Police departments are now equipped with battlefield gear and military equipment, some of it surplus from the Army. And that problem grows worse as the military uses its heft to lobby for yet more money from Congress.Īt home, the growth of the armed forces means that American society has become more militarized. We send soldiers where we need civilians because the soldiers get the resources. Other agencies do not have the same capacity. This means that when nonmilitary overseas jobs like training local government administrators are required, the U.S. military has grown to more than a gargantuan $700 billion, and we are more likely to use it, and less likely to build better substitutes. This is the peril of creating such a large force: The annual budget for the U.S. American military occupations have worked best where the governing institutions preceded the arrival of foreign soldiers, as in Germany and Japan after World War II.Īmerican leaders have depended on our armed forces so much because they are so vast and easy to deploy. If anything, the record shows that a large military presence distorts political development, directing it toward combat and policing, not social development. Stable societies need to have a foundation of peaceful forms of trade, education and citizen participation.
Military forces are not a substitute for the hard work of building representative and effective institutions of governance. The fault lies not with the soldiers, but with the mission. Following an offensive by North Vietnam in 1975, American-trained allies collapsed, much as they did in Afghanistan this summer. American military escalation increased the popularity of the insurgency while also creating greater South Vietnamese dependence on the United States. In Vietnam, the “best and brightest” experts around President Lyndon Johnson advised him that America’s overwhelming power would crush the insurgency and bolster anti-Communist defenses. Now, after seven decades of American military deployments on the peninsula, the Communist regime in North Korea is as strong as ever, with a growing nuclear arsenal. He hoped American soldiers could reunite the divided Korean Peninsula, but instead the incursion set off a wider war with China and a stalemated conflict. In the Korean War, the overestimation of American military power convinced President Harry Truman to authorize the Army to cross into North Korea and approach the border of China. Time and again, despite battlefield successes, our military has come up short in achieving stated goals. American leaders have consistently assumed that military superiority will compensate for diplomatic and political limitations. The reliance on military force has repeatedly entangled the United States in distant, costly, long conflicts with self-defeating consequences - in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Our country needs to re-examine the value of military dominance. public opinion seems to have moved in this direction, too. History is clear: We would be better off with more modest, restrained military and strategic goals. This military hegemony has brought more defeats than victories and undermined democratic values at home and abroad. It is stark evidence of how counterproductive global military dominance is to American interests. The war in Afghanistan is much more than a failed intervention. The collapse of the American-supported government in Afghanistan, after 20 years of effort and billions of dollars, is just the latest setback in a long narrative of failure.
Yet this military dominance has hardly yielded the promised benefits.
They hoped overwhelming military capacity would avert another world war, deter adversaries and encourage foreign countries to follow our wishes. World War II changed that permanently: American leaders decided that a country with new global obligations needed a very large peacetime military, including a nuclear arsenal and a worldwide network of bases. For much of its history, the United States was a big country with a small peacetime military.