Who should fight? It is no idle question in an era in
which thousands of U.S. troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq
to protect Americans back home. In fact, the answer has profound consequences
for the way policymakers make decisions about how these wars are waged. On Dec.
2, scholars from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the School of
Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University examined this issue
as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), co-sponsored by the Center for International
Security and Cooperation. Their conclusion: there is a wide and troubling divide between the 2.4 million Americans who volunteer to serve in the
military and the many millions more who choose not to.
The statistics are revealing: During World War II, some 16
million men, and several thousand women, served in the military, representing
12 percent of the U.S. population. They came from all walks of life, and those
who stayed home made sacrifices of their own for the greater war effort. But
while the U.S. population has more than doubled since then, the military is now
just 4 percent of the size it was in the 1940s. At the same time, today's wars
require virtually no sacrifice at home, and those who enlist come from an
extremely narrow demographic segment of the U.S. population. According to
Stanford historian David Kennedy, who spoke at the event, in 2007, only 2.6
percent of enlisted personnel had exposure to college, compared to 32 percent
of men age 18 to 24 in the general population. The military is
disproportionately composed of racial, ethnic, and other demographic
minorities, he noted. The political elites making the decisions about warfare
seldom have children serving. Among the 535 elected members of Congress in 2008
only 10 had children in the military.
The implications of this are vast. A lack of personal
familiarity for many Americans with the military breeds to some puzzling
behavior, says Eliot Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies
at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Congressmen say
they can't imagine U.S. troops committing the kinds of atrocities recorded at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; left-leaning anti-war advocates at Moveon.org
refer to General David Petraeus, the highly regarded commander of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, as General Betray Us. More than that, a large gap between
those who make the decisions about war and those who fight it raises serious
questions about accountability. The Vietnam-era draft inspired thousands of
Americans to push back against Washington's decisions to expand the war.
Conversely, the existence of the all volunteer army, in effect since 1973, may
have one been one reason for the relatively smaller level of protest in the run
up to, and the execution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, at a 2006
Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, Kennedy said the president
told him that if the draft had been in place he "would have been impeached
by now."
The gap also raises concerns about civic unity.
Earth-shaking events such as World War II and Sept. 11 brought citizens
together, says Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of
Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.
But sustaining that unity is extremely difficult, and becomes even more so when
one segment of the population is willing to give its life to protect Americans
while the vast majority go on with their lives without making any sacrifice of
their own. To Elshtain, this raises a basic issue of fairness and social
justice. There is a general lack of equity, she says, when "some families
bear a radically disproportionate burden of service and sacrifice." As
their peers "study or work or frolic, they die" in Iraq or
Afghanistan.
Redressing this imbalance is an extraordinary challenge.
Surely a draft would help. But it raises ethical questions of its own. There is
also no political will to reinstate it. Nor, says Cohen, is it necessary or
even desirable from a military perspective. A better set of solutions, he
suggests, would start with expanding the depth and scope of relations between
civilians and military personnel. He recommends siting military bases around
the country so that civilians in New England, say, where there is virtually no
military presence, can have greater exposure to an institution about which many
of them know very little. Elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard,
which have long prohibited on-campus ROTC activities, should start revisiting
and revising their policies so that over time the military will have a wider
diversity of background. Doing so might enrich the campus experience, and it
could also lead to a stronger military in which the highly educated
graduates of America's elite educational institutions would take a greater role
influencing America's elite military institutions. For now, Kennedy observes,
we have effectively "hired some of the least advantaged of our fellow
countrymen to do some of our most dangerous business." And we continue down this path at our peril.
