Kaplan is in The American Interest

Francis Fukuyama, one of my favorite post-Cold War thinkers along with Kaplan, has just launched a new magazine, The American Interest. Kaplan has written an article, but alas, it’s for subscribers only. The article appears to be about why the military votes Republican. Here’s the abstract:

Warrior Honor
By Robert D. Kaplan

Virtually all close observers inside and outside the U.S. military estimate that anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of active duty servicemen, reservists and National Guardsmen voted Republican in the last presidential election.1 I suspect that among the non-commissioned ranks of the combat arms community—the grunts—that figure may have been significantly higher. What makes me think so?

I spent part of the summer of 2004 in West Africa with a platoon of United States Marines. I would guess that, with few exceptions, they voted for President George W. Bush. Some of them feared that the Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, would end the war in Iraq before they themselves had a chance “to get in on the fight.” Election night found me in a restaurant-bar in central Alaska frequented by members of an army infantry brigade about to be deployed to Iraq. As the results from Florida and Ohio came in—and for days afterward—the mood was of relief sometimes bordering on euphoria. They, too, would get to fight. What the Ivy League professoriate is to the Democratic Party, the fighting units of the U.S. military are to the Republicans.

Wanting to fight is an ordinary emotion for those who choose combat arms as a profession. In My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Winston Churchill’s memoir of his early life as a soldier and journalist, he writes of elation in the ranks when his unit of the Indian army was ordered from serene southern India to the Afghan frontier to fight rebellious tribesmen. He describes “the delicious yet tremulous sensations” that professional soldiers, bred in a time of peace, feel when approaching “an actual theatre of operations.” To a greater degree than today’s media commentators, Churchill has cut to the essence of America’s fighting units, liberated by 9/11 from a policy that did not allow for significant personal risk, particularly in the case of ground troops.