But what Clark mainly asks about in this clip is Groce's recent role as a "musician in residence," sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in rural areas of West Virginia.

After that first, half-accidental exposure to West Virginia when he was in his early 20s, Groce decided to stay. Last month, my wife Deb and I spent time with him in Charleston, where he has continued his recording career (he has now done 23 albums, including some very successful children's albums for Disney) and where he and his wife Sandra Armstrong, also a musician, have become major cultural and civic figures. For the past decade Groce has been the founding executive director of FestivALL, an annual ten-day arts festival in Charleston. In the 1980s he owned and ran a ballet school in Morgantown. And for the past 30 years he has been host of (and performer on) the National Public Radio music show Mountain Stage.

We got to see a live Mountain Stage performance at the Civic Center in downtown Charleston, before an enthusiastic and youngish full-house crowd, with tickets arranged through Bob and Suzanne Coffield of Charleston. It was two hours of music by a range of established and rising artists. James McMurtry—a singer-songwriter, whom I first met when he was a teenager hanging around in his father Larry's bookstore in Washington—ended the show. Before him came the acoustic rock/folk/jazz band The Devil Makes Three, based in California; and the "progressive bluegrass" group Yonder Mountain String Band, from Colorado. And opening the evening, for a bewitching 20+ minutes, were two teenaged sisters from Indiana, Lily and Madeleine. You can get an idea of their approach from the look of their site and this studio video of one of the songs they performed:

We had gone to see Groce at his house a few days later because we enjoyed his show, but also because his name frequently came up when we asked people in Charleston, Who makes this town go? West Virginia in general and the Kanawha Valley region around Charleston are, of course, places where not enough has gone right for quite a long time. The coal industry inevitably shrinks; the big processing works that once gave the area the name "Chemical Valley" are mainly gone; other corporate headquarters have left; and the leading employers in the Charleston area are now the hospitals.

So what was it like to run a recording career from here? And to produce a national radio show from a state usually the object of condescension from coastal big-city taste-makers?

I would love to reproduce everything Groce told us that afternoon, but let me boil it down to two themes that matched larger patterns we've noticed over the past year.

1. One was about the possibilities and challenges of doing first-tier creative work in what the world considers second- or third-tier locations. I put it that baldly because, whether they come out and say it or not, many of the country's most ambitious people assume that work of a certain level requires being in a certain place. Finance or arts or publishing, you go to New York. Info tech, the San Francisco Bay area. General misery: Washington, D.C. (a little joke: D.C. is actually a great town, though shamelessly oppressed by Congress). And so on down the list.

The idea of a vast national talent-sorting-out has huge ramifications. The obvious ones involve politics. Here's a less obvious one: the national commentariat is used to the idea of outrageous, burdensome real estate prices as a central distorting factor in people's financial lives. That's because they are exactly that in a handful of places—New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles to San Diego, D.C., and a few more, where most of the commenting people live.

But in countless other places across the country people don't have to start out assuming that most of what they take home will immediately go out for the rent or mortgage. And we keep finding in such places—in Duluth and Greenville and Redlands and Holland and Sioux Falls and Burlington and Allentown and larger places like Columbus and Pittsburgh—people who have calculated that they can build their company, pursue their ambition, realize their dream without crowding into the biggest cities.

Of course some people have always preferred the small-town life; of course America has always had diverse regional centers; and of course locational concentration matters in many industries. I knew that before we started these travels. What I hadn't known is how consistently, and across such a wide range, we would find people pursuing first-tier ambitions in what big-city people would consider the sticks.

* * *

Now, back to Larry Groce. When he first got to West Virginia, he said he found it comfortable, because "the way people here looked, acted, and even sounded" reminded him of his grandparents' and great aunts' generation in Texas. Which made sense, since many Texans of that era had migrated from Appalachia. As he stayed, he came to appreciate its practicality, its lack of pretension, and its person-to-person level of generosity.

Practicality: "It's one of those places that has never had a boom, so booms and busts are relative. If you’re never up, you can’t be down."

Lack of pretension: "Lots of people can make an album in the studio who can't do it live. [Mountain Stage is recorded before a live audience.] That is very West Virginia too: to deliver in person. We have hillbillies, but we'll tell you what a hillbilly is, you [outsiders] don't tell us. A hillbilly isn’t an ignorant fool. He’s a straight forward, self-effacing, what-you-see-is-what-you-get-person. He relies on his friends because he doesn’t trust a lot of other things. He is not necessarily formally educated. But he is smart."

Generosity: "If your car gets broken down, you want it to happen in West Virginia. This whole stuff about Deliverance, it's just the opposite. If something happens, you want it to happen here. People will stop and help." Groce told the story of a national network correspondent who came to interview people nearby and found them unwilling to answer questions. So he put up the hood of his car as if it had broken down, and people came over to help him out and talk with him.

How does that affect his show? Groce seems content with and proud of his show and its cultural reach, but he is fully aware that "since it is a national show, we have felt stereotypes people have about West Virginia."

"Once thing I’ve learned over the years, when you put 'Mountain' in the title of something, people think you’re the fiddle-and-banjo show. Which we're not. Of course, if we were just a old-timey bluegrass country show, we'd probably get more national press, since we'd fit expectations."

"We see the expectations in the stories that are generated about this place. Have a mine disaster? The reporters are all here. Have a chemical spill ? All here. Have something where it shows that some percentage of the children are poor, or obese? Yes. But if you have Gabriel Kahane and Kate Miller-Heidke on one show, and then James McMurtry, it doesn't fit the categories, doesn't make sense."

If I am making Groce sound defensive in recounting this, I'm mis-representing him. His tone was like that of a politician who understands anthropologist-style that the press simply can't help concentrating on elections rather than governing, but nonetheless realizes that his or her job comes down to governing.

* * *

2. And the second theme I said Larry Groce reminded us of? His sense that West Virginia and Charleston, for all their travails, were moving in the right rather than the wrong direction.

How do the state's prospects compare with when he first arrived?, we asked. "Lots of people who are older are looking backwards," he said. "Fifty years ago, there were 80,000 people in Charleston. Now there are 50,000. Back then Union Carbide employed a lot of people with advanced degrees who made good money. So people can get stuck in, 'I remember when...'"

But, he said, younger people, or those from elsewhere, didn't have that memory. They were starting new businesses and families and projects. "I think in the last ten years there has been a renaissance," he said. "It’s easy to go to a place because the money is good. It’s different because you like being there. I am optimistic about this place."

This is not to discount any of the obvious problems of "this place" but to give an idea of what it's like to meet someone determined to cope with them.

* * *

As promised, here is Larry Groce singing his song "Junk Food Junkie" in the 1980s:

And, as a seasonal bonus, here he is singing "Frosty the Snowman" in a video that has had 13 million hits.

Check your local NPR listings for broadcast of the show we heard, which should start airing in the middle of January.

* To read about and sign-up for our new American Futures email newsletter, see here. Or just go straight to the sign-up here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/from-american-bandstand-to-mountain-stage-music-as-cultural-connector/383650/

This doesn't count as the long-awaited No. 15 Finale in the California High-Speed Rail series. (For previous episodes see No. 1, No. 2, No. 3,No. 4,No. 5, No. 6, No. 7, No. 8, No. 9, No. 10, No. 11, No. 12, No. 13, and No. 14.) All readers will be relieved to hear that No. 15 is still to come. Instead this is to announce, as No. 14 1/2 in the series, some actual news. It's best understood in this sequence:

1) A little more than a month ago, Jerry Brown won his (unprecedented) fourth term as governor of California. One of the campaign issues was Brown's commitment to build a north-south High-Speed Rail (HSR) system as his signature project for the state.

2) A little less than a month from now in Sacramento, on January 5, Jerry Brown will be sworn in to begin that fourth and final term. Term limits will keep him to four, and will hold his successors to two.

3) The very next day, according to an announcement a few hours ago, Brown will go to Fresno for — ta da! — a groundbreaking ceremony on the first leg of the HSR system. This is the way politicians indicate causes that matter to them. I think I have to be in DC on January 6, but I would give anything a lot to be in Fresno on that day.

4) Today the California High-Speed Rail Authority also announced that the winning bid for the next leg of construction had come in substantially under budget estimates. The Authority had estimated the cost of this segment at between $1.5 and $2 billion. It accepted a winning bid of $1.2 billion. You can read all the details here.

In the next few days, in the long-awaited installment No. 15, I'll argue more fully why I think this is a good move for Jerry Brown, for the state, and for the country. For now, as national politics remain locked in stasis, a reminder of what it is like when public efforts can get things done.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/california-high-speed-rail-its-happening/383733/

Yesterday I noted two seemingly positive developments in the California High-Speed Rail saga. That was installment No. 14 1/2 in the series. For previous episodes see No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 7, No. 8, No. 9, No. 10, No. 11, No. 12, No. 13, No. 14, and then No. 14 1/2. Today's item is officially No. 14 3/4. Number 15 is still to come!

The two bright spots were that re-elected Gov. Jerry Brown will spend the first full day of his fourth and final term at a groundbreaking ceremony in Fresno for the first leg of the system, indicating both that the project is getting going and that he remains committed to it; and that the winning bid for construction of the second leg had come in substantially under estimates. The High-Speed Rail Authority's estimate had been $1.5 billion to $2 billion for this leg. The winning bid was $1.2 billion.

A reader on the West Coast, who asks not to be identified because he deals with companies involved in public construction, sends this cautionary note:

I've been reading your posts on the California High Speed Rail project with interest but just had to comment on the lower than expected bid submitted by the Dragados group [the winning bidders]. The large spread in bid amounts tells me one thing. Dragados has identified flaws in the design of the project and expects to make it up and more in engineering change orders.

On a project of this size and complexity the engineering is more of a guideline than an absolute and as part of putting together the bid package, all these companies are looking for engineering flaws. These aren't lump sum bids but instead have pricing associated with different aspects.

I haven't seen the bid submittals but I'll wager there are many items bid at close to cost or below cost and some others that represent mistakes and are listed at higher than normal rates. This is standard practice on public projects and no one should have the illusion that this phase is going to be completed for $1.2 billion. That's a political number to be trotted out up until the time the project is complete and the true bill becomes apparent.

Here are the bids we're talking about, with the winning entry noted (by me) in red. More details on the bidding and scoring here.

Back in Episode 3, I quoted the responses of Dan Richard, chairman of the CHSRA authority, to a range of technical, environmental, commercial, and political criticisms of the project. Richard, as a reminder, had twice been head of the board overseeing the Bay Area's public-transit system, BART, and has experience with projects of this sort.

I sent Richard this reader's skeptical argument (of course minus the reader's name). Just now Richard sends this response:

I understand the reader's concern because it is often the norm in large, complex projects that there are overruns caused by change orders, based on engineering design flaws. However, there is a very key difference in this procurement, because we are using an approach called "design-build."

In a standard procurement, the sponsor (i.e., a governmental entity or corporation) hires one firm to design the project and then puts the design out to bid to potential constructors. That is where the disconnect between the design and actual construction can result in problems. In contrast, a design-build approach works as follows:
   
    (a) our design contractor produces a design at about a 30% level;  this is enough to define the project conceptually, allow for environmental analysis and so forth;
    (b) we then receive bids from teams that will complete the design and build to that design;  this method makes it exceedingly difficult for the contractor to claim design flaws as a basis for change orders since they are the ones completing the design, and
    (c) the bid teams have the right to submit so-called Alternate Technical Concepts (ATCs) that propose changes to our basic design that would save money or time in the construction.   These ATCs are reviewed by us before the bids are submitted for consistency with the approved environmental documents, adopted design standards, community impacts, etc.  If approved, the bidder may include them in their bid to further enhance their economic competitiveness.

Design-build has been used successfully on many large projects (when I was at BART, we built the extension to San Francisco Airport using a design-build approach). We feel this procurement showed that design-build is the way to go and we do not believe we will be subjected to a spate of change orders as a result.  Moreover, it is an approach that encourages innovation and we're seeing that here.

The proof will be in the pudding, but we are quite cognizant of the issues raised by your readers.

Onward.

[And, yes, I have asked Richard whether the exact winning bid (look at it again, 1,234,567,890) is serendipitous, engineered to come out that way, a bit of whimsy, etc.]

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/that-winning-bid-for-californias-high-speed-rail-is-it-too-low/383737/

By the classification rules of the world of physics, we all know that the Earth's atmosphere is made of gas (rather than liquid, solid, or plasma). But in the world of flying it's often useful to think of air as a fluid. Landing with crosswinds in an aircraft has some similarities to tacking in a sailboat. The turbulence created by high winds over rough terrain is easiest to understand if you think of it as the counterpart to the whitewater rapids created when water flows over stones.

This is my way of introducing an absolutely fascinating site that depicts wind flows around the world as visible currents. It's called Windyty, it is a non-commercial project by an avid kite-skier and pilot in the Czech Republic, and the link is here.

The image at the top of this item is a static screen shot. If you play around with the site, as I predict you'll want to, you will see that you can pan and zoom all over the place, you can choose different color overlays to show different values — wind speed, moisture, etc — and you can see how things look at different altitudes. For instance, the opening image shows surface-level winds. Here is the view at 20,000 feet, dramatizing the increase in wind speed as you go up (with North America still at the center of the shot):

The real breakthrough of this site, for non-weather-professional viewers like me, is depicting atmospheric flows as if they were movements of liquids. Once you see the movement and currents depicted here, you'll think of the big H's and L's on weather maps in a new way. Here is a video from Ivo, the adventurer and programmer in Prague who has created Windyty:

Windyty, wind forecast from Ivo on Vimeo.

And one more: If you'd like to see a similar animation presented on a globe, try this site, from the Earth community. Here's a sample:

Thanks to Mike McCoy, of UC Davis and the California Strategic Growth Council, for pointing these out.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/envisioning-a-river-of-air/383739/

Yesterday I mentioned a fabulous site for envisioning the swirl and flow of winds around the world. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, and if you have any interest in the geophysical world, take a minute now to check out the Czech-originated site Windyty.

Okay, glad to have you back. Here are several followups:

1) Oceans have currents, too. From a professor at a major state university who specializes in fluid dynamics:

As a working scientist whose curiosity was sparked by the New York Times science section in high school, I greatly appreciate seeing more science-related content in venues read by “laypersons."

NASA has done a similar thing with the ocean currents that is truly amazing. It may be worthwhile to share with your readers.

Indeed it is! This NASA project is the source of the image at the top of this post. I don't see a way to embed its videos, but if you go to the NASA site here, you'll be able to see a range of fascinating high-res, high-amazement representations of ocean flows.

2) Flows go up and down, not just side to side. From a Ph.D. meteorologist with NOAA:

With respect to those visuals of rivers of air, it's worth being aware that there is one dramatic simplification at work in such figures, namely that the motion is portrayed as only horizontal. It is, of course, not just horizontal, and not just because of the flow over mountains.

At any given time, there is probably 1 cm/sec large-scale vertical motion on average a few thousand feet above the ground. While that may not seem like a large quantity, suppose the typical wind a few thousand feet up is order 10 m/sec. This means that for every 1000 m (1 km) traveled, that air will change in height by 1 m, and thus for every 1000 km the air will change in height by 1 km, if the vertical motion is consistent along the trajectory of that air.

So, on a diagram like the ones you showed, in actuality an air "parcel" that you might be tracking from Hawaii may end up whisked away at 10 km altitude, with a very different speed and direction than at the surface, by the time it reaches the west coast of the U.S. And similarly, the surface air along the West Coast may have come from somewhere very different than implied by such a diagram.

And thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for those vertical motions, for that's what brings us the rains and snows (on ascent) or what clears out the smog after the passage of a cold front (the descent of clean air from high aloft).

3) Envisioning the layers of the atmosphere. The weather is way more interesting to me now than it was before I was spending time planning flights through it. Not weather as in, "Nice day today," or, "Hot enough for you?" But weather as in, "How low will the ceiling be?" Or in the wintertime, "Where is the icing risk?" Or in the summer, "Where are the thunderstorms?"

A radically useful tool for answering these questions is something known as a Skew-T Log(p) chart, a sample of which you see below. It represents soundings from weather balloons, which measure changing temperature, dew point, wind speed etc. as they ascend toward the stratosphere. As I say, these charts are very useful, but to put it mildly they take some getting used to. You can find introductory material here and more advanced material here The Skew-T chart below basically tells you: If you fly between altitudes of about 10,000 and 20,000 feet, you're likely to be inside a cloud at temperatures just below freezing, and therefore in danger of airframe icing.

One of the features of the great Czech Windyty site mentioned earlier is that it presents some of the same underlying information on a local basis (with analysis from meteoblue in Switzerland). For instance, here's the way it shows likely cloud layers over Chicago this week. The middle row, which I've highlighted, shows likely altitudes of cloudy and clear layers, as the week wears on. The Skew-T has its function, but so does this.

4) Your tax dollars at work. David Ryan, who under his nom de blog Tony Comstock was a guest blogger here back in 2011 and who in his role as charter-boat captain pays attention to the weather, writes:

It might be worth mentioning that the data for that and (nearly) all other private weather outlets comes from government sources. Here's the one I use: https://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/wxmap_cgi/index.html. And here's the European consortium:

The visualizations are cool, but they aren't possible without the data!

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/fluid-flows-in-the-air-and-on-the-seas/383787/

For at least 35 years, the U.S. embargo on diplomatic or commercial dealings with Cuba has been the single stupidest aspect of U.S. foreign policy.

Not the most destructive: that title would go to the decision to invade Iraq, plus the ongoing ramifications of the age of torture, open-ended war, and the security/surveillance state.

But the Cuba policy has been the stupidest, because there has been absolutely zero rational arguments for its strategic wisdom or tactical effectiveness. Jeffrey Goldberg, who has traveled in Cuba and interviewed Castro, more tactfully calls it "ridiculous." In my impetuous youth a few years ago, I called it not the stupidest part of U.S. policy but the "most idiotic." Take your pick.

I choose "at least 35 years" as the demarcation point for undeniable irrationality because that is when the U.S. fully normalized its relations with mainland China. If successive Republican and Democratic administrations could see the merit of trying to engage (rather than exclude) a one-party repressive Communist-run state, even when that state had four times as many people as the U.S. did, and is nuclear-armed, and is a regional rival of several U.S. allies, how much more obvious is the case for a tiny little island practically within eyesight of American mainland and certain to fall under the sway of U.S. cultural and economic influence if given a chance?

Not to mention that recognizing the People's Republic of China meant cutting off America's relationship with the people and government of the Republic of China on Taiwan, which itself has twice the population of Cuba and nearly ten times as large an economy. There is no comparable tit-for-tat cost for the U.S. in normalizing relations with Cuba. (As shown by the photo above, there are protests in Little Havana today. That is nothing compared with the riots in Taiwan after the U.S. announcement, which Warren Christopher braved when traveling there in 1978 to deliver the official news that the U.S. no longer considered Taiwan a real country.)

The stupid policy persisted because of inertia, and because there actually was a counterpart to the Cold War-era "China Lobby" that pressured against dealing with Mao's Beijing government and in favor of Chiang Kai-Shek's Taiwan. This was of course the emigre Cuban community concentrated in Florida. Let's round up to say that perhaps one percent of the U.S. population has modern family ties to Cuba. That's not many people. But enough members of that one percent would work hard enough, in a concentrated enough political sphere, with enough resources and intensity behind them, that they were able, NRA-style, to make this a line just not worth crossing for most politicians. Very few members of the remaining 99% of the electorate were going to change their votes based on Cuba policy. Why should politicians take the risk?

Thus even though people out of electoral office — Richard Nixon as an ex-president, William F. Buckley, even (bravely!) Paul Ryan before his vice-presidential run — have urged opening up to Cuba, for people in office, or considering a run, the ramifications in Florida have made this not worth the risk and bother. Every sane person knew the Cuba policy "would" and "should" change. But it didn't.

Until now. It is unwholesome for U.S. democracy that so little now happens through normal "bill becomes a law" procedure, and so much depends on executive action. But in this case the executive is doing manifestly the right thing. Congratulations, thanks, and it's about time. "Don't do stupid shit" may have limits as a world view, but it is an improvement over the alternative.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/dont-do-stupid-st-has-its-virtues-as-a-foreign-policy/383865/

Yesterday I did a brief compare-and-contrast on the U.S. decision to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China, under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter in the 1970s, and yesterday's announcement by President Obama that the U.S. will begin the process of normalizing relations with Cuba.

The normalizations were similar in both being sensible, realistic, and in America's interest—or so I contend. One difference, I said, was the level of rancor the two decisions generated.

In the Cuban case, we've seen some protests in Little Havana (below) and heard Sen. Marco Rubio's undoubtedly heartfelt (if in my view wholly misguided) avowal that "I don’t care if polls say the 99 percent of the people support normalizing relations with Cuba," he is still against it. But all signs are that this long-overdue change will soon be an accepted part of reality every place except some parts of southern Florida.

But 35 years ago in the Chinese case, the admirable but in this case unfortunate Warren Christopher, in his role as Deputy Secretary of State, was dispatched on a mission for which there is no current counterpart. He had to fly to Taipei and there inform the leaders of the Republic of China on Taiwan that the U.S. was switching its recognition to their bitterest adversaries, in Beijing, and would no longer deal with the ROC as an official country.

I'd paid attention to that episode because I was a junior staffer in the Carter White House at the time — and because Warren Christopher, later Bill Clinton's Secretary of State and a lifelong example of steady, understated public service, was a contemporary of my parents and by chance a friend of theirs from Southern California. From all accounts I'd heard then and later, the Taiwan trip was an episode that called for sangfroid on Christopher's part, as crowds surrounded his car.

A reader who had been in Taiwan back then said, let's keep it in perspective. He said he agreed with me on the welcome change toward Cuba. But:

The line about "...nothing compared with the riots in Taiwan after the U.S. announcement..." did catch my eye, however.

I was living in Taipei at the time and that feels overstated. There were some demonstrations, and yes, a smallish group roughed up Christopher's motorcade (without hurting anyone), and in a separate incident an unlucky Colombian diplomat was dragged out of his car and beaten up.  But nothing you would call widespread rioting.

Considering the suddenness and significance of the U.S. de-recognition, I thought the popular reaction was pretty restrained. Typically so, -- the Taiwanesecan get unruly, but they're violence-averse (except for gatherings of politicians, apparently, but these were pre-democracy days). [JF note: fist fights have broken out surprisingly often in the modern, democracy-era Legislative Yuan of Taiwan.]

None of which has much to do with the Cubans, who would probably appreciate a little less recognition from the U.S. government.

Because I'd heard of the Christopher trip as such a dramatic moment, I went prowling around for further accounts of it. It turns out the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, based in Arlington, Va. outside Washington DC, has a riveting account by Neal Donnelly, who was public affairs officer in the U.S. Embassy in Taipei at just the time it was down graded to a non-Embassy. You can read the whole thing here. Here are two samples.

When the then-ambassador in Taipei got word of the impending change:

That night, Ambassador Leonard Unger went to the American Chamber of Commerce Christmas party…. A cable came in late at night saying that Carter was going to announce the normalization of China and the de-recognition of Taiwan. [An embassy staffer] immediately got a hold of Unger at the Christmas party at I think about 11:00 pm and then Unger started the wheels in motion to contact Chiang Ching-kuo who was the President of the country [and son of Chiang Kai-shek].

Now you don’t just go to the President of the country’s house and ring the bell and talk to him, so it took a while to go through the several people that they had to and then they got Chiang Ching-kuo at, I think, slightly after two o’clock in the morning. Unger told him that we were de-recognizing Taiwan.

I’m told that he was in shock, shocked into inaction, and really didn’t do anything until the following morning. At six o’clock in the morning I was called by the duty officer and told to get down to the office. I got there, I guess about 8:00, and the country team was in the bubble [secure meeting room]….

We got there and Unger, still in his tuxedo and red bow tie [from the previous night's party], told us what Carter was going to do and we should call our families and tell them to listen to the radio, the armed forces radio station in Taiwan which would broadcast the message. And to tell our families to keep the kids home from school and things like that. So we did.

Then the announcement came and, of course, people were very upset.

After Warren Christopher arrived, he addressed the people of Taiwan. A senior Taiwanese diplomat, Chen Fu, introduced him at a press conference:

Chen's introduction was not “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, this is the Deputy Secretary of State. He has a short statement and then he’ll take your questions.” It was nothing like that at all. It was a condemnation of the act of normalization, and the Taiwan government negotiating position on normalization, from which they would not retreat....

It went on for about five minutes, after which, Warren Christopher read this very bland statement …. [in which he said he was] “look[ing] forward to meetings which will reflect the goodwill and understanding that has existed between us.”

Obviously there wasn’t any goodwill or understanding. (laughs) …

We went out then and got in the motorcade and started out. By the time that we got outside the gates, the students, I don’t know how many there were, several thousand, surrounded the cars and began to pelt them with eggs and rocks and to jump up on top of the cars and stamp on the roofs.…

A student came with a flag pole and shoved it through the window and broke the window. I was covered with glass and cut a little bit. Ambassador Unger was driving with one of the admirals, I think. He was mildly cut and his glasses were knocked off. He had the Seventh Fleet commander with him, I think….

Our car was badly damaged. They kept us for a long, long time in that motorcade; wouldn’t let us go through. Just pounded the cars and breaking the windows. No one was hurt badly and I’m told by a young friend of mine who was a military officer — a young Chinese friend — that the soldiers were told to don civilian clothes and make sure that none of the students got too wild. He said he himself wrestled down a student who was going after the Ambassador’s car with a hammer. So they were prepared.

To round this out, two other reader notes. First on the longer-term politics of Cuban policy, from a reader in California:

By beginning the process to normalize relations with Cuba, Obama may have actually helped the GOP in one small way with the Hispanic community.

Many Mexican-Americans that I've talked to over the years resent the way Cuban-Americans have always been given a special status as refugees.  So while Cuban-Americans are definitely part of the larger American Hispanic community, many Mexican-Americans feel Cuban-Americans are treated better.  Normalizing relations with Cuba removes the refuge aspect.

Of course, if Cuban-Americans no longer provide any particular influence, the GOP could start ignoring them as well.  Maybe Marco Rubio becomes just another GOP Senator.

And on comparing U.S. policy toward the one-party Communist government in China with policy toward the one in Cuba:

The spring after 9/11, I spent several weeks traveling around the back roads of the U.K. by myself, and almost invariably in chatting with people I met along the way, after they realized I was an American and we'd agreed on George Bush (bad) and Bill Clinton (good), the next question would be something along the lines of (imagine a rural northern Scottish road crew member leaning on his shovel), "Can ye tell me then, wot's it with you people and Cuba?"

A standing joke when I was living in Beijing is that there was exactly one steadfast, true-believer Marxist among the billion-plus residents of China. That was the Cuban Ambassador in Beijing. We'll see how long that goes on.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-diplomatic-life-its-not-all-striped-trousers-and-polite-talks/383904/

Everyone has got lots of things to think about at the end of a year. But I wanted to note things we've seen, have reported on, and are about to cover in our ongoing travels across the country.

1. This Past Week: Deb Fallows completed her four-installment chronicle of what it is like to cross the continent at low altitude, with various surprises, rewards, and challenges along the way. If you missed them, they are:

• "Flying West From the Winter," on getting out of D.C. just before a big storm
• "Connecting the Dots Over America," day two, with an intended destination of Little Rock and an unexpected stop in Kentucky
• "Revisiting the Atlantic's Dust Bowl Series," Thanksgiving in a historic but surprising location in Oklahoma
• "The Long Stretch Home," on the always-astounding terrain of the American southwest

2. This Coming Week: I will have some wrap-up reports on three larger Eastern/Midwest cities that John Tierney and Deb have written about extensively: Columbus, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Charleston, West Virginia. Plus, a bonus year-end item about the things I know (or think I do)—about America's economy, its civic fabric, its trouble signs, and its promise—that I didn't know a year ago, before spending time in places from Mississippi, to central California, to coastal Georgia, to Pennsylvania, to Minnesota and Wisconsin, to Ohio and West Virginia.

3. For the Weeks Ahead: We'll be in the western half of the country, with stops planned from Oregon to Arizona to Montana and points in between.

Including: early on, a report on San Bernardino, a place I've known all my life and that is on the list with Detroit and Stockton among major cities forced into bankruptcy following the financial crash of 2008. That crash was particularly devastating in San Bernardino's part of the Southern California "Inland Empire" since, for reasons we'll get into, it was one of the very most-exposed parts of the country to the real-estate bubble of the "subprime mortgage" years. Over the past 18 months, we've been writing about cities and regions that have figured out answers to their economic and political challenges. This will be an examination of a place still grappling with really profound challenges.

The San Bernardino story is partly a California-ethnic story. The Esri map below shows the predominant ethnic groups, by zip code, in Southern California: green for Latino, magenta for Asian, red for African-American (largely in south-central LA), gray or beige for white. The Latino concentration at the upper right side of the view is the Fontana-Colton-San Bernardino expanse, which enjoyed California's strongest job growth in the years before the 2008 crash but has suffered very badly since. (I'll include an interactive version of this map in later posts.) There's another green concentration southeast of that, in the Moreno Valley area. If you overlaid this map with one showing mortgage problems after the crash, you'd see a close match.

Partly the story is about industrial choice. This map, from the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at the University of Redlands, highlights something unusual: the proportion of a regional economy based on logistics. Transport, warehousing, distribution, storage—the areas in red have logistics-heavy economies, with particular strengths and weaknesses we'll talk about further. Again that's the Fontana-Colton-San Bernardino area in red, and highlighted by the yellow arrow.

Logistics involves a lot of things: railroad lines, which came over the Cajon Pass to this area; freeways, with several N-S and E-W routes intersecting here (Route 66 ran through San Bernardino, as you may recall from the song); warehouse sites, which have been built in huge expanses of a dry river bed; and an airport, which plays a central role in the San Bernardino story.

San Bernardino had historically been a tough, blue-collar town. But from World War II through all the Cold War years, it has also been the home of Norton Air Force Base, where thousands of airmen and officers were based. When I was growing up in nearby Redlands, enormous bombers and transport planes from Norton would circle over our school yards all day long; teachers would routinely pause during class time to wait for sonic booms from the jets to subside. Through the 1980s, the base had supported well over 10,000 local jobs. But as part of the post-Cold War base-closing movement, Norton was deemed unnecessary in 1988 and entirely shuttered by 1994. Norton's closing, plus the demise of Kaiser Steel in nearby Fontana, "ripped a part of the heart out of the San Bernardino area economy,” the local economist John Husing told the San Bernardino Sun. “And really in many respects the bankruptcy of San Bernardino today can be traced back to events in that period of time.”

Unlike some other now-closed bases, much of the physical infrastructure of the former Norton AFB is still intact. It's become the San Bernardino International Airport, which has been the focus of an expensive (and controversial) effort to make it a transport and logistics hub for an area with heavily overburdened infrastructure of all sorts. The runway there, which once handled bombers, is big enough for any airliner or cargo plane. The city has invested in a beautiful new terminal to make itself a center for new traffic. Here is how it looked when we were there yesterday, with everything you can see except the mountains or clouds being part of the vast airport complex.

It's one of several assets ready for use, that the city is trying to put together to make a new start, against considerable odds. More to come about the efforts, and the obstacles, in future installments.

* To read about and sign-up for our new American Futures email newsletter, see here. Or just go straight to the sign-up here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/travel-chronicles-from-west-to-east/383925/

In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the U.S. military strategy turned out to be.

The part of the speech intended to get coverage was Obama’s rationale for reengaging the United States in Iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. This was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live. I watched it on an overhead TV while I sat waiting for a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. When Obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit U.S. troops in Iraq (at the time, he didn’t), I noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the TV. As soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their Cinnabons as the president droned on.

Usually I would have stopped watching too, since so many aspects of public figures’ appearances before the troops have become so formulaic and routine. But I decided to see the whole show. Obama gave his still-not-quite-natural-sounding callouts to the different military services represented in the crowd. (“I know we’ve got some Air Force in the house!” and so on, receiving cheers rendered as “Hooyah!” and “Oorah!” in the official White House transcript.) He told members of the military that the nation was grateful for their nonstop deployments and for the unique losses and burdens placed on them through the past dozen years of open-ended war. He noted that they were often the face of American influence in the world, being dispatched to Liberia in 2014 to cope with the then-dawning Ebola epidemic as they had been sent to Indonesia 10 years earlier to rescue victims of the catastrophic tsunami there. He said that the “9/11 generation of heroes” represented the very best in its country, and that its members constituted a military that was not only superior to all current adversaries but no less than “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.”

If any of my fellow travelers at O’Hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. And why would they? This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.

The public attitude evident in the airport was reflected by the public’s representatives in Washington. That same afternoon, September 17, the House of Representatives voted after brief debate to authorize arms and supplies for rebel forces in Syria, in hopes that more of them would fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS, than for it. The Senate did the same the next day—and then both houses adjourned early, after an unusually short and historically unproductive term of Congress, to spend the next six and a half weeks fund-raising and campaigning full-time. I’m not aware of any midterm race for the House or Senate in which matters of war and peace—as opposed to immigration, Obamacare, voting rights, tax rates, the Ebola scare—were first-tier campaign issues on either side, except for the metaphorical “war on women” and “war on coal.”

Why does civilian technology grow ever cheaper and more reliable while military technology does the opposite? An animated explainer narrated by James Fallows.

This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture. While World War II was under way, its best-known chroniclers were the Scripps Howard reporter Ernie Pyle, who described the daily braveries and travails of the troops (until he was killed near the war’s end by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Iejima), and the Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who mocked the obtuseness of generals and their distance from the foxhole realities faced by his wisecracking GI characters, Willie and Joe.

From Mister Roberts to South Pacific to Catch-22, from The Caine Mutiny to The Naked and the Dead to From Here to Eternity, American popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. The collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. A decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed TV program was The Phil Silvers Show, about a con man in uniform named Sgt. Bilko. As Bilko, Phil Silvers was that stock American sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners to Homer Simpson in The Simpsons today. Gomer Pyle, USMC; Hogan’s Heroes; McHale’s Navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show F Troop were sitcoms whose settings were U.S. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. American culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.

Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H was clearly “about” the Vietnam War, then well into its bloodiest and most bitterly divisive period. (As I point out whenever discussing this topic, I was eligible for the draft at the time, was one of those protesting the war, and at age 20 legally but intentionally failed my draft medical exam. I told this story in a 1975 Washington Monthly article, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”) But M*A*S*H’s ostensible placement in the Korean War of the early 1950s somewhat distanced its darkly mocking attitude about military competence and authority from fierce disagreements about Vietnam. (The one big Vietnam movie to precede it was John Wayne’s doughily prowar The Green Berets, in 1968. What we think of as the classic run of Vietnam films did not begin until the end of the 1970s, with The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.) The TV spin-off of Altman’s film, which ran from 1972 through 1983, was a simpler and more straightforward sitcom on the Sgt. Bilko model, again suggesting a culture close enough to its military to put up with, and enjoy, jokes about it.

Let’s skip to today’s Iraq-Afghanistan era, in which everyone “supports” the troops but few know very much about them. The pop-culture references to the people fighting our ongoing wars emphasize their suffering and stoicism, or the long-term personal damage they may endure. The Hurt Locker is the clearest example, but also Lone Survivor; Restrepo; the short-lived 2005 FX series set in Iraq, Over There; and Showtime’s current series Homeland. Some emphasize high-stakes action, from the fictionalized 24 to the meant-to-be-true Zero Dark Thirty. Often they portray military and intelligence officials as brave and daring. But while cumulatively these dramas highlight the damage that open-ended warfare has done—on the battlefield and elsewhere, to warriors and civilians alike, in the short term but also through long-term blowback—they lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as they would any other institution’s.

The battlefield is of course a separate realm, as the literature of warfare from Homer’s time onward has emphasized. But the distance between today’s stateside America and its always-at-war expeditionary troops is extraordinary. Last year, the writer Rebecca Frankel published War Dogs, a study of the dog-and-handler teams that had played a large part in the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of the reason she chose the topic, she told me, was that dogs were one of the few common points of reference between the military and the larger public. “When we cannot make that human connection over war, when we cannot empathize or imagine the far-off world of a combat zone … these military working dogs are a bridge over the divide,” Frankel wrote in the introduction to her book.

It’s a wonderful book, and dogs are a better connection than nothing. But … dogs! When the country fought its previous wars, its common points of reference were human rather than canine: fathers and sons in harm’s way, mothers and daughters working in defense plants and in uniform as well. For two decades after World War II, the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection. Among older Baby Boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. Of Americans born since 1980, the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.

The most biting satirical novel to come from the Iraq-Afghanistan era, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, is a takedown of our empty modern “thank you for your service” rituals. It is the story of an Army squad that is badly shot up in Iraq; is brought back to be honored at halftime during a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game; while there, is slapped on the back and toasted by owner’s-box moguls and flirted with by cheerleaders, “passed around like everyone’s favorite bong,” as platoon member Billy Lynn thinks of it; and is then shipped right back to the front.

The people at the stadium feel good about what they’ve done to show their support for the troops. From the troops’ point of view, the spectacle looks different. “There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need,” the narrator says of Billy Lynn’s thoughts. “That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.” Fountain’s novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2012, but it did not dent mainstream awareness enough to make anyone self-conscious about continuing the “salute to the heroes” gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’. As I listened to Obama that day in the airport, and remembered Ben Fountain’s book, and observed the hum of preoccupied America around me, I thought that the parts of the presidential speech few Americans were listening to were the ones historians might someday seize upon to explain the temper of our times.

I. Chickenhawk Nation

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress.

Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”

Moulton told me, as did many others with Iraq-era military experience, that if more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq at all. Because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, Moulton decided while in Iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military. “I actually remember the moment,” Moulton told me. “It was after a difficult day in Najaf in 2004. A young marine in my platoon said, ‘Sir, you should run for Congress someday. So this shit doesn’t happen again.’ ” In January, Moulton takes office as a freshman Democratic representative from Massachusetts’s Sixth District, north of Boston.

What Moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. It is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in 2008. George W. Bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of Iraq. But those two are the exceptions. Most other public figures, from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell on down, have put Iraq behind them. In part this is because of the Obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such willed amnesia would have been harder if more Americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. This is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.

Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign for telling The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years.

Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.

“We are vulnerable,” the author William Greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight ISIS, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” And the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats. The last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief Gulf War of 1991.

After the Vietnam War, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution. But the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. In 1978, a military-intelligence veteran named Richard A. Gabriel published, with Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, which traced many of the failures in Vietnam to the military’s having adopted a bureaucratized management style. Three years later, a broadside called Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era, by a military officer writing under the pen name Cincinnatus (later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, Cecil B. Currey), linked problems in Vietnam to the ethical and intellectual shortcomings of the career military. The book was hotly debated—but not dismissed. An article about the book for the Air Force’s Air University Review said that “the author’s case is airtight” and that the military’s career structure “corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants.”

Today, you hear judgments like that frequently from within the military and occasionally from politicians—but only in private. It’s not the way we talk in public about our heroes anymore, with the result that accountability for the career military has been much sketchier than during our previous wars. William S. Lind is a military historian who in the 1990s helped develop the concept of “Fourth Generation War,” or struggles against the insurgents, terrorists, or other “nonstate” groups that refuse to form ranks and fight like conventional armies. He wrote recently:

The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers … Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please.

During and after even successful American wars, and certainly after the standoff in Korea and the defeat in Vietnam, the professional military’s leadership and judgment were considered fair game for criticism. Grant saved the Union; McClellan seemed almost to sabotage it—and he was only one of the Union generals Lincoln had to move out of the way. Something similar was true in wars through Vietnam. Some leaders were good; others were bad. Now, for purposes of public discussion, they’re all heroes. In our past decade’s wars, as Thomas Ricks wrote in this magazine in 2012, “hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness.” This, he said, was not only a radical break from American tradition but also “an important factor in the failure” of our recent wars.

Partly this change has come because the public, at its safe remove, doesn’t insist on accountability. Partly it is because legislators and even presidents recognize the sizable risks and limited payoffs of taking on the career military. When recent presidents have relieved officers of command, they have usually done so over allegations of sexual or financial misconduct, or other issues of personal discipline. These include the cases of the two famous four-star generals who resigned rather than waiting for President Obama to dismiss them: Stanley A. McChrystal, as the commander in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus in his post-Centcom role as the head of the CIA. The exception proving the rule occurred a dozen years ago, when a senior civilian official directly challenged a four-star general on his military competence. In congressional testimony just before the Iraq War, General Eric Shinseki, then the Army’s chief of staff, said that many more troops might be necessary to successfully occupy Iraq than plans were allowing for—only to be ridiculed in public by Paul Wolfowitz, then Shinseki’s superior as the deputy secretary of defense, who said views like Shinseki’s were “outlandish” and “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz and his superior, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ostentatiously marginalized Shinseki from that point on.

In that case, the general was right and the politicians were wrong. But more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong. Some of this PR shift is anthropological. Most reporters who cover politics are fascinated by the process and enjoy practitioners who love it too, which is one reason most were (like the rest of the country) more forgiving of the happy warrior Bill Clinton than they have been of the “cold” and “aloof” Barack Obama. But political reporters are always hunting for the gaffe or scandal that could bring a target down, and feel they’re acting in the public interest in doing so.

Most reporters who cover the military are also fascinated by its processes and cannot help liking or at least respecting their subjects: physically fit, trained to say “sir” and “ma’am,” often tested in a way most civilians will never be, part of a disciplined and selfless-seeming culture that naturally draws respect. And whether or not this was a conscious plan, the military gets a substantial PR boost from the modern practice of placing officers in mid-career assignments at think tanks, on congressional staffs, and in graduate programs across the country. For universities, military students are (as a dean at a public-policy school put it to me) “a better version of foreign students.” That is, they work hard, pay full tuition, and unlike many international students face no language barrier or difficulty adjusting to the American style of give-and-take classroom exchanges. Most cultures esteem the scholar-warrior, and these programs expose usually skeptical American elites to people like the young Colin Powell, who as a lieutenant colonel in his mid-30s was a White House fellow after serving in Vietnam, and David Petraeus, who got his Ph.D. at Princeton as a major 13 years after graduating from West Point.

And yet however much Americans “support” and “respect” their troops, they are not involved with them, and that disengagement inevitably leads to dangerous decisions the public barely notices. “My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military,” retired Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama (and whose mid-career academic stint was at Harvard Business School), told me recently. The military is “professional and capable,” he said, “but I would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.”

Citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. Not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. The country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1 percent under fire in our name.

II. Chickenhawk Economy

America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops (see “Gun Trouble,” by Robert H. Scales, in this issue).

We know that technology is our military’s main advantage. Yet the story of the post-9/11 “long wars” is of America’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned. Many of the Pentagon’s most audacious high-tech ventures have been costly and spectacular failures, including (as we will see) the major air-power project of recent years, the F-35. In an America connected to its military, such questions of strategy and implementation would be at least as familiar as, say, the problems with the Common Core education standards.

Those technological breakthroughs that do make their way to the battlefield may prove to be strategic liabilities in the long run. During the years in which the United States has enjoyed a near-monopoly on weaponized drones, for example, they have killed individuals or small groups at the price of antagonizing whole societies. When the monopoly ends, which is inevitable, the very openness of the United States will make it uniquely vulnerable to the cheap, swarming weapons others will deploy.

The cost of defense, meanwhile, goes up and up and up, with little political resistance and barely any public discussion. By the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the United States will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. That includes about $580 billion for the Pentagon’s baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” funds, $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs, and other expenses. But it doesn’t count more than $80 billion a year of interest on the military-related share of the national debt. After adjustments for inflation, the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War. It will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined—three to five times as much as China, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as Russia. The world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the United States, about 4 percent.

Yet such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the Pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “We’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” Charles A. Stevenson, a onetime staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former professor at the National War College, told me. “We’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. We are flatlining R&D.”

Here is just one newsworthy example that illustrates the broad and depressingly intractable tendencies of weapons development and spending: the failed hopes for a new airplane called the F-35 “Lightning.”


Today’s weapons can be decades in gestation, and the history of the F-35 traces back long before most of today’s troops were born. Two early-1970s-era planes, the F-16 “Fighting Falcon” jet and the A-10 “Thunderbolt II” attack plane, departed from the trend of military design in much the same way the compact Japanese cars of that era departed from the tail-fin American look. These planes were relatively cheap, pared to their essentials, easy to maintain, and designed to do a specific thing very well. For the F-16, that was to be fast, highly maneuverable, and deadly in air-to-air combat. For the A-10, it was to serve as a kind of flying tank that could provide what the military calls “close air support” to troops in combat by blasting enemy formations. The A-10 needed to be heavily armored, so it could absorb opposing fire; designed to fly as slowly as possible over the battlefield, rather than as rapidly, so that it could stay in range to do damage rather than roaring through; and built around one very powerful gun.

There are physical devices that seem the pure expression of a function. The Eames chair, a classic No. 2 pencil, the original Ford Mustang or VW Beetle, the MacBook Air—take your pick. The A-10, generally known not as the Thunderbolt but as the Warthog, fills that role in the modern military. It is rugged; it is inexpensive; it can shred enemy tanks and convoys by firing up to 70 rounds a second of armor-piercing, 11-inch-long depleted-uranium shells.

And the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the Republican leadership of the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership of Obama, has been to get rid of the A-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care.

The weapon in whose name the A-10 is being phased out is its opposite in almost every way. In automotive terms, it would be a Lamborghini rather than a pickup truck (or a flying tank). In air-travel terms, the first-class sleeper compartment on Singapore Airlines rather than advance-purchase Economy Plus (or even business class) on United. These comparisons seem ridiculous, but they are fair. That is, a Lamborghini is demonstrably “better” than a pickup truck in certain ways—speed, handling, comfort—but only in very special circumstances is it a better overall choice. Same for the first-class sleeper, which would be anyone’s choice if someone else were footing the bill but is simply not worth the trade-off for most people most of the time.

Each new generation of weapons tends to be “better” in much the way a Lamborghini is, and “worth it” in the same sense as a first-class airline seat. The A-10 shows the pattern. According to figures from the aircraft analyst Richard L. Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, the “unit recurring flyaway” costs in 2014 dollars—the fairest apples-to-apples comparison—stack up like this. Each Warthog now costs about $19 million, less than any other manned combat aircraft. A Predator drone costs about two-thirds as much. Other fighter, bomber, and multipurpose planes cost much more: about $72 million for the V-22 Osprey, about $144 million for the F-22 fighter, about $810 million for the B-2 bomber, and about $101 million (or five A‑10s) for the F-35. There’s a similar difference in operating costs. The operating expenses are low for the A-10 and much higher for the others largely because the A-10’s design is simpler, with fewer things that could go wrong. The simplicity of design allows it to spend more of its time flying instead of being in the shop.

In clear contrast to the A-10, the F-35 is an ill-starred undertaking that would have been on the front pages as often as other botched federal projects, from the Obamacare rollout to the FEMA response after Hurricane Katrina, if, like those others, it either seemed to affect a broad class of people or could easily be shown on TV—or if so many politicians didn’t have a stake in protecting it. One measure of the gap in coverage: Total taxpayer losses in the failed Solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War.

The condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the Pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. An aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop. The federal official who made the project a symbol of a new, transparent, rigorously data-dependent approach to awarding contracts ended up serving time in federal prison for corruption involving projects with Boeing. (Boeing’s chief financial officer also did time in prison.) For the record, the Pentagon and the lead contractors stoutly defend the plane and say that its teething problems will be over soon—and that anyway, it is the plane of the future, and the A-10 is an aging relic of the past. (We have posted reports here on the A-10, pro and con, so you can see whether you are convinced.)

In theory, the F-35 would show common purpose among the military services, since the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps would all get their own custom-tailored versions of the plane. In fact, a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive Navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an Air Force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised. In theory, the F-35 was meant to knit U.S. allies together, since other countries would buy it as their mainstay airplane and in turn would get part of the contracting business. In fact, the delays, cost overruns, and mechanical problems of the airplane have made it a contentious political issue in customer countries from Canada and Holland to Italy and Australia.

The country where the airplane has least been a public issue is the United States. In their 2012 debates, Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama for supporting “green energy” projects, including Solyndra. Neither man mentioned the F-35, and I am still looking for evidence that President Obama has talked about it in any of his speeches. In other countries, the F-35 can be cast as another annoying American intrusion. Here, it is protected by supplier contracts that have been spread as broadly as possible.

“Political engineering,” a term popularized by a young Pentagon analyst named Chuck Spinney in the 1970s, is pork-barrel politics on the grandest scale. Cost overruns sound bad if someone else is getting the extra money. They can be good if they are creating business for your company or jobs in your congressional district. Political engineering is the art of spreading a military project to as many congressional districts as possible, and thus maximizing the number of members of Congress who feel that if they cut off funding, they’d be hurting themselves.

A $10 million parts contract in one congressional district builds one representative’s support. Two $5 million contracts in two districts are twice as good, and better all around would be three contracts at $3 million apiece. Every participant in the military-contracting process understands this logic: the prime contractors who parcel out supply deals around the country, the military’s procurement officers who divide work among contractors, the politicians who vote up or down on the results. In the late 1980s, a coalition of so-called cheap hawks in Congress tried to cut funding for the B-2 bomber. They got nowhere after it became clear that work for the project was being carried out in 46 states and no fewer than 383 congressional districts (of 435 total). The difference between then and now is that in 1989, Northrop, the main contractor for the plane, had to release previously classified data to demonstrate how broadly the dollars were being spread.

Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, [the F-35] is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation.

The next big project the Air Force is considering is the Long Range Strike Bomber, a successor to the B-1 and B-2 whose specifications include an ability to do bombing runs deep into China. (A step so wildly reckless that the U.S. didn’t consider it even when fighting Chinese troops during the Korean War.) By the time the plane’s full costs and capabilities become apparent, Chuck Spinney wrote last summer, the airplane, “like the F-35 today, will be unstoppable.” That is because even now its supporters are building the plane’s “social safety net by spreading the subcontracts around the country, or perhaps like the F-35, around the world.”

III. Chickenhawk Politics

Politicians say that national security is their first and most sacred duty, but they do not act as if this is so. The most recent defense budget passed the House Armed Services Committee by a vote of 61 to zero, with similarly one-sided debate before the vote. This is the same House of Representatives that cannot pass a long-term Highway Trust Fund bill that both parties support. “The lionization of military officials by politicians is remarkable and dangerous,” a retired Air Force colonel named Tom Ruby, who now writes on organizational culture, told me. He and others said that this deference was one reason so little serious oversight of the military took place.

T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford, told me that instead of applying critical judgment to military programs, or even regarding national defense as any kind of sacred duty, politicians have come to view it simply as a teat. “Many on Capitol Hill see the Pentagon with admirable simplicity,” he said: “It is a way of directing tax money to selected districts. It’s part of what they were elected to do.”

In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama asked Gary Hart, the Democratic Party’s most experienced and best-connected figure on defense reform, to form a small bipartisan task force that would draft recommendations on how Obama might try to recast the Pentagon and its practices if he won a second term. Hart did so (I was part of the group, along with Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, and Norman R. Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin), and sent a report to Obama that fall. [Here is that memo.] He never heard back. Every White House is swamped with recommendations and requests, and it responds only to those it considers most urgent—which defense reform obviously was not.

Soon thereafter, during the 2012 presidential race, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney said much about how they would spend the billion and a half dollars a day that go to military programs, except for when Romney said that if elected, he would spend a total of $1 trillion more. In their only direct exchange about military policy, during their final campaign debate, Obama said that Romney’s plans would give the services more money than they were asking for. Romney pointed out that the Navy had fewer ships than it did before World War I. Obama shot back, “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.” It was Obama’s most sarcastic and aggressive moment of any of the debates, and was also the entirety of the discussion about where those trillions would go.

Jim Webb is a decorated Vietnam veteran, an author, a former Democratic senator, and a likely presidential candidate. Seven years ago in his book A Time to Fight, he wrote that the career military was turning into a “don’t break my rice bowl” culture, referring to an Asian phrase roughly comparable to making sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. Webb meant that ambitious officers notice how many of their mentors and predecessors move after retirement into board positions, consultancies, or operational roles with defense contractors. (Pensions now exceed preretirement pay for some very senior officers; for instance, a four-star general or admiral with 40 years of service can receive a pension of more than $237,000 a year, even if his maximum salary on active duty was $180,000.)

Webb says it would defy human nature if knowledge of the post-service prospects did not affect the way some high-ranking officers behave while in uniform, including “protecting the rice bowl” of military budgets and cultivating connections with their predecessors and their postretirement businesses. “There have always been some officers who went on to contracting jobs,” Webb, who grew up in an Air Force family, told me recently. “What’s new is the scale of the phenomenon, and its impact on the highest ranks of the military.”

Of course, the modern military advertises itself as a place where young people who have lacked the chance or money for higher education can develop valuable skills, plus earn GI Bill benefits for post-service studies. That’s good all around, and is part of the military’s perhaps unintended but certainly important role as an opportunity creator for undercredentialed Americans. Webb is talking about a different, potentially corrupting “prepare for your future” effect on the military’s best-trained, most influential careerists.

“It is no secret that in subtle ways, many of these top leaders begin positioning themselves for their second-career employment during their final military assignments,” Webb wrote in A Time to Fight. The result, he said, is a “seamless interplay” of corporate and military interests “that threatens the integrity of defense procurement, of controversial personnel issues such as the huge ‘quasi-military’ structure [of contractors, like Blackwater and Halliburton] that has evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and inevitably of the balance within our national security process itself.” I heard assessments like this from many of the men and women I spoke with. The harshest ones came not from people who mistrusted the military but from those who, like Webb, had devoted much of their lives to it.

A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”

Of course it was the most revered American warrior of the 20th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned most urgently that business and politics would corrupt the military, and vice versa. Everyone has heard of this speech. Not enough people have actually read it and been exposed to what would now be considered its dangerously antimilitary views. Which mainstream politician could say today, as Eisenhower said in 1961, that the military-industrial complex has a “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—[that] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government”?

Seth Moulton, a few days after his victory in last fall’s congressional race, said that the overall quality and morale of people in the military has dramatically improved since the days of a conscript force. “But it’s become populated, especially at the highest ranks, by careerists, people who have gotten where they are by checking all the boxes and not taking risks,” he told me. “Some of the finest officers I knew were lieutenants who knew they were getting out, so weren’t afraid to make the right decision. I know an awful lot of senior officers who are very afraid to make a tough choice because they’re worried how it will look on their fitness report.” This may sound like a complaint about life in any big organization, but it’s something more. There’s no rival Army or Marine Corps you can switch to for a new start. There’s almost no surmounting an error or a black mark on the fitness or evaluation reports that are the basis for promotions.

Every institution has problems, and at every stage of U.S. history, some critics have considered the U.S. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. The difference now, I contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy.

At enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. But because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.

I have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “Since the time of the Romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,” John A. Nagl told me. Nagl is a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who was a combat commander in Iraq and has written two influential books about the modern military. He left the Army as a lieutenant colonel and now, in his late 40s, is the head of the Haverford prep school, near Philadelphia.

“They know what they are signing up for,” Nagl said of today’s troops. “They are proud to do it, and in exchange they expect a reasonable living, and pensions and health care if they are hurt or fall sick. The American public is completely willing to let this professional class of volunteers serve where they should, for wise purpose. This gives the president much greater freedom of action to make decisions in the national interest, with troops who will salute sharply and do what needs to be done.”

I like and respect Nagl, but I completely disagree. As we’ve seen, public inattention to the military, born of having no direct interest in what happens to it, has allowed both strategic and institutional problems to fester.

“A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2012. Bacevich himself fought in Vietnam; his son was killed in Iraq. “Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.”

Mike Mullen thinks that one way to reengage Americans with the military is to shrink the active-duty force, a process already under way. “The next time we go to war,” he said, “the American people should have to say yes. And that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. They would have to be inconvenienced. That would bring America in. America hasn’t been in these previous wars. And we are paying dearly for that.”

With their distance from the military, politicians don’t talk seriously about whether the United States is directly threatened by chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere, or is in fact safer than ever (as Christopher Preble and John Mueller, of the Cato Institute, have argued in a new book, A Dangerous World?). The vast majority of Americans outside the military can be triply cynical in their attitude toward it. Triply? One: “honoring” the troops but not thinking about them. Two: “caring” about defense spending but really viewing it as a bipartisan stimulus program. Three: supporting a “strong” defense but assuming that the United States is so much stronger than any rival that it’s pointless to worry whether strategy, weaponry, and leadership are right.

The cultural problems arising from an arm’s-length military could be even worse. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who now teaches at Duke law school, has thought about civic-military relations through much of his professional life. When he was studying at the National Defense University as a young Air Force officer in the early 1990s, just after the first Gulf War, he was a co-winner of the prize for best student essay with an imagined-future work called “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.”

His essay’s premise was cautionary, and was based on the tension between rising adulation for the military and declining trust in most other aspects of government. The more exasperated Americans grew about economic and social problems, the more relieved they were when competent men in uniform, led by General Thomas E. T. Brutus, finally stepped in to take control. Part of the reason for the takeover, Dunlap explained, was that the military had grown so separate from mainstream culture and currents that it viewed the rest of society as a foreign territory to occupy and administer.

Recently I asked Dunlap how the real world of post-2012 America matched his imagined version.

“I think we’re on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of a phenomenon that has always been embedded in the American psyche,” he said. “That is benign antimilitarism,” which would be the other side of the reflexive pro-militarism of recent years. “People don’t appreciate how unprecedented our situation is,” he told me. What is that situation? For the first time in the nation’s history, America has a permanent military establishment large enough to shape our dealings in the world and seriously influence our economy. Yet the Americans in that military, during what Dunlap calls the “maturing years of the volunteer force,” are few enough in number not to seem representative of the country they defend.

“It’s becoming increasingly tribal,” Dunlap says of the at-war force in our chickenhawk nation, “in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.”

People within that military tribe can feel both above and below the messy civilian reality of America. Below, in the burdens placed upon them, and the inattention to the lives, limbs, and opportunities they have lost. Above, in being able to withstand hardships that would break their hipster or slacker contemporaries.

“I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves,” Dunlap said. “And there is some rationality for that.” Anyone who has spent time with troops and their families knows what he means. Physical fitness, standards of promptness and dress, all the aspects of self-discipline that have traditionally made the military a place where misdirected youth could “straighten out,” plus the spirit of love and loyalty for comrades that is found in civilian life mainly on sports teams. The best resolution of this tension between military and mainstream values would of course come as those who understand the military’s tribal identity apply their strengths outside the tribe. “The generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts,” Dunlap said of the young veterans of the recent long wars. “They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’ ”

In addition to Seth Moulton, this year’s Congress will have more than 20 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, including new Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa. The 17 who are already there, including Democratic Representatives Tulsi Gabbard and Tammy Duckworth and Republican Representatives Duncan D. Hunter and Adam Kinzinger, have played an active role in veterans’ policies and in the 2013 debates about intervening in Syria. Gabbard was strongly against it; some of the Republican veterans were for it—but all of them made arguments based on firsthand observation of what had worked and failed. Moulton told me that the main lesson he’ll apply from his four tours in Iraq is the importance of service, of whatever kind. He said that Harvard’s famed chaplain during Moulton’s years as an undergraduate physics student, the late Peter J. Gomes, had convinced him that “it’s not enough to ‘believe’ in service. You should find a way, yourself, to serve.” Barring unimaginable changes, “service” in America will not mean a draft. But Moulton says he will look for ways “to promote a culture where more people want to serve.”

For all the differences in their emphases and conclusions, these young veterans are alike in all taking the military seriously, rather than just revering it. The vast majority of Americans will never share their experiences. But we can learn from that seriousness, and view military policy as deserving at least the attention we give to taxes or schools.

What might that mean, in specific? Here is a start. In the private report prepared for President Obama more than three years ago, Gary Hart’s working group laid out prescriptions on a range of operational practices, from the need for smaller, more agile combat units to a shift in the national command structure to a different approach toward preventing nuclear proliferation. Three of the recommendations were about the way the country as a whole should engage with its armed forces. They were:

Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions.

Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities.

Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.

Barack Obama, busy on other fronts, had no time for this. The rest of us should make time, if we hope to choose our wars more wisely, and win them.

To read more about the arguments for and against the F-35, see this list of articles and official statements compiled by James Fallows.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/

In the January/February 2015 Atlantic, James Fallows argues that a specific example of flawed defense decision-making, under what he calls "Chickenhawk Nation" circumstances, involves the contrasting fates of two military aircraft. One is the Air Force's A-10 attack plane, nicknamed the "Warthog." The other is a multi-service airplane that was originally called the "joint strike fighter" and now is known as the F-35 "Lightning II." The A-10—which is relatively cheap, highly reliable and battle-tested, and designed for the specific task of flying low and slow over a battlefield so as to support U.S. and allied troops—is being phased out. Much of the money is going to what the article describes as the over-budget, past-schedule, too-complex, problem-plagued F-35.

The article points out that the Department of Defense strongly disputes these views, and says that we will offer links to documents pro and con about these airplanes and other relevant defense issues. Here they are:

I. The Gary Hart Commission memo. As the article discusses, in 2011 Barack Obama asked former Senator Gary Hart, who in the 1980s had been a leader in the “defense reform” movement, to convene a small group and offer recommendations on how a reelected President Obama might work lasting changes on the Pentagon. Read the summary memo, “Bending the Arc of Military History.”

Hart remained in contact with the administration and in 2014 was appointed a special negotiator for Northern Ireland. But, as the article says, he heard no follow-up on these points.

II. Official arguments in favor of the F-35 and against the A-10

• “Uncle Sam Builds an Airplane,” a June 2002 Atlantic article by James Fallows, summarizing the reasoning behind the F-35, backed when it was intended to be the solution to the Pentagon's budget problems rather than another illustration of them
• The main project page for the F-35 on the Pentagon’s site, with information about its progress
• A report from the Pentagon’s comptroller on the costs of the A-10, the F-35, and other significant programs
• "F-35 on time to delivery global security," an Air Force presentation from September, 2014, featuring Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the executive officer of the F-35 program
• “The F-35 Is on Track,” a Pentagon video from July 2014
• “F-35 Engine Fix Coming,” a Pentagon news release from October 2014
• “F-35 Production on Track,” a positive report from Bogdan in 2013
• A 2009 press release from then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arguing that the F-35 was “the heart of future tactical combat aviation”
• A 2010 press release by a Navy admiral arguing that “the Navy needs the F-35’s capabilities”
• A similar argument from the Air Force chief of staff, General Mark Welsh, in 2013
• A 2012 Pentagon announcement that the F-35 would be a “big leap” in fighter-plane capabilities
• A 2014 Pentagon announcement that cost-overruns were being reduced
• A 2012 Pentagon announcement about the strategic importance of the F-35 and the F-22
• A 2014 Air Force announcement on why the A-10 had to be cut while the F-35 went ahead  
• A similar story from 2013, from the Air Force, on the need to cut the A-10 in favor of the F-35

III. Arguments and analyses on the other side, about the importance of the A-10 and the ongoing failures of the F-35

• “The A-10 Warthog: A Core Defense Issue Washington Can No Longer Ignore,” a compendium of links and references on the two aircraft by the Straus Military Reform Project of the Project of Government Oversight (POGO)
• “Should the Air Force Retire the A-10? A Seminar on a Seminal Subject,” a 2013 tradeoff analysis by the very influential former Pentagon budget analyst Chuck Spinney
• “On the Road to a Hollow Military,” by Chuck Spinney, in 2014
• “Three Reports on the F-35, One of Them Informative,” by the Project on Government Oversight in 2014
• Analyst Eric Palmer's annotations on Time magazine’s “Battleland” 2013 series
• “Airmen at Odds with Air Force Brass Over Future of Beloved A-10 Plane,” a 2014 PBS Newshour feature
• "Newest U.S. Stealth Fighter '10 Years Behind' Older Jets," a Daily Beast report this week on sensor problems with the F-35.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-reading-list-on-the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/384065/

In his January/February Atlantic cover story, I write about politicians' reluctance to reform the military:

In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama asked Gary Hart, the Democratic Party’s most experienced and best-connected figure on defense reform, to form a small bipartisan task force that would draft recommendations on how Obama might try to recast the Pentagon and its practices if he won a second term. Hart did so (I was part of the group, along with Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, and Norman R. Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin), and sent a report to Obama that fall. He never heard back. Every White House is swamped with recommendations and requests, and it responds only to those it considers most urgent—which defense reform obviously was not.

That memo, which was titled “Bending the Arc of Military History,” can be read below.

Twenty-first Century Directions for America’s Defense. War has changed and we have not kept pace. The potential for traditional nation-state wars is decreasing. Unconventional, irregular conflicts are increasing. Rather than traditional, hierarchical command systems managing concentrated, large-scale force structures designed for major global wars, 21st century conflicts require networked, smaller-scale combat units configured for maneuver, mobility, flexibility, and surprise operating under a modern, faster, cohesive command structure.

Major recommendations:

1. Combat units must become smaller, faster, and more lethal. Unlike the 20th century when size meant power, today smaller combat units have much greater power due to technology, weapons precision, and networked communications and information systems.  Brigade, regiment, and company size units seamlessly networked will be much more effective on the 21st century battlefield. These more powerful and effective combat units can be “scaled-up” into larger, more traditional formations if required by larger-scale conflicts.

2. Conduct a critical review of the U.S global posture. Our foreign “footprint” is represented by our current legacy regional commands heavily layered since the end of World War II. This review should determine which foreign headquarters and bases may be consolidated,  reduced, or replaced by maritime assets.

3. Streamline the Cold War national security apparatus. Replace it with a smaller, more compact system designed to provide the commander in chief with focused, precise, and timely advice based on refined real-time intelligence. This new national command authority support structure should be augmented with a small senior Defense Council composed of seasoned national security experts free from institutional responsibilities who would report directly to the President.

4. Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st century realities.

5. Appoint a Commission to Assess the Long Wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a Commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions.

6. The Commander in Chief as military reformer. Major political and technological changes require the President once again, as in previous instances in U.S. history, to become a bold military reformer. Under differing circumstances this role has been played by Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan.

7. Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.

Supporting discussion:

Purpose of this memorandum: Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, and after a decade of experience in a different kind of warfare brought on by new kinds of threats, our military remains fundamentally unchanged from its Cold War organizational schemes. We inherited and continue to maintain a military structure, spending patterns, and habits of thought that owe too much to threats and technologies of a bygone age and reflect too little the strategic challenges and technological opportunities of the decades ahead.

Over time, we cannot continue to outspend the rest of the world, combined, on military forces when our economy represents one quarter of the world’s output and requires sustained domestic investment to preserve and increase economic leadership and opportunity for the American people. A restructured 21st century military should cost no less nor no more than is required to defend our country. But savings in lives and money will result from making that military more effective.

We face a security environment increasingly mismatched to our legacy national security systems. Evolving threats are specifically designed to avoid our fortified points. Opportunities for strengthening American economic and political power are being sacrificed to the maintenance of a military system from the last century.

At critical historical moments, such as following World War II and the Vietnam War, our nation has adapted its security resources to the realities of the age. In these and other cases we learned from experience and profited by correlating our strategies and military resources to the realities of changing times. Lessons learned from two current long wars must guide us in undertaking long overdue post-Cold War reforms.

1. Smaller combat units have much greater power due to technology, weapons precision, and networked communications and information systems. These more powerful and effective smaller combat units can be “scaled-up” into larger, traditional formations if required by larger scale conflicts. Technology, especially high technologies such as robotics, now enable us to reverse the recent pattern of “scaling down” and, instead, make our baseline forces the brigade, regiment, or company which can be “scaled up” in the event of a major nation-state war.

Scaling-up, fitting smaller combat units into larger division, carrier task group, and bomber wing formations, can be accomplished in a timely fashion, when required, through training, equipping, and exercising, to achieve combat presence in the case of threatened conflicts at the nation-state level.

However, about two dozen wars are presently underway around the world, all of them irregular, attritional and protracted. We are presently militarily involved in three of them. This memorandum recommends changes designed to enable us to engage with smaller, nimbler, more networked forces. This will in turn make it possible for us to sustain combat presence, when our interests or our ethics demand, without exhausting our military in the process of endless repeated deployments of large combat and support contingents.

Networked intelligence systems constructed laterally will increasingly erode the traditional intelligence hierarchy accustomed to secrecy hoarding. The National Directorate of Intelligence is a layer of hierarchy that makes networking (lateral information sharing) harder. Advanced technologies both enable us and require us to must transition from centralized intelligence to networked intelligence. Serious consideration should be given to the elimination of the NDI structure.

The U.S. should, finally, declare a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons. A world without large strategic arsenals is one in which American air power, naval mastery and incomparable ground forces would have their advantages sealed into place. Nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue nations or terror networks pose a terrible threat. Denuclearization – even eventual abolition, carefully and verifiably pursued – should be our goal. It is our obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both measures make practical national security sense. And it is the right thing to do for future generations.

2. Review the U.S. global posture. Since the end of World War II, every conflict has produced far-flung, permanent foreign deployments now controlled by regional commands top-heavy with bureaucracy. New conflicts produce new commands and sub-commands and those produced by old conflicts are seldom reduced or eliminated.

It is now necessary to liquidate unnecessary foreign deployments and commands, consolidate others, and, where strategically logical, consider replacement of them by maritime assets. Produced by accretion and the reluctance to surrender an established “presence”, our global posture manages to avoid critical examination and proliferates without a rational strategy. A critical review of this crazy-quilt system will produce a much more rational and relevant global posture for the nation, one attuned to the realities of the current new century.

3. The national command structure. The National Security Act of 1947 provides the statutory framework upon which a vast and growing defense structure has expanded by accretion. Layer upon layer of civilian and military command structures and inter-departmental committees and bureaus overlap to a degree that makes focused, well-informed, and timely decisions increasingly difficult. This system must be simplified, rationalized, and made relevant to a newer, faster-moving age. Warning times and therefore reaction times are dramatically more compressed.

A thorough, top-down review by disinterested and experienced advisors can provide a blueprint for achieving this too-long delayed objective. The national command authority is not well served by the present security super-structure. It is more elaborate than necessary and increasingly irrelevant to the realities of the 21st century.

A 21st century support structure for the national command authority should be augmented by a Defense Council composed of those with superior experience in national security affairs who are not encumbered by current institutional responsibilities or allegiances and who are available to give the President their best advice.

4. The use of force. Current practices for determining to commit U.S. military forces are irregular, uneven, and ad hoc. Though the circumstances of conflict will always and inevitably vary, it is possible to produce a regular order for deciding when, where, how, and most importantly whether to apply military resources. This system can and must be superbly informed, based on an agreed data base (and not contradictory intelligence reports and confused and conflicting information), involve a predetermined and established set of senior civilian and military commanders, be based on timely communications, and be premised on an established set of guidelines as to both the advantages and costs, financial and political, of engagement.

A streamlined and effective command structure and decision-making process must also consider projected loss of life among both indigenous populations and U.S. forces and projected time commitments based on realistic, not fanciful, estimates. Future force deployments should take place only after a thorough understanding of the historical and cultural conditions in the theater and their implications for long-term commitments

5. A Commission to Assess the Long Wars. An unprecedented effort to learn the lessons of modern conflict, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, is required. Traditionally, our society is sufficiently relieved by the suspension of hostilities that we choose not to look back. This reluctance sacrifices invaluable knowledge shared among those who participated in the conflict and those who commanded.

Lessons learned are imperative if we are to prosecute future conflicts more effectively and if we are to know more clearly whether military intervention makes sense. We must assess the nature of unconventional, irregular warfare, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, coordination of allied efforts, and effective combat unit performance.

A precedent for this commission may be found in the 9/11 Commission.

Such a commission will greatly enhance our clarity in knowing when, where, how, and whether to commit American military forces. It will help us anticipate when we are committing ourselves to long-term nation building. Most of all, this full-scale review represents a moral duty to those who have sacrificed their lives in these current protracted conflicts.

6. The Commander in Chief as military reformer. A number of previous presidents have influenced major strategy changes, usually in advance of established military theory and doctrine and traditional military institutions. The combination of three on-going conflicts and new national security leadership, provide the platform for the commander in chief to articulate the US approach to conflict in the 21st century.

Abraham Lincoln understood, in many cases ahead of his senior military commanders, the strategic revolutions represented by the railroads and the telegraph. His appreciation of these revolutions directly impacted the Union’s military strategy throughout our Civil War.

Franklin Roosevelt modernized mass mobilization and skillfully allocated resources between two major global combat theaters. American forces at the end of World War II were radically different from those that went to war in December 1941. A decade after 9.11, the U.S. military still looks structurally as it did the day the twin towers fell.

Dwight Eisenhower rejected advice to eliminate adversaries by pre-emptive warfare, including the use of nuclear weapons, and instead established the doctrine of containment and nuclear deterrence that guided us successfully through the Cold War.

John Kennedy managed the Cuban missile crisis, often in contradiction to the wishes of senior military commanders, and is credited with avoiding nuclear confrontation and potential exchange by instituting the quarantine of Cuba.

Ronald Reagan instituted arms control breakthroughs by imagining an exchange of highly advanced space technologies with the Soviet Union adversary. This innovation was resisted strongly by senior military commanders and political advisors alike. He also instituted a maritime strategy and presided over the introduction of technologically advanced precision-guided weapons.

7. Restoring a healthy civil-military relation. National security education must be increased in two dimensions: the military academies and officer training schools must be more widely focused in terms of involvement in civilian instructors, such as historians; and the commander-in-chief must play a larger role in educating the public at large concerning national security issues.

Greater attention must be paid to the implications of a widening chasm between civilian and military sectors of society and the increasing detachment of the military from the society it serves. Americans in general and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women who protect them must be more closely linked. This may be achieved via educational programs that can give all Americans a deeper appreciation for military and security affairs.

Citizens, especially those who have no family member in the military, see our military as a distant and little-understood system somewhere on the outer edges of our society. Military professionals continue to be respected but do not engage the public’s interests on any immediate basis. Very few members of Congress have any military experience whatsoever and most take little interest in military affairs.

An age in which our military is constantly engaged and our public is not is a potentially serious challenge to American democracy.

Summary. Twentieth century conflict involved traditional nation-state wars with formal declarations of war, direct involvement of the public, conscription and mass mobilization, often increased taxation, and even rationing. These wars had a beginning and an official end.

Late 20th century and early 21st century conflicts have been irregular and unconventional with less Congressional involvement and oversight, much less involvement of civil society and without an official beginning and end. Victory is increasingly elusive and difficult to define.

There are three fundamental reasons to pursue military reforms. First, every period of technological change implies the adoption of new, oft-times radically different, military “tools and practices.” Second, our stressed economic situation and consequent fiscal constraints require us to invest in our military with far more circumspection than in the past. Last, the external security environment, filling up with rising regional powers – and ever more potent networks – should spur us, in our straitened economic condition, to pursue innovative approaches that will restore our somewhat blunted “edge.”

Resistance to change must be confronted from the outset. Militaries practice a dangerous, complex business, and are loath to risk changing from tools and practices that have worked in the past and that they believe may still work. But sometimes the risk of not changing is greater, as was the case a century ago when the great powers marched their armies off into battle, massed shoulder to shoulder, against machine guns and high explosive artillery. Millions were slaughtered needlessly because of the reluctance to embrace change when it was clearly necessary.

Post-Cold War military reform is twenty years over-due.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-gary-hart-tried-to-change-military-history/384064/

Several times this past fall, I've mentioned that I was concentrating on a big project for the magazine and thus was deferring most other commitments, from our ongoing (and soon-to-be-revamped) American Futures saga to the daily fray of news about politics, China, aviation, etc.

The article I was working on has now come out in the new January-February 2015 issue of the magazine (subscribe!) and has gone online this evening. In the days to come I'll say more about the themes I emphasize in this article, and the ones I decided to leave out. Also about some of the ramifications for policy and politics, plus the reactions I've begun receiving from people who have read the print magazine.

My purpose right now is simpler. It is to point you to:

1. The article itself, which you can find here, "The Tragedy of the American Military."

2. The article above includes some powerful interactive graphics, plus a video The Atlantic's online team has created to accompany the online version of the article, which you will see as you read through it. The graphics are meant to underscore one of the "Chickenhawk Nation" themes, which is the stark contrast between the relative handful of Americans directly involved in the country's ongoing wars and the huge majority of politicians who are dealt into what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" through supply contracts to their home districts. The video illustrates the difference between civilian technology, which grows ever cheaper and more reliable, and military technology, which does the reverse.

3. The brief background on and text of "the Gary Hart memo" that I mention in the article. When I first began reporting on the post-Vietnam War "military reform" movement, in a 1980 Atlantic article called "The Musclebound Superpower" and then in my 1981 book National Defense, Gary Hart was a rising young Democratic senator from Colorado who was assembling a network of historians, technologists, combat leaders, weapons designers, and others to think about how the United States could take a more flexible, realistic, and sustainable approach to defending itself. His main Republican counterparts were the then-young and rising Representatives Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Dick Cheney of Wyoming.

We know about the subsequent paths of Gingrich and Cheney. What many people don't realize about Hart's career since then is how seriously he has maintained his interest in the tactics and strategy of national defense. Because of this background, in 2011 President Obama privately asked Hart to formulate advice on what Obama could do, if he won a second term, to make a difference in long-standing military problems. This memo, published here for the first time, was the result.

4. A collection of arguments pro and con about two controversial military aircraft, the A-10 "Warthog" attack plane and the F-35 "Lightning II" fighter. My article takes a hard line in arguing that the A-10 illustrates some of the best practices in weapons-design, and the F-35 the reverse. Thus I argue that the current policy of phasing out the A-10 while pouring money into the F-35 is a costly and illustrative mistake.

The civilian and military officials in the Pentagon who have been pushing for the F-35 and against the A-10 obviously disagree. The links on this page will allow you to explore the claims and responses and see which you find most convincing. And since the main argument of my article is that the hollow practice of "honoring our heroes" at halftime ceremonies and through priority boarding at airports has become a cheap substitute for serious engagement with the real problems of our defense establishment, whatever you conclude about specific weapons or policies, wading into the issues is important in itself.

* * *

The memo from Gary Hart's small group was meant to be terse and suggestive rather than encyclopedic. Knowing how fiercely competed-for a president's time and attention are, Hart insisted that the memo be kept under 2,500 words in length.

My article, as you might notice, is not quite that short. Even so, with about 10,000 words to work with, there are a lot of themes and discussions we decided to save for another time, in the interest of concentrating this one on its central chickenhawk theme. For instance, the "Air-Sea Battle" concept, which could loom large in future tensions between the United States and China, is important. So, obviously, are the future of the nuclear deterrent, and the implications of cheaper, widely dispersed drones, and the ways in which the military trains and promotes its officers. But we decided to deal with those later.

This article, plus its accompanying material, is meant to raise questions rather than resolve them all, begin a discussion rather than conclude it.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/my-story-on-chickenhawk-nation/384077/

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/384088/the-pentagons-15-trillion-mistake/

Last night my article on "The Tragedy of the American Military" went online. The article is here; an accompanying reading list is here; the "Gary Hart memo" that I mention in the article is here. And a video on how the troubled F-35 fighter plane exemplifies larger Pentagon problems is here.

Rather than wait a few days to quote reader mail, I'm going to dig right in and start doing so now, since so much has arrived with such range and intensity of argument. I'll do two or three per installment.

From a West Point graduate who became a successful business executive:

I am an [post-Vietnam era] West Point grad. Resigned after 5 years.

Your article is spot on. I often wonder what the rest of the world thinks of us when at each major sporting event, we have fly overs of fighter planes, B-52s, Apache helicopters and legions of troops getting awards at halftime.

I see in my classmates a total divorce from civilian reality. They live in a rarefied world where they are the only ones who are honest, law abiding, and religious.

They totally disdain social welfare programs as they receive health benefits to death, commissary privileges, and pensions. In their view, civilians are not worthy of these programs.

It is a dangerous slope we are on where we worship the troops, have no clue what they do, or why, and as along as we don't need to know, we are happy.

I hope your article stirs discussion. I fear it won't. The coup may in fact be coming.

From a reader in the West:

I am Vietnam Vet of two tours ('68-70). I strongly believe at least some of the issues regarding  present day military-civilian interactions is ownership. There is none.

As you stated at the beginning of your article: Having another war is OK as long as someone else is going to do the fighting. If a draft had been in place at the beginning of the Iraq War, the war might not have started or not have gone on as long as it did and the same would hold true for the Afghan war.

In this last midterm elections only 33.6 percent (nationally and some states were as low as 22 percent) of the electorate showed up to vote. In my mind that is total disrespect towards those whom the fans cheer for at any of the respective sporting events.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were sold to the American populace stating these military actions are being fought to preserve American Freedoms and way a of life, yet the electorate throws their right to vote in the circular file.

From Jamie Dodson in Alabama:

As a retired Army officer I concur with your overall assessment and see Gary Hart’s three recommendations as key. Of the three, I see restoring the military-civilian relationship as the most vital.

I strongly support the return of the draft and the citizen soldier. That’s a tall order considering our high tech military. It takes a great deal of time to train soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen/women. So how long would our new draft have to be—three years?

The draft changed my life for the better, and I rose through the ranks to retire as a field grade officer. I feel certain that it could also do wonders for many of our nation’s youth—especially those of the elite. And perhaps by extension, keep us out of unnecessary conflicts.

On this last reader's point, I agree in principle that a broadly based draft might rebuild a connection between the citizenry and its military, as well as creating additional drag against launching "wars of choice." In the current issue, Joseph Epstein writes about what such a draft meant for the America of the early Cold War era.

But as a practical matter, I think there is simply zero possibility that the United States will adopt compulsory service of any sort, absent some change in world circumstances no one can now foresee. Therefore I view this as a thought experiment rather than as a real option.

* * *

Three process notes:

1) Comments. For reasons explained here and here, I've never allowed comments on my portion of The Atlantic's site, although comments are enabled on my article itself. Instead I enjoy receiving, quoting, and learning from reader emails, as I am doing here and will in coming days. For me this approach offers most of the benefits of a comments section, including exposing a range of informed (or sometimes only passionate) response, without the drawbacks that are on display in many unmoderated comment sites.

A carefully moderated comments site, like the one that Ta-Nehisi Coates has operated over the years, is in principle the best solution of all. But I've never been willing to commit the time to run a site that way.

2) American Futures. I'm tagging this post as part of our American Futures series, because we're really talking about another part of our ongoing question about the civic fiber of the country. It's different in nature from the other entries but it meant to get at similar long-term themes.

3) Editing. Some messages I quote originally began with something like "Great story" or "I'm glad you wrote this!" On principle I edit most of this out. Although I crave compliments as much as the next person, it just seems creepy to quote them about yourself. Thus when I leave in positive comments, as I have in a message here, it's either because they're addressed at some criticism I've posted, or because they seem germane to the larger point the reader is making. I realize that it is a form of humblebrag to raise this point at all, but it seemed part of explaining the reader/writer interaction on which online forums rely.

Thanks for these reader messages. That's all for the process notes. More comments on the substance of civil-military issues coming shortly.

* To read about and sign-up for our new American Futures email newsletter, see here. Or just go straight to the sign-up here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/readers-on-the-tragedy-of-the-american-military-no-1/384093/

Background: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and here is reader response No. 1.

Next we have No. 2: Scott Kirkpatrick, who grew up in America and is now a professor in the school of computer science and engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes about my 40-year-old Washington Monthly article, "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?"

I read your article when it appeared [in 1975].  Have you read John Lithgow's description from 2-3 years ahead of you (from his book "Drama:  An Actor's Education")?  [JF answer: No.] He put his full set of dramatic skills plus a few months of starvation and filth-buildup into a psychological profile for which he was rejected. He didn't go down to the reception center with a Harvard busload—it seems to have been a more lonely process.  As a result, rather than drawing a social moral from the experience, he seems to have been deeply shamed by the whole thing, plus feeling that he misused his art.

My experience was closer to yours. Grad-school deferments, had to pass an exam one year, and I had aged out when I finished my Ph.D. and left Harvard for the Real World in 1969.

I live now in Israel ... Service is broadly interpreted, but it is definitely universal, starting at age 18 and followed by years of reserve obligations.

The class stratification is visible. Kids from good middle-class backgrounds know how to use awesome test scores to get into the most career-advancing and least life-threatening intelligence groups. The macho appeal of fighter training and commando groups draws pretty widely, even though the minimum enlistments there are for 6+ years. We have many new immigrants, who seem to get shuffled into the army more randomly.

A recent Ukrainian student of mine served on a bomb-disposal squad (Hurt Locker stuff with IEDs) that had several casualties in the course of his two active years. As one of your commenters has pointed out, Army service when there is shooting is a fertile ground for recruiting into the more fundamentalist religious groups.

Here the nationalist/Zionist/settler direction is the most troubling. But we are a country in which the military is broadly understood, both in its power and in its limitations. Still is is not clear that this shared knowledge is getting translated into a national consensus to go beyond a politics of preserving and expanding what we presently hold.  

I asked my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written a book about his own service in the Israeli security forces, what he thought about the trends Kirkpatrick had noted. Here is his reply.

A number of observations on this:

1. Service in Israel is still, relative to everywhere else I can think of off the top of my head, universal, with some notable exceptions: Palestinian-Israelis are exempt from service, and the ultra-Orthodox still rarely serve.

2. Some of the changes your correspondent is writing about are due to the different needs of the IDF today. Unit 8200, which is Israel's NSA equivalent in many ways, has a huge need for big, trained brains. These big, trained brains are going to be found at Israel's best high schools. I know of some kids who would rather have gone to combat units, but the army didn't give them a choice.

3. On the other hand, for the obvious reason that graduates of 8200 are largely responsible for Israel's tech boom, very smart kids who want to go build start-up nation (or to make the commute between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv) know that the education they receive in 8200, and the products they devise, could help make them successful and rich. (One caveat to all of this is that some of the best best kids, especially those with perfect eyesight, are funneled to pilot training.)

4. Your commenter is right when he suggests that the national-religious camp is providing a disproportionate number of recruits to combat units (infantry units mainly), and he's right to suggest that this has political consequences. The settlements have replaced the kibbutzim as a main feeder to the junior officer corps, though kibbutz kids still go to combat units in sizable numbers, as best as I know.

5. The broader point he makes re: the national consensus on politics is interesting—the generals are usually more dovish than the typical Likud politician, and we've seen, again and again over the years, retired generals (as well as chiefs of the intelligence services) advocating for compromise positions of the sort we don't associate with the current government. What we haven't seen yet is an army general staff dominated by religious officers from the settlements (or, really, religious officers at all.)  This may be coming if current trends continue, at which point things become (from my perspective) particularly troubling—if a democratically elected government one day orders the chief of general staff to forcibly evacuate settlements, what will happen if one of those settlements happens to be his home? More broadly, how would the junior officers who would be leading such a forced evacuation react if they were ordered to evict their parents? Theoretical questions for now, but fraught. (On the other hand, the army, in Gaza, did what it was ordered to do in 2005, forcibly evacuating 8,000 Jewish settlers.)

6. On the broadest point, there is still a more or less high desire on the part of the majority of high school males across the political and religious spectrum to serve in combat units—most of Israel is still geared to venerate the combat soldier. This veneration crosses many lines, and you'll still find plenty of self-identified left-wing young men in combat units. (For instance, the left-wing novelist David Grossman's son was a tank commander who died in Lebanon in 2006—a story I wrote about several years ago in The Atlantic.) But the army's needs are changing, and parts of the culture are changing—certainly there are pockets of Tel Aviv, and other upper-income, culturally liberal areas, where army service holds much less attraction than it used to, and of course there are 18-year-olds who try to avoid service (and there are always a certain number of declared conscientious objectors as well.)  

Still, I would say that Israel provides great arguments for those who argue for a draft, or some form of national service, in America. To a greater extent than any other institution, the army mixes kids from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds (and even confessional backgrounds —the number of Druze and Bedouin in the army is high, and some Arab Christians are now volunteering for service.) And of course, the universal draft means that the army leadership, and the political echelon above it, must be sensitive to the feelings and fears and wishes of a nation of Jewish mothers.

* * *

Additional in-house note: In my article I say that Seth Moulton, who will soon take office as a freshman Democratic representative from Massachusetts, "enlisted" in the Marine Corps after graduating from Harvard in 2001. In fact he was commissioned as a Marine Corps officer. I understand the difference and am sorry for the careless mis-phrasing.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/on-class-war-and-chickenhawk-politics-from-israel-to-america-reader-response-no-2/384105/

Background: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and here are previous reader responses No. 1 and No. 2. Background on house rules: I will assume that I can quote from any message that comes in via the "email" button above, unless the sender specifies otherwise. I will assume that I should not use the sender's real name or identifying details, unless specified otherwise.

This is today's installment No. 3.

1. The continuing class war. My article talks about how the military has become exotic territory to most Americans; in his article in the same issue, Joseph Epstein talks about the democratizing effects of the draft in the post-Korean War era. A reader who served in that same period, after graduating from Harvard, reinforces what Epstein says.

The analysis about the military services now being a tiny group about which people know nothing is right on. It was utterly different in my day … (I am 77).

One of my Harvard roommates was NROTC, as was one of my closest friends. They did 2 or 3 years of active duty Naval service between 1959 and 1962. A lot of other classmates satisfied military obligation by joining the reserves and doing 6 months active duty and then another 3 or 4 years of going to meetings plus 2 or 3 weeks of active duty training in the summer.

I volunteered to be drafted for 2 years. (Same as Elvis, BTW, who was in Germany when I was.) My Army serial number began with "U.S." (draftee) vs. "RA" (regular army volunteer). In basic I bunked with overweight kids from the Bronx and tough high school grads from South Boston ... It was a "democratic" experience. But of course Vietnam and the reaction to it changed all that and created a system that provided the Cheneys and Bushes of this world with a ready-to-use mercenary force that can be sent anywhere to fight and die with nary a whisper of protest.   

My mixed army of civilian draftees and volunteers appreciated having a few of us college grads down in the ranks. When I arrived at my basic training unit at Fort Hood, the company sergeant called for a show of hands of college graduates ... About half a dozen of us raised our hands. "You're squad leaders," he said. For the next 10 weeks we wore temporary corporal's stripes on our arms ...

2. "People hold their civilian counterparts in contempt, and that's not good":

By way of introduction I am a retired Naval Officer having served [approximately 30 years] in the U.S. Navy and retiring as a Captain. I was a Naval Flight Officer gaining [many thousands of hours of flight experience] in a variety of aircrafts.

The Navy was everything I had hoped it would be in that I joined it to see the world and fly. I got my wish. To say I joined out patriotic fervor was an overstatement—I really didn't. I just wanted to fly and travel and I knew it would give me those opportunities.

That said I am troubled by what I see as the colossal waste of the last 15 years. I am not talking about wasting money—although certainly the country has done that. I am talking about the wasted strategic direction of the country:

First, in its misreading of how to react to 9/11, then in the folly of the invasion of Iraq, which I regard as the biggest foreign policy mistake of the last 30 years. Bye the bye, I am no Johnny-come-lately on being against Iraq, I've been opposed to it since I was first shown the logistics plans for the operation over 11 years ago. It created the current train wreck of long deployments that sailors have to suffer through. We have expended huge efforts on behalf of ungrateful populations overseas, but we do nothing to better ourselves at home. What was the point of serving if it was not to come back to a better country at home?

I agree with your other readers' comments about the disconnect between what military personnel say they believe and what they really need to be advocating. I see it every day at work. People hold their civilian counterparts (not their civilian co-workers, but rather what they see as the unknown "moochers" they have been told exist) in contempt and that's not good.

Most military officers rail conservative talking points about how they hate Obamacare, but have no idea at all how the program really works. But if you try to change military healthcare (which is really 'socialized medicine') watch what happens. If you ever want to see an example of how Fox News shapes opinions for the worse, stick around my office for a while.

If you want proof this is true, go to any of the major military blogs and read their comment sections. Watch how they rise up and viciously attack anyone who opposes the "conventional wisdom". (For example, it is accepted as an article of faith among many that "Obama lost Afghanistan" with his West Point speech. This even though he agreed to his commander's advice about surging more troops.)

One area you did not touch on well, in my opinion, was the social changes that have taken place in the military and how it has been forced to gloss over the costs involved. Yes these changes may have been necessary, but don't kid yourself—mixed gender units are harder to run and a lot of people deeply resent the continued emphasis on diversity. They perceive "preferred customers" being created and that's a problem. It contributes to what you write about in that the public face the military presents is at odds with what is really happening.

This is a complex story and it needs to be told. Andrew Bacevich is right when he says our lack of a program of national service is creating a military that is insulated from the society it serves...

You raised some good points—but I fear like others they won't be discussed.

3. "For the most part, what I have seen is a quiet gratitude." An Army veteran with a view that is more positive than the previous reader's, and than the one in my article:

I have recently retired after 28 years in the Army, this morning actually, and so have had the experience of both the peacetime and wartime service.

I am not a graduate of the military academy nor a commissioned officer so my experience may be somewhat different than your previous posters, but my view of the the American soldier and the perceptions of the public are quite different.

I consider the many soldiers I have known to be among the finest men and women the country has to offer simply because they volunteered to serve their country, most of them joining the military in a time of war. There is nothing remarkable or extraordinary about them. They are in fact very much average Americans. If at times they display acts of courage or heroism it is because they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

But you should understand that if they put themselves in danger or sacrifice their life it is out of a sense of loyalty to their fellow soldiers, not for the greater good. [JF note: Yes. This is a theme that rings through any history of combat or accounts by combat veterans. I quoted many people on this point in National Defense.] They join the military and go to war out of a sense of duty but a soldier does not die for his country. He may die to protect his brothers and sisters in arms but not for an abstract idea.

As for the public perception I don't think worship is a fair characterization. For the most part what I have seen is a quiet sincere gratitude. I think it is a mistake to equate the spectacle of entertainment promoters for public sentiment. It is true that most civilians have little understanding of what the costs of war are, but I do not think that we should expect them to. I do not think greater exposure to the evils of war would be in any way of benefit to society though I agree that those who have had firsthand experience in war and understand it's consequences should play a larger role in decisions about whether to go to war or not and in policy decisions that concern military readiness...

I oppose compulsory service because being continually on a war footing is neither healthy nor productive for a society. It is better that the military not be on the minds of the public except when they on occasion happen to meet a soldier on the street and they say thank you for your service.

4. No decent person...  On the other hand:

I stopped reading your Atlantic piece when I got to:

"No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do."

I consider myself to be a decent person but I have no respect for or any gratitude for our cowardly, sadistic, murderous men and women in uniform.

Do you have any idea what they have done since WWII? You must. It's incredible. You don't know about the atrocities, the massacres, the civilians slaughtered, countries ruined, demolished. You don't know about the misery, hatred, fear spread by your friends in the military.

[Seth] Moulton got his reward for his four tours of duty much like Kerrey did during and after the Vietnam War. Do you remember the Vietnam War? You must. I don't have to spell it out. And this is what you respect?

Have you followed subsequent wars since? What are you, one of those blame the politicians types or is it blame the public?

I am a Vietnam era draft resister and proud of it. I was charged for Failure to Comply with the Selective Service Act, investigated by the F.B.I. and indicted by the Justice Department. I have nothing but disgust for military apologists such as James Fallows.

Maybe the draftees and enlistees were duped but what could your excuse possibly be. Sick, psychologically sick. And for what: failure after failure, bodies heaped upon bodies, cities, countries lying in smoking ashes—caused by your vaunted military heroes. The heroes in body armor, night goggles, in tanks and armored vehicles, afraid to confront an enemy without air support. Jesus Christ, man, take a look in the mirror; that's you, the killer, the destroyer, the liar, the violent, brutal, merciless face of American military might.

***

I'm tagging this as part of our American Futures series because these discussions are another way of examining the civic fabric of America, the strains it is undergoing, and our successes or failures in recognizing and coping with them. You can see past installments here or sign up for the newsletter here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/chickenhawk-nation-reader-response-no-3/384135/

Background: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and here are previous reader responses No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3.

Today's installment No. 4 is an essay-in-response by James Franklin Jeffrey, who was an Army infantry officer in Vietnam, was then in the Foreign Service, and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute in D.C. I'll save responses for later—although, okay, I'll say that I think we actually agree on fundamentals and disagree on the terminology of where "blame" for America's strategic failures should be placed. But let me turn it over to him:

* * *

By James Franklin Jeffrey

James Fallows has done yet another service to public discourse on national security with his Atlantic piece “Why Do the Best Soldiers in the World Keep Losing.” But I have two problems with it. First, he asserts that various problems, from the military’s insular nature to erratic weapons development, help explain why our soldiers allegedly keep losing wars—without proving the connection, particularly on weapons development—a problem dating back decades. Second, I dispute Fallows’ core argument that “our soldiers … keep losing.” As winning not losing is the central purpose of having a military, let’s start there.

Since World War II the U.S. military has won all its campaigns in strictly military terms, except the 1950 offensive into North Korea and two minor engagements, Beirut in 1983, and Somalia in 1993. By "winning" I mean that it has forced the other side to cease all or most military operations and gained command of the terrain in play. In Vietnam, the U.S. military had largely wiped out the Vietcong insurgency by 1972, and defeated a North Vietnamese Army invasion that same year. In Iraq the U.S. military defeated the Iraqi army in weeks, and in 2007-8 defeated both the al-Qaeda insurgency and uprisings by Shia militias. In Afghanistan the military and CIA took down the Taliban and drove the al-Qaeda movement into Pakistan quickly, and by 2012 had secured most of Afghanistan.

Did we accept a "draw" in Korea, ultimately lose Vietnam, and fail to fully eliminate insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan? All true, but those represent failures of policy at the national level, failures that the military contributed to by not helping develop winning strategies, but the military here has had much company, most importantly presidents with ultimate responsibility for war strategy (and even my institution, the Foreign Service, which has not made clear our dismal record effecting socio-economic transformation and resolving deep sectarian strife in third-world countries even absent insurgencies).

The core purpose of the military is not to win wars but to win at the tactical and operational levels against opposing forces. As noted above, our military has been generally successful at this. But as Clausewitz notes, successful strategy is not just a function of battlefield success and commander genius, but above all the judgment of the political leadership in determining war goals consistent with political objectives and the military, economic and diplomatic means available; in other, Clausewitzian terms—turning tactical victories into a strategic win. This is particularly so in limited wars of choice and inherently political internal conflicts.

In those (Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) failure came from defining "victory" in terms of an all but impossible non-military objective, to reform societies in our image while eliminating social and political drivers of insurgency. These errors were compounded by not committing sufficient means including time to maximize chances of attaining that elusive objective. (In part because the American public saw this objective as impossible and/or not worth the price.)

While the military must focus its intellectual power on winning in the field, it shares with other institutions responsibility for formulating larger war goals. It thus not only must answer questions about whether and how our troops can defeat opposing forces, but also must help answer the question of what strategic success can be obtained if the military succeeds tactically .

In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, even when military leaders got the battlefield right, they did not succeed in this secondary but important job. The question is why did not more officers, and with more effect, ask David Petraeus’s 2003 question "how does this end?"

From my observations, the problem is that the military often conflates winning battles with winning the war, as they sometimes assume someone else was engaged in the knitting together of their tactical victories into strategic success. This was all the more understandable when strategic success as in these insurgency wars was defined in socio-political, not military, terms. Meanwhile, elements of the national leadership, congress and public assume that if our esteemed military were on the case, it would produce not only tactical victories—its core job—but also strategic success. To sum up, each side implicitly pushed responsibility for the really big war questions to the other side. This was not the military’s failure alone, and is not "losing" in the military sense, but it is failure none the less.

The final question is, why does the military keep getting this strategic job wrong. One factor, which Fallows does not highlight, but others including Huntington have, is the anti-Clausewitz mindset of the U.S. military. If victory is defined as ‘unconditional surrender’ then strategy and thus victory look a lot like tactical battlefield action on a grand scale. If national leadership (at least of a power without peers) wants such a victory it just pours resources into the military until victory is achieved. And here Fallows has a point.

The more the military is isolated from our society and its political limitations, the more it can harbor this view. Likewise, the more the military is placed on a pedestal, the more its confusion of tactical military success with political victory will go unchallenged by our political system, and likely shift to reluctance to criticize the political leadership’s war goals and means.

Fixing this is hard. Fallows correctly rejects a draft, but even with one, this dynamic was seen during Vietnam. The military puts enormous effort into civilian education and other exposure for its promising officers, but an inbred service family caste, military academies which segregate future officers early from civilian America, base services that isolate service families from their communities, all reinforce the separateness that feeds misunderstanding in both directions.

There is no feasible solution to this isolation, thus better to recognize and deal with it. That begins with our political leadership’s mission of winning conflicts and the military’s role to assist. The military must insist on knowing what the political goals are, which assumptions underlie these goals, what the means will be, and then insist on receiving them. And the country’s political leadership and public must understand that it is their job, not the military’s, to define victory and mobilize resources to achieve it—while holding the military responsible for winning on the battlefield.

* * *

This is J Fallows again, not J. Jeffrey. More to come.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/chickenhawk-nation-response-no-4/384141/

If you're joining us late: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and here are previous reader responses No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4. As mentioned earlier, I'm including these in our American Futures saga because, while from a different vantage point than our normal city-visits, they're about the civic texture of American society

Today's installment No. 5 is reader mail on the general subject of recognizing those who serve.

1) All the whooping and hollering. From a young American who has not been in the military but has spent time in Iraq and Turkey working with Kurdish refugees:

One point in your analysis that finally puts into words something I have struggled to vocalize for years. I was always put off by the whooping and hollering that went along with those military appreciation football games at [the University of North Carolina].

Those young men and women were paraded onto the field, drunk college kids falling over one another to show how proud they were by screaming "America!" and "Go Heels, Go America!"

I sat questioning what exactly it was that these folks were cheering for.  Were they cheering because they knew what these young people would face if they were deployed? Were they cheering because of the useless and sometimes counterproductive violence that our military and political leaders would ask these young people to inflict upon others? Were they cheering with the knowledge that the C.I.A. had failed to notify our soldiers that they might come into close proximity and/or handle leftover chemical weapons in Iraq (even after they knew these weapons existed)?

No, none of these, they were cheering because they wanted to be seen as patriots and they wanted to feel as if they were doing something rather than do anything at all.

To think critically about the military would be too difficult, too risky, too doubt-inducing. So instead, they choose to cheer and go home, forgetting about the military or anyone in it until the next game day.

I sometimes find myself becoming bitter when I think of how superficial all of it is—from politicians, to students, to older folks, no one knows what our military really does, how they do it, or why. They'd rather not know, and hang out their "support our troops" sign and forget about it all. They don't want to know what's wrong, they just want to think they are safe.

I never cheered at these games... Then I attended a program at the U.S. Army War College and another program at the U.S. Air Force Academy. These programs gave me the chance to speak directly with the people who have made it a part of their life to understand, improve and participate in the military. My thoughts on it, surprisingly, did not catch their ire, rather, they were welcomed. In mainstream society, any rebuke of the military in any form is quickly quashed by nationalistic fervor and patriotic ramblings, and sometimes, personal attacks.

I am well-educated, come from a modestly wealthy family, and I was lucky enough to be afforded great opportunities. It is people like myself who shun or even despise the idea of serving in the military. Although I never served, through my time roaming the streets of Cairo, Erbil, Hatay, Tehran, Ramallah, Mosul, etc. I have met many soldiers and others associated with the military. These interactions have shown me that the job is difficult, it is important, and it is crucial, for our soldiers are our country's most accessible ambassadors in regions of the world where our dominance is questioned, tenuous and good will towards our nation dwindles if it is not cultivated. Soldiers are part of a larger culture that must be developed in a thoughtful and democratic manner.

Two quick comments. Nothing profound.

First, my dad was drafted for Vietnam, hated every second of it, and could never stand it when people thanked him for his service—or the pervasive, treacly displays of thanks to others' for their service.

Second, I did an extended volunteer tour in the U.S. Peace Corps (three years, instead of two) in the mid '90s, and nobody has ever thanked me for my service. Not that I really give a damn (I would probably laugh if anyone did.) But it is odd that the military is the only national service deemed "thankworthy" by the public.

It makes me wonder whether Peace Corps (or Americorps, or anything where you don't use firearms) would even "count" if we had compulsory national service.

3) "When you say, 'Thank you for your service,' this is what I hear." From a Marine Corps combat veteran of Vietnam, with later service in the Balkans:

I read your article with great interest.

Things have changed since 9/11 but not the isolation of the military from mainstream America.

And I can’t help it but when I hear someone say to me “Thank you for your service” it sounds more like “Get the hell back in your foxhole.”

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This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/chickenhawk-nation-responses-no-5/384157/

As we near the end of the year, background: My piece on "The Tragedy of the American Military" is here; the "Gary Hart Memo" is here; an extra reading list is here; and here are previous reader responses No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5

For No. 6 we have two reading-list updates, then a message from a recent Air Force veteran.

1) The F-35 and its gun that won't shoot. It's worth reading this new report by Dave Majumdar of The Daily Beast about the latest travails of the F-35, the plane I described in my article. Short version: The challenged F-35 is scheduled to start becoming operational next year. But software problems reportedly mean that its cannon will not work, and the problem will apparently take longer to fix than the United States spent fighting all of World War II. As the story says:

Even though the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is supposed to join frontline U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadrons next year and Air Force units in 2016, the jet’s software does not yet have the ability to shoot its 25mm cannon. But even when the jet will be able to shoot its gun, the F-35 barely carries enough ammunition to make the weapon useful.

The report relies entirely on unnamed sources, which is not ideal; but several similar preceding reports by Majumdar have not been knocked down by Pentagon responses.

2) Aussie reading on the F-35. It is also worth checking out this quite interesting site. Its head of testing and evaluation, Peter Goon, previews its approach:

What is America and its closest allies like Canada, Japan and Australia going to do in the post-2015 "stealth-on-stealth"/"counter-stealth" world where all the leading reference threats, both airborne and surface based, being proliferated around the world by some of the world's best new-age capitalists, have the common design aim of going up against and defeating the F-22A Raptor and B-2A Spirit stealth bomber; especially when there are so few of the latter capabilities to be a persuasive deterrent let alone an effective defence?

3) "It angers me to the point of an ulcer." Stephen Specht, who served in the Air Force from 2006 to 2010, writes:

I suppose I come from a military family as most of the males and at least one female has served in the armed forces, but I don't really think of it as an obligation to family history so much as an obligation as a citizen.

The constant prattle of "first, I want to thank you for your service" angers me to the point of an ulcer. Normally I just mutter a thank you and go on ordering my coffee, but deep down I feel a seething anger of wanting to ask them precisely what they want to thank me for.

The anger came to a head this most recent Veterans Day when I was asked to come to a Veterans Day event held by a local lawyers organization. (I am a vet and a law student). I wrote the following piece titled "If You Want to Thank Me for My Service." I think it captures some of the substance of what you speak of.

* * *

By Stephen Specht

It is Veterans Day.

I will be thanked a few dozen times for my service. I will feel some combination of irritation and embarrassment as I mumble a thank you for the thank you. I am generally humble about what I did. It’s not that I don’t like to talk about it but that there isn’t much to say. Any pride is rooted in the crews and teams I served with. They are some of the best people I will ever know, and it was an honor to serve among them. Some of them are dead; some have moved on; some are lifers that will stay in the uniform until the government tells them to go home. Despite what I was told in briefings, I wasn’t that special. I was but a tiny cog in a giant war machine.

If you want to thank me and honor my friends, do so by being a good citizen.

I do not take the term citizen lightly, and I bristle when politicians and pundits refer to us as consumers or some “percent.” We are American citizens, and we deserve more than this. However, as American citizens, we owe much more than we have been willing to give.

Good citizenship entails more than standing for the Pledge of Allegiance or taking our hats off for the Star Spangled Banner. These are bare-minimum acts of citizenship. I won’t call them meaningless, because they do forge a sense of national identity, but they are akin to reciting the alphabet, something learned alongside the Pledge of Allegiance in kindergarten. When moving beyond the age of six, good citizenship is so much more. It is constant work that begins at the first moments of cognizance and ends only when our minds and bodies have failed us.

I write to point out what Good Citizenship means to me as a veteran and what a thank you looks like.

The first step is to read the U.S. Constitution. This remains the supreme law of our nation. So many are quick to thump their chests and assert what is constitutional, but so few people have ever bothered to read our founding documents; fewer ever try to understand them. At 4,400 words, it should take less than an hour to bulldoze through the content, but it takes much more time to explore its meaning. We must think in terms of years rather than hours. We must realize that there are multiple ways to view each clause. For everything that seems obvious, there is another clause which may counter that belief. The brilliance of the document is the necessity of interpretation and political growth rather than being locked into a single paradigm forevermore. The task of reading the U.S. Constitution is to be done annually, for understanding will likely change over time. That understanding serves as the basis of our legal system.

Once we are informed on our legal values, we must work toward being informed on a variety of issues. This does not mean establishing an opinion and finding information to justify it. It means learning over time through a wide array of sources. Cable news is a beginning, but it isn’t sufficient, even when consciously seeking out anchors with whom we disagree. Read magazines, newspapers, and blogs. Go to conspiracy sites and see what the fringe believes. View foreign sources to understand how we are perceived and the things that affect those beyond our borders but never make it to the front page of The New York Times. Just like reading the U.S. Constitution, learning is a lifelong process. What we know today may be irrelevant tomorrow.

We must test our knowledge through civic engagement. Good national citizenship starts locally, so join a lodge, or start a community garden. Meet with people in a book club. The greatest source of learning is through interacting with others, and while we don’t have to agree on the details, we can generally face forward and embrace our fellow citizens. Don’t just embrace the ones that agree with you. Despite what the pundits tell us, I seriously doubt any among us actually hate America. We may just disagree on what is best.

We must vote. I would like to say that voting is one of the bare-minimum acts of citizenship, but it seems most of us have missed that memo. I am embarrassed by a country which speaks on changes in Congress last week after only 37 percent of eligible voters voted. This is purportedly the lowest turn out since WWII. I say again, I am embarrassed, because I knew Afghans who risked their lives to vote in Afghan elections, but I know many not willing to spend a modicum of time it takes to cast a ballot in my own community. Voting has not always been something we could take for granted. There was a time when we only voted in local elections that often excluded all but white-male landowners. The scope of elections broadened with time to include national elections, women’s suffrage, and equal access for minorities. This change did not come easily as women risked their dignity and familial wealth to achieve their goals. Minorities faced down brutality and lynching to gain access to polls. With early voting and mail ballots, the process is easier than ever. What excuse do 63 percent of Americans have for failing to vote? Why have millions not even registered?

We must learn to question government. When I say question the government, I do not mean we should idle in a smoky room and wonder whether 9/11 was an inside job. I mean we must assert ourselves proudly and politely in front of elected officials who depend on our input to do their job effectively. Write a letter to your representative or call the White House. When that fails, we must take to the streets in protest. Protest does not mean looting and burning parked cars, but it may mean facing down tear gas and uniformed police wielding assault rifles. A great man once said, “If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Those who signed the Declaration of Independence all knew they would be executed if they failed in their treason. By no means am I using analogy to suggest sedition. I am saying that the revolution that began in 1776 has never actually ended and in each generation, we get better, only by being engaged citizens.

Finally, we must reject the notion of American Exceptionalism. I have no doubt that we are a great nation, but we are not this way through some external force. What makes America great is not an abstraction but angry people who wanted more than death and taxes. If America is exceptional, it will be only because we work to ensure America is continually improved as we lean in toward a more perfect union. We are not the best at everything. We don’t need to be the best at everything, but we do need to work toward constant betterment of ourselves and our nation.

This list is not comprehensive. I’ve left some things out purposefully, because these six work concurrently. By doing all of the above, the other requisites of citizenship will become obvious and fall into place. If you want to thank me for my service, do so by telling me that on your day off for a federal holiday, you took an hour of your time to explore the meanings of the Constitution’s Preamble. If you want to honor my friends, tell me that you sat down to write a letter to a politician on an issue of importance to you. Make yourself known. Do not settle for the bare minimum of citizenship any longer.

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Thanks to all, and Happy New Year.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/chickenhawk-response-no-6-showing-gratitude-in-a-way-that-matters/384161/