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By Root 386 0

As the empire changed, the foot soldiers manning its ramparts learned to accommodate themselves to new environments. U.S. forces used to worry about operating in subfreezing temperatures or in the midst of monsoons; today they cope with sandstorms while trying to avoid heatstroke. American military vernacular had formerly incorporated bits of German, Korean, and Vietnamese, often off-color. In our own day GI scatology has taken on Arabic overtones. Rather than beer steins, souvenir-collecting soldiers bring home hookah pipes and prayer rugs. The upshot is that the U.S. military since Vietnam has sustained and even expanded its global presence.

REINVENTING WAR

More striking still was the post-Vietnam rehabilitation of the Pentagon’s power-projection capabilities. Superficially, this was simply a matter of loosening constraints, persuading Americans (and American soldiers) that the risks entailed in sending U.S. forces into action in some far-off land were tolerable and the likelihood of a new “quagmire” remote. More fundamentally, the goal was to make war once again purposeful, refuting the lingering Vietnam-era impression that committing forces abroad almost inevitably yielded only meaningless slaughter.

Between 1981 and 2000, three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—collaborated to lift the constraints that Vietnam had seemingly imposed. Each of the three vowed as commander in chief to take a vigorous, assertive approach to military intervention—no shilly-shallying. Each made good on that promise.

Over these two decades, the use of force by the United States became both notably more frequent and less controversial. Bit by bit, the concept of deterrence as a cornerstone of national security strategy lost its salience. In its place emerged a clear preference for putting U.S. forces to work rather than holding them in reserve.

At one end of this narrative stands the U.S. involvement in the El Salvadoran civil war, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 decision to send a grand total of fifty-five U.S. military “trainers” to assist the Salvadoran army, evoking from panicky observers predictions that the United States was plunging headlong into another Vietnam. At the other end stand Bill Clinton’s efforts to “contain” Saddam Hussein during the 1990s, which saw U.S. combat aircraft penetrating Iraqi airspace on a daily basis for years on end—tens of thousands of sorties flown, thousands of weapons expended in attacking Iraqi targets—with few Americans even bothering to take notice.4

In between were a slew of combat and quasi-combat missions that saw American troops going into action everywhere from Latin America to the Caribbean, the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, East Africa to Asia Minor. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the War Powers Act of 1973, and therefore any congressional brake on decisions related to war, had become a dead letter. To a greater extent than any earlier period in U.S. history, Americans had come to accept the use of force as routine.

In the wake of 9/11, this trend found its ultimate expression in the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, which swept aside any lingering reticence about employing force. When acting in the role of commander in chief, the president now claimed—and exercised—essentially unlimited entitlements. Anything he and his advisers judged necessary to “keep America safe” became legitimate. In the midst of the Watergate scandal that ultimately proved his undoing, President Richard Nixon had advanced the argument that “if the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Nixon’s removal from office had seemingly discredited this claim; after 9/11, this perverse Nixon Doctrine returned to favor.

All of this happened in plain sight. If the American people did not actively endorse the ever greater militarization of foreign policy and the concentration of ever more power in the Oval Office, they passively assented. White House advisers increasingly operated on the assumption that the benefits of using force outweighed the risks. At a minimum, dropping a few bombs