Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [65]
A president could now—it seemed—take the nation to war without Americans being noticeably discomfited. War, after all, had become a spectacle, not a phenomenon that inflicted pain and suffering on citizens of the United States.
Behind the scenes, the reformulation of the American way of war involved sustained conflict, pitting an officer corps still bearing the scars of Vietnam against a new generation of civilian semiwarriors keen to prove Vietnam’s irrelevance. Both camps were committed to restoring the utility of force. Each camp entertained its own specific vision of what that should entail. Yet note carefully: Although soldiers and semiwarriors disagreed on matters of technique, they were united in their commitment to restoring the credibility of America’s armed forces as an instrument of global power projection. That the Department of Defense might define its purpose as defending the United States never received serious consideration.
This process of reinventing war occurred in two stages. For a time, the officer corps had the upper hand. After 9/11, the semiwarriors gained the advantage. The defining events in this saga were Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. The first was Gen. Colin Powell’s war, its conduct reflecting precepts to which Powell and the officer corps as a whole had become deeply devoted. The second was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s war, its conduct—in its early stages at least—reflecting the way that he and his fellow semiwarriors believed the United States ought to fight.
Operation Desert Storm represented the culmination of a reform project that had absorbed the energies of the officer corps ever since the Vietnam War ended. Its principal theme was the reconstitution of conventional warfare—the clash of regular forces on non-nuclear battlefields uncluttered with civilians, directed by generals insulated from meddling politicians and intrusive media, and culminating in an operationally decisive outcome. From Vietnam, officers like Powell had drawn this lesson: Long wars spelled institutional disaster and were to be avoided at all costs. The military’s version of a new American way of war aimed to preclude protracted fighting and therefore all of the political and moral complications that had made Vietnam such a frustrating and agonizing experience.
Largely conceived by the officer corps itself at installations such as Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Monroe, Virginia, the reforms instituted during the period leading up to Desert Storm looked to the past as much as the future. For inspiration, they drew upon World War II (emphasizing Europe over the Pacific) and to a lesser extent on the Israeli military experience (focusing on the ostensibly decisive Six-Day War of 1967). Military reformers consciously disregarded the U.S. experience of Vietnam altogether. Indeed, a central purpose of the reform project was to purge the armed forces of the effects of Vietnam and avert the recurrence of anything even remotely similar. Counterinsurgency, nation building, winning hearts and minds: Officers who had served in Vietnam invariably viewed these as anathema.
Although styled as bold and innovative, the spirit of this enterprise was deeply conservative. This becomes especially evident when considering how the military chose to spend its money during the bountiful years of the Reagan defense buildup. The signature weapons that had defined the services prior to Vietnam continued to define them afterward: For the army, this meant, above all, the tank; for the navy, the aircraft carrier; for the air force, the long-range bomber and manned