Skin in the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots
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Skin in the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491703823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2013 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d) |
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SKIN IN THE GAME: POOR KIDS AND PATRIOTS
By Dennis Laich
iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2013 Major General Dennis LaichAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0382-3
CHAPTER 1
AMERICA AND ITS MILITARY
How the All Volunteer Force widens the gap between the military and the citizens it protects.
In the history of the United States, Americans have embraced a host of laws, policies, practices and value sets that worked toward strengthening our democracy. As time passed, we reevaluated and modified a number of these conventions. These changes occurred not necessarily because the status quo was wrong or misguided but because circumstances changed or because, upon reflection, the people questioned the assumptions or facts that undergirded existing laws, policies, practices, and value sets.
Positive changes that have strengthened American democracy include the elimination of slavery, the achievement of women's suffrage, the repeal of prohibition, expansions of civil rights, Reagan-era tax cuts, and improvements to women's reproductive rights. In the military, changes have included racial integration, gender integration, the all-volunteer force (AVF) and the recent repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT). However, not all Americans would agree that all these changes were positive.
None of these changes came easily, and some were particularly troublesome to certain segments of the population. Change is difficult for institutions and even more difficult for individuals acting as change agents, even when maintaining the status quo poses great risk. Indeed, this is particularly true for individual behavior. In their book Immunity to Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, members of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote, "not long ago a medical study showed that if heart doctors tell their seriously at risk heart patients that they will literally die if they do not make changes to their personal lives—diet, exercise, smoking—still only one in seven is able to make the change."
Over time, the pace of change has dramatically increased for everyone. This is apparent in America's use of—and increased reliance on—the employment of US armed forces. American service members and their families have endured tremendous hardships and changes that have a number of significant consequences. The United States has been at war since 2001. Some 2.4 million American troops out of a population of 240 million citizens over the age of eighteen have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan—1 percent of the population. This statistic is relevant not only to national military strategy and wartime planning but also to the social fabric of our nation—what has been referred to as civil-military relations. The fact that the AVF makes up such a small percentage of the population was a deliberate manpower consideration from the early planning stages of the Iraq War, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to prove that the "shock and awe" provided by superior technology would be sufficient to ensure victory with minimal troop levels. The Iraq War would be a short affair paid for with Iraqi oil, and the Iraqi people would greet us as liberators. General Eric Shinseki, army chief of staff, assessed it differently and testified before Congress that success in Iraq would require three to four times the number of troops suggested by Rumsfeld and his acolytes. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly pilloried Shinseki immediately after his testimony and pressured him to resign. Later, as the war dragged on, Shinseki's estimates proved correct.
The Iraq War soon morphed into a full-fledged insurgency, if not a civil war. Consequently, the Pentagon faced fighting a long war for the first time since the AVF was implemented in 1973. When a sufficient number of qualified citizens failed to volunteer, the Pentagon reacted with a number of personnel policies geared toward attracting new recruits. For example, the army lowered enlistment standards for high-school graduation, age, and physical fitness. The Pentagon granted the highest number of moral waivers in the history of the AVF, allowing convicted felons and violent criminals to enter its ranks.
As the wars continued, many service members whose terms of enlistment had expired were forced to remain in uniform due to a policy called stop-loss. Some critics labeled this a backdoor draft that violated underlying principles of the AVF. The army ignored violations of physical fitness and weight control standards that in peacetime were grounds for discharge. The army paid unprecedented cash bonuses, which were largely tax free, for enlistment and reenlistment. Additionally, the Pentagon employed civilian contractors at an unprecedented level, most notably Halliburton and Blackwater, to execute tasks traditionally performed by uniformed service members. Finally, soldiers and Marines were sent into harm's way for third, fourth, and fifth combat tours, and National Guardsmen and Reservists were sent for second and third tours while 99 percent of their fellow citizens went about their daily lives. Some observers of the Pentagon's personnel policies expressed concern that the army and Marine Corps would break under this strain. Although neither service broke, thousands of service members and their families did as evidenced by unprecedented suicides and divorce rates, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), drug abuse, and veteran homelessness and unemployment. The US government and all Americans will bear the social and financial costs of these tragedies for at least a generation to come. The fact that only 1 percent of the American people were directly involved in these two decade-long wars suggests that a serious gap exists in civil-military relations.
The question of whether such a gap exists is not new. Experts have expressed a pattern of concern for at least six decades. In 1957, sociologist Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State that the US military had "the outlook of an estranged minority." In 1986, journalist Arthur Hadley referred to the relationship as "the less than amicable separation of the military from financial, business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly the last two." In 1997, Tom Ricks wrote in the Atlantic that the "American political and economic elite generally don't understand the military" and added, "nor is such an understanding deemed important, even in making national security policy." In fact, the last two chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressmen Buck Mckeon and Ike Skelton, never served in the military, a situation unprecedented in modern times. Finally, journalist Mark Thompson wrote in a 2012 Time cover story that "over the past generation the world's lone superpower has created and grown accustomed to a permanent military caste, increasingly disconnected from US society, waging decade-long wars in its name, no longer representative of or drawn from the citizenry as a whole." What do all of these observations suggest in regard to the health of American civil-military relations today? What is the likelihood—and will the consequence be—of this tug at our social fabric becoming a tear?
This estrangement and consequent deference to the military in general and to the question of how we man our forces in particular may be viewed as a strange twist to the highly publicized Occupy Wall Street movement. The movement characterized itself as a response to the 99 percent being taken advantage of by the 1 percent—that is, the wealthy, powerful, and well connected. The twist is that the 1 percent who serve in our military are similarly being taken advantage of by the 99 percent who do not choose to serve. A moral and ethical element arises in both cases. Most Americans look at the issue of manning our military through the lens of fear, apathy, ignorance, and guilt—a lens often polished by self-interest and immediate gratification.
Fear is a powerful force that we often would rather not acknowledge or deal with. We have both collective fears and individual fears, and those fears vary over time depending on the threat and the individual or organization in danger. Collectively, we fear terrorism, a mushroom cloud on the horizon, or the disruption of the flow of oil from the Middle East, to name a few fears that we have come to believe can be dealt with most effectively by our military. Before these fears came to dominance, our nation experienced a series of fears from Barbary pirates to Soviet domination, all of them dealt with by military force. Without fear, the military loses its raison d'être and its budget, prominence, and Beltway influence. Without fear, defense contractors lose billion-dollar weapons contracts. I am not implying that the world is not a dangerous and complex place but that fear drives us to the military-industrial- congressional complex as a convenient savior, and it is more than ready to feed that fear and offer a solution. We may also have a collective, perhaps unconscious, fear of asking ourselves the fundamental question of this book: Is the AVF fair, efficient, and sustainable? Congress may be afraid to entertain a potentially unpopular alternative to the volunteer force and afraid of the political and social pushback it could create. Congress may also fear that an examination of the question of how we man the force will result in a realization that the civil military relationship is broken. That which is unexamined is invisible. Senior members of the military also may fear to entertain this question, as doing so could create difficulties for Congress, upon which the military depends not only for its budget appropriations but also for confirmation of its promotions. The military may also fear that it will be unable to train, lead, and discipline a more representative force that includes nonvolunteers. Volunteers are expected to be compliant. After all, they volunteered.
We also have individual fears, real or imagined, of military service. The surrender of individual rights, the rigors of boot camp, the physical danger of the battlefield, and the long-term physical and mental scars of war make many young Americans who have viable alternatives to military service (and their parents) reluctant to offer their service, and perhaps their lives, to our national security. Parents have even banded together to keep military recruiters from contacting their high-school-aged children and formed a national alliance, Leave My Child Alone! The organization offers information on how to protect America's youth against military recruiters. The current volunteer system accommodates these fears.
Second is apathy. Generally, apathy may be a way to deal with fear. If something frightens us, we can deal with the fear by consciously or unconsciously exercising a lack of concern, interest, or emotion. The apathy that we exhibit toward the issue of how we man our military forces or deal with veterans' issues may be part of a wider apathy in our democracy reflected in people's disappointment with the dysfunction in Washington as Congress fails to deal effectively with difficult but important issues. Low voter turnout reflects a collective apathy regarding our democracy. Disparate penalties for white-collar versus street crime and the widening income gap between low wage earners and the wealthy may reflect and fuel apathy. This broad evidence of apathy in our society makes it unsurprising that we might be apathetic toward the issue of how we man our military forces.
We often hear people of good faith saying things like, "It's a shame that he's on his fourth combat tour in Iraq, but he volunteered; who am I to judge his choice?" This is not necessarily a malicious apathy but one born of perceived helplessness and frustration that leads to rationalization and denial. Apathy is reflected in our individual and collective response to the adverse consequences of military service as reflected in veteran homelessness, unemployment, suicide, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual violence (which the Department of Defense euphemistically labels military sexual trauma). We are even apathetic to our military's conduct, whether it's Blackwater contractors gunning down seventeen innocent civilians in Nissor Square in Iraq or the deaths of innocent civilians that we refer to as collateral damage in drone strikes. At the end of 2012, the Afghan war did not make the Pew Research list of top fifteen news stories or the Associated Press editors and news directors list, and Yahoo's list of top news stories for 2012 omitted the Afghan war. These omissions existed despite the fact that sixty-eight thousand Americans were fighting—and some of them dying—in Afghanistan at the end of 2012. Michael Dimock, the associate director at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, said, "the public is having a hard time staying focused on foreign engagements that have been ongoing for over a decade." Those who had skin in the game, though, generally found ways to get the news. A last example of collective apathy is the fact that many of those who have volunteered for military service are now part of a nine-hundred- thousand-case backlog at the Veterans Administration that denies them medical attention for up to two years. As a colleague of mine asks, "Where is the outrage?"
One might like to help but doesn't know where to start, so defers to apathy. A token example is the "Support the Troops" bumper sticker. A more meaningful variation would be a bumper sticker that reads, "Support the Troops ... Enlist." How many Americans have visited seriously injured soldiers and their families at Walter Reed? How many Americans have attended a military funeral in their community? How many Americans have volunteered to help the family of a disabled veteran care for their loved one? Apathy steels us against these uncomfortable realities.
Third is ignorance. Apathy and ignorance go hand in hand. In fact, there's a joke in which a grade-school teacher asks little Johnny, "What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?" Johnny defiantly responds, "I don't know and I don't care." The teacher then says, "Very good, Johnny, very good." I refer to ignorance here not as socially unacceptable behavior but as a lack of knowledge or awareness of a particular thing—in this case national security in general and specifically how we man our military. I realize that most Americans are too engaged in keeping a job (or finding one), paying a mortgage, or funding retirement to take the time to understand geopolitics or military strategy, so they leave these issues to the wisdom of their elected leaders and their appointees and form their opinions based on superficial repetition that reflects and affirms their conservative or liberal biases. Conservatives watch FOX, and liberals watch MSNBC. After watching, though, few Americans know how many service members have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan or how many have been seriously injured. Nor do they know the cost of the two wars. We can't even be sure of the mission or our success in Iraq. In 2003, President Bush told us it was accomplished (aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln) but the 2012 Army Posture Statement simply says we left Iraq "responsibly"; there is no mention of mission accomplishment or winning. Few are asking if the official assessment of Afghanistan will be any more positive when we depart in 2014.
We find comfort in the idea of American exceptionalism and use it in place of knowledge and rigorous analysis. Often we marginalize those who do not buy into this comforting and dominant view. Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, writes in his book Strategic Vision that a major American "vulnerability is a public that is highly ignorant about the world. The uncomfortable truth is that the US public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events, and even pivotal movements in world history."
Finally, we experience guilt. Many Americans, consciously or unconsciously, feel guilt as a result of their choice not to serve in their nation's AVF. The dictionary defines guilt as a feeling of culpability, especially for ongoing offenses or from a sense of inadequacy. When lightly challenged, they rationalize or justify their decision and move on. Vice-President Dick Cheney is not considered a dove regarding military issues. Nevertheless, as a young man he secured five deferments from military service during the Vietnam War. When asked why he chose to not serve, he said he had other priorities. As a result of guilt, most Americans are less inclined to question or critique military strategy, call military senior leaders to task, or hold service members rigorously accountable for war crimes or gross deviations from rules of engagement. We are inclined to give American service members the benefit of the doubt, because they are ours and they are doing something for us that we decline to do for ourselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SKIN IN THE GAME: POOR KIDS AND PATRIOTS by Dennis Laich. Copyright © 2013 Major General Dennis Laich. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword.................... xi
Preface.................... xiii
Acknowledgements.................... xv
Chapter 1 – America and Its Military How the All Volunteer Force widens
the gap between the military and the citizens it protects.................. 1
Chapter 2 – A History of Manning the Force Conscription "worked" for two
centuries; conscripted militaries won the Revolutionary War, the Civil
War, WWI and WWII.................... 13
Chapter 3 – Nixon and the Gates Commission When politics trumps national
security Conscription sacrificed at the alter of the most unpopular war in
US history.................... 27
Chapter 4 – Saving the All-Volunteer Force The military compromises to
fight a long war the AVF was never intended to fight.................... 49
Chapter 5 – Effects of Saving the All-Volunteer Force How the global war
on terror breaks not the force, but volunteers and families................ 97
Chapter 6 – The Future We will go to war again against capable opponents
Will enough volunteers show up on our side?.................... 119
Chapter 7 – Alternatives The All Volunteer Force is not fair, efficient,
and sustainable What are the options?.................... 133
Afterword Now is the time to ask the question is the AVF working and will
it work in the future Tomorrow or in the middle of our next war is too
late.................... 161
Appendixes.................... 165
References.................... 169
Index.................... 171