A couple years ago, some Army recruiters asked if they could come make a pitch to a large lecture class I was teaching. It was already clear that the war in Iraq wasn’t going according to script.
None of the students seemed tempted, though a couple later said they wouldn’t mind being in the army, if only there wasn’t a war. I spent some time talking to one of the recruiters, a captain with a wry sense of humor. I mentioned the recruiting slogan, “An Army of One.”
He said. “Do you want to know what we say that really means? An army of one is what’s left when you subtract all the men in Iraq, on their way to Iraq, or on their way back from Iraq.”
What would happen if the North Koreans pour across the 38th parallel, I asked? That’s a very good question, he said grimly.
The military, especially the army, has had trouble recruiting enough soldiers lately. Some blame the war, others, the poor quality of the human specimens now of prime recruiting age.
But I think the real problem is something else. Specifically, we don’t know what we really want the military to be anymore.
Throughout most of our history, the United States was deeply suspicious of large standing armies. When we had wars, we hurriedly threw armies together, and afterwards disbanded them as rapidly as possible, leaving little more than an underfunded skeleton force.
In the 1930s, our army was smaller than Romania’s. But after World War II, that all changed. The cold war was a new kind of war – a war in which success depended on avoiding a full-blown conflict.
That meant we needed a large permanent standing army as a deterrent force. Since it was a national burden, we staffed this army mainly through the draft, in which young men were expected to give from two to four years of their life to protect their country.
There were conflicts during that time, but they were never all-consuming. After Vietnam, we went to an all-volunteer force, with the unspoken understanding that the days of the long war were over.
Then the world suddenly changed. The Soviet Union vanished. The Cold War ended. And we no longer knew what we wanted or needed our military to be.
Three years after we went into Iraq, I’m not sure we know yet. I do know this about wars. They tend to be easier to start than stop, and they seldom turn out the way everyone hoped in the beginning.
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