Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [164]
The new budget of $83.4 billion for defense represents five times the amount allotted to education and nearly forty times the amount for control of pollution (our government having failed to notice that pollution by now is a graver threat to us than the Russians). It costs an annual average of about $10,000 to maintain each man in uniform compared to a national expenditure of $1,172.86 for each person in the United States; in other words, the man in uniform absorbs ten times as much. The Pentagon, where lies the pulse of all this energy and activity, spends annually $140 million on public relations alone, nearly twice as much as the entire budget of the National Endowment for Arts and Humanities. When military and military-connected interests penetrate government to that extent, the government becomes more or less the prisoner of the Pentagon.
In this situation, the location of ultimate responsibility for policymaking is no longer clearly discernible. What is clear is that while the military exerts that much influence in government, it cannot at the same time retain the stance of innocence.
It used to be that any difficulty of assignment could be taken care of under the sheltering umbrella of Duty, Honor, Country. As long as you had a casus belli like the Maine or the Alamo you could get through any dubious expedition without agony. The West Point formula may no longer suffice. Country is clear enough, but what is Duty in a wrong war? What is Honor when fighting is reduced to “wasting” the living space—not to mention the lives—of a people that never did us any harm? The simple West Point answer is that Duty and Honor consist in carrying out the orders of the government. That is what the Nazis said in their defense, and we tried them for war crimes nevertheless. We undercut our own claim at Nuremberg and Tokyo.
When fighting reaches the classic formula recently voiced by a soldier in the act of setting fire to a hamlet in Vietnam, “We must destroy it in order to save it,” one must go further than duty and honor and ask, “Where is common sense?” I am aware that common sense does not figure in the West Point motto; nevertheless soldiers are no less subject to Descartes’ law, “I think, therefore I am,” than other mortals. Thinking will keep breaking in. That is the penalty of abandoning the purity of self-defense as casus belli. When a soldier starts thinking, according to the good soldier Schweik, “he is no longer a soldier but a lousy civilian.” I do not know if it will come to that, but it serves to bring in the civilian point of view.
Does civilian society really want the Army to start thinking for itself? Does this not raise all sorts of dread potentials for right-wing coups or left-wing mutinies? While the military normally tends to the right, there have been other cases: Cromwell’s New Model Army overturned the King, the naval mutiny at Kronstadt and desertions from the front brought on the Russian Revolution. Already we have a dangerously undisciplined enlisted force in Vietnam, which admittedly does not come so much from thinking as from general disgust. While this development is not political, from what one can tell, it is certainly not healthy.
I know that I have wandered far from my assignment, but I raise these questions because it seems to me that generalship will have to cope with them from now on. The trouble with this talk, as I imagine will now have become visible, is that I have none of the answers. That will take another breed of thinker. I can only say that it has always been a challenge to be a general; his role, like that of the citizen, is growing no easier.
Address, U.S. Army War College, April 1972. Parameters, Spring 1972.
Why Policy-Makers Do Not Listen
We have gathered to honor a group of Foreign Service officers—represented in the person of Jack