• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 759 0

and moral, how much will be left for the general to do? Given chemical detectors and people-sniffers, defoliators and biological weapons, infrared radar and electronic communication by satellite, not to mention, as once conceived by our planners, an invisible electric fence to keep out the enemy, the scope for decision-making in the field must inevitably be reduced. Artillery and even infantry fire, I understand, will be targeted by computers, extending from pocket-size models in the soldier’s pack all the way to the console at headquarters. This is supposed to raise the dazzling prospect of eliminating human error, like Professor Skinner’s vision of eliminating human evil by the teaching machine. The realization of either of those prospects, I can guarantee you as a historian, has about the same degree of probability as the return of the dinosaur.

The change that could be the most momentous would be a change in the relation of the military to the state. This is sensitive territory with potential for trouble, and I am entering here into an area of speculation which you may find refutable, and certainly arguable.

So that it may carry out the orders of government without hesitation or question, the officer corps has traditionally maintained, on the whole, a habit of non-partisanship, at least skin-deep, whatever individual ideological passions may rumble beneath the surface., Can this attitude last when the military find themselves being sent to fight for purposes so speculative or so blurred that they cannot support a legal state of war? You may say that it is a matter of semantics, but semantics make a good test. As a writer I can tell you that trouble in writing clearly invariably reflects troubled thinking, usually an incomplete grasp of the facts or of their meaning.

One wonders what proportion of officers in Southeast Asia today get through a tour of duty without asking themselves “Why?” or “What for?” As they make their sociopolitical rounds in the future, will that number uncomfortably grow? That is why the defunct principle that a nation should go to war only in self-defense or for vital and immediate national interest was a sound one. The nation that abides by it will have a better case with its own citizens and certainly with history. No one could misunderstand Pearl Harbor or have difficulty explaining or defining the need for a response. War which spends lives is too serious a business to do without definition. It requires definition—and declaration. No citizen, I believe, whether military or civilian, should be required to stake his life for what some uncertain men in Washington think is a good idea in gamesmanship or deterrence or containment or whatever is the governing idea of the moment.

If the military is to be used for political ends, can it continue to be the innocent automaton? Will the time come when this position is abandoned, and the Army or members of it will question and judge the purpose of what they are called upon to do? Not that they will necessarily be out of sympathy with government policy. Generally speaking, American policy since the onset of the cold war has been the containment of communism, with which, one may presume, the Army agrees. But the questions grow complex. What about Russia vis-à-vis China? What about India vis-à-vis Pakistan, where recently we skirted the consequences of folly by a hair? What about the Middle East? Suppose we decide that unless we rescue Syria from Russian influence, Iraq will fall? or suppose we transpose that principle to South America? You can play dominoes on any continent. What happens if we blunder again into a war on the wrong side of history?

That is not the military’s fault, the military will reply. It is a civilian decision. The military arm remains under civilian control. Did not Truman fire MacArthur?

It is true that in America the military has never seriously challenged civilian rule, but in late years it hardly needs to. With a third of the national budget absorbed by military spending, with the cost of producing nuclear and other modern