What’s
Wrong Today:
A smaller percentage
of Americans currently serve in the U.S. Armed Forces than at any time since the
era between World Wars I and II. Yet, during the past decade, our military has
been engaged in the longest period of sustained conflict in the nation’s
history, but just one-half of one
percent of American adults has served on active duty at any given time.
So,
What’s Wrong?
We are now
seeing the convergence of three bad trends
that are driven by multiple deployments to an Afghan war that seems unwinnable
in historical contexts:
1. As the
Wrongologist has reported, after
two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops
last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives,
antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently
disclosed by the U.S. Army Surgeon General. Nearly 8 percent of the active-duty
Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants – an
eightfold increase since 2005. See also, this.
2. The
drip, drip, drip of gross-out acts and indiscipline by our troops in Afghanistan have
us waiting for the next ugly shoe to drop. The tragedy of Army
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, on his fourth combat tour, allegedly slaughtering
17 civilians underscores this bad trend. Also, we have seen other bad behavior,
including this,
this,
this,
this,
this,
all wrapped up in a surprising lack
of accountability by leadership for these acts, which are called “isolated
events”, and counter to “who we are as a people”. If fault is found, leadership
invariably fixes responsibility and imposes penalties at echelons well below
the people in charge. The fall guy
ends up being the little guy.
Anyone
who understands the military’s professional ethic will see these explanations, whatever
their value in providing context, for what they are: excuses for a repeated failure
to enforce standards. This kind of failure undermines mission success and,
regardless of how loosely defined, is a failure of leadership. However, we
shouldn’t overstate the reach
of command authority. Only someone lacking in military experience would believe
that a directive from an American four-star general elicits enthusiastic and
universal agreement. Orders are misconstrued, reinterpreted, overlooked or
selectively disobeyed, hence, the need to restate them continually while demanding full compliance.
We
know that protracted armed conflicts undermine discipline, and this conflict has been the longest in U.S. history. Soldiers are sent to wage frustrating
and possibly unwinnable wars to which the public has become indifferent. Under these circumstances our troops deserve
considerable sympathy. In the Vietnam era, when the war went desperately wrong
for desperately long, a U.S. draft army began to disintegrate
into rebellion and chaos.
In
Afghanistan, an all-volunteer professional army may be cracking under stress-related trauma, drug use, and freak out. The simple fact is that,
however spun, repeated combat stress affects everything in countless, often
hard to quantify ways.
3. Finally, the Afghanistan war has become this generation’s Vietnam,
despite our desire to make sure it wouldn’t happen, and our inability to see
the parallels. As
Nick Turse reports at TomDispatch:
“The conflict in
Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, “We don’t do body counts,” but a quick glance at
recent U.S. military press releases touting supposed “high-value kills” or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates otherwise. As in Vietnam, the
U.S. is once again waging a war of attrition, even as America’s Afghan enemies
employ their own very different attrition strategy. Instead of slugging
it out toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they’ve planned a savvy,
conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an
unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and simultaneously exposing the
futility of the conflict to the American public…”
Like
in Vietnam, the precipitous attrition of U.S. support for the Afghan war is
unmistakable. As
Pew Research is reporting,
As
late as 2008, 61% of Americans believed the Afghan War was worth
fighting. Today, the numbers are reversed: 60% of Americans say we should
remove the troops as soon as possible. Whatever the Pentagon’s spin about enemy
dead, they seem to be powerless to reverse this trend.
In this era of an all-voluntary military, American
public opinion probably matters less than in the Vietnam era, but it still makes
a political difference. The Taliban and its allies may or may not be taking territory, but in this guerrilla
war, it turns out that the territory
that really matters is the territory inside people’s heads and it is there the
Pentagon is losing. More than a decade
after our forces swept into Kabul, what began as a rag-tag, remnant Taliban insurgency
has grown stronger and continues to
play to a draw the most skilled, heavily armed, technologically
advanced, and best-funded military on the planet.
All of America’s tactical gains and
captured territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of Helmand Province,
however, haven’t led to anything close to victory.
One after another of our highly publicized light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel offensives, like the
much-hyped 2010 Marjah campaign, have faded away.
Leaders shape institutions. Sometimes
nothing beats replacing a few near the top to focus the attention of the rest.
For an American military well into a second exhausting decade of continuous
war, this may one of those times.
Otherwise,
we should expect these Three Bad Trends to continue.
