Losing Private Ryan - American's attitudes towards the military

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Andrew J. Bacevich

Why the citizen-soldier is MIA.

Mr. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University.

The war over Kosovo was indeed a peculiar one, as its aftermath proved. It was the first American war fought and won without a single U.S. combat casualty, and it was the first one conducted from start to finish without engaging the passions of the American people. Victory prompted not celebrations but sighs of relief. Rather than put on a parade up Fifth Avenue, marking "V-K Day," the nation-bored, impatient, and slightly embarrassed-chose to concentrate on summer vacation.

The Kosovo war was also our first not to produce a single bona fide hero. The pilots who executed the air campaign remain shrouded in anonymity, as remote from the average American as they themselves were from the targets they obliterated in Serbia. When the air squadrons that carried the brunt of the war rotated back from the combat zone, newspapers were content to report their homecoming via brief, colorless wire-service dispatches, printed on the inside pages.

Nor have the war's chief architects attained glory. So far at least, publishers have suppressed any impulse to cough up a Schwarzkopf- or Powell-style advance for Gen. Wesley Clark's memoirs. On his first postwar trip to Washington, the NATO commander found himself reporting not to a specially convened joint session of Congress but to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Those members who bothered to show up greeted Clark with decided chilliness. As for the victorious commander in chief, far from being rewarded with a "bounce" in the polls, his approval ratings actually dipped.

What gives? Why has this latest demonstration of U.S. military might resulted in apathy rather than approbation? Why has NATO's big win over the dictator Milosevic lacked savor? There is widespread ambivalence about U.S. involvement in the Balkans, yes. But there is something else to consider, too: Public lethargy concerning Kosovo is one more sign that the American civil-military compact-not the relationship between senior civilian officials and the Pentagon brass, but the one shared by the people, their military institutions, and the state-is coming unglued.

In recent years, we have heard complaints wafting from military quarters about either the state (personified by the lubricious commander in chief) or civil society (perceived as decadent, self- absorbed, and politically correct). In a democracy, however, the people dictate the status, prerogatives, and role of soldiers. Popular attitudes toward the military are therefore of paramount importance.

Kosovo revealed the extent to which these attitudes are today in flux. Americans show signs that they are increasingly aloof from their military. The problem is not one of hostility or alienation, but rather of indifference. And for a nation that is the world's only superpower, the implications are profound.

Evidence of this popular disengagement predates Kosovo, and it is empirical as well as impressionistic. Indeed, the evidence relates to the U.S. military's greatest point of vulnerability: whether it can attract sufficient numbers of able and motivated young people to serve. For nearly 30 years, the military has been an all-volunteer force. For senior military leaders, initially hostile to proposals to end the draft, this reliance on volunteers has long been a point of pride. For politicians, the all-volunteer force has been a godsend, enabling them to field a powerful military while freeing them from any requirement to impose the most burdensome of all taxes. Yet the success of the all- volunteer force is necessarily precarious, dependent on an obliging populace. Nor was this success foreordained. Indeed, it would not have occurred if not for the exceptional leadership of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan's supreme achievement, apart from winning the Cold War, was to preside over the revival of U.S. military power. To be sure, credit should not go to Reagan alone; others played their parts. But Reagan provided the essential ingredient without which other efforts would have availed little: In declaring that Vietnam had been "in truth a noble war," he both absolved Americans who fought there of the unjust charges against them and refuted the claim that to exercise American power is to perpetrate evil. In labeling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," he imparted to the armed forces a renewed sense of purpose and explained to Americans why the prosecution of the Cold War deserved their wholehearted support. In celebrating the valorous G. I.s of an earlier day-"the Boys of Pointe du Hoc," for example-he revived an old- fashioned patriotism the 1960s and '70s had discredited, seemingly forever. In lavishing affection and respect on the troops under his command, he declared them to be the embodiment of that patriotic spirit.

One consequence of Reagan's revitalization was to make it hip to be a soldier. Whereas the all-volunteer force had once been an iffy proposition, it now flourished. Gone were the days when getting the required quantity of recruits meant skimping on quality. Nowhere to be seen were the slugs, druggies, and dropouts who not long before had found their way into uniform. By the middle of the '80s, commanders were bragging that the force was the smartest, best educated, most trainable, and best disciplined in American history.