Citizens and Soldiers
Cohen, Eliot A.
CITIZENS AND SOLDIERS: THE DILEMMAS OF MILITARY SERVICE Eliot A. Cohen/Cornell University Press/$22.50 Harry G. Summers, Jr. Re Reviewing my military records prior to retirement, I came...
...to the security of a free state...
...All I want to know from you is, which one of you is right...
...Re Reviewing my military records prior to retirement, I came across a curious entry long forgotten...
...Their sons and daughters fill the Army's ranks...
...It was from a young female soldier who posed a disturbing question: '"When I enlisted in the Army," she wrote, "you said it was okay if I brought my baby with me...
...Dated in November 1951, it read: "Permission to marry granted...
...The army is the instrument for carrying them out, but it is the people who provide the nation's ultimate strength...
...Indeed since the end of the Vietnam war Secretaries of the Army have tended to see the Army as an instrument not of the battlefield but of social change...
...Beginning with a historical examination of the relationship between the army and the state, Cohen presents a masterful analysis of the connection between the people and their military...
...As if that were not bad enough, an active duty Army lieutenant colonel, a West Point graduate, has been accused of abandoning the ideals of duty, honor, and country in pursuit of a fortune from selling arms to America's enemies...
...Cohen reports, "The Commissioner started from the premises that 'conscription is a form of taxation, the power to conscript is the power to tax' . . . [and] the Gates Commission staff even devised mathematical formulae to calculate the precise dollar costs of the 'conscription tax.' "In this view," notes Cohen (himself a Reserve Army officer, now a visiting professor at the Naval War College), "there was nothing elevated above military service, or indeed any kind of national service...
...The First Sergeant was concerned with his unit's readiness...
...their monies equip them for war...
...As he concludes, most of the debate on military manpower "has been characterized by the development of arcane and improbable models, unthinking reliance on the ethics and efficiency of the marketplace, resort to simplistic assertions about American political traditions, manipulation of statistical information, and, above all, a myopic preoccupation with short-term problems and trends...
...News & World Report...
...As Harvard's Eliot A. Cohen points out in his important new book, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service, the thinking of the Gates Commission∔like the strategies and policies for the Vietnam war∔was dominated by systems analysis derived from economics...
...Now my First Sergeant tells me that it's not okay and there is neither time nor facilities available to care for my baby...
...Cohen's remarks take on a new meaning and a new urgency in the wake of recent events...
...In fact, at the time this letter was writHarry G. Summers, Jr., author of On Strategy and the forthcoming Vietnam War Almanac (Facts on File), is the senior military correspondent for U.S...
...Ironically, at about the same time the Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the United States and nuclear weapons were thus reduced in importance as a means of providing for national security, the United States decided to end compulsory military service and thus further weakened the linkage between the people and their army...
...dividual's choice about service...
...Manpower became a commodity, an input into the machinery of national defense, in the same way that weapons or installations were...
...The government is responsible for setting the objectives of national security...
...Citizens and Soldiers is must reading for all who are concerned with the common defense of our country...
...ten, the then Secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, had graphically demonstrated what he believed the Army was all about when he countermanded an order that all members of a tank crew speak English while on duty, thus creating a potentially disastrous battlefield situation in which a tank commander could not communicate with his own gunner...
...The Militia Act of 1792, which required "every able bodied male citizen between 18 and 45 years of age to be enrolled in the militia," has long since been repealed, but its principles are perhaps even more important today than they were then...
...If he had seen this soldier's letter (which he did not), he undoubtedly would have reiterated his belief that the promotion of egalitarianism and equal opportunity∔not warfighting∔was the Army's most important mission...
...We are now getting what we paid for∔ soldiers motivated more by love of money than by love of country...
...Yet all of these despicable actions fit comfortably with the basic assumptions behind America's decision to eliminate conscription and rely on economic incentives to recruit an all-volunteer force...
...Although an anachronism even then∔Congress in response to the Korean War had extended conscription to include married men with minor children∔it was a reminder that at one time regular soldiers below the top two enlisted ranks were required to have their commander's permission before they could marry...
...To his great credit, he attempts not so much to provide answers as to illuminate the dilemmas and lay out the difficult questions that must be ad42 dressed if we are to continue to provide for the common defense...
...The regular forces in peacetime were restricted to those available for immediate deployment...
...The Secretary of the Army, on the other hand, was more concerned with the relationship of the Army to society...
...They are the pernicious legacy of the so-called Gates Commission, appointed by President Nixon in March 1969 and headed by former Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates...
...My discovery also brought to mind a rather poignant letter addressed to the Secretary of the Army that passed over my desk when I worked at the Pentagon several years ago...
...Putting a philosophical and theoretical gloss on the innovations begun by the American Constitution, Clausewitz emphasized that in the "modern" world, national security depends on what he called the "remarkable trinity" of the people, the government, and the army...
...While such liberal sappiness about the nature of military service is bad enough, even worse are libertarian notions about military service as primarily an economic matter...
...The consequences of this attitude . . . would include a transformation of the military's self-conception...
...In what was then a radical departure from established practices, the Founding Fathers created an armed force that would be an instrument of the people rather than of the state, a belief reinforced by the Second Amendment, which tied the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" to the importance of "a well-regulated militia...
...Thus, even those (the officer corps) who would probably have served regardless of whether there was a draft found themselves influenced by the ethos of the marketplace...
...Cohen's purpose is to replace these misconceptions with a hard-headed critical analysis of the dilemmas of military service...
...She could not know her question was unanswerable: Her First Sergeant and the Secretary of the Army had totally different priorities...
...and their determination makes it possible to stay the course...
...The nation was shocked this summer by reports that retired Naval officers were willing to sell out their country for economic gain...
...Oxford Professor Michael Howard pointed out recently in Foreign Affairs that the advent of nuclear weapons seriously weakened the trinity, for it allowed the idea to grow that national security is not the responsibility of every citizen but is instead something provided by technical experts and esoteric nuclear weapons systems...
...The regular Army in those days did not tolerate lower-ranking soldiers with either wives or minor children, and female soldiers regardless of rank were automatically discharged if they became pregnant...
...The preamble to the Constitution emphasizes that it is the people of the United States who have the ultimate responsibility to "provide for the common defense...
...While we can take comfort in the loyalty and dedication of the overwhelming majority of those who today man our nation's defenses, these recent incidents are a grim reminder that military service cannot be measured solely∔or even primarily∔in economic terms...
...The economic approach implied that purely financial motivations could∔and ought to∔direct an in41...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
