The Aspen Ideas Festival

Atlantic, The, October, 2006

David M. Kennedy on the military and American democracy In a Fourth of July debate about the state of American democracy, Kennedy, a historian at Stanford, suggested that war making was becoming too easy for American policy makers. Today’s all-volunteer force numbers 1.4 million … and about 900,000 in the Reserves.

The active forces today proportionate to population are [1]-125th the size of the force that we deployed in World War II. Moreover, thanks to the advances in technology … that extremely small force, measured by historical standards, is extraordinarily lethal … From Atlantic Unbound: Blog: Atlantic@Aspen (July 3-9, 2006) Dispatches from the Aspen Ideas Festival by James Fallows, Ross Douthat, James Bennet, Clive Crook, and Corby Kummer. The total Defense Department budget today, including the expenditures for Afghanistan and Iraq, is less than 4 percent of GDP—one-tenth of what this economy had to deliver to win World War II. ...