introduzione
David M. Kennedy
Parvi enim sunt foris arma, nisi est consilium domi.
–Cicero, De Of½ciis1
This volume surveys the evolution, character, mis-
sions, and possible futures of the modern U.S. armed
forces. It proceeds from the conviction that today’s
American military is at once increasingly prominent
as an instrument of national policy and increasing-
ly detached from and poorly understood by the ci-
vilian society in whose name it is asked to ½ght.
Since the creation of the all-volunteer force (avf)
In 1973, the United States has relied on an ever-small-
er proportion of its citizens to shoulder its military
burdens, con½guring service members into a stand-
ing professional force with formidable capacities
to prevail in virtually any conceivable battle space.
Whether those developments should be celebrated
or lamented is a question that animates many of
the essays to follow, but all contributors agree that
this is a situation with slender precedent in the his-
tory of the American republic. “A standing army,
however necessary it may be at some times, is al-
ways dangerous to the liberties of the people,"
warned Samuel Adams, a leader in the American
Revolution. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves
as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens. . . .
Such a power should be watched with a jealous
eye.” For nearly two centuries thereafter, the Unit-
ed States accordingly embraced the principle of the
citizen-soldier. Deeply rooted in antiquity, that prin-
ciple was axiomatic in the organization of the Amer-
© 2011 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti & Scienze
DAVID M. KENNEDY, a Fellow of
the American Academy since 1996,
is the Donald J. McLachlan Profes-
sor of History, Emeritus, at Stan-
ford University, where he is also
Codirector of the Bill Lane Center
for the American West and a Se-
nior Fellow in the Woods Institute
for the Environment. His publica-
tions include Over Here: The First
World War and American Society
(1980) and Freedom From Fear: IL
American People in Depression and
War, 1929–1945 (1999), for which
he received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize
in History.
10
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ican military well into the twentieth cen-
tury. It held that all who were able and
deemed ½t for service were liable to serve.
As George Washington put it in 1783: “It
may be laid down as a primary position,
and the basis of our system, that every cit-
izen who enjoys the protection of a free
government, owes not only a proportion
of his property, but even of his personal
services, to the defense of it.”
To be sure, the citizen-soldier principle
was more an ideal than a reality for much
of the nineteenth century, when the mili-
tary usually consisted of a modestly scaled
professional force largely con½ned to fron-
tier Indian-½ghting and occasional con-
stabulary duties. But the ideal remained
robust and had a powerful effect in shap-
ing the great conscript armies that the
United States ½elded in World Wars I and
II, Korea, and Vietnam.
But since the close of the Vietnam era,
the United States has sought to wage ma-
jor expeditionary wars with a relatively
small professional force. That kind of force
used in that way is something new in the
American experience; small wonder that
soldiers and civilians alike remain am-
biguous or just plain uninformed about
the structure of today’s armed forces and
the purposes for which they are used.
The advent of the avf also severed the
link between citizenship and service. No
American today is obligated to serve in the
military. Infatti, the ranks of the armed
forces now include tens of thousands of
non-citizens, who receive accelerated ac-
cess to citizenship on the basis of their
service. So service can earn citizenship,
but citizenship does not require service.
The implications of that curious asym-
metry inform the analysis in several of
the essays in this volume.
In December 2004, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld said: “As you know, you
go to war with the Army you have. They’re
not the Army you might want or wish to
have at a later time.” His now-notorious
comment underscored the truth that the
Army (and Navy, and Marine Corps, E
Air Force) that this or any country has at
any given time is the product of both his-
tory and prophecy. The size of the force,
the con½guration of its combat and sup-
port arms, the missions for which it is
trained and equipped: all are guided by
lessons distilled from the experience of
the past and by guesses about what the
future might hold. And because modern
weapons systems and training regimes
take years, even decades, to develop, IL
inexorable logic of inertia shapes the mil-
itary’s state of readiness at any given mo-
ment, even while the nature of the even-
tual mission might be largely unantici-
pated. A timeless issue, this phenomenon
has become decidedly more pronounced
in an age of exponentially accelerating so-
cial and technological change.
Recent years have seen striking dis-
junctions between the nature of the force
and the tasks it has been assigned. The au-
thors in this volume seek to explain just
how history has deposited the U.S. armed
forces where they are today, to clarify what
is new and what is not about the twenty-
½rst-century military and its missions, A
understand the demography and the psy-
chology of those who serve, and to judge
the appropriateness of the force to the
missions at hand. They also do their best
to foresee the kinds of adaptations that
are likely to be necessary going forward.
This volume thus aims to shed light both
on what today’s military does and what it
È, as well as on what it might become.
Beginning with the foreword by former
Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, Tutto
the essays that follow take a historical ap-
proach to their various parts of the sub-
ject. They share the premise that Amer-
ican forces today are by no means your
grandfather’s or even your father’s mil-
David M.
Kennedy
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140 (3) Estate 2011
11
introduzione
itary. They explore the strategic, techno-
logical, and cultural factors that have
made the modern American armed forces
distinctive, with respect to both their own
national antecedents and other nations’
contemporary military establishments.
They emphasize the ever-changing politi-
cal and ½scal contexts in which the armed
forces are recruited, trained, and de-
ployed, and the constantly shifting objec-
tives that they are tasked to achieve, espe-
cially in the post–Cold War and post-9/11
ambiente. Authors examine threat as-
sessments, strategic doctrine, force con½g-
uration, composition, and training, anche
as questions about who serves and why;
the nature of modern warfare; the tacti-
cal challenges and ethical dilemmas it can
creare; genere, legal, and medical is-
sues in the battle space and beyond; IL
relation of the military to civil society, In-
cluding the ways it is depicted in popular
culture and the health of command-and-
control systems; and its role in the institu-
tional structure that constitutes the na-
tional security apparatus.
All consideration of these topics, Di
course, begins with an understanding of
the threats for which the military thinks
it must prepare and the means it deems
appropriate for coping with them. Legge-
rence Freedman documents the advent
of the high-tech Revolution in Military
Affairs, or rma, that drove doctrinal and
weapon-system changes in the closing
years of the twentieth century. He takes
both the military and civilian leadership
to task for embracing the rma too un-
critically, especially in the post–Cold War
era when protracted, large-scale conven-
tional warfare among advanced industri-
al nation-states seemed decreasingly like-
ly. He dwells on the inappropriateness of
rma-driven weapons and tactics in coun-
terinsurgency warfare and the effort, led
by General David Petraeus among others,
to devise an effective way to wage “fourth-
generation warfare,” or “war among the
people.” He predicts a considerably di-
minished role for conventional military
forces in the coming years. Brian McAllis-
ter Linn expands on Freedman’s contri-
bution by focusing on the uniformed “mil-
itary intellectuals” who write about stra-
tegic doctrine. He tracks the debate with-
in military circles about fourth-generation
warfare and ends with a discussion of how
the Petraeus counterinsurgency doctrine
has been promulgated and implemented.
Thomas G. Mahnken also puts the accu-
racy-and-technology-driven rma at the
center of his analysis. He describes the
adaptive responses to it as either “emula-
tive” or “countervailing,” with special em-
phasis on the latter. He shares Freedman’s
view that the architects of the rma did not
adequately anticipate what the counter-
responses would be, especially the emer-
gence of asymmetrical warfare. He pro-
vocatively speculates that the evolution-
ary pathway of these weapons and the
tactical innovations they have spurred on
the part of adversaries may drive Ameri-
can war-½ghting doctrine back to a greater
or renewed reliance on nuclear weapons.
Turning from what the military is asked
to do to who actually does it–to the hu-
man face of the force–Robert L. Goldich
examines the widely held notion that to-
day’s recruits come from the least ad-
vantaged corners of American society, E
he comes up with some surprising an-
swers. But he also invokes the example of
the Roman Legionaries to argue that a
potentially dangerous gap has opened be-
tween military and civilian cultures. Lui
focuses not only on the socioeconomic
differences between the civil and military
sectors but also on the possible divergence
in values between those serving in the
military and civilians, particularly with
respect to the legitimacy of violence and
force. It should be noted that some of his
empirical data about who serves is dis-
12
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puted by Lawrence J. Korb and David R.
Segal in the immediately succeeding con-
tribution–especially with respect to Gold-
ich’s argument that the educational pro-
½le of avf recruits is superior to that in
the comparable civilian cohort. Segal and
Korb examine the demographic and ½s-
cal characteristics of the avf, with spe-
cial attention to the ½nancial implica-
tions of measures taken to meet recruit-
ment and retention goals. They are par-
ticularly critical of the fact that military
health and pension bene½ts have not
been budgeted on an accrual basis. They
raise the vexed question of whether it
might be desirable to restore conscription,
or at least Selective Service registration.
They also advocate reforms in veterans’
medical bene½ts, along the lines that Sec-
retary of Defense Robert Gates suggested
in January 2011. Deborah D. Avant and
Renée de Nevers examine that part of the
overall force that is not in uniform: IL
surprisingly large numbers of civilian
“contractors” who have taken over a
range of traditional military duties,
including construction and supply, Ma
armed combat roles as well. In Iraq and
Afghanistan the number of contractors
has apparently equaled or exceeded the
number of uniformed troops. Avant and
de Nevers probe the implications of those
numbers for civilian perceptions of the
size of the force commitment and the
political ease of defending that commit-
ment (since its true scale is not altogeth-
er apparent). They also analyze issues of
command, controllo, and accountability
that arise from such heavy reliance on an
“irregular” force component, while not-
ing that the Defense Contract Manage-
ment Agency, in charge of overseeing
those contractors, has actually down-
sized rather remarkably since 2002.
Jay M. Winter and James J. Sheehan
open the supremely important subject of
the military’s relation to civil society.
Winter asks how the public on the home
front forms its image of warfare on the
distant ½ghting front. He discusses some
widely read war novels but focuses on
that most accessible and influential of all
popular media, ½lm, from the era of the
silents to the present. He ½nds a persis-
tent tension between the rendition of war
as spectacle and war as the setting for
psychological and moral drama, with an
increasing tendency in our time to focus
on stories that are less about war per se
than about individual warriors and their
interior lives. Sheehan rehearses the role
of the military in state formation in
Europe over the last two centuries, show-
ing how most Western European nations
have become “civilian societies,” with a
much diminished role for the military.
Nel frattempo, across an ill-de½ned but dis-
cernible boundary, on the eastern side of
which lie many of the successor Soviet
stati, as well as Turkey, the military re-
mains a powerful institution, largely rely-
ing on conscription. Sheehan’s compara-
tive analysis casts the United States into
clearer perspective as an anomalous hy-
brid of the Eastern and Western European
models: it has a small and relatively inex-
pensive military that commands unprec-
edented destructive power, and it is a civil-
ian state with signi½cant military obliga-
tions–indeed, a greater weight and range
of such obligations than any other nation.
Andrew J. Bacevich takes Sheehan’s
argument about the relation of the Amer-
ican military to the civilian state still fur-
ther. He decries what he sees as the ascen-
dant power of the military in national se-
curity decision-making, what he calls “in-
side the Beltway” civil-military relations.
Turning to the “beyond the Beltway” di-
mensions of the subject, he revisits the
long-running debate about the political
implications of force con½guration among
military intellectuals and policy-makers
from Emery Upton and Elihu Root in the
David M.
Kennedy
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140 (3) Estate 2011
13
introduzione
early twentieth century to John McCau-
ley Palmer and George C. Marshall in the
World War II and Cold War eras. He asks
how the tradition of the citizen-soldier or
its functional equivalent might somehow
be restored, as a way of buttressing civil-
ian engagement with the military and un-
derwriting political accountability for de-
cisions to resort to force. Charles J. Dun-
lap, Jr., looks at a special and crucial fac-
et of the civil-military interface by recol-
lecting President Dwight Eisenhower’s
famous warning that “we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted in-
fluence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military industrial complex.” He ar-
gues that Eisenhower’s warning was heard
and largely heeded, and that the real dan-
ger today is that we may dismantle the re-
maining industrial infrastructure on which
military ef½cacy ultimately depends.
Martha E. McSally, a former ½ghter pi-
lot, examines another of the myriad ways
that the armed forces are challenged to
reflect the norms that are honored in civil
society: in this case, gender equality. Re-
viewing women’s role in the military from
the Revolutionary era to the present, she
concludes that the time has come for giv-
ing women unquali½ed access to all com-
bat arms and assignments. Eugene R. Fi-
dell examines yet another aspect of civil-
military relations, the relation of the Uni-
versal Code of Military Justice (ucmj) A
civilian law. He argues that although there
are problems inherent in the differences
between the two, and in their sometimes
uneasy relation to each other (as in the
controversy about whether to try suspect-
ed terrorists in civil or military courts),
the ucmj is a healthy, defensible corpus
of jurisprudence, whose practitioners de-
serve to be better understood and respect-
ed in the larger society.
Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist
who has written extensively about Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd), con-
cludes this volume with reflections on
war’s aftermath for the men and women
who wage it, and the wounds, physical and
psychological, it has inflicted on them.
He distinguishes between “primary” and
“secondary” physical wounds and points
out that most battle deaths have histori-
cally resulted from the latter–from in-
fection and exsanguination, Per esempio
–and that modern battle½eld medicine
has sharply reduced the incidence of sec-
ondary effects. He explores the implica-
tions of those improved battle½eld med-
icine techniques that have, in effect, sub-
stituted long-term disability for mortal-
ity for tens of thousands of service peo-
ple. (By some estimates, if the armed
forces had practiced Vietnam-era battle
medicine procedures in Iraq, the U.S.
military death toll would have been well
Sopra 20,000, rather than the approxi-
mately 4,500 dead counted by mid-2011.)
He then draws a parallel with psycholog-
ical trauma, arguing that the secondary,
or post-battle, effects of what he terms
“moral wounds” are less well understood
and currently receive inadequate atten-
tion from the military and the medical
profession.
Taken together, the essays in this vol-
ume paint a comprehensive portrait of the
American armed forces today, and they
raise several urgent questions, which may
be summarized as matters of military
ef½ciency, political accountability, E
social equity. Does the United States have
a well-articulated national security doc-
trine that is relevant to the challenges
ahead, and are the armed forces properly
con½gured for those challenges? Are the
mechanisms that throughout American
history have ensured civilian control of
the military, and held civilian leaders
properly accountable for the decision to
shoulder arms, still operating properly?
Does the recruitment of today’s force
14
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honor American notions of fairness and
shared obligations? Perhaps most impor-
tant, how faithful are we to Cicero’s an-
cient dictum that arms are of little value
in the ½eld unless there is wise counsel at
casa? On the answers to those questions
hangs not only the security of the repub-
lic, but its political and moral health as
BENE.
David M.
Kennedy
endnote
1 “Arms are of little value in the ½eld unless there is wise counsel at home”; Cicero, De Of½ciis,
Book I, XXII, par. 76.
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