Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^AFTERWORD THE NON-WARRIOR DEMOCRACY

If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present, further clarified by the great works of the past. Rereading, upon a halt in my travels, The Art of Warfare by the fourth century B.C. Chinese court minister Sun-Tzu and On War by the early-nineteenth-century Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz, I was struck by something straightaway—something that has little to do with the specific ideas of the two men, but is everywhere in the background of their thoughts. It is something that the many months I spent with the combat arms community alerted me to.

Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe—in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, both are willing to fight. That is so clear that they never need to state it.

Sun-Tzu is concerned with war on the highest strategic level; Clausewitz more on the operational level. Sun-Tzu affirms that the greatest warrior is one who calculates so well that he never needs to fight. For Clausewitz, war takes precedence only after other forms of politics have failed. In sum, both men have internalized the fact that war is so awful that it constitutes a last resort. Both are opponents of militarism. But there is never the slightest doubt that each would fight if necessary, and that each man could live only with a policy of such vigor that it would never, at any moment, fail to communicate a warrior spirit.

Sun-Tzu respects only a leader “who plans and calculates like a hungry man,” who sanctions every manner of deceit provided it is necessary to gain strategic advantage, who is never swayed by public opinion, and “who advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment,” if he judges it to be in the interest of his army and his state.¹ Clausewitz is no less committed. “In affairs so dangerous as war,” he writes, “false ideas proceeding from kindness of heart are precisely the worst.” He adds: “The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.”

The logic of both men is grounded in patriotic commitment. According to Clausewitz, an army’s national feeling is among “the chief moral powers” in war. Each man, to quote Theodore Roosevelt, has actually been in the arena. He “knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions” he has spent “himself in a worthy cause… so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”[119]

Sun-Tzu was likely a court minister during the chaos of the Warring States 2,300 years ago, prior to the relative stability of Han rule.[120] Clausewitz was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who served with both the Prussian and Russian armies against the French. While each man seeks to avoid war, each is a warrior. What stands out in The Art of Warfare and On War, more so than the incisiveness of the analysis, is the character of the writers themselves. Because knowing something abstractly is different from knowing it firsthand, I could grasp this vividly only after living beside junior officers and senior NCOs, whose logic also flowed from their patriotic commitment.

Patriotism, in the famously quoted phrase of Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.[121] Yet such a truth is misused by those who have little loyalty to any place, and who therefore lack any accountability, since it is easy to be in favor of this cause, or against that cause, if one has no down-to-earth stake in the outcome. While some patriots certainly are scoundrels, the vast majority are more trustworthy than those who are not.

Patriotism, as I learned from one soldier and marine, one sailor and airman, after another, overlaps with moral hardiness. I can best illustrate moral hardiness and its opposite by describing two characters of Joseph Conrad, whose writings, like those of Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz, took on a richer meaning following my travels with the military.

Captain MacWhirr is the protagonist in Conrad’s short story “Typhoon” (1902). The son of a Belfast grocer, he is a man of few words and little imagination, a man so taciturn that his chief mate says of him: “There are feelings that this man simply hasn’t got…. You might just as well try to make a bedpost understand.” As Captain MacWhirr’s steamer, Nan-Shan, sets out to the coast of China to return Chinese coolies home, a great storm is brewing in the Formosa Channel, recorded by the dramatic drop of his barometer. But what would terrify most other men he accepts matter-of-factly.

A few hours later, his ship is in chaos. The wind alone has such a “disintegrating” force, Conrad writes, that it “isolates” every man on board from every other. The mates panic, the coolies riot as the Nan-Shan nearly splits apart. As for MacWhirr, rather than sail miles off course to get around the storm, he quietly decides to plow straight into it, like a platoon leader charging straight into an ambush. “Facing it—always facing it,” he mumbles, “that’s the way to get through.” So it is that this ordinary, very extraordinary man saves the ship because, as Conrad mightily suggests, he not only believes, but also believes deeply in his moral duty to the shipping company and to the men under him. Once the storm is past, rather than sleep, or remove his boots even, he makes sure that every coolie gets his proper wages.

MacWhirr is not clever. He is not even minimally well spoken. But his abiding faith results in an iron certainty about himself, for which words are quite beside the point.

MacWhirr is not the type to be afraid, whether of a typhoon or, for that matter, months upon months of god-awful headlines. During the worst of times in Iraq, one officer after another, commissioned and noncommissioned, communicated to me a fierce conviction. Take the otherwise quiet, MacWhirr-like Sgt. Maj. Dennis Zavodsky of Mapleton, Oregon, who at a Thanksgiving service in Mosul remarked that the Pilgrims during the first winter in the New World experienced a casualty rate that would render any combat unit ineffective. “This country isn’t a quitter,” he said. “It doesn’t withdraw. It doesn’t give in.” Stubbornness, inspired by faith, was the rule among those I was privileged to be with.

I do not mean religious faith per se, since quite a few of those I met despised “the Bible thumpers.” I mean simply the moral stamina of a MacWhirr—something that has a tendency to go hand in hand with the bumps and bruises of a dangerous, working-class existence.

Yet the moment I left these combat units I encountered the Martin Decouds of this world, the brilliant sneerers who analyzed everything into oblivion.

Martin Decoud is a character in the novel Nostromo (1904), about an imaginary Latin American country, Costaguana, in the throes of upheaval. Decoud has studied law in Paris, dabbles in literature, writes political commentary, and all in all, as Conrad explains, is an “idle boulevardier.” Decoud becomes heroic only when he is faced with a political crisis that matters to his own welfare. But when he finds himself alone on an island off Costaguana, he gives in to despair, even though he has been told he will be rescued. The “brilliant” journalist Decoud, the “spoiled darling” of his family, as Conrad writes, “was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed.” Whereas Captain MacWhirr could assume the breathtaking loneliness of command in the midst of a nighttime typhoon that silences all human voices, Decoud, also faced with disintegrative natural forces, breaks down. Despite Decoud’s virtuoso conversation and commentary, as Conrad tells us, in a crisis it turns out he “believed in nothing.”

Alas, in the unpredictable fog and Clausewitzian “friction” of war, to believe—to believe in something—is more important than to be blessed by mere logic, or the ability for talented argument.

“Faith is the great strategic factor that unbelieving faculties and bureaucracies ignore,” writes retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (Ret.) in an essay, “The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs.”² This idea is not new. The signal flaw of the upper classes, in Dostoevsky’s words, is that they “want to base justice on reason alone,” not on any deeper belief system, absent which everything can be rationalized, so the will of a society to fight and survive withers away.³

Peters fears that Islamic revolutionaries believe in themselves more than we believe in ourselves. Terrorists do not fear the Pentagon’s much touted “network-centric warfare,” he writes, because they have mastered it for a fraction of a cent on the dollar, “achieving greater relative effects with the Internet, cellphones, and cheap airline tickets” than have all of our military technologies. He notes that our trillion-dollar arsenal cannot produce an instrument of war as effective as the suicide bomber—“the breakthrough weapon of our time.”

Kipling understood this. In the poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” Kipling writes that as the hillsides of eastern Afghanistan teem with “home-bred” troops brought from England at “vast expense of time and steam,” the odds remain, nevertheless, “on the cheaper man”—the native fighter, that is. The suicide bomber is Kipling’s “cheaper man” incarnate. This breakthrough weapon is a product of fanatical belief—of a different sort than Captain MacWhirr’s, but of belief nonetheless.

Take jihad, which places more emphasis on the “mystical dimension” of sacrifice than on any tactical or strategic objective. Jihad is an act of individual exultation rather than of collective action, observes the French academic and scholar of Islam Olivier Roy. As Roy explains, it is “an affair between the believer and God and not between the believer and his enemy. There is no obligation to obtain a result. Hence the demonstrative, even exhibitionist, aspects of the attacks.”[122]

The suicide bomber is the distilled essence of jihad, the result of an age when the electronic media provide an unprecedented platform for exhibitionism. Clausewitz’s rules of war do not apply in this case, for he conceived of nothing like the modern media, whose members tend to be as avowedly secular as suicide bombers are devout. Without a stabilizing belief system, the global media’s spiritual void has been partially filled by a resentment against the United States—the embodiment of unruly modernization and raw political and military power that the global citizens of the media detest. And so it is that the video camera—“that insatiable accomplice of the terrorist” in Peters’s words—becomes the “cheap negation” of American military technology.

Even as we narrow our own view of warfare’s acceptable parameters, our enemies amplify the concept of total war, which is about targeting tens, or hundreds, or occasionally thousands of civilians, in order to undermine the morale of millions. The killing of three thousand 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 conflict. In Iraq, a country of twenty-six million people in which over a million American troops have passed through, killing a few Americans and three dozen or so Iraqis daily in suicide bombings is enough to demoralize a home front seven thousand miles away. A non-warrior democracy with a very limited appetite for casualties is a good thing, in terms of putting brakes on a directionless war strategy. All I am saying is that we as a people, as we grow increasingly prosperous, will find it harder to wage war.

Stark religious faith, in concert with a generally irreligious global media, makes for a cheap and efficient weapon of war. Of course, nationalism is another form of faith. Nationalism, of a kind that is going out of fashion among sectors of the American elite, could also defeat us.

Here is where someone like Ralph Peters comes completely in line with someone of impeccable credentials from the academic establishment: Paul Bracken, Yale University professor of political science, and defense consultant to both Democratic and Republican administrations. Bracken’s book Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age has, as one of its major themes, the ascent of blood-and-soil nationalism. In discussing the acquisition of nuclear technology by China, Iran, India, Pakistan, and other powers on the Asian continent, Bracken writes:

The link to nationalism makes the second nuclear age even harder for the West to comprehend. Nationalism is not viewed kindly in the West these days. It is seen as nonsensical, a throwback, and, it is hoped, a dying force in the world. The notion that the Chinese or Indians could conduct foreign policy on the assumption of their own national superiority goes against nearly every important trend in American and West European thought.⁴

Bracken next observes that successful nuclear tests in places like India and Pakistan “set off public euphoria—literally, people danced in the streets.” It was an “emotional embrace of a technology Westerners have been taught to loathe and abhor.” Americans forget, perhaps at their peril, how in the 1950s the atomic bomb “was an important source of American pride,” in Bracken’s words. Henceforth, “no one should be surprised that Asian countries today feel the same way.” The Yale professor adds, again, completely in line with the iconoclastic Peters: “In focusing on whether the West can keep its lead in technology, the United States is asking the wrong question. It overlooks the military advantages that accrue to societies with a less fastidious approach to violence.”⁵

In such a world, the real threat to our national security may be our own lack of faith in ourselves, which, in turn, leads to an over-dependence on technology by our military establishment. How to kill at no risk to our troops is only in our eyes a sign of strength; in those of our enemy it is a sign of weakness, cowardice even.

Never-say-die religious faith, accompanied by old-fashioned nationalism, is alive in America, to such a degree that I have found it a match for the most fanatical suicide bombers. But with some exceptions, it is confined to our finest combat infantry units, and to specific sections of the country and socioeconomic strata from which these “warriors” (as they like to call themselves) hail. It is not characteristic of a country that in many ways is going in the opposite direction, because of irreversible economic and social forces. This is not the 1950s when Americans took a certain relief in possessing “the bomb.”

Faith, which is about struggle and having confidence precisely when the odds are the worst, is receding among a social and economic class that is increasingly motivated by universal values—that is, caring for the suffering of famine victims abroad as much as for hurricane victims at home. Universal values are not the opposite of faith, but they should never be confused with it. You may care to the point of tears about suffering humankind without having the will to actually fight (let alone inconvenience yourself) for your concerns. Thus, if accompanied by a loss of faith, universal values pose an existential challenge to national security.

The loss of a warrior mentality and the rise of universal values is a feature of all stable, Western-style middle-class democracies. Witness our situation. The Reserve is desperate for officers. Yet there is little urge among our elites to volunteer, and thus our military takes on more of a regional caste. The British Army may have been drawn from the dregs of society, but it was officered by the country’s political class. Not so ours, which has little to do with the business of soldiering, and is socially disconnected from what guards us in our sleep. Nine Princeton graduates in the class of 2006 entered the military, compared to four hundred in 1956, when there was a draft. Other Ivy League schools had no one enter the military in 2006. Only one member of the Stanford graduating class had a parent in the military.⁶ Nor do our top schools encourage recruitment; in fact, they often actively discourage it. Many people, especially academics and intellectuals, have a visceral distrust of units like Special Forces. They are more comfortable with regular citizen armies that seem to better represent democracy. But other than a professional warrior class or a draft, what is available to a democracy whose upper stratum has less and less of a commitment to military values?

As for the combat arms community itself, warrior consciousness will further intensify, even as the identities of each of the four armed services become less distinct. This is an exceedingly slow process, more noticeable at the top levels of command than elsewhere. But rather than Army green, Air Force blue, or Navy khaki, for example, the trend could be toward purple—the color of jointness. This is not to say that the services are losing their individual cultures, only that operations both big and small are more and more integrated affairs.

As each year goes by, the interaction between the services deepens. The Air Force, with its once cushy, corporate way of existence, is becoming a bit more hardened and austere like the Army, as the Big Army becomes more small unit–oriented like the Marine Corps. The Big Navy, with its new emphasis on small ships to meet the demands of littoral combat, is becoming more unconventional and powered down, also like the Marines. Without a draft (or a revitalized Reserve and National Guard that ties the military closer to civilian society), in the decades ahead American troops, at least in frontline units, may become less soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen, and more and more purple warriors: a guild practically, in which the profession of combat arms is passed down from father to son. It was striking how many troops I met whose parents and other relatives had also been in the service, especially among the units whose members face the highest level of personal risk.

At the 2006 Stanford commencement ceremony, a Marine general whose son was the lone graduating student from a military family said he was struck by how many of the other parents had never even met a member of the military before he introduced himself.⁷

A citizen army is composed of conscripts from all classes and parts of the country in roughly equal amounts. But a volunteer military is necessarily dominated by those regions with an old-fashioned fighting ethos. I refer to the South and the adjacent Bible Belts of the southern Midwest and Great Plains. Marine and Army infantry units, in particular Army Special Forces A-teams, manifested a proclivity for volunteers from the states of the former Confederacy, as well as Irish and Hispanics from poorer, more culturally conservative sections of coastal cities. In sum, the American military has become, in some respects, a higher-quality version of what it was on the eve of World War II.

The Greatest Generation may have come from all walks of life and all regions of the country, but when it got to boot camp its trainers were professional soldiers, often with southern accents, intent on doing their thirty years. But the southern soldier of today is different from back then. Take Army Special Forces Maj. Robert E. Lee, Jr., of Mobile, Alabama, whom I met in the Philippines in 2003. Maj. Lee named his son “Stonewall.” But Maj. Lee also worked as a church-based volunteer in a poor African-American section of Wichita, Kansas. “It was my first real exposure to blacks, I mean not from afar,” he told me. “It was a year of learning, day after day, that folks are just folks.” He was not unusual. It is a commonplace among observers of the American military that race relations in the barracks are significantly better than in the society at large.

Yet even such an encouraging evolution constitutes another sign of the emergence of a separate caste. I found that it wasn’t just in war zones where soldiers bond with one another, but at bases within the United States, too, where troops and their families live separately from close-by civilian communities, and the short duty rotation makes it hard for the inhabitants of the base to develop ties outside it. Spending months upon months with American troops, I entered a social world where friendships stretched across units and racial lines more than across military-civilian ones, and home-front references were to forts rather than to states.

Commonly, liberal democratic societies have been defended by conservative military establishments, whose members may lack the sensitivities and social graces of the cosmopolitan classes whom they protect. Such a traditional American military, very much rooted in the old nation-state, now has a thankless task. When one considers that much of what it does abroad is guard sea-lanes and train troops of fledgling democracies, it helps provide the security armature for an emerging global civilization that, the more that civilization evolves—with its own mass media, nongovernmental organizations, and professional class—the less credit and sympathy it grants to the American troops who at times risk and give their lives for it.

The military historian James L. Stokesbury writes that middle-class democracies fight two kinds of wars well: little wars, fought by professional warriors, which garner little media attention and which consequently the public does not bother about; and big wars, in which the whole country, in spite of itself, may occasionally get caught up in a patriotic fervor. The small footprint deployments I have covered in recent years are a variation of these little wars, as are the many discreet intelligence operations and raids that various branches of the national security apparatus continue to carry out around the globe.

The problem, as Stokesbury explains, arises not with the little or big wars, but with the “middle-sized” ones, of which the public is very much aware, thanks now to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, but is nevertheless confused as to its goals. These middle-sized wars are very bloody affairs, in which we are nevertheless forced to place a high value on the individual because of our universal values, even as the enemy does not.⁸ Abu Ghraib, which showed America at its worst, does not register in terms of barbarity compared to what the enemy was doing on a daily basis in Iraq at the same time. In big, good-versus-evil wars, the home front feels itself a part of the fighting machine. In little and middle-sized wars, it does not. But in little wars, it doesn’t matter that the public doesn’t feel itself at war, because it is largely unknowing about it in the first place. It is the middle-sized war that creates the worst sort of combination for a non-warrior democracy, one in which the public is keenly knowledgeable of the worst details, yet has no context in which to assimilate them, and is otherwise unaffected.

Stokesbury’s example of a middle-sized war is Korea, but his point also applies to Vietnam and Iraq. The so-called Powell Doctrine, in which then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell advised that the United States should not get involved in a war without overwhelming force, a near certainty of victory, and a clear exit strategy, may seem overly timid to many. But if one views the Powell Doctrine as a way to avoid middle-sized wars (or little wars that through miscalculations can become middle-sized ones), it makes sense for the needs of a non-warrior democracy.

In these wars, the lack of a broad-based warrior mentality is clearly a disadvantage. The problem, though, is that it often isn’t clear what will become a middle-sized war and what won’t. The Powell Doctrine was used as an argument not to get involved in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. But we inserted troops anyway and they did not turn out to be middle-sized wars. The gradual stabilization of the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea indicate that the Balkan interventions of 1995 and 1999 were in the nation’s interest. Few if any of the neoconservatives, realists, and liberals who supported the invasion of Iraq expected it to be a middle-sized war that would go on for years. Simply never to get involved anywhere, except in the smallest deployments, or in a bigger one without the absolute certainty of a clean victory, is itself an indication of defeat and retreat from the world. Alas, the Powell Doctrine is not perfect.

Great Britain employed others to help it fight Napoleon, and it maintained an elite navy rather than a vast and financially debilitating national army. But it’s not that we haven’t tried to do this. All our training missions around the world are designed to bring indigenous forces up to the level where they can fight on their own. Moreover, PACOM officials are obsessed with military multilateralism. Even President Bush attempted to build a military coalition of major nations for invading Iraq, before he did so with the help of mainly Great Britain. And Iraq was the exception. The American way of war is, by and large, by coalitions. As for sea power, for over six decades we’ve been the successor to the Royal Navy. Yet in coming decades we will likely have no choice but to gradually cede some of that oceanic space to the rising Indian and Chinese navies.

The warrior spirit of our illiberal adversaries means that deterrence also requires a credible, land-based conventional force structure: it’s that or appeasement if we want to avoid middle-sized wars and still be taken seriously. This brings me to Frederick Kagan, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and author of “A Strategy for Heroes: What’s Wrong with the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.”[123]

Kagan believes that troop numbers really do matter, and while they may not be able to solve the problem of suicide bombers, they can solve a lot of other problems that will allow us to prosper. For example, he notes that even as airpower becomes increasingly effective, we should not expect it to obviate the need for large numbers of conventional ground troops in future crises—something Iraq has demonstrated. Here he seems to be in disagreement with those like Air Force Col. Robert Wheeler, operations commander for the B-2 squadron on Guam, who told me that the massing of troops will become less and less feasible as time goes on.

“Wise commanders,” Kagan writes, “design plans that can be executed by ordinary soldiers.” Yet Pentagon planners, he complains, with their focus on light and lethal small-footprint strategies, are wedded to a concept that “only heroes” can make work. Of course, light and lethal small-footprint strategies are what I have spent much of my time covering. And I found that they worked quite well, in terms of their low risk and reasonable degree of success, particularly in relation to their costs, since expensive hardware is not needed so much as basics like language and diplomatic skills. Small footprints are about little wars, which, unlike middle-sized ones, are to our advantage.

Still, Kagan has a point. After all, he isn’t referring to most of the operations that I reported on, in which, for the most part, American troops have been invited into various countries not to stabilize dictatorships, as in the past, but to help stabilize and professionalize the militaries of new democracies along Western lines. Rather, he is referring to contingencies for middle-and big-sized wars, for another way to avoid such wars is to plan perfectly for them. Instead, he finds a Pentagon strategy that only heroes can make work—if your definition of heroes is the kind of marines and Green Berets that I kept running into, whose main worry was that they would not get to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.

As much as I respect the troops whom I profile, I also realize that the armed services constitute a vast world in which the majority of enlistees, as well as of reservists and national guardsmen, have joined for complex social and economic reasons that often have little to do with wanting to see combat. Defense strategy must accept this reality. The members of our social and economic elite that avoid military service, and encourage their children to do likewise, are not the only problem. Just as the American public has a limited appetite for grand causes and conflicts, so do the troops themselves, outside of the best units. Thus, there needs to be enough of a strategic reserve of manpower so that even in times of conflict, units will not be overdeployed and overworked indefinitely.

Kagan’s other point is that by putting so much emphasis on Special Operations–type activities, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2006, which generally reflects the thinking of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, commits a classic error—that of seeing the future as a continuation of the present, while at the same time not taking into account the mistakes of the present.

To wit, the future will be about much more than counterinsurgency against the likes of al-Qaeda. As Iraq has demonstrated, in the years ahead the Pentagon may require many ordinary soldiers in the field. The festering problems of Iran and North Korea, and the rise of China’s military power to accompany its economic weight, all point to the need for a large, well-funded conventional military, as well as for a much better, more linguistically adroit unconventional one than we have now. (As I’ve written in an earlier chapter, the debate over conventional versus unconventional is a false one. Both are necessary, and in any case the distinction between them is eroding.)

Kagan is not saying that we will fight Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, or even any one of them, or any combination of them. But he is saying that we must be prepared for these and other contingencies. Optimism is not the Pentagon’s job. Donald Rumsfeld thought in terms of worst-case scenarios for the original invasion of Iraq, and got the best possible result; but because he thought in terms of best-case scenarios for the ensuing occupation, he got the worst possible result.

Colin S. Gray, an advisor to British and American governments for a quarter century on defense policy, writes that when it comes to optimism and pessimism, “optimism is apt to kill with greater certainty.” Nothing is more dangerous, he says, than “a policy that amounts to an investment of hope either that humankind has forsworn most forms of warfare, or, more likely, that someone else will be on call to bear the security burden.”⁹ Gray, whose book Another Bloody Century offers a thorough, nonpolemical analysis of the forms of twenty-first-century military conflict, is, like Kagan, very impressed with the health and persistence of interstate rivalries. Such rivalries, he concludes, have the probability in the next few decades of overshadowing the danger of al-Qaeda–style insurgencies. An example he cites may be the slow-motion emergence of an anti-American, Sino-Russian continental axis in Asia, to which illiberal regimes will overtly gravitate, and terrorist groups covertly so. In such a future, while we hope to defend ourselves, pace Wheeler’s vision, through air-land-sea combinations that fuse together for sudden strikes without having to risk large numbers of ground troops, we will still need large numbers of ground troops available.

In this reckoning, the United States military will not only have to get better, and even more light and lethal, but also bigger and more robust in many ways. The only way for the defense establishment to avoid tragedy is to think tragically, for we will be up against adversaries who have not had their fighting spirits as debilitated as ours by globalization. Though everyone will be affected by technological and economic integration, those who are less so will have the psychological advantage when it comes to war.

Despite globalization, national militaries will not diminish in importance, at least for some decades. To the contrary, in some cases, they could grow in significance compared to other forms of human organizations. The “technologies of wealth and war have always been closely connected,” Bracken warns. To a significant degree since the early 1990s, “missile and bomb tests…biological warfare programs, and…chemical weapons” have been “the products of a prosperous, liberalizing Asia.”

Indeed, the political-military map of Eurasia—one-third of the earth’s landmass—is changing radically. Europe is increasingly less a serious military power. Its own peoples see their respective militaries not as defenders of their homelands but as civil servants in uniforms. A revitalized, more expeditionary NATO can certainly mitigate this situation. But the overall trend will more likely see Europe devote itself to peacekeeping and disaster details. And while Europe slowly recedes as a purely military factor, a chain of Asian countries, from Israel to North Korea—including Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, and China—have assembled nuclear and/or chemical stockpiles, aided by ballistic missile delivery systems in more and more cases.

The key element in judging the future of national militaries will be the civilian-military relationship in each particular country. In Europe, as I’ve noted, civilians take little pride in their standing armies. In America, they do. In this respect, Iraq has not been like Vietnam. While Americans may have turned against the Iraq war, they have not turned against the troops there, and, if anything, in recent years have grown more appreciative of them. Precisely because they are so socially disconnected from the military, many members of the elite hold the military in awe. Though our own elite may want no part of military life, and show no warrior spirit when a military situation becomes difficult, nevertheless, openly mocking the idea of military service is by and large not socially acceptable. The upshot: America has a first-class, professional military that is respected, even as it is not reflective of society.

Though the American military in qualitative terms (though not in manpower terms) gets better and better, increasingly restrictive rules of engagement, coupled with the ascent of Asian militaries, could make it increasingly weaker in relative terms. Whereas Asian militaries, particularly in the case of China and India, used to be characterized by mass conscript armies of peasants who could withdraw into the countryside, so one vast country did not in any real operational sense threaten its neighbors, homegrown communications technologies, including digital phones, satellites, and so on, have created real civilian-military industrial complexes across the Asian landmass.¹⁰

These countries are not weighed down by the kind of imperial responsibilities that burden America—the legacy of World War II, Korea, and beyond. While Army Special Forces and the Marines, for relatively small outlays of money, experiment at the unconventional edges of the battlefield, the Air Force and Navy patrol vast air and sea spaces at significant cost to the American taxpayer. A country like China can build an empire of sorts for less money than the U.S. spends merely to keep its. As we have seen in Korea, the more established an empire is, the harder and more expensive it is to maintain.

Americans like to believe that the advance of democracy the world over will make them more secure. They may be right. But it is also worth considering that the United States is a status quo power, like every other in history, meaning its power depends on the current situation in world affairs, and as that situation changes, whether because of the advance of democracy or its retreat, its power is threatened.

Take China. Many analysts posit that if China remains repressive it will be a threat, whereas if China embraces democracy it will be a friend. Obviously, China’s future will see a mixture of both trends. Even so, a repressive China could face internal problems that could actually diminish its expansionist tendencies, while an increasingly free China, rather than be benign, could exhibit a kind of nationalist dynamism that will make it more of a challenge to the United States. My point is only that an age of democracy will give free rein to an array of vibrant new forces that make it unlikely America’s global role will be as dominant as it is now.

That could turn out to be a good thing, not just for the outer world but for individual Americans, too. For example, Great Britain is no longer the world power it was, but the average Briton certainly lives better than his forebears of an imperial age. It is not a question of whether we will fade away as a great power over the decades and centuries, but how, at what pace, and at what price we will do so.

Our current imperial-like situation is quite real, in terms of a military presence around the globe that bears similarities to the frustrations and challenges of other empires, during other times in history, when empires took a much different form. With the possible exception of Iraq, these deployments have been something in which Americans can take genuine pride. Yet, there is no contradiction in acknowledging this pride, and also acknowledging that an American empire of sorts is not the natural order of things to come. There is no contradiction in being frankly impressed with the troops and their accomplishments in places as diverse as Colombia, Mali, and the Strait of Malacca, and accepting the fact that such tasks have an end point. There may be nothing healthier for running an empire-of-sorts than to look forward to its own obsolescence. That way there is a goal, rather than an enjoyment of power for its own sake.

The goal to which I refer is not world government, or anything of the sort—a tyranny of the worst kind because there will always be arguments about how to organize society and improve it. Still, the overarching objective of the American military’s imperial-like deployments should be, as I wrote near the beginning of this odyssey, to provide a security armature for an emerging global civilization, which, in turn, nurtures a loose set of international arrangements that have arisen organically among responsible and like-minded states. Winston Churchill saw in the United States a worthy successor to the British Empire, one that would carry on Britain’s liberalizing mission. We cannot rest until something emerges that is just as estimable and concrete as what Churchill saw.¹¹

But that something remains elusive, especially at a time when globalization is having the ironic effect of encouraging both nationalism and the acquisition of nuclear arsenals from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Our tensions with a responsible regime like China’s, and even with irresponsible ones like Iran’s and North Korea’s, will hopefully be solved at the negotiating table. But the power that American diplomats will wield in these cases is the result not just of our economic weight, but also of the American military being deployed where it is, and the armaments and manpower it brings to bear.

Let me end with an observation by Air Force Col. Robert Wheeler, a combat pilot I met with the B-2 squadron on Guam whose résumé I will reprise because it is the kind that solid, middle-of-the-road citizens trust. He is a midwesterner with an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin, whose post-graduate degrees include a master of arts in strategic studies from the Naval War College. He participated in several wars over the course of three administrations, Democratic and Republican, and was the senior advisor to the U.S. Mission for the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a job less military than diplomatic.

Wheeler told me that “decadence” is the essential condition of “a society which believes it has evolved to the point where it will never have to go to war” since, by eliminating war as a possibility, “it has nothing left to fight and sacrifice for, and thus no longer wants to make a difference.” In such a situation, historical memory becomes lost, while pleasure and convenience take over as values in and of themselves. While a society should certainly never want to go to war, it should nevertheless feel the need to always be prepared for it; for to believe is to be willing—when necessary—to fight.

The United States is far from being a decadent country. We have enormous reserves of good character, in and out of the military. Americans are still willing to fight the necessary fight, so long as their leaders can speak plainly about situations that almost invariably pair limited goals with uncertain costs. Certainly, no one can blame the American public for becoming disenchanted with a war that has gone on for so long and that has been so badly handled. The question is, in what direction is our morale headed, as well as the morale of our current and future adversaries? Argue the question as we may, one thing is clear: we’re fated to find out.