Were the military to make a conscious effort to earn back the trust of the American people and many of its own members, we perhaps could see a better relationship, one more in line with what we need in this day and age and for the future.

Whether it’s with Iraq-style invasions or “surgical” teams of commando ninjas, for people like Kaplan the solution is always military. Whatever the military fad of the moment is , the whole national security state approach is yielding severely diminished returns, and has been for some decades. Yet rather than examine basic assumptions about our place in the world, about whether its really our place to be telling the world how to live, “defense” solons like Kaplan make a pretty sweet living ginning up sophistries about better ways to meddle. (Didn’t we ease into the brilliant success of Vietnam by following nostrums very similar to Kaplan’s Phillipine therapy?)

For much of our history, it was taken as a given that large militaries, hell, standing national armies of any kind, were a symptom of the rot of the European royalist states—something that Americans fled the Old World to avoid. To those Americans, talk of a “warrior spirit” as some kind of national virtue would have been simply nuts. I think the same remains true in any society that’s worth living in today.

All this aside, what’s really whacked about Kaplan’s screed is how it’s practically at right angles to reality. With a very brief Vietnam-era hiatus, America’s been on an extended pro-military swoon since Pearl Harbor. No national politician can mention the military without using language that used to be reserved for saints. Military heroes are far more prominent in American movies and books than those of any culture I can think of. In public opinion surveys, the military typically rates as well or better than any of the professions.

The chigacoboyz are having a nice discussion too.

We defeated a country of 25 million+ with a force of less than 200k (and took down Afghanistan with less than 50k). Our casualty rate, as well as the civilian casualty rate, is, by the standards of modern industrial war, astonishingly low. The reality is the military side has been remarkably effective and efficient.

We are entering the 5th year of a counterinsurgency in Iraq. These usually take a decade or so to quell—something never mentioned in the morale-sapping defeatist media.

If every Iraq war decision had been made perfectly, which never happens in any war, then it’s hard to imagine how much lower our own casualty rate could be. Remember, Iraq was essentially a large ammo dump with a displaced minority elite who had been running things for decade, not to mention the large # of outside agitators looking to interfere.

I can respect the argument that the Iraq war is not worth the cost in American lives, or that the end result will be worse for American national interest. But the Left and the Media don’t stick to that argument. They also argue that the entire thing has been one gigantic military disaster.

And they, in their deep expertise on military matters, claim there were obvious screw-ups that anyone with half a brain could have avoided. The idea that there was a simple and obvious answer to how to deal with the ruling Baathists is naive and ignorant. Any decision on how much to de-Baathisize the Iraqi Army had the potential for serious downsides.

War is hard and mistakes are inevitable. But the end result, judged in the proper context of history and past counter-insurgencies, shows the Iraq War to be remarkably effective, efficient, and humane.

Whether it turns out to have been a wise decision from the standpoint of American national security remains to be seen.

That said, this article was a logical conclusion of where Kaplan’s writing had been headed for some time now, and clearly his own reverence for the military only grows with each assignment.

I understand why foreigners resort to anti-Americanism. I’ll never understand why my own countrymen do. Among certain elites the more anti-American they are the more respected they are. Sad.

I must have missed the part of the article where Kaplan advocates a kind of warrior spirit as that advocated by the National Socialists or the Japanese in the late 1930’s. It’s a silly comment.

@Sonagi – The Kaplan piece is a little long on emotion but he is more concerned with the civilian disconnect at the individual level, not necessarily the institutional level. As he points out, there is hardly the distrust of the military that existed 40 years ago. The loss of faith is in the civilian policy makers who control the military (and there were many in the military who were against the Iraq invasion). Kaplan seems to be worried in the narrow band of the country that is joining and actively interacting with the military. As youself, how many people do you know that have been in the military, then take away anyone who served in Vietnam or further back (i.e. the draft years). As evident in some of his other writings Kaplan worries about the distance between civilians and the military causing both to become estranged from the other. I’m not sure I fully buy into this thesis, particularly as the military still draws from all over (though small towns like my own are over represented). I would also note the inter-war years between WWI and WWII where the military was in a similar state of disconnection from the overall culture.

Sonagi, above, makes the crucial point: Kaplan’s screed is long on emotional hand-waving, yet completely empty of any sort of awareness of how his own nostrums may have been, ahem, just a little off. I suggest that one very large contributor to American demoralization is that people like Kaplan have been allowed to run with their fantasies and abstractions, have (predictably) squandered immense advantages and resources, and have suffered not at all for their incompetence and criminality. In fact, they continue to profit from it all—which suggests that our leadership caste exhibits an estrangement from basic reality that’s a helluva lot more worrisome than insufficient bloodlust for the next military adventure.

The killing of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001 might have temporarily awakened a warrior spirit in American democracy, but such a spirit is hard to sustain in the crucible of an ambiguous conflict. In Iraq, a country of 26 million people through which more than a million American troops have passed, the loss of a few Americans and three dozen-or-so Iraqis daily in suicide bombs is enough to demoralize a homefront 7,000 miles away.

Throughout the whole piece, Kaplan never questions the legitimacy of invading Iraq, and here he sounds like a Wolfowitz-Rove war propagandist smoothly gliding from 9/11 to Iraq without expliciting identifying the cause-effect link between the two, which surprises me as his educated audience isn’t dumb enough to confuse Al-Qaeda and Saddam.

His essay is a lamentation of the loss of civilian faith in the US military yet never really offers any concrete explanations for this change.

Faith, no. Trust, yes. Trust may be earned or lost, depending on one’s words and actions.

Monty Python foresaw this weakness in the free market:

City Gent: (he goes to the intercom) Ah Miss Godfrey could you send in the pantomime horses please.

The door opens and two pantomime horses run in. Pantomime music. They do a routine including running round the room and bumping into each other. They then stand in front of the city gent crossing their legs and putting their heads on one side.

City Gent: Now I’ve asked you to … (they repeat the routine) Now I’ve asked you … (they start again) Shut up! (they stop) Now I’ve asked you in here to see me this morning because I’m afraid we’re going to have to let one of you go. (the pantomime horses heads go up, their ears waggle and their eyes go round)
I’m very sorry but the present rationalization of this firm makes it inevitable that we hive one of you off. (water spurts out of their eyes in a stream)
Now you may think that this is very harsh behaviour but let me tell you that our management consultants actually queried the necessity for us to employ a pantomime horse at all. (the horses register surprise and generally behave ostentatiously) And so the decision has to be made which one of you is to go.
Champion… how many years have you been with this firm? (Champion stamps his foot three times)
Trigger? (Trigger stamps his front foot twice and rear foot once) I see.

Well, it’s a difficult decision. But in accordance with our traditional principles of free enterprise and healthy competition I’m going to ask the two of you to fight to the death for it.

Robert Kaplan says that some kinds of war – “in between” wars he calls them [others call them “wars of national choice”] have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

Perhaps the rules for nations going to war should be tightened. And what about R2P. But how is this best arranged?

I do hope Americans do not confuse that sort of “faith” with faith. Bullies usually end up with egg on their faces.