The Military Reach
Ambrose, Stephen E.
The Military's Reach The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society, by Adam Yarmolinsky. Harper & Row. 434 pp. $10. Reviewed by Stephen E. Ambrose "Tt is not an anti-military...
...In the ancient world, Sparta was the most secure and well-defended society in existence...
...Yarmolinksy, now a Harvard law professor, is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense...
...There is a great deal of material here, much of it thoughtfully presented, on the size and influence of the military...
...These are all men who have themselves benefited from public spending on the Cold War, brilliant men to be sure, but hardly the scholars to take a fresh, different view of America's military institution...
...All of which hardly seems likely to lead us out of the wilderness...
...it is the prescription...
...The point cannot be overstated...
...This is true, and is the reason that although nearly everyone seems to worry about the power of the military in modern America, no one—including Yarmolinsky—seems to know quite what to do about it...
...Given the American view of the world, we must have a gigantic military, and no matter how good or fair-minded the men in charge, a gigantic military will have a decisive effect on the quality of life in the United States...
...The U.S...
...Reviewed by Stephen E. Ambrose "Tt is not an anti-military book," A Cyrus Vance has said about this Twentieth Century Fund study, and he is certainly right...
...professor Burton Klein of Cal Tech...
...He calls on the President to exercise greater veto power at budget time, for Congress "to apply more effective countervailing power to the military establishment," for the public to "keep a wary eye on where the military is heading and why and at how much cost...
...Everything in Sparta was done to promote the good of the state and to protect the nation's security...
...Neither Adam Yarmolinsky nor his researchers rejects the fundamental assumptions about the nature of the good life, or of the world, that led to the creation of the mighty American military machine in the first place...
...In the past decade young American historians (not to mention European and Asian scholars) have challenged President Truman's interpretation at every point, claiming at a minimum that Mr...
...It is not the description of the problem that is weak...
...and Cal Tech...
...In the present state of the world," he declares, "defense will be costly...
...On questions basic to survival on this planet, one must forego tinkering and get down to fundamentals...
...It is in his most far-reaching recommendation that Yarmolinsky reveals the true nature of his thinking...
...Yarmolinsky does not...
...The statement reminds one of the oil company executive who answered criticism about the oil in San Francisco Bay by pointing out, "If you want cars, you have to put up with oil spills...
...Yarmolinsky's answer to the problem of how to control the military is to tinker...
...Morris Janowitz, chairman of the department of sociology at Chicago...
...He refuses to confront the arguments of the revisionist historians and accepts without question the rationalization that we have 1,517,000 troops stationed in 119 countries as a purely defensive measure...
...In the end, the Spartans were defending a society not worth living in...
...It is important to understand what The Military Establishment is not...
...Yarmolinsky dismisses ten years of scholarship in one paragraph, maintaining that any open-minded person would have to agree that "the Soviet Union aimed at control of Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East" as a start...
...There is little new information, but Yarmolinsky has done a solid job of gathering together material previously known only to specialists...
...Murray Weidenbaum, formerly professor of economics at Washington University and now an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury...
...There are pages and pages of graphs, charts, and statistics...
...The shared attitude of unrelieved hostility towards Russia, China, and Communism, based on the assumption that the Communists had conspired to take over the world, led directly to the military establishment...
...His researchers, almost to a man, are intellectuals who have spent their lives working for (and inside) the establishment—Dean Harvey Brooks of Harvard...
...As long as Americans hold to that bed-rock attitude, they will require an enormous military machine to back it up...
...The writing, as is usual in institutional efforts (including Pentagon staff studies, which are done in the same manner as this book), ranges from uneven to terrible, but then no one is likely to read the book for its prose...
...The book will become a major reference tool...
...To return to the major theme of the book, Yarmolinsky recognizes whence the growth of the American military sprang...
...Armed Forces grew because America needed, or rather its leaders felt it needed, to expand...
...The Military Establishment is, rather, an extensive examination of diverse aspects of the U.S...
...One fears that Yarmolinsky's proposed society would quickly reach the same point...
...It must be said that what Yarmp-linsky and his associates do, they do well...
...President Truman and his advisers built up our modern Armed Forces on the basis of their interpretation of Josef Stalin's post-World War II intentions...
...This is the prescription of men who want to manage the rest of us...
...His solution to the military-industrial complex, for example, is to take research funds away from private industry and give them to M.I.T...
...He urges us to recognize that the nation needs more than soldiers and that it must begin conscripting teachers, doctors, police officers, and so on...
...It is not a call for revolution, nor even a plea for major changes in our society and its military arm...
...This is because Yarmolinsky shares the assumptions about the nature of the world that Harry Truman, James For-restal, John F. Kennedy, Robert Mac-Namara, Melvin Laird, and the other leaders held, assumptions that led them first to inaugurate the greatest arms race in the history of the world and then to maintain the world's mightiest military machine...
...Truman overreacted to the supposed Russian threat, and at a maximum that it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, that was truly expansive and set on empire-building after the war...
...If the principle of mandatory service were not only accepted but also applied beyond the military to other forms of national service, equally urgent and important for the country, the military would have the benefits of a public policy declaration in favor of a priority allocation of manpower as befits a critical public function, but it would not be identified as the sole repository of the responsibility for safeguarding the nation's security and its most sacred values...
...Armed Forces, with emphasis on the military's influence on public spending and the economy, on foreign policy, on race relations, on scientific research and the academic world, on the social structure and social values, and on control of domestic disorder...
...It is fair to say," he writes, "that if American foreign policy became partially militarized, the blame should not be laid primarily on the military establishment but on, Presidents, civilian policy-makers, the Congress, and the American people...
...It was not written by objective, critical scholars from outside the Establishment...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
