AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country (Harper-Collins, 2006) poses some provocative questions. The excerpt (reprinted with permission) below challenges the appeals used for recruiting and tackles the results when only a few Americans serve.
By Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer
In 2005-06, the Army tried to do everything it could to avoid recasting the argument as to why people should volunteer. It raised recruiting bonuses to $40,000, offered to pay mortgages for the period of enlistment, dangled promises of a fast track to citizenship and raised the enlistment age to 42—just about anything short of winning a date with the general’s daughter.
The adjustments seemed to be working to the extent that by the end of 2005 fiscal year, Army recruitment numbers were better than at the start of the year, even while the war in Iraq continued to lose public support. These efforts had all the appearance of hastily conceived and somewhat panicky “Band-Aid” solutions.
Just Another Corporation?
The old urgent, in-your-face WWII poster, “Uncle Sam Needs You!” has been changed by today’s military to read, “Uncle Sam wants to make you a job offer you might consider. Got a better offer? Okay, sorry to have bothered you.” Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?
It seems to us that it is as demeaning and shortsighted to pitch the military as a sort of bonus program as it would be if the IRS began to offer mileage points to people who volunteered to pay their taxes.
The idea of reducing patriotic duty to a matter of personal choice, job options and perks on the one hand, while tacitly writing off Americans who can afford to ignore the bribes on the other, seems to us to spell trouble. But that is more or less what the military’s recruiting policy is these days.
Since the recruiting methods are weighted in favor of the job-offer pitch, the military knows it can’t compete with “job offers” made to prospective Ivy League graduates (averaging $50,000 starting salaries), so why bother? Besides which, it is too expensive to pay for those Ivy League tuitions; better to take kids from the state schools, where the prices are cheaper. To us this seems to be a capitulation to cynicism.
How we got to this place reflects very badly on our top schools’ commitment to our country (as we’ve discussed, many kicked the ROTC off campus), the military’s commitment to fairness (it has given up on the upper classes while concentrating on the “productive” parts of the country, the heartland and small towns), and our government’s commitment to the long-term well-being of our armed forces.
In the long term, we as a country need to ask certain questions before we settle for the status quo. What do we lose under the status quo? We diminish the strength of our country’s decision making. We lose because of the underdevelopment of character in the upper classes. And we diminish the long-term health of the military. And the military also loses future support.
There are fewer civilian leaders with knowledgeable, hands-on military experience. In other words, the military’s future civilian bosses are going to be more ignorant than ever. If present statistical trends continue, we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress and no President will have served or have any children serving.
If military leaders think this will be good for them and the men and women they lead, we beg to differ. We predict that the military will be overused and underled and that support will run out fast for any project that becomes a political liability.
We predict that if the military leadership thinks that the men and women of the armed services were left twisting in the wind in the last years of the Vietnam War, as the saying goes, “they ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
There is a day of reckoning approaching when the military is going to be asked to do the impossible by very misinformed civilian leaders who will not be around to pick up the pieces.
We hope we are wrong. But whatever comes to pass, present trends are already taking a toll. We are losing certain important spiritual intangibles. We are losing fairness and national resolve born of shared sacrifice. We are losing the feeling of national unity and a sustained support for military action that comes only when all our classes serve.
Does the military really want to be a force that can only be effective in a hurry-up mode? Will America’s enemies take us seriously when each engagement’s “success” is tied to a short attention span and the next election cycle? Will a cycle of overextending ourselves, then cutting and running, become the permanent “strategy” of the future?
A New Personal Connection
The real and symbolic issue of the unarmored Humvees that our troops patrolled the streets of Baghdad in—and were needlessly killed and maimed in—makes the point. It may be almost a cliché to say, but it seems to us that it is also true to note that if the daughters of, say, President Bush and Bill Clinton had been patrolling the streets of Baghdad with, say, the son of the CEO of the New York Times, they likely would have been provided with German- or South African-made armored cars designed for patrolling insurgent-controlled hostile territory rather than sent out in our woefully underarmored carriers.
And it is possible that the civilian leaders who did not listen to the warnings that the Iraq War would turn into a protracted conflict with an insurgency might instead have put together a plan B, just in case their hoped-for outcome of happy Iraqis taking over the running of their country didn’t pan out.
One tends to take a worst-case scenario rather seriously if your son or daughter will be on the receiving end. [AWOL co-author] Frank recalls how he sat in John’s [his son’s] barracks room and watched John pack up his equipment for his first deployment.
Frank literally prayed over each piece of protective gear as it was packed, holding a flack jacket in his hands, then atropine injections (the antidote to chemical attack), and then John’s helmet.
The desire to see this equipment work properly was not theoretical. We can’t help but feel that our troops would be better served if the last several presidents and many political, business, academic and media leaders shared Frank’s experience.
Our country is better served by a military that is part of the democratic experiment in law and spirit, rather than standing apart from it.
And here is one more intangible worth considering: If we are in wars with widespread, steady support from members of all classes of society, this sends a strong message to our enemies. That message is: We are all in this together; we will not give up. We are putting our whole nation on the line.
Kathy Roth-Douquet’s husband is a career Marine and Iraq vet. Frank Schaeffer’s son served in the Marines in Afghanistan.
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