Why America's All-Volunteer Force Fails to Win Wars by Andrew Bacevich, Dallas Morning News
A conundrum: Today’s American soldier is by common consent the world’s finest, even history’s finest, but the United States doesn’t win its wars. Time and again, the mission – the overall aim of the exercise – goes unaccomplished, while the war itself continues as if on autopilot. Why?
Instinctively, and not entirely without reason, Americans hold politicians responsible for failing to deliver victories promised and expected. For many, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault. For others, it’s Barack Obama’s. Dig a bit deeper, however, and the American people themselves share in the culpability.
Put simply, the nation’s military system is out of sync with its military ambitions. That system, euphemistically known as the All-Volunteer Force or AVF, employs a mix of patriotic appeals and material blandishments to induce young Americans to go fight in distant lands. Yet those responding to these inducements are too few in number to get the job done…
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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were undertaken by the Bush Administration and Congress with the understanding that these wars would -- due to such things as "universal (Western) values," "the overwhelming appeal of our way of life," etc. -- be cheap, quick and easy to win/accomplish.
These wars -- undertaken as per the above premise ("universal values" = cheap, quick and easy wars) -- suggesting that all we needed to do was to liberate these foreign populations (all chomping at the bit for democracy, freedom and free enterprise; i.e., "universal values," etc.) from their oppressive regimes (think those foreign leaders denying their populations same) and the military's job would essentially be done.
In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, however, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff GEN Eric Shinseki would publicly disagree and suggest, instead, that we would need "several hundred thousand" troops, employed indefinitely, to secure post-war Iraq. Herein, Shinseki essentially saying that the premise upon which the Bush Administration and Congress were contemplating the war -- to wit: that "universal values," etc. had, in fact, obtained in Iraq and elsewhere -- this was an invalid premise. (For his such knowledge, honestly and insight, Shinseki would, in effect, be publicly castigated and cashiered.)
So, when we go to war anyway, and when Shinseki (re: "universal values, etc.") is quickly proven to be right, and the Bush Administration and Congress (re: "universal values," etc.) are quickly proven to be wrong; then, in such adverse circumstances as these, then why would the American people generally wish to sign up to go to and fight wars which, they now understood, had (a) been undertaken as per an invalid premise and which, thus, had (b) essentially been lost before they were ever even begun?
(Note: With the understanding that the premise upon which these wars had been based was invalid [see "universal values, etc., above], the "war job" soon becomes -- not to "win" these wars -- but to simply get out of them. Accordingly, and given such circumstances, how should we expect that the American population, as a whole, would feel interested in, and/or feel compelled to, sign up to go and fight such wars?)
Shouldn't have bothered reading this...it's three minutes of my life I'll never get back. Bacevich is unhappy that American civic virtue isn't the Norman Rockwell, post-Pearl Harbor ideal he thinks it should be, and wants to hang that on the military to fix. Ultimately, though, the problem is a Congress more focused on job security than doing the job, which meant we only partially mobilized (and didn't ask much of that), and we didn't make efforts to raise additional revenue to pay the bills.
Perhaps the U.S. population would have rebelled at a war tax. Perhaps not. We'll never know, because no one in Congress were willing to ask.