Free Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country by Andrew J. Bacevich

“personal relationship with his Commander in Chief,” he wrote, thereby equating George W. Bush with Queen Victoria. “Above all, like Tommy, he ships out. Ordered to a strange corner of the world, often at the ends of the earth, he packs his kit, says his farewells and departs. He does not ask how long he will be away or where he is going or why. If the President gives the word, that is enough.”
    These new warrior-professionals differed fundamentally from the citizen-soldiers who had fought in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. “America’s armed forces are becoming imperial,” Keegan continued, adding reassuringly that this was occurring “without their country’s becoming imperialist.” Barely containing his enthusiasm, he concluded on an implicitly imperial note. “Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica,” he wrote, “is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe.” 8 Here was a fighting force suited for safeguarding, and perhaps Americanizing, the world.
    In Keegan’s considered assessment, the troops fighting in Iraq at the beginning of the twenty-first century had far more in common with British soldiers upholding Victoria’s nineteenth-century empire than they did with the GIs in Korea at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In 1951, Time had gone out of its way to specify that Americans in uniform were not civilization’s crusaders; by 2004, they had evidently become just that, even if for reasons of political correctness the magazine had banished from its pages any actual reference to crusades.
    In fact, Keegan’s essay ought to have given American readers pause. After all, the army that enforced the British Pax had achieved a rather mixed record of success, losing decisively to an armed rabble at places like Saratoga, Yorktown, and New Orleans and subsequently enduring disasters on widely scattered battlefields from Afghanistan and the Crimea to Sudan and the Transvaal. Why having present-day American warriors replicate this experience should qualify as a good idea might seem self-evident to a Briton like John Keegan. Yet any of Time ’s American subscribers with even a modest knowledge of British imperial history might well have entertained doubts. Kipling himself knew what Keegan was choosing to overlook: keeping in line (even while purporting to uplift) the peoples Tommy Atkins disparaged as wogs is an ugly, thankless, demeaning, and ultimately futile task. 9
    REPEALING THE THREE NO’S
    “America is not to be Rome or Britain,” insisted the historian Charles Beard in 1939. “It is to be America.” 10 Seven decades on, Beard’s sentiment has a quaint ring to it. Americans have become accustomed to their country asserting “global leadership”—shorthand for doing what Rome and Britain once did—with the heavy lifting consigned to a small but obliging warrior class.
    Indeed, without the warrior, the entire enterprise collapses. Absent the warrior who fights without asking “where he is going or why,” assertions of global leadership become unsustainable. Absent the myth of that warrior’s indomitability, evidence that recent wars have depleted America’s power while undercutting its prosperity becomes irrefutably obvious. Absent the insistence that among warriors virtue remains alive and well, the moral confusion pervading society—to which neither celebrity nor geek offers an antidote—becomes impossible to ignore.
    American warriors may not win wars, but they do perform the invaluable service of providing their countrymen with an excuse to avoid introspection. They make second thoughts unnecessary. In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism. In the words of a hit country song, Americans
    salute the ones who died, and the ones that gave their lives,
    so we don’t have to sacrifice all the things we love …
    like our chicken fried, cold beer on a Friday