The Soldiering Ethos (I)

[thedrifter]

02-25-2004

Guest Column: The Soldiering Ethos (I)



By Michael Vlahos



First of three parts



America has fought a war for two years with its peacetime military. Moreover, this is what both the nation and the military have wanted. But the situation is changing. Effective insurgency in Iraq is just the first step moving America?s military into long-term wartime.



Like so many others before us, we find it is the enemy that is the real instrument of change. In today?s context, thus, it is America?s enemies that are bringing true ?transformation? ? in the form of a modern and yet also ancient, soldiering ethos. The current war will not be won by citizen-soldiers and loyal allies but by a professional veteran soldiery and U.S.-led local (once called ?native?) forces. This is the long-awaited transformation, and it comes at a price. But then, victory always has a price.



How could our nation?s armed forces officially at war still be peacetime military? Perhaps it is worth explaining what ?peacetime? has meant to Americans. We must remember that to America?s first seven generations, peacetime meant just that. No war. The United States created itself as The People?s answer to corrupt European monarchies. Its kings fought wars at their whim. Thus in the eighteenth century ? at the time of America?s founding ? it could be said that there was no such thing as peacetime in Europe.



A new America only reluctantly allowed a military at all. It was finally created to protect the national interest in time of peace and give The People a small, professional soldiering corps to assist in mobilization and offer trained leadership in time of war.



To Americans, ?war? meant mustering the Militia. The citizenry fought our nation?s wars ? and war was about the mobilization of citizen-soldiers.



Thus it can be said in truth that ? since this country turned over its defense to a professional military, and since this military has begun to fight real wars with only the merest demur from us about mustering the citizenry ? there has been no traditional ?peacetime? for some time.



But ?peacetime? means one thing to the nation, and quite another to military societies. Since Americans and their military were officially separated in 1973, military ethos has sought to successfully juggle two expectations that promised someday to bring us to a national-existential contradiction.



One was the expectation that the military would take care of all our national security needs unless some unimaginable (and thus nearly impossible) emergency arose, like the resurrection of Hitler or Stalin. Thus the military would not simply, as in ancient tradition, protect the national interest abroad; it would fight any and all small-to-medium wars without resort to national mobilization.



But the other expectation was that an American military designed to fight wars without mobilization would still embody a bit of the old republic?s militia ethos ? to keep from becoming legionnaires with the eagle-standards of emperors and kings. This means keeping somehow to the Founders? Cincinnatus tradition, where the citizen lays down his plough to take up a sword in time of national need. The Army that fights America?s wars must always be at least in part, part-time. It must not become wholly the hard-bitten force of our leaders.



Hence two responses: the volunteer force, and military transformation.



The so-called volunteer force is really a professional military supplemented by reservists. These supplemental forces were designed to be used sparingly. Inasmuch as some were veterans with unmatched skills, reserve forces were a way to keep valuable soldier-experience in the force. But as necessary as supplemental forces might be, they also have had an essential cultural mission: to preserve at least the symbol of a republic defended by citizen-soldiers. Thus the conundrum: use them sparingly, or they cease to look like citizen-soldiers.



But how could the volunteer force ? with only a light touch on its own reserves ? be enough to fight America's future wars? The answer that emerged during the 1990s was ?transformation.? Transformation seemed to be all about technology, but of course it meant much more than just building a better military. It was a big concept because it promised that just over a million people on the ground (the Army's ?Total Force?) could fully meet America?s global national security needs. [i] Military transformation sought to achieve this with a mix of new and old: new technology and new ways of war, in concert with an old established orchestra of ?friends and allies.?



What the volunteer force and transformation offered may not have been peacetime as in the days of Young America or the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties. But neither, suggested its visionaries, would it entail national sacrifice on the scale of, say, the Cold War?s Vietnams and Koreas. There would be some actual war ?events,? certainly a fair share of ?combat,? and lots and lots of ?peacekeeping? and ?peacemaking.? America could rely on volunteers and on technology, enough still to take us to the Promised Land. Call it ?new age peacetime.?



But why bring up ancient history? Because for a golden decade this solution worked ? but it worked to set us up. When unexpected challenge came, it came in the form of something as significant as any world war. Yet this big challenge would not let us face it like a world war: in other words, it would not let us do what we do best!



So we were left with the military of ?new age peacetime.? We rushed the Muslim world with what we had and hoped that would be enough. After two years and some, a national-existential contradiction is finally upon us. The United States and The American people can no longer sustain both ?big war? and ?old identity.?



Three vignettes show what is happening:



In September, I had lunch with a thoughtful flag officer. He told me that all through the summer, while casualties from the Iraq insurgency piled up, his Pentagon colleagues were still on the old lifestyle clock, punching out promptly each day for their 1700 golf date at the Army-Navy Country Club. We know the government was surprised by the ?postwar? Iraqi insurgency. But that should come as no surprise. The real surprise is that they have taken so long to take the measure of what the resistance really means - not in terms of tactical responses ?on the ground,? but rather in terms of fundamental reassessments required by the true nature of the war.



Second vignette: a long story in the metro section of The Washington Times ? hardly media-critical of the war ? dated 20 December 2003. [ii] The headline: ?I?m never wearing tan again.? It was about returning soldiers from the 115th Military Police Battalion, Maryland National Guard. They had been deployed, active-duty, for 27 months. The supplemental citizen-soldiers have outdone themselves in service to their country. But a ?forever war? [iii] is not what they signed up for. And a forever war is what we have.



Third is an accountant's entry. The United States has over a third of its people deployed overseas. ?New age peacetime? was above all a lifestyle military. But the United States cannot keep a third of its active (and supplemental) force deployed ?out of area? (away from home). [iv] The law of ?new age peacetime? is clear: only one battalion out of every four (or even five) can be deployed. This ratio worked out OK in the 1990s for Bosnia and Kosovo ? it was just enough.



Military transformation suggested if it did not actually promise, that war had become a sort of premium service that only the United States could afford. Campaigns would be blisteringly brief, and only a very few in war paint would ever taste the fetid dust of combat. ?Shock and awe? would prevail. Modernity?s ?all-seeing-eye? ? network centric warfare ? would catch the slightest rustle of disobedience, just as it does in that Lockheed-Martin TV ad: ?Bring it on,? it whispers. [v]

Administration strategists calculated that the Global War on Terrorism could still be handled by the just-enough paradigm of ?new age peacetime.? Thus, even periods of relatively intense combat operations could be sustained through a plussed-up overhead of world security management.



Iraqi insurgency is slowly destroying this calculation. Not because budget deficits will blow the overhead. Not because we will take too many casualties. Not because we won?t win in Iraq. ?New age peacetime? is winning in Iraq ? in the sense of containing and ultimately eradicating resistance there.



But this is not a war about Iraq. This war is only beginning. America faces the prospect of continuing conflict in the Muslim world. Future conflict may look like what we have encountered in Iraq, but on a much greater scale. Future pre-emptive interventions already under active discussion by the Washington establishment include Syria ? an Iraqi ?comparable? ? and Iran ? a conflict of incomparably greater magnitude. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are fragile and unstable, and Pakistan even more so.



It is almost certain that Americans will end up fighting in places that, like Baghdad and Kabul, once seemed unimaginable. Now they are not only imaginable but also imminent. We must come to terms with the true nature of the war, and realize that it is not about ?terrorism? but a deep struggle within Muslim identity over the very spirit of Islam. Thus, to turn a Churchillian quip, Iraq will not mark the beginning of the end, nor even the end of the beginning, but rather only, our own end of innocence.



Next: The price of victory.



Guest Contributor Michael Vlahos is a frequent contributor to TechCentralStation, where this series originally appeared as a single article. He is currently a senior member of the Joint Warfare Analysis Department at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Maryland. He can be reached at Michael.Vlahos@jhuapl.edu. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

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Sempers,

Roger