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

assisting the poor and destitute, or joining the Peace Corps. Some could groom our national cemeteries. Others might work as aides in VA hospitals or staff facilities that provide shelter to homeless vets. Some national service personnel might carry assault rifles; others would empty bedpans or pass out bed linens.
    Whether relying on conscription or national service to raise such a force, a two-year military term of enlistment would provide ample time to acquire and employ most soldierly skills. Crewing a tank or an artillery piece, conducting patrols or ambushes are not rocket science. Certain specialties—flying an airplane is one obvious example—require longer periods of training. Becoming a pilot, therefore, would entail a more extended period of service, undertaken voluntarily. Yet the majority of the rank and file would consist of those serving two-year terms, with a follow-on cohort taking their place as they return to civilian life.
    Critics will complain that relying on a citizen army will make it difficult to sustain protracted campaigns in far-off places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Just so. It will be incumbent upon civilian and military leaders to make the case to citizen-soldiers (and their parents) for long, drawn-out, inconclusive wars in far-off places. No doubt this will pose a challenge.
    Yet the mere attempt to formulate such an explanation could well open up a larger conversation about what it means to “be America” in the twenty-first century. Those committed to the proposition that the United States has succeeded Rome and Britain understandably favor warrior-professionals for imperial expeditions, conducted, of course, under less incendiary labels. The United States really has no choice in the matter, they will insist. Has not Providence itself singled out this country to play a dominant role in world affairs?
    Viable alternatives to the current all-volunteer system simply do not exist, they will claim, and are inconceivable in twenty-first-century America. On this point, they will have good reason to be adamant. Change the military system and hitherto unseen (or repressed) foreign policy alternatives suddenly come into view. Being Rome or Britain no longer defines the full menu of options. Gracefully adjusting to the reality of being one great power among several—which events will oblige the United States to do in any case—becomes a possibility.
    Alas, the likelihood of any such reevaluation occurring anytime soon is small. This is true not only because those wielding power in Washington oppose any change in the status quo but because the American people can’t or won’t make the effort.
    Here’s why. However packaged, the three yeses all imply collective obligation. That’s something a culture in thrall to celebrities, geeks, and warriors cannot abide.
    In the early 1970s, a failed war reinforced by a radical shift in culture persuaded Americans to jettison the tradition of the citizen-soldier. In creating the all-volunteer force, Richard Nixon accurately interpreted the popular will.
    Forty years later, the mournful consequences of this decision continue to pile up. Not least among them is a proclivity for wars that are, if anything, even more misguided and counterproductive than Vietnam was. Yet this time around, a collective refusal even to acknowledge those consequences takes precedence over corrective action. The warriors may be brave, but the people are timid. So where courage is most needed, passivity prevails, exquisitely expressed (and sanctimoniously justified) in the omnipresent call to “support the troops.”
    CODA
    The American people have rarely devoted more than passing attention to their relationship with their military. In recent decades, they have ignored the subject altogether. In an earlier day, however, the issue did command the attention of at least some American soldiers. Prominent among them was George C. Marshall.
    General Marshall understood that when it came to