How Much Military Is Enough?

In the January 28, 2013 The New Yorker, Jill Lepore asks the question: "How Much Military Is Enough?" Lepore presents some signposts along the way to illustrate how the role of the military has grown like Topsy.

Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing committees: one for the Army, and the other for the Navy. A committee on the militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911 -- the militia itself having been essentially abandoned. It was in 1934 that Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) The Supreme Court, in effect, was warning about the militarism of civilian life, a trend that has accelerated in recent times.

It was not until the Second World War that the United States established what would become a standing Army. A seminal event occurred in 1947, when Lockheed Martin's chief executive told a Senate committee that the nation needed funding for military production that was "adequate, continuous, and permanent."

We are now slightly over seven decades past V-J Day and we have nearly 300,000 U.S. troops stationed overseas, including 55,000 in Germany, 35,000 in Japan and 10,000 in Italy. Much of the money hat the federal government spends on "defense" involves neither securing the nation's borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces U.S. foreign policy.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a career Army officer and now a professor of history, has captured the extent to which the U.S. public has "fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of  military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals." Bacevich refers to the irony of a nation founded on opposition to a standing Army,  now being a nation engaged in a standing war.

Bacevich refers to the "mystical war on terrorism" and finds its counterpart in the "mystical war on Communism." Mystification, he has said, leads to exaggerated threats and ignores costs. "It prevents us from seeing things as they are."

When General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on October 13, 2011, he made it clear that we should not expect to see any change in the preeminent role of the military in American life: "I didn't become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to  oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of he United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power. That is not who we are as a nation."

Jill Lepore has a much more hopeful vision of a nation not consumed with the use of force as the be-all and end-all of its role as a global power. Lepore says: "The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey's won't be the last word."