The Comment Factory

“Remember why we have a military. The reason is to be prepared to fight and win wars. That is our basic, fundamental mission. The military is not a social welfare agency, it is not a jobs program. We aren’t there to run social experiments. We are there to fight and win wars.”

Then-Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, 1992

“Building tomorrow’s force is not going to be easy. Changing the direction of our military is like changing the course of a mighty ship.”

President George W. Bush, May 2001

“He served up our great military a huge bowl of chicken feces, and ever since then, our military and our country have been trying to turn this bowl into chicken salad.”

General John Batiste, commander in Iraq, on Donald Rumsfeld, 2006

As of September 2008, 1.6 million Americans had served their country in the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s one in every 200 Americans, or a military bigger than the population of a country like Estonia or a city like Philadelphia. But in spite of this astronomical number of serving Americans, the Bush administration never dared institute a policy of mass conscription, a deeply unpopular political move for an already unpopular government.

The void has been partly filled by subcontracting operations out to private military institutions, like Blackwater and DynCorp, who have received billions of dollars in government largesse to populate the frontlines in the War on Terror. The thin coalition of countries, now incorporating NATO in Afghanistan and the U.N. in Iraq, have also helped ameliorate the chronic troop needs.

But this patchwork hasn’t been anywhere near enough. Maintaining an all-volunteer force while overseeing an occupation force of 140,000 in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan, has meant that the U.S. military has had to change irrevocably over the past seven years and the men and women pulling on the fatigues have got an unprecedented facelift.

In the halcyon days of the First Gulf War in 1990, the U.S. military blocked the enlistment of felons, they spurned men and women with low IQ’s, and would kick out neo-Nazis, gang-members, the obese, alcoholics, drug abusers, and the mentally ill. No more.

Conservative on pretty much every issue of state, the Bush administration has saved its liberalism for the U.S. military, where it has scrapped all the most sacred regulations governing the most powerful fighting force in the world, from weight restrictions to addiction to insanity. Under the aegis of the War on Terror, the U.S. armed forces have become a Mecca for the ‘different’, the weird and wonderful (and dangerous) of Americana.

In the cascade of books about private military contractors and the effects of Afghanistan and Iraq on the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century, there has been nothing which has catalogued the most obvious: the new texture of the U.S. military, which has become inexorably divorced from the pervasive mythology of young idealistic warriors spreading enlightenment values to the dark corners of the world. Instead, neo-Nazis break bread with gangbangers in Baghdad and alcoholics sup ‘Haji juice’ with the mentally ill in Falluja.

Only one in three men in the general population met the pre-9/11 physical, mental, educational, and other eligibility requirements in the armed forces. To re-enfranchize the other two-thirds, the U.S. military had to change in profound ways not seen the Vietnam War. The results have been astounding, not only for the young Americans in the desert, but also the inhabitants of the countries that have been occupied by the U.S. armed forces over the past five years.

The first essay next week will look into the changing treatment of homosexual soldiers during the War on Terror.