The relation of the civilian citizen to the military is a subject usually productive of instant emotion and very little rational thinking. Peace-minded people seem to disapprove study of the soldier, on the theory that if starved of attention he will eventually vanish. That is unlikely. Militarism is simply the organized form of natural aggression. The same people who march to protest in the afternoon will stand in line that evening to see the latest in sadistic movies and thoroughly enjoy themselves watching blood and pain, murder, torture, and rape.
To register one’s dissent from the war in Vietnam by expressing disgust for the military and turning one’s back on whatever shape the military wears is a natural impulse. But the error of that war, together with two other developments—the newly acquired permanence of the military role in our society and the shift to an all-volunteer force—are powerful, urgent reasons why more enlightened and better-educated citizens should not turn their backs and not abdicate their responsibility for controlling military policies.
Earlier in this century the French writer Julien Benda elaborated his thesis of “the treason of the intellectuals.” He accused them of betraying the life of the mind and the realm of reason by descending into the arena of political, social, and national passions. Now we have a treason of the intellectuals in reverse. While military-industrial and military-political interests penetrate all policy-making and add their weight to every political decision, the enlightened citizen refuses his participation, climbs out of the arena, and leaves control to the professionals of war.
Let us look at the facts of the case.
Contrary to the general impression, nuclear firepower, because it is too lethal to use, has reduced, not enlarged, the scope of war, with the secondary and rather sinister result that while unlimited war is out, limited war is in, not as a last resort in the old-fashioned way, but as the regular, on-going support of policy.
This development means that the military arm will be used more for political and ideological ends than in the past, and that because of chronic commitment and the self-multiplying business of deterrence and a global strategy of preparedness for two and a half wars—or whatever is this week’s figure—the technological, industrial, and governmental foundations for this enterprise have become so gigantic, extended, and pervasive that they affect every act of government and consequently all our lives.
We now maintain two thousand military bases in thirty-three countries and have Military Assistance Advisory groups functioning in fifty countries and disbursing arms and aid amounting to nearly $4 billion a year. To furnish these programs in addition to the war in Vietnam and the regular armed forces of the United States, there are defense plants or installations in 363 out of the 435 congressional districts in this country—in five-sixths of the total.
Who benefits? Who profits? Who lobbies in Congress to keep them in operation or to attract new plants where there are none? If you say it is the Pentagon, do not forget the local merchants and manufacturers, the local labor unions and employers, and the localCongressman whom we put there and whom we can recall. Who pays for our present military budget of $84 billion? The taxpayers—who also have the vote.
Traditionally, the American Army has considered itself the neutral instrument of state policy. It exists to carry out the government’s orders and when ordered into action does not ask “Why?” or “What for?” But the more it is used for political ends and the more deeply its influence pervades government, the less it can retain the stance of innocent instrument. The same holds true of the citizen. Our innocence too is flawed.
The fundamental American premise has always been civilian control of the military. The Vietnam war is a product of civilian policy shaped by three successive civilian Presidents and their academic and other civilian advisers. The failure to end the war is also, in the last resort, civilian, since it is a failure by Congress to cut off appropriations.
And where does that failure trace back to? To where the vote is. I feel bewildered when I hear that easy, empty slogan “Power to the People!” Is there any country in the world whose people have more than ours?
To blame the military for this shameful war and renounce with disgust any share in their profession is a form of escapism. It allows the anti-war civilian to feel virtuous and uninvolved in the shame. It allows someone else to do the soldier’s job, which is essential to an organized state and which in the long run protects the security of the high-minded civilian while he claims it is a job too dirty for him.
Certainly the conduct of this war, perhaps because it is purposeless and inane, has led to abominations and inhumanities by the military which cannot be forgiven and for which the West Pointer with his motto of “Duty, Honor, Country” is as much responsible as the semi-educated Lieutenant Calleys commissioned through OCS. But as one officer said, “We have the Calleys because those Harvard bastards won’t fight”—“Harvard” being shorthand for all deferred college students.
Perhaps if there had been more college bastards instead of Calleys, there might have been mutinies or sitdowns instead of My Lais—certainly a preferable alternative. As for the Regular Army, it is likely that with morale so near ruin, there is nothing the professional officers want more than to get the ground forces out of Vietnam as quickly as possible, which is perhaps one reason why President Nixon is doing it.
The liberal’s sneer at the military man does himself no honor, nor does it mark him as the better man. Military men are people. There are good ones and bad ones, some thoughtful and intelligent, some dimwits and dodos, some men of courage and integrity, some slick operators and sharp practicers, some scholars and fighters, some braggarts and synthetic heroes. The profession contains perhaps an over-supply of routinized thinking, servility to rank, and right-wing super-patriots, but every group has undesirable qualities that are occupationally induced.
It is not the nature of the military man that accounts for war, but the nature of man. The soldier is merely one shape that nature takes. Aggression is part of us, as innate as eating or copulating. As a student of the human record, I can say with confidence that peace is not the norm. Historians have calculated that up until the Industrial Revolution belligerent action occupied more man hours than any other activity except agriculture.
Human society started with the tribe—with a sense of “We” as opposed to “They.” Tribe A can have no sense of identity unless it is conscious of the otherness of Tribe B. All life and thought and action, according to the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, is based on this state of binary opposites: heaven and earth, earth and water, dark and light, right and left, north and south, male and female. These poles are not necessarily hostile, but hostility is inherent between the poles of We and They. When the tribes become conscious of otherness, they fight—for food or territory or dominance. This is inescapable and probably eternal. Students around the country and sympathetic faculty will not make it go away by chasing ROTC off campus, no matter how understandable the motive.
Freud called it the death wish, meaning self-destruction. It could just as well be called the life wish because it is an active instinct, a desire to fight, to conquer, and if also to kill, then to kill not self but others. The instinct says, “I shall conquer, I shall live.” It is also a male instinct. Women, being child-bearers, have a primary instinct to preserve life. Probably if we had a woman in the White House and a majority of females in Congress, we could be out of Vietnam yesterday.
“Our permanent enemy,” said William James in 1904, “is the rooted bellicosity of human nature. A millennium of peace would not breed the fighting instinct out of our bone and marrow.” Has anything occurred in our century to suggest that James was wrong?
What this suggests is that we should face the military element rather than turn our backs on it, learn about it, even participate in it through ROTC. If the college-educated youths become the reserve officers upon whom the Army depends, then they are in a position to exert influence. That is the place to pull a strike. If all reserve officers walked out, the Army could not move.
Recently a retired Army colonel suggested that all Army career officers, not only reserve officers, “should be obtained through civilian college scholarship programs and direct entry from college ROTC.” Now if that could be arranged, the educated civilian would really be at the controls. If the young want to make a revolution, that is the way to do it. Oliver Cromwell did not spend his time trying to close down Oxford. He built the New Model Army.
Our form of democracy—the political system which is the matrix of our liberties—rests upon the citizen’s participation, not excluding —indeed, especially including—participation in the armed forces. That was the great principle of the French Revolution: the nation in arms, meaning the people in arms as distinct from a professional standing army. The nation in arms was considered the safeguard of the Republic, the guarantor against tyranny and military coups d’état.
The same idea underlies the fundamental American principle of the right to bear arms as guaranteed by our Bill of Rights for the specific purpose of maintaining “a well-regulated Militia” to protect “the security of a free state.” To serve the state is what the Constitution meant, not, as the Gun Lobby pretends, the right to keep a pistol under your pillow and shoot at whomever you want to. To serve under arms in this sense is not only a right but a criterion of citizenship.
To abdicate the right because our armed forces are being used in a wrong war is natural. Nobody wants to share in or get killed in an operation that is both wicked and stupid. But we must realize that this rejection abdicates a responsibility of citizenship and contributes to an already dangerous development—the reappearance of the standing army. That is what is happening as a consequence of the changeover to an all-volunteer force. We will have an army even more separate, more isolated and possibly alienated from civilian society than ever. Military men have always cherished a sense of separateness from the civilian sector, a sense of special calling deriving from their choice of a profession involving the risk of life. They feel this separateness confers a distinction that compensates them to some extent for the risk of the profession, just as the glitter and pomp and brilliant uniforms and social prestige for the officers used to compensate the armies of Europe.
For the United States the draft was the great corrective—or would have been if it had worked properly. The draft has an evil name because it would have dragged young people into an evil war. Yet it remains the only way, if administered justly, to preserve the principle of the nation in arms. The college deferrals made it a mockery. The deferral system was as anti-democratic and elitist (to use the favorite word of those who consider themselves equalizers) as anything that has ever happened in the United States. I may be happy that it kept my kin and the sons of some of my friends out of Vietnam, but I am nonetheless ashamed of it.
We need to re-admit some common sense into conventional liberal thinking—or feeling—about the military. It seems to me urgent that we understand our relationship to the soldier’s task free of emotion.
I know of no problem so subject as this one to what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called “the imbecile catchwords of our era like ‘repression’ and ‘imperialism’ which have had all the meaning washed out of them.” Those who yell these words, he wrote, “simply have no idea what they are talking about.”
The role of the military in our lives has become too serious a matter to be treated to this kind of slogan thinking, or non-thinking.
Newsday, March 8, 1968.
New York Times, May 26, 1972.
Commencement Address, Williams College, June 1972.