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1997 The Widening Gap Between Military and Society
U.S.
military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their
own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically
active than ever before. Do they see America clearly?
After
following a platoon of Marine recruits through eleven weeks of boot-camp
training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see, when
they went home for postgraduation leave, how alienated they felt from their old
lives. At various times each of these new Marines seemed to experience a moment
of private loathing for public America. They were repulsed by the physical
unfitness of civilians, by the uncouth behavior they witnessed, and by what
they saw as pervasive selfishness and consumerism. Many found themselves
avoiding old friends, and some experienced difficulty even in communicating
with their families.
One
typical member of Platoon 3086, Craig Hoover, reported that the Amtrak ride
home to Kensington, Maryland, was "horrible." The train was
"filled with smoke," he said. "People were drinking and their
kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some
people." (An article I published in The Wall Street Journal in July, 1995,
mentioned many of the recruits quoted here.) Hoover also found the train ride a
sad contrast to the relative racial harmony of Parris Island. "It felt
kind of segregated by race and class—a poor white car, a poor black car, a
middle-class white car, a middle-class black car." Even McDonald's—which
had become a fantasy-like symbol to the recruits as they ate military rations,
particularly during a week of training in the woods-proved to be a letdown.
"You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight,
and a little sloppy," Hoover said.
Jonathan
Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile,
Alabama. "We played pool and drank," he reported, in a typical
comment. "It seemed like everyone there was losers. All they want to do is
get smashed. They're self-destructive. They're not trying. They're just goofing
around."
In
the wealthy Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, Eric Didier felt the same
way. "There are some friends I've stayed away from," he said.
"They're not going anywhere, and I don't want to be around them. We don't
have any common ground." Though they are in their early twenties, he said,
"they're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not
studying."
In
Pittsburgh, Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday-night party where he saw two old
friends as "losers." "Everything feels different," he said.
"I can't stand half my friends no more." Frank DeMarco attended a
street fair in Bayonne, New Jersey. "It was crowded. Trash everywhere.
People were drinking, getting into fights. People with obnoxious attitudes, no
politeness whatsoever." But, he said, "I didn't let it get to me. I
just said, 'This is the way civilian life is: nasty.'"
Yet
the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was
Daniel Keane, whose background was probably the most privileged. The son of a
Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain when I
interviewed him in the living room of his parents' house, in Summit, New
Jersey. When he first got home from Parris Island, he said about being with his
family, "I didn't know how to act. They said, 'What do you want to do?'
I'd say, 'I don't know.' I didn't know how to carry on a conversation."
He
found his old peer group even more difficult. "All my friends are home
from college now, drinking, acting stupid and loud," the eighteen-year-old
Marine said. He was particularly disappointed when two old friends refused to
postpone smoking marijuana for a few minutes, until he was away from them.
"They were getting ready to smoke their weed. I said, 'Could you just hang
on for a minute? Can't you wait till you get to the party instead of smoking in
the car?' They said, 'Then we'd have to give it out.'" So, he recalled,
they lit up in front of their Marine friend. "I was pretty disappointed in
them doing that. It made me want to be at SOI [the Marines' School of
Infantry]."
Like
many other members of 3086, Keane felt as if he had joined a cult or religion.
"People don't understand," he told me, "and I'm not going to
waste my breath trying to explain when the only thing that really impresses
them is how much beer you can chug down in thirty seconds."
THE
GAP
I
think the Marines of Platoon 3086 were experiencing in a very personal way the
widening gap between today's military and civilian America. To be sure, their
reaction was exaggerated by the boot-camp experience, during which the Marine
Corps especially among the services tries to sever a recruit's ties to his or
her previous life. But because of the nature of American society today, the
re-entry shock upon leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it
was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lieutenant
General Bernard Trainor said, "When I got out of boot camp, in 1946,
society was different. It was more disciplined, and most Americans trusted the
government. Most males had some military experience. It was an entirely
different society—one that thought more about its responsibilities than its
rights."
Similarly,
Sergeant Major James Moore, now retired but at that time the senior sergeant on
Parris Island, commented, "It is difficult to go back into a society of
'What's in it for me?' when a Marine has been taught the opposite for so long.
When I look at society today, I see a group of young people without direction
because of the lack of teaching of moral values at home and in school. We see
that when we get them in recruit training. The recruits are smarter today—they
run rings around what we were able to do, on average. Their problems are moral
problems: lying, cheating, and stealing, and the very fact of being committed.
We find that to get young people to dedicate themselves to a cause is difficult
sometimes."
The
idea of a gap between the military and civilian America is hardly new. For much
of the nation's history, Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State
(1957), the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged
minority." A decade ago the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained
civilian-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw
Giant: Triumph and Failure—America's Armed Forces (1986) he defined this as
"the less-than-amicable separation of the military from the financial,
business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly from
the last two."
The
fact that most Americans pay attention to the military only when they see news
of a sexual-abuse scandal, such as the one at Aberdeen Proving Ground,
underscores that separation. As far as media coverage is concerned, the U.S.
military has fallen to the level of a mid-sized Asian nation that breaks onto
the front page with a large disaster but gets just a few paragraphs for bus
plunges and plane crashes. The estrangement appears to be more complete now
than it was in the past, for, I think, two overarching reasons. First, more
than twenty years after the end of conscription the ignorance of American
elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War
the United States has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the
Cold War is indeed considered to have been a kind of war, then for the first
time in American history the nation is maintaining a large military
establishment during peacetime, with 1.5 million people on active duty and
millions more serving in reserve and supporting civilian roles in the Defense
Department and the defense industry.
Several
trends already under way in civilian society and in the post-Cold War military
threaten to widen the gap in the coming years, further isolating and alienating
the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional
Soldier, Morris Janowitz concluded confidently that there would not be "a
return to earlier forms of a highly self-contained and socially distinct military
force; the requirements of technology of education and of political support
make that impossible." But the conditions that shaped the military of
which Janowitz wrote no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but
likely that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind
of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a
society and subculture. "Today," says retired Admiral Stanley Arthur,
who commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War, "the armed forces are
no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men
and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special,
better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force
serving a democracy."
In
this light, the Clinton Administration's frictions with the military—over gays
in the armed forces, the alleged "dissing" of a uniformed general by
a White House aide, military resentment at the Administration's ham-handedness
in the later phases of the Somalia mission, and military resistance to U.S.
interventions in Haiti and Bosnia—can be seen not as the unique product of the
personal histories of one President and his advisers but as a precursor of
future problems. The Harvard political scientist Michael Desch concluded in a
recent assessment of post-Cold War decision-making in the United States that
civilians are now apparently less able "to get the military to do what
they want them to do" than they were during the Cold War.
Three
broad areas need to be examined to understand why this political, social, and
cultural gap appears to be widening: changes in the military, changes in
civilian society, and changes in the international-security environment.
CHANGES
IN THE MILITARY
By
far the most important change that has taken place in the military is the
termination of the draft in 1973. Twenty-four years later the consequences are
still unfolding. Today all 1.5 million people on active duty are volunteers.
That fact carries vast implications for how the military operates and how it
relates to society. In contrast to the post-Second World War demobilization,
for example, the post-Cold War drawdown is being met with fierce resistance by
many soldiers, because all volunteered to be in the military and most are
indeed fighting to stay in.
Partly
as a result of the end of conscription, the past fifteen years especially has
seen the rise of a professional military, even in the enlisted ranks. Although
better trained as soldiers and more stable as a society, these professionals
are very expensive, because they bring with them families and all the attendant
social infrastructure, from health care to substance-abuse counseling to higher
education on military bases. John Luddy, a Senate Republican aide, wrote that
family-related costs to the Defense Department total more than $25 billion a
year.
This
strong social safety net may not be sustained. With defense-policy analysts in
general agreement that a severe defense-budget problem looms in the late 1990s,
the military's vast social infrastructure is likely to come under attack by
Congress. The military—especially the Army, which is the most vulnerable of the
services in terms of personnel—faces a dilemma in addressing those cuts. The
social safety net appears necessary to support a professional military with a
high "operating tempo." But to find the funds to maintain that net,
the Army is likely to be required to take cuts in personnel far beyond what it
will consider tolerable. Either course—curtailing support for personnel or
curtailing personnel—is likely to engender resentment in the military.
The
post-draft professionalization of the military has also wrought cultural
changes. Richard H. Kohn, a former chief historian of the Air Force who now
teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that the
officer corps has changed since the Cold War in the way it acts and feels.
"I sense an ethos that is different," he told me in an interview.
"They talk about themselves as 'we,' separate from society. They see
themselves as different, morally and culturally. It isn't the military of the
fifties and sixties, which was a large, semi-mobilized citizen military
establishment, with a lot of younger officers who were there temporarily, and a
base of draftees." Change in the military culture aside, the American
people have never been comfortable with professional militaries, as Huntington
observed in The Soldier and the State—theirs or anybody else's.
The Revolutionary War was described as a war of
citizen-soldiers against the standing armies and mercenaries of George III. The
Civil War was [the Union fighting] against the West Point directed armies of
the South.... German militarism was the principal enemy in World War I.... The
professionals, in other words, are always on the other side.
A
second major area of change in the military is the rebuilding that has occurred
since the Vietnam War. In this area, as in many other aspects of defense
nowadays, the Marine Corps appears to be exemplary. During the 1970s the Corps
was a disaster. Drug use was rampant and discipline ragged. There were 1,060
violent racial incidents in the Corps in 1970. Jeffrey Record noted in the May,
1995, Proceedings, the magazine of the Navy's professional society, that during
the Vietnam era
the Corps registered rates of courts-martial, non-judicial
punishments, unauthorized absences, and outright desertions unprecedented in
its own history, and, in most cases, three to four times those plaguing the
U.S. Army. Violence and crime at recruit depots and other installations
escalated; in some cases, officers ventured out only in pairs or groups and
only in daylight.
Today
the Marine Corps has drastically reduced its discipline problems. Its drug
problem, too, is minor, with less than four percent of Marines testing positive
in random urinalysis. And although racial tension still exists in the military,
the services, especially the Army, have probably done about as good a job of
minimizing the issue of race as is possible in the American context. In the
Army's officer corps of 78,000, there are now some 9,000 blacks. As Charles
Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, has observed, the
U.S. military is still the only place in American society where it is routine
for black people to boss around white people. (This may be one reason the black
drill instructor has become a stock figure in American popular culture, not
only in films such as Private Benjamin, An Officer and a Gentleman, Major
Payne, Renaissance Man, and In the Army Now but also in commercials for beer
and long-distance telephone services.)
In
addition, two related post-Cold War trends having to do with the military's
infrastructure may have had important consequences for civilian-military relations.
These are the process of closing unneeded bases and the privatization of many
functions of logistics and maintenance.
The
many base closings may increase the geographical and political isolation of the
military—or, to put it another way, may return the military to its pre-Second
World War condition. "Before World War II, the majority of the military
posts were located in the South and in the West," Janowitz notes. Also
earlier in this century the South was disproportionately represented in the
ranks of senior officers—in 1910 some 90 percent of Army generals had a
"southern affiliation," Janowitz reports. The closing of bases has so
far hit especially hard in the Far West and the Northeast—areas that are both
more liberal and more expensive to live in and operate in than the rest of the
nation.
The
move to privatize much of the military's huge depot structure—the network that
maintains aircraft, vehicles, and other defense gear—may also contribute to the
social and political isolation of the military. Faced with the need to cut
personnel, and seeking to preserve its war-fighting "tooth," the
post-Cold War military has sought to privatize much of its support
"tail." This privatization, which promises to reduce the number of
soldiers in civilian occupations, is occurring not only on U.S. soil, where
maintenance work is being farmed out to corporations, but also in other
countries where U.S. soldiers operate. In Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, for
example, Brown & Root has performed a host of functions once done or at
least supervised by the uniformed military, from staffing mess halls to
purifying water to preparing the bodies of soldiers killed in firefights for
shipment home. A concern relating to extensive civilian contracting is that
military personnel today are less likely to be serving in occupations that have
civilian equivalents, and are more likely to specialize in military skills that
are neither transferable to the civilian sector nor well understood by
civilians.
These
isolating trends are occurring amid broader cultural changes in the
military—notably the politicization of the officer corps. Of course, military
culture has always had a conservative streak, just as journalism has always had
an element of anti-authoritarianism. I suspect, however, that today's officers
are both more conservative and more politically active than their predecessors.
Admittedly,
the evidence is hazy and the data are skimpy—in part because
"conservative" is almost impossible to define. Nonetheless, the few
indications available today are strikingly at odds with the conclusions
Janowitz reached. Janowitz found that many officers continued to avoid open
party preferences, but also detected a trend toward more liberals among
military officers. He found the military becoming more representative of
society, with a long-term upward trend in the number of officers "willing
to deviate from traditional conservative identification." And he detected
a correlation between higher ranks and greater intensity of conservative attitudes.
Today
the available evidence indicates that all these trends have reversed. The
military appears to be becoming politically less representative of society,
with a long-term downward trend in the number of officers willing to identify
themselves as liberals. Open identification with the Republican Party is
becoming the norm. And the few remaining liberals in uniform tend to be
colonels and generals, perhaps because they began their careers in the
draft-era military. The junior officer corps, apart from its female and
minority members, appears to be overwhelmingly hard-right Republican and
largely comfortable with the views of Rush Limbaugh. Air Force Colonel Charles
Dunlap observed in a recent essay published by the Air Force Academy,
"Many officers privately expressed delight that" as a result of the
controversy over gays in the military, the Reserve Officers Training Corps
program is producing "fewer officers from the more liberal campuses to
challenge [the Air Force officers'] increasingly right-wing philosophy."
A
variety of recent formal and informal surveys point toward those conclusions.
Midshipmen at Annapolis, who in 1974 were similar in their politics to their
peers at civilian colleges, are now twice as likely as other students to
consider themselves conservative, according to an unpublished internal Navy
survey. "The shift to the right has been rather remarkable, even while
there has been an infusion of rather more liberal women and minorities,"
one of the study's conductors concluded.
Former
Army Major Dana Isaacoff, who taught at West Point in the early 1990s,
routinely surveyed her students on their politics, assessing about sixty of
them during each of six semesters. In a typical section, she reported in a talk
last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seventeen would
identify themselves as Republican, but none would label themselves Democratic
or Independent, instead choosing the traditional course of adopting no
political label. She concluded that to today's West Point cadets, being a Republican
is becoming part of the definition of being a military officer. "Students
overwhelmingly identified themselves as conservatives," she said. Here the
definition of conservatism is important: this does not appear to be the
compromising, solution-oriented politics of, say, Bob Dole. "There is a
tendency among the cadets to adopt the mainstream conservative attitudes and
push them to extremes," Isaacoff said. "The Democratic-controlled
Congress was Public Enemy Number One. Number Two was the liberal media. . . .
They firmly believed in the existence of the Welfare Queen."
This
tendency toward right-wing attitudes is not limited to malleable students at
military academies. A 1995 survey of Marine officers at Quantico, a large base
in Virginia that focuses on training officers, found similar views. The Marines
are not the most representative example, but because they are the most
tradition-bound and unabashedly culturally conservative of the services, they
are the most dramatic. They should be viewed as an indicator not of where the
U.S. military is today but of where it is heading. The Corps was less altered
by the Cold War than any of the other services. With the end of the Cold War
the other services are becoming more like the Marines: smaller, insular, and
expeditionary.
In
the Quantico survey 50 percent of the new officers studying at the Basic School
identified themselves as conservatives. In a parallel survey of mid-career
officers at the Command and Staff College 69 percent identified themselves as
conservatives. In a striking indication of alienation from civilian society, an
overwhelming proportion of the Basic School lieutenants—81 percent—said that
the military's values are closer to the values of the Founding Fathers than are
the values of civilian society. At the Command and Staff College, where
students generally have at least ten years of military experience, 64 percent
agreed with that statement. A majority of officers at both schools agreed that
a gap exists between the military and civilian society, and stated that they
expect it to increase with the passage of time. Fewer than half believed it
desirable to have people with different political views within their
organizations.
"I
believe these results indicate the potential for a serious problem in
civil-military relations for the United States," concluded Army Major
Robert A. Newton, who conducted the survey of Marine officers and analyzed the
responses. "Instead of viewing themselves as the representatives of
society," he wrote, "the participating officers believe they are a
unique element within society."
Again,
officers today appear to be not only more conservative than those in the past
but also more active in politics—both in how they describe themselves and in
how they vote. This change is all the more striking because traditionally the
American military has avoided political involvement. After the Civil War,
Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State, "not one officer in five
hundred, it was estimated, ever cast a ballot." In Once an Eagle (1968),
an illuminating novel about the twentieth-century U.S. Army, Anton Myrer has
his young hero tell a congressman, "When I serve my country as a soldier
I'm not going to serve her as a Democrat or as a Republican, I'm going to serve
her as an American." But military personnel have for the past decade been
voting in greater percentages than the general population. In his survey of
Marine officers Newton found that "although the majority of the officers
did not believe the military should play an active role in political decisions,
a significant minority did believe such activity was appropriate."
It
is worth noting that the past two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have
entered election-year debates on issues touching on the military. During the
1992 election General Colin Powell twice spoke out against military
intervention in Bosnia, which candidate Bill Clinton was proposing. Less
noticed, Powell's comparatively retiring successor, General John Shalikashvili,
spoke out during the 1996 presidential-primary season against isolationism and
anti-immigrationism—two issues the Republican candidate Pat Buchanan was
promoting.
An
odd little book titled Clint McQuade USMC: The New Beginning (1990) is perhaps
unintentionally revealing. Reading this novel—which was privately published by
the author, Gene Duncan, a retired Marine major—feels like taking a spelunking
trip through the collective unconscious of the Corps. Indeed, Duncan states at
the outset that any resemblance to real people "springs from my
subconscious, over which I have no control." The book is about a retired
Marine master gunnery sergeant who is reborn with the body of a
sixteen-year-old while retaining the knowledge, memories, and experience of his
old self. He eventually—of course—joins the Marines.
The
book is most interesting for what it asserts as a matter of course: essentially
that American society is decaying, corrupted, misled by its elected officials,
and deserving of resentment from the Marines who protect it. "Americans
are selfish people," the hero explains to his buddies. Later he tells
them, "I think I have lost all faith in our politicians, so I take the
narrow view and confine it to those around me of like mind, minds which dictate
unselfishness and honor." In a postscript the author says that his
"purpose in writing" has been to "give to the reader a sense of
the heart of the United States Marine Corps." He explains that he has
tried to show the Marines to be "special people with special hearts who
serve a seemingly ungrateful nation."
The
novel shows part of the military talking to itself when it doesn't think it is
being overheard. Though hardly famous in the outside world, Gene Duncan is well
known within the Marines: his books are sold by the Marine Corps Association,
which at its Quantico bookshop has a special "Duncan's Books" area.
The 1991 edition of General Military Subjects, the textbook used to train all
recruits at Parris Island, quotes Duncan on its inside cover as saying that the
job of a drill instructor is to undo "eighteen years of cumulative
selfishness and 'Me-ism.'" Just after the table of contents the textbook
gives Duncan a full page. The only other person so honored in the entire
199-page textbook is President George Bush.
These
isolating attitudes, while perhaps most extreme in the Marines, are also found
in varying degrees elsewhere in the military. "There is a deep-seated
suspicion in the U.S. military of society," Andrew Bacevich, a retired
Army colonel who is the executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at
Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, told me in
an interview. It is "part of the Vietnam hangover—'You guys betrayed us
once, and you could do it again.'" This suspicion, he added, "isn't
going away, it's being transmitted" to a new generation of officers.
Here
again the long-term consequences of the end of conscription are still
unfolding. It has become easier for the middle class in general and liberals in
particular to follow their traditional impulse to turn away from the military.
Within the military the end of the draft has also meant the end of its
leavening effect: people from nonmilitary families were conscripted or spurred
by the draft to enroll in ROTC, and found they actually liked military life.
General Powell, for example, came from a nonmilitary background and attended
the distinctly nonmilitary City University of New York. General Shalikashvili
was a draftee. In some years of the early 1990s the Joint Chiefs contained more
members who had come out of public universities than members who had gone the
traditional routes of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. But the
generation of draft-era officers is now retiring, and it is a virtual certainty
that in twenty years the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be a volunteer. All
this will make it easier for the military and the liberal professionals of the
middle class to look upon each other with contempt.
It
is one matter to acknowledge that much in American society today is deserving
of contempt. It is another matter to propose that the role of the U.S.
military—especially an all-volunteer professional military oriented toward
conservative Republicanism—is to fix those problems. Yet that is what some are
doing. "It is no longer enough for Marines to 'reflect' the society they
defend," Michael Wyly, a retired colonel, advised in the March, 1995,
issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. "They must lead it, not politically but
culturally. For it is the culture we are defending."
In
some ways this is nothing new. The military can be seen as just reverting to
its pre-Second World War and pre-Cold War stances—socially isolated,
politically conservative, and working primarily on bases in the South and West.
In The Professional Soldier, Janowitz wrote, "Military ideology has
maintained a disapproval of the lack of order and respect for authority which
it feels characterizes civilian society. . . . In the past most professional
soldiers even felt that the moral fibre of American manpower was 'degenerating'
and might not be able to withstand the rigors of battle."
There
are two important differences between today's military and the military before
the Second World War. First, it is far larger—some six times the size of the
244,000-man active-duty military of 1933. (Over the same period the U.S.
population has merely doubled in size.) Second, it is frequently used as an
instrument of national policy, as it was with the recent large deployments to
Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Possibly a third major difference is its quality: for
the first time in the nation's history the U.S. military is generally regarded
as the best in the world. If, as now appears likely, it is cut significantly
over the next ten years, frustrated officers may be more politically direct in
expressing their resentment than they were in the past. It would be surprising
if all were to adopt the stance of General Omar Bradley, who in a passage
quoted by Janowitz commented, "Thirty-two years in the peacetime army had
taught me to do my job, hold my tongue, and keep my name out of the
papers."
CHANGES
IN SOCIETY
There
is widespread agreement that over the past few decades American society has
become more fragmented, more individualistic, and less disciplined, with
institutions such as church, family, and school wielding less influence.
Whatever the implications of these changes, they put society at odds with the
classic military values of sacrifice, unity, self-discipline, and considering
the interests of the group before those of the individual.
The
split is all the deeper because the military has effectively addressed the two
great plagues of American society, drug abuse and racial tension, but civilian
society has not. In addition, the military is doing a better job in other areas
where society is faltering, including education. The Army especially has done
well with the growth of realistic training at facilities such as the National
Training Center, the Joint Readiness Training Center, and the Combat Maneuver
Training Center, where soldiers live in the field and conduct bloodless battles
against well-trained opponents. Younger enlisted soldiers and Marines
frequently exude an air of competence that is rare in today's eighteen- and
nineteen-year-old civilians. Local military recruiters report that they no
longer recruit from certain high schools, because so few of the graduates of
those schools are able to pass the military entrance examination—the Armed
Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a simple test of reading, writing, and
arithmetic skills. The result of this selectivity is that the military is now
far better educated than the general population: about 96 percent of recruits
in 1995, for example, earned high school diplomas, as compared with 79 percent
of civilians aged eighteen to twenty-four. Indeed, about 40 percent of all
officers now hold postgraduate degrees.
The
end of the draft has altered the way society looks at the military. Charles
Moskos traces the American people's supposed intolerance of casualties to the
end of the draft: because the elites aren't putting their own offspring in
harm's way, the American people mistrust their sending everyone else's children
into battle. I disagree with this analysis, and am instead persuaded by the
explanation put forward by James Burk, a professor of sociology at Texas
A&M University, that the American people will not tolerate casualties when
they dislike a policy or don't understand it, as was true with Somalia.
But
I think that Moskos is pointing in the right direction: American political and
economic elites generally don't understand the military. A comment published
this spring in the Utne Reader—the Reader's Digest of the New Age
crowd—captured the disdain for today's military. In an editorial introduction
to an article the magazine stated that in light of the Tailhook and Aberdeen
scandals, "it's hard to imagine why any woman—or any man with a
conscience—would want to join the military."
Nor
is such understanding deemed important, even in making national-security
policy. Consider, for example, the conspicuous lack in the White House of staff
members with military experience—in an Administration that has proved to be
militarily activist. Even after bungling an inherited mission in Somalia and
then using U.S. forces to feed Rwandan refugees, invade Haiti, and enforce a
peace agreement in Bosnia, the Clinton Administration did not see fit to follow
Pentagon suggestions that it appoint someone with a military background to a
senior post on the National Security Council. Misunderstanding the military is
dangerous for both the military and the civilian population. Nowadays, I think,
policymakers tend to overestimate what the military can do. It isn't clear, for
example, just how the Clinton Administration expects the appointment of a
four-star general, Barry McCaffrey, as drug czar to revitalize its efforts
against drugs. Overestimating the military is probably even more dangerous than
believing that it is made up of incompetent buffoons, as Baby Boomers seemed to
believe in the 1970s.
An
uncertain grasp of military affairs is likely to characterize policymaking for
the foreseeable future. As recently as during the Vietnam War two thirds of the
members of Congress were veterans. Today almost two thirds are not. What most
congressmen know of the military is what they saw on television during the Gulf
War. They learned two lessons: high-tech weaponry works, and the United States
needs missile defenses. Partly because the Army effectively blacked out media
coverage of its Gulf War triumph, Congress came away with little interest in
training, personnel issues, or ground forces in general. It should have been no
surprise to the military that after the Republicans won a majority in Congress
in 1994, they advocated missile defenses and B-2 bombers while trying to cut
military pensions. In March of last year several younger members of Congress
formed the Republican Defense Working Group, which, they said, would
"scour the defense budget for savings." As Andrew Bacevich has
observed, it will be interesting to see how the political beliefs of the
officer corps change when officers realize that to be conservative is no longer
necessarily to be in favor of defense spending.
But
the most salient point is that Congress isn't particularly interested in
defense issues. This isn't a matter of ideology. Even before the Republican
victory the Armed Services Committees were declining in prestige. Mainly
because of the post-Cold War reduction in military budgets, defense is an
unpleasant issue for members of Congress. Several rounds of base closings have
made membership on the Armed Services Committees something of a liability: as
one congressional staff member told me several years ago, "Back home,
they'll ask, 'If you're on the committee, why couldn't you do something about
it?'" Among the congressional freshmen elected to the House in 1992,
nineteen requested seats on the Science and Technology Committee, historically
a backwater, whereas only seven asked for Armed Services.
CHANGES
IN THE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT
With
the evaporation of the Soviet Union, many Americans don't understand why the
nation needs a large standing army. For the first time in its history (with the
possible exception of the two decades preceding the Spanish-American War) the
U.S. Army must justify its existence to the American people. Again, this
suggests that the Army will become more like the Marines—small, expeditionary,
and, for the good of the institution, better at explaining itself to Congress
and the media. Peacetime trends in American civilian-military relations already
point toward huge budget cuts in the coming years. Last year, for example,
Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, proposed reducing defense
spending to $210 billion in 2001, from the current $263 billion. The Electronic
Industries Association in 1995 forecast a 2005 defense budget of $214 billion.
The Army is likely to suffer a disproportionate share of the cuts, and most of
the cuts will be aimed at personnel rather than at procurement or operations
and maintenance.
Also
with the end of the Cold War, the military's definition of "the
threat" went up for grabs. Everybody used to agree that it was the Soviet
Union. Now there is a lot of talk in the military, especially in the Marines,
that the new threat is chaos. Sergeant Darren Carey, a drill instructor for
Platoon 3086, the unit I followed home from Parris Island, taught the platoon
that "today the threat is the low-intensity things, the nine-one-one, that
you never know what's going to happen—it's Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia." He told
me that he also teaches that the threat is "the decline of the family, the
decline of morals."
As
his comment indicates, it is easy to blur the line between foreign and domestic
enemies. I think this haziness may already be occurring on an institutional
scale with the Marines, for whom the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were a preamble
to the Somalia deployment later that year. From a military perspective, the
operations were similar: in both cases Marine combat units based in California
were sent to intervene in fighting between armed urban factions. "As soon
as we got to Mogadishu, we were struck by the similarity to L.A.," one
Marine colonel involved in both operations told me.
Some
of the lessons learned by the Marines in Los Angeles are worrisome, especially
when seen in the context of a strongly conservative, politically active
military. Marine Major Timothy Reeves argued in a paper written at the Marine
Command and Staff College that because of "the rising potential for civil
disobedience within the inner cities" it is "inevitable" that
the U.S. military will be employed more often within American borders. The
trouble, he said, is that a variety of U.S. laws inhibit the execution of
domestic missions. In Los Angeles, Reeves said, when faced with a choice
between violating doctrine and violating federal law some Marines chose the
latter course, detaining suspects and conducting warrantless searches.
Similarly, Marine Captain Guy Miner reported in a 1992 issue of the Marine
Corps Gazette that Marine intelligence units were initially worried by the need
to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens in ways that would violate a 1981
Executive Order, but that "this inhibition was quickly overcome as
intelligence personnel sought any way possible to support the operation with which
the regiment had been tasked."
Reeves
called for major alterations of U.S. law to enable the Marines to execute these
new domestic missions just as they execute missions abroad—changes that could
carry long-term consequences for U.S. civilian-military relations.
"Experience from the Los Angeles riots," he said in his paper,
"demonstrated the need to grant U.S. Marine forces the legal right to
detain vehicles and suspects, conduct arrests, searches, and seizures in order
to accomplish the peacekeeping mission." (The Los Angeles mission also
demonstrated a need for the Marines to coordinate terminology with the police:
when police officers asked some Marines to cover them while they confronted an
armed suspect barricaded in his residence, Reeves reported, the Marines shot
approximately thirty rounds of what they call "covering fire" into
the building before the police stopped them.)
In
a December, 1994, article in the Marine Corps Gazette, William S. Lind, a
military analyst who has been influential in the doctrinal thinking of the
post-Cold War Marines, wrote with two Marine reservists that American culture
is "collapsing."
Little
is remarkable about that paragraph, which reads like standard right-wing
American rhetoric of the nineties—not all that different from Pat Robertson or
Pat Buchanan. Its significance lies in the conclusion that Lind and his
co-authors drew: "The next real war we fight is likely to be on American
soil."
As
a coda, retired Colonel Michael Wyly wrote a few months later in another Gazette
article, "We must be willing to realize that our real enemy is as likely
to appear within our own borders as without." He then took swipes at the
two fundamental principles of U.S. military professionalism: unwavering
subordination to civilian control and nonparticipation in politics. "If
our laws and self-image of our role as military professionals do not allow for
[the recognition that the real enemy may be within] we need to change
them." Wyly raised the possibility that the Marines would refuse to
enforce certain laws. Specifically, if Congress were to restrict gun ownership,
then Marines would need to understand that "enforcing such a restriction
could quickly make us the enemy of constitutional freedom." (To its
credit, the Gazette carried in the same issue a commonsense response to the
Lind article from Major Mark Bean, who wrote, "America is made of tougher
stuff than the authors would have us believe.")
When
the military is politically active, when it believes it is uniquely aware of
certain dangers, when it discusses responding to domestic threats to cherished
values, then it edges toward becoming an independent actor in domestic
politics. "A classic example of this situation happened in Chile,"
Major Robert Newton warned at the conclusion of his report "The
Politicization of the Officer Corps." "The Chilean military was a
very professional organization. The majority of the officer corps came from the
middle class. When the society elected a communist President, the military
broke from society. The officer corps believed this change threatened the basic
principles upon which the society rested."
Starting in the mid-1960s, we have thrown away the values,
morals, and standards that define traditional Western culture. In part, this
has been driven by cultural radicals, people who hate our Judeo-Christian
culture. Dominant in the elite, especially in the universities, the media, and
the entertainment industry (now the most powerful force in our culture and a
source of endless degradation), the cultural radicals have successfully pushed
an agenda of moral relativism, militant secularism, and sexual and social
"liberation." This agenda has slowly codified into a new ideology,
usually known as "multiculturalism" or "political
correctness," that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into
social and cultural terms.
WHAT
MUST BE DONE?
A
U.S. military coup remains extremely unlikely. Samuel Huntington seems closer
to the mark when he attributes the civilian-military turbulence of the Clinton
Administration to the process of seeking out a new post-Cold War equilibrium in
the civilian-military relationship.
But
not all equilibriums are equal. The United States may be in danger of drifting
into a situation in which the military is neither well understood nor well used
and yet—as was not true in previous eras of military estrangement—is big,
politically active, and frequently employed on a large scale to execute American
foreign policy. The development of the semi-autonomous military described by
the Harvard political scientist Michael Desch isn't healthy in a democracy. In
addition, it isn't clear that the U.S. military, for all its political-military
expertise, is best placed to decide how it should be used, either at home or
abroad. However ignorant of military affairs the Clinton Administration may be,
its estimate of the human costs of invading Haiti appears to have been far more
accurate than the Pentagon's. Similarly, sixteen months into the Bosnian
deployment none of the military's grim warnings that the U.S. military would
suffer widespread casualties as it became entangled in a guerrilla war had been
realized. This is a testament in part to the professionalism of today's
soldiers. But it should also suggest that future Pentagon estimates of the
human costs of possible operations deserve to be viewed with great skepticism.
Mutual
distrust between the nation's political elites and military leaders could
ultimately undercut U.S. foreign policy, making it more difficult to use force
effectively. Indeed, this unease may in part explain why the Army was reluctant
to take a more activist stance in the Haiti and Bosnia missions, and instead
fretted publicly about "mission creep." To begin to repair the
relationship, several steps could be taken.
First,
consideration should be given to reinstating some form of a draft. Along the
lines of the current German system, youths could be given the choice of
performing, say, eighteen months of military service or two years of public
service.
But
the resumption of conscription appears unlikely for the foreseeable future, so
several other steps should be considered in order to engage the military with
civilian society. ROTC programs should be vastly expanded, especially at elite
institutions. The service requirement attached to attending one of the three
military academies might be shortened, in order to encourage more military
officers to pursue careers in civilian society. Among other things, this might
eventually lead to the presence in Congress of more people with military
experience. Whenever possible, military officers pursuing higher degrees should
be sent to civilian universities, whether or not this means closing some military
schools. As Eliot Cohen, a military strategist at Johns Hopkins who is one of
the most thoughtful commentators on U.S. civilian-military relations, has
suggested, there may even be ways of bringing people into the military later in
their lives—possibly at ranks as high as lieutenant colonel. And the military
could use the skills of reservists far more imaginatively, especially in an era
when civilian technologies are outpacing military ones. To help recruiters draw
from the other end of the socio-economic scale, retired Admiral Stanley Arthur
suggests that the military establish special preparatory programs that would
enable more inner-city youths to enlist.
But
the most important change that should be made involves the military only
secondarily. This concerns the isolation of professional Americans, or the
upper middle class, from the broad concerns of society. Ignorance of the
military is, I think, just one manifestation of that larger problem. We live in
an era when a Democratic President sends his child to private school and few
eyebrows are raised. America's military problem is not unlike that facing parts
of the former Soviet Union. In reviewing the depredations of semi-autonomous or
fully autonomous militias in thirty-one new states and "ministates" in
the old Eastern bloc and the former Yugoslavia, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., an
expert on post-Communist transitions, recommended that in order to assert
public control over those forces, "it is particularly important to involve
the new middle class ... in military service." America would do well to
take the same advice.
HOTEL CALIFORNIA-
1976- BEST QUOTE OF OUR 60s and early 70s- Lost soul, high, in desert of lost hope, is
spiritually dying, but sees a hotel, like a mission church, with a beautiful
woman, death, inviting him inside to rest. Heaven or Hell, guided by
Death, he hears other residents welcoming him to their lost world.
California or californication is often a symbol for a lost cursed land of
plenty but wasted, in its ruined beauty it seduces lost souls to their ruin.
Lady Death has all the riches of Benzs and her vapid pretty boys, empty
of feelings, the "guests" dance in the heat of Hell. The
wine/spirit of 1969 is gone, the idealism of the Sixties, abandoned to empty
pleasures that need excuses to tolerate. The room is copy of brothel with
champagne riches. The people there put themselves there via empty chases
after sensation and that lure keeps them chasing. They try to eat and
kill their sins, but The Beast, Satan, can not be killed. Escape
is impossible. You can check out, die, anytime but can never escape your
wasted life.
The Eagles Hotel California
[Remastered] 01 Hotel California-1976
· Written by Don Felder, Glenn Frey and Don
Henley, this song is about materialism and excess. California is used as the
setting, but it could relate to anywhere in America. Don Henley in the
London Daily Mail November 9, 2007 said: "Some of the
wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the
excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about
the uneasy balance between art and commerce."
On November 25, 2007 Henley appeared on the TV news show 60 Minutes,
where he was told, "everyone wants to know what this song means."
Henley replied: "I know, it's so boring. It's a song about the dark
underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was
something we knew about."
He offered yet another interpretation in the 2013 History of the Eaglesdocumentary:
"It's a song about a journey from innocence to experience."
--------------
Canada”s military mission in Iraq A
closeup look at the fight against ISIS
ERBIL, Iraq — Abandoned villages, a shattered bridge,
hidden bombs and a steady stream of fighters headed to the frontline.
That’s the scene that greeted Canada’s top general as he
paid a dramatic visit to northern Iraq Thursday to the area where Canadian
special operations forces soldiers are aiding Peshmerga fighters.
Gen. Jonathan Vance, chief of defence staff, said the
Islamic State is doomed to defeat and predicted that Canadian forces and their
Peshmerga allies will play a key role in the coming battle for Mosul, the Iraqi
city that remains a key extremist stronghold.
“We are on key terrain with a key partner as what is being
billed as the final coup de grace of ISIL in Iraq occurs on Mosul,”
Vance said.
CTV News and The Toronto Star were on hand as Vance came to
take stock of Canada’s military mission, to “get eyes on as we contemplate next
steps in the campaign.”
For more than a year, a small group of Canadian special
operations forces soldiers have been working here, teaching Peshmerga troops
skills that range from the basics — map reading and shooting — to calling in
airstrikes.
That mission will get bigger in the coming months with the
Liberal decision to end airstrikes and instead triple the number of troops on
the ground to act as advisors.
The United States has also committed Apache attack
helicopters, more cash and more troops as Western nations lay the groundwork
for a final push to defeat ISIS, which has wreaked havoc across Iraq and Syria
since 2014.
With the extra personnel, Canada will stretch its reach in
this area west of Erbil, assisting Peshmerga along a line more than 100
kilometres long.
All of it is key terrain, some within sight of Mosul.
Vance predicts the battle for the city will unfold over the
coming year, a battle delayed as Iraqi forces first seek to oust Islamic
extremists from other sites across the country.
“There’s no question that Iraq and the coalition, they all
want to get on with it but there’s other things that have to get done,” said
Vance, who was making his first visit to Iraq since taking over as chief of
defence staff in 2015.
“For a battle that must be started correctly and finished
correctly, you don’t want to necessarily rush it,” Vance said.
But when that battle comes, Iraqi forces will squeeze Mosul
from the south and it will be up to the Peshmerga soldiers, mentored by Canadian
special operations forces troops, to protect the northern flank — and block the
ISIS’s path of escape.
“At some point, the coalition and Iraqi security forces
will deal with Mosul and our forces will be on vital ground, key to the
containment of ISIL,” Vance said.
Vance stressed that the Peshmerga — not Canadians — will be
on the frontline to hold Islamic State fighters in place. “We are responsible
to train and support them. They’re responsible to hold,” Vance said.
Canadian forces and their Peshmerga allies are already
eroding the Islamic State’s capabilities in Mosul, thanks to their proximity to
the city which enables intelligence collection and targeting, said Col. Andrew
Milburn of the U.S. Marines, who commands coalition special operations forces.
“It’s very careful targeting. Your guys are not causing
civilian casualties here. I can affirm that,” Milburn told the Star in an
interview earlier this week.
“That’s a hard claim to make but these guys are doing this
very well. They’re deliberately going after what we call key nodes in ISIS
infrastructure, leadership, (command and control) nodes,” he said.
It was Vance’s first visit to Iraq since taking over as top
general last summer and he saw firsthand the devastation caused by Daesh and
the ongoing disruption caused by the conflict.
Vance visited a key stretch of the highway linking Erbil
and Mosul where it crosses the Khazir River.
In 2014, this territory was all held by ISIS. With Erbil at
risk, Peshmerga forces counterattacked, pushing ISIS fighters back. In their
retreat, the militants blew up the bridge to stall the Peshmerga counterattack.
Today, two spans of the bridge are nothing more than
smashed concrete and twisted metal, resting in the river.
An improvised single-lane, steel girder bridge has been
erected in its place. On Thursday afternoon, a steady of cars passed by
carrying Peshmerga fighters headed to and from the front, just a short distance
to the west. Lacking military transport, they are forced to rely on their
personal vehicles to move about.
Three villages, all within eyesight, have been largely
abandoned and the buildings and terrain remain littered with explosive devices.
“Anything in the bushes, avoid it. The last thing I want is
for you guys is to step on something that goes boom,” a Canadian special
operations sergeant cautioned journalists as they awaited Vance’s arrival.
Indeed, the general’s visit — done under a tight cordon of
security provided by Canadian special operations forces troops — was not
without risk. ISIS militants are just a few kilometres away and their rockets
and mortars land on the riverside villages every day, the sergeant said.
Vance cast an expert eye on the demolished bridge and said
it highlights the capabilities of ISIS. “That’s a professional military act to
drop that bridge,” he said.
But while still dangerous, Vance painted a picture of ISIS
as a faltering force, starved of financing, losing terrain and forced to put
inexperienced personnel into battle as “cannon fodder.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind — and I don’t want to overplay
this — they will lose militarily in Iraq. It’s inevitable,” Vance said.
“But between now and the time they lose militarily they
still have the power to generate big events that can cause a lot of problems,”
he said.
That’s why local commanders like Maj.-Gen. Aziz Waisi,
commander of the Zeravini forces, express gratitude for the work of Canadian
soldiers — and appeal for more.
“The Canadian people should be proud of their forces on the
ground. They’re doing excellent work with us,” said Waisi, who accompanied
Vance.
But like others here, he pressed home their need for better
weapons to replace decades-old military gear, equipment like vehicles,
anti-tank weapons, night-vision goggles, robots to help defuse improvised
explosive devices and drones.
“We are hoping that Canada can assist us more,” Waisi said.
As part of its retooled mission, Canada has committed to
providing arms for a new Zeravini commando force. “As we form it and train it,
they’ll have the weapons necessary to do the job,” Vance said.
But he quickly adds, “we are not doing a wholesale
re-equipping of the Peshmerga.”
Canadian commanders have conceded that more troops on the
ground means more risk.
But Vance is hoping Canadians get behind the expanded
mission.
“Just because it’s hard and dangerous doesn’t mean it’s
bad,” Vance said.
“We do danger. That’s what a military force is for.
Canada’s military goes to dangerous places all the time. It’s always for a good
cause. I’d like very much for Canadians to put their shoulder behind what we’re
doing here,” Vance said.
“Despite the dangers, it is for a good cause,” he said.
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: War Hero George S.
McGovern opposed the Vietnam War- Castro Fixation and decried America's
capacity for Nuclear 'overkill'-I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up
wars 4 young men 2 die in..../musings.... God bless our troops and yours
Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro’s recent Atlantic
article, “America Can’t Do Much About ISIS,” advocated
containing the Islamic State and questioned America’s ability to destroy the
group. The first problem with this analysis is how the authors define “destroy
ISIS.” They compare the amorphous fight against al-Qaeda with the one against
ISIS, discussing how to get at the roots of its terrorist ideology and fix the
ungoverned space that provides its sanctuary. This leads them repeatedly to
conflate destroying ISIS in its current form as a quasi-state with the
monumental task of resolving the Syrian Civil War and the Sunni-Shia split in
Iraq. To the contrary, if the mission is properly defined, America can destroy
ISIS, and must.
James Jeffrey is the Philip Solondz distinguished fellow at
The Washington Institute, and a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. A
former infantry officer in the U.S. army, Ambassador Jeffrey served in Germany
and Vietnam from 1969 to 1976. Full Bio
Defeating ISIS-as-state is not dependent upon solving Syria
as a social, historical, cultural, religious, and governance project, let alone
doing the same with Iraq. ISIS feeds on the conflicts in both countries and
makes the situation in both worse. But it is possible to defeat ISIS as a
“state” and as a military-economic “power”—that is, deal with the truly
threatening part— without having to solve the Syrian and Iraqi crises or
eliminate ISIS as a set of terrorist cells or source of ideological
inspiration. Of course, even if ISIS is destroyed as a state, we would still
have the Syrian Civil War and Iraqi disunity, but we have all that now, along
with ISIS, which presents its own challenges to the region and the West.
Normally, if one opts not to ignore a foreign-policy
problem, the two choices are: Fix it (which in ISIS’s case would mean defeat
and destroy it, per America’s official policy), or contain it. The
choice is made based on an analysis of the likely costs and risks of
eliminating the problem versus those of living with it, as well as the impact
of one’s decision on broader concerns. From both points of view, Biddle and
Shapiro’s arguments are flawed.
Admittedly the costs of destroying ISIS as a jihadist
ideological movement, and its remnants as an insurgency (i.e., what it was in
Iraq before 2014), not to speak of “fixing” Syria and Iraq, are just as
daunting as Biddle and Shapiro repeatedly argue. But that isn’t, or shouldn’t
be, the mission. The mission should be crushing ISIS as a state and as a
military and economic power. That is a different challenge, and one far more
responsive to conventional military power. Local forces with minimal U.S.
indirect support have already made progress in some areas, including recently
in Shadadi, Syria, and Ramadi, Iraq. ISIS has fewer foot soldiers than at any time since
2014, and has problems, as the authors note, paying its bills.
A much more robust indirect support package of advisers,
artillery, and attack helicopters, more special-operations raids, and even more
liberal rules of engagement for air strikes than those just adopted (decentralizing strike
decisions, accepting slightly higher risk of civilian casualties, and using
more airpower and more powerful bombs) could generate more rapid victories. A
limited commitment of U.S. ground troops—two brigades of 5,000 troops each,
reinforced by other NATO forces, along with local allies—could make even more
rapid progress. These would supplement the 5,000 or so American troops now in Iraq training
local forces and the 250 special-operations forces just deployed to Syria. Thus even a tweaking of
current U.S. indirect support (now in the works), and certainly limited direct
American combat, could destroy ISIS relatively rapidly as a “state” and “army.”
That would leave a “day after” problem, but would solve ISIS-as-a-state.
And the U.S., at least sometimes, has effectively dealt
with such “days after” without massive American troop presence, from northern
Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991, to Kosovo, El Salvador, and Colombia. But even
a messy post-ISIS situation is better than containment, given that course’s
dangers and costs. It’s those, which the authors largely ignore, that have to
be weighed against the costs of destroying the ISIS state.
The costs of containment begin with a huge military
campaign, in terms of time (almost two years so far, with no end in sight), forces (thousands of American ground troops,
large coalition contributions, hundreds of aircraft, hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi regular and Iraqi and Syrian irregular forces), and money ($7 billion so far, with billions more spent by
the Iraqis), just to “contain” and slowly degrade ISIS.
If the Baghdad and Kurdistan governments start collapsing,
any ‘containment’ strategy would as well.
Right now, maintaining troops and dealing with millions of
internally displaced persons is bankrupting the Iraqi state (and the Kurdistan government) and generating much
political turbulence. If those governments start collapsing, any “containment”
strategy would as well.
Finally, if you don’t deal with a problem, particularly in
the Middle East, it usually gets worse. The Syrian Civil War, unchecked,
eventually spawned ISIS, a migration crisis straining
Europe, and a worrisome Russian intervention.
Until ISIS is destroyed as a state, it can still launch
horrific terrorist attacks, provoke political collapse in Baghdad or among the
Iraqi Kurds, and even trigger a descent into a Sunni-Shia regional conflict, if
Shia Iran targets ISIS and thereby threatens the Sunni Arab territory in which
ISIS is nested. (ISIS remnants could still threaten terrorist attacks, but not
of the same magnitude or with the same geostrategic consequences.)
The second consideration in any decision about how to
handle a foreign-policy problem is its impact on broader foreign relations. For
example, in 2007, the U.S. opted not to act itself against Syria’s secret
al-Kibar nuclear reactor, which Israel destroyed in an airstrike that year. This was not
because U.S. action was less risky than an Israeli attack, but largely because
America’s “plate” in the Middle East was full with two wars, along with
negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But today, after Obama’s 2013 failure to enforce his self-declared “red line”
against the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the forces of Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad, the U.S. needs to build credibility that it will follow up
threats of force with action to counter states like Iran, Russia, China, and
North Korea that threaten the existing global order. The best place to build
such credibility, with maximum chance of success and least escalation risk, is
the fight against ISIS.
Finally, Biddle and Shapiro’s arguments all would have
sounded equally reasonable if made against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
Syrian intervention. But he went ahead, and with a fraction of America’s
diplomatic and military capabilities achieved a limited but important victory,
avoiding the “quagmire” President Obama predicted. And America can’t?
The battlefield of today’s world will be a relatively
sparse one. Thanks to advancements in technology, wars will be fought with the
push of a button rather than an invasion of thousands of troops à la World War
2. We are seeing technology rise to the forefront of military operations and be
utilized in lieu of the human soldier. What are the implications for this
intersection of technology and its military usage? That is the question I will
seek to answer this summer through my contributions to the blog. By exploring
the mechanics and implications of drone usage and the newfound battle arena of
cyber warfare, I will attempt to paint a picture of our modern war landscape
and question how this technology changes the nature of war and our
understanding of it. I will do these through short exposes on various fields
within drone and cyber war, focusing on topics as the National Security Agency,
the use of robots, and computer worms like Stuxnet.
So what does our Revolution look like? 21st
century warfare will inevitably be dominated by information technologies that
lend an increased accuracy and lethality to fighting.5 In defining
information technologies, I refer to computers and other communications platforms
such as cellphones and televisions.6 Here, I will outline a few
characteristics of what is currently happening with war and what we can expect
in the future.
·With the use now of Unmanned Arial
Vehicles (UAVS, aka drones) and the ability for computers to monitor and launch
attacks thousands of miles from an intended target, our capability to conduct
surveillance and lead orchestrated attacks has risen.7
·A marked increase in involvement of the
civilian sector in military affairs as corporate contractors begin to develop
and supply more weaponry.8 For example, as Time reports, the
2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States “has been the most privatized engagement
in U.S. history, with private contractors actually outnumbering traditional
troops.”9
·Steven Metz, a researcher at the Strategic
Studies Institute in Pennsylvania notes that, “ ‘information superiority’ will
be the lifeblood of a post-modern military and thus the key to battlefield
success.”10 Who, right now, is capable of such “information
superiority”? The United States. Political theorists cite the 1991 Gulf War as
a turning point for U.S. military operations, that the technology we developed
to refine our air strike capabilities finally proved itself in battle.11
We are continuing that trajectory today in developing and applying new
technologies to the battlefield and fueling asymmetry.
·There will be a rise in asymmetrical
warfare.12 This type of warfare occurs when a powerful entity, such
as the United States, has an advantage (currently in the field of military
technology) over other states that are weaker in that field.13 This
promotes the use of atypical military tactics by these weaker states to subvert
and counteract the advancement of the U.S military.14 Examples of
asymmetrical warfare in recent times include 9/11, where terrorists utilized
planes and box cutters, seemingly ordinary objects, and used them as weapons
against the powerful U.S.15
This Revolution is ongoing and has consequences in the
field of military policy and action. What we must consider now is the nature of
warfare and how it will change…exploring the rise of the drone and computer as
modern weapons of warfare is a good start. Stay tuned.
Works Cited:
Krepinevich, Andrew F. “Cavalry to
Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions.” The National Interest,
no. 37 (1994): 30-42. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42896863,
34.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 36.
Cohen, Eliot A. “A Revolution in Warfare.”
Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2 (1996): 37-54. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047487,
43.
Metz, Steven. Armed Conflict in the
21st Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare. Carlisle,
PA: Strategic Studies Institute, War Army Collee, 2000, 5.
Cohen, Foreign Affairs, 37.
Metz, Armed Conflict in the 21st
Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare, 6.
Anna Silk is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University
originally from Los Angeles, California. Majoring in International Studies with
a concentration in Security Studies and a minor in History, she hopes to work
in the field of international affairs one day. She discovered her passion for
the subject during a yearlong independent research project she completed in
high school on U.S. counterterrorism actions against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Other topics she is interested in include nuclear
non-proliferation issues, cyber warfare, and bioweapons.
When a Millennial employee swipes their card to gain access
to the company’s building, their interests, networks, and personal passions
don’t remain at the door. After all, the concept of work-life balance is not a
term with which Millennials are familiar. They live an environment where
work-life blending is the norm. Like it or not, the lines are blurring.
When it comes to community engagement, the lines are also
blurred. Millennials see their involvement with causes not as a thing that
happens outside of work, but as an interest to be explored throughout the day.
The data continues to suggest that Millennials place higher value on companies
that offer service and pro-bono, skills-based volunteering opportunities.
If this is the case, then why are Millennial employees not
getting involved in your organization’s CSR programming?
The answer lies in how corporations approach volunteer
programming, and whether or not they can be an asset in a Millennial’s search
for community interaction, experimentation and action.
It
is Not About Your Company
Millennials are interested in making things happen in their
communities, and look to any institution – their work, home, and/or faith – to
channel their passion. When doing ‘good’ through the company is focused on
corporate attention in the process, it will loose its importance with
Millennial employees. Millennials care about the issues, not the company
wanting to gain awareness for efforts addressing the issues. The goal of the
company should be to help Millennials channel their passion to causes and
experiment with service to find the issues they care about.
It
Is About Being Challenged
Millennials are inspired by the opportunity to tackle a
challenge, build a prototype that will solve a problem, and create a concrete
solution. Volunteer programming based on long standing relationships with
community organizations is appreciated, but may not be personal and challenging
to the Millennial. Identifying and providing opportunities that will challenge
their thinking and test their skills will draw them closer to community
organizations and ultimately more service.
The
Big Question – Why?
Millennials need to know why their participation in service
or workplace giving matters. Not why it matters to the company, but why their
work will matter to the people they help. If companies are going to ask
Millennials to participate in service, just like nonprofits, they need to report
back on the people helped and how the community issue is different because of
their efforts. Even if the experience is a one-time volunteer project, it is
imperative that Millennials are provided feedback to quickly inspire future
engagement. Remember: this generation gets instantaneous feedback from social
networking all the time.
The ultimate goal of any corporation is to be the
conduit for Millennial cause action. Companies acting as honest and fair
brokers of Millennial service, skill, and interest with causes will move into a
different role than where they are currently. This new role, as manager and
advisor to Millennials on their cause interests, will place a new value on the
company. A value driven by their Millennial employees that represents one of
trust, appreciation, and openness to a very personal thing – the issues in the
community that drive their passion. The bottom line? Millennials invested in
the ethos of the company.
Join us on July 18, 2013 at MCON
to explore how Millennials are redefining their workplace engagement,
connection with causes, and how they activate for good.
Analysis of Financial Support to the
Surviving Spouses and Children of Casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Research Questions
How have the deaths of service members
during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan affected the subsequent labor market
earnings of their surviving spouses?
Do survivor benefits provided by the
Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the
Social Security Administration (SSA) compensate for lost household earnings?
This study examines how the deaths of service members
during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have affected the subsequent labor
market earnings of their surviving spouses and the extent to which survivor
benefits provided by the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans
Affairs, and the Social Security Administration compensate for lost household
earnings. It also assesses the extent to which payments that surviving spouses
and children receive compensate for earnings losses attributable to combat
deaths. The labor market earnings of households experiencing a combat death in
the years following deployment are compared with those of deployed but
uninjured service-member households. Because the risk of combat death is likely
to be correlated with characteristics of service members that could themselves
affect household labor market outcomes (e.g., pay grade, military occupation,
risk-taking behavior), the study controlled for a rich array of
individual-level characteristics, including labor market outcomes for both
service members and spouses prior to deployment. This approach includes
potentially unobserved factors that are unique to specific households and fixed
over time and increases the likelihood that the results capture the causal
effect of combat death on household earnings.
Key Findings
Household Labor Market Earnings Decline Substantially in the
Years Following the Combat Death of a Member of the Household
·Household earnings losses following the
combat death of a household member are economically large and persistent over
time.
·Most (approximately 90 percent) of the
losses can be attributed to the loss of the deceased service member's own
earnings, with the remainder attributable to declines in spousal earnings.
·Recurrent benefits replace a substantial
fraction of earnings losses, but meaningful income losses remain after taking
them into account.
·The combined value of recurrent and
lump-sum benefits can fully offset household earnings losses for 20 years or
more.
Toward the Development of New Recruiting Policy Options
Although the military's need for enlisted personnel has
declined by almost one-third since the end of the cold war, the armed services
are finding it difficult to meet their recruiting goals. Among ongoing changes
in the civilian labor market is a strong demand for skilled labor, which has
prompted an increasing number of "high quality" youth to pursue
post-secondary education and subsequent civilian employment. Because of this
competition for high quality youth, the Department of Defense may want to
explore new options for attracting desirable young people into the armed
forces. The military, for example, offers a myriad of options for service
members to take college courses while in active service. However, the programs
do not in fact generate significant increases in educational attainment during
time in service. One popular program, the Montgomery GI Bill, enrolls large
numbers of individuals, but the vast majority of service members use their
benefits after separating from service. Thus, the military does not receive the
benefits of a more educated and productive workforce, unless the individuals
subsequently join a reserve component. The authors suggest the Department of
Defense should consider nontraditional policy options to enhance recruitment of
college-bound youth. Recruiters could target more thoroughly students on
two-year college campuses, or dropouts from two- or four-year colleges. Options
for obtaining some college before military service could be expanded by
allowing high school seniors to first attend college, paid for by the military,
and then enlist. Or the student might serve in a reserve component while in
college and then enter an active component after college. Alternatively, the
military could create an entirely new path for combining college and military
service by encouraging enlisted veterans to attend college and then reenlist
(at a higher pay grade). The most promising alternatives should be evaluated in
a national experiment designed to test their effectiveness and
cost-effectiveness, similar to the one that led to the creation of the Army College
Fund and the Navy College Fund.
USA- Alternative Ways to Meet Your Goals
Without Joining The Military
There are many reasons people consider joining the
military. You may be thinking about money for college, job training or the
physical challenge. You may just need to get out of the house, out of the
neighborhood, out on your own. You may want to travel, serve your country, or
do something meaningful with your life.
Before you consider enlistment, it is important to know of
the hundreds of other options available for you.
Paying for College
The government provides financial aid to help students pay
for college. There are also millions of dollars available in scholarships and
grants.
FAFSA
(Free Application for Federal Student Aid).
Apply for student financial aid from the federal government, including grants,
loans, & work-study. Its free. You can download FAFSA forms in English or
Spanish, get help filling out the forms and track the status of your
application. www.fafsa.ed.gov.
Federal Student Aid Information Center 1-800-4-FED-AID (1-800-433-3243)
Scholarship
Search Tools. There are several web tools that
help you search for scholarships.
Want to become a culinary artist or learn cosmetology?
Maybe, you want to learn a skilled trade that will provide you with a good
living. If this type of future is where you see yourself heading, but you don’t
have the necessary skills, you can get job training from a variety of sources.
Non-profits, community colleges, large corporations and vocational schools
provide the necessary skills training to do a variety of jobs and skilled
trades. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate among military veterans age 20-24
is three times higher than the national average. Before you think about the
military, check out these options.
Directories
and Databases
·Vocational Information Center. This is a GREAT
website. It includes a searchable directory of trade, career & technical
schools, and apprenticeships, and much more.
Be sure to do a background check on a school before signing
up. Many of them are completely legit, but some are a rip-off. Here are some tips on how to do this.
National
Opportunities>
·Job Corps. This program gets you out of the
house, and provides academic, vocational, and social skills training you need
to gain independence and get quality, long-term jobs or further your education.
·YouthBuild. Teaches young people how to build new
homes for people in need, and new lives for themselves. Receive a combination
of classroom academic and job skills development and on-site training in a
construction trade.
·Americorps. Jobs in all types of community
programs. Provides training, work experience, stipend and scholarships.
Finding a Job
Finding a job is a lot of work. Start by checking out your
local newspapers to get an idea of what is out there and what you are qualified
for.
See the World : Living/Working/Volunteering Abroad
“Traveling” with the military doesn’t exactly mean
traveling. If you are lucky enough not to get sent to a war zone, you’ll spend
most of your time on a US military base, oftentimes to a country that doesn’t
welcome the US Army. “Traveling” with the Navy can mean 6 months confined to a
ship, without ever going ashore. If this is not what you have in mind, there
are many other options.
·Peace Brigades International (Guatemala,
Columbia, and Indonesia). PBI offers volunteer positions, paid job positions
(which are limited) and internships.
·Service Civil International. Has short term (2-
weeks) and long term (3-12 months) opportunities that costs approximately $175
plus cost of travel. Includes food and housing.
·VE Global
Voluntarios de la Esperanza. This program offers an intensive
(living with host family) and part time (mostly administrative work) program in
Chile. This unpaid program last three months and will require some out of
pocket expenses.
Many young people feel that the only way they can serve
their country and community is to join the military. That is not true! There
are many opportunities to become a hero, build communities, and promote peace
and justice without risking your life or taking another.
An excellent book of alternatives called “It’s My Life” is available FREE to
youth. Websites that can give you some ideas, tips, next steps, and
local, national, and international professional and volunteer opportunities:
With many others, I serve on the Leadership Council of The Franklin
Project at the Aspen Institute. This is a bipartisan initiative led
by retired General Stanley McChrystal, working to transform how we think about
national service. The Franklin Project believes that a year of service should
be a common opportunity, civic rite of passage and cultural expectation for
young Americans. From the birth of our nation through today, America has always
recognized that a commitment to each other and a sense of shared responsibility
to our country as citizens is a critical part of our security and well-being as
a nation.
Transforming the idea of national service here at home and
elevating it as an issue in our personal conversations, political debates and
media coverage is going to require a serious concerted effort. The time is ripe
for this sort of vision, particularly in light of the upcoming presidential
elections. While nothing may be more powerful than an idea whose time has come,
the idea needs a campaign behind it with surrogates and visionaries to amplify
the idea around the country. Between the barbecues and fireworks of this July
4th holiday, let us think about the sacrifices made for our nation and the
sacrifices we as a nation can make today for its future.
National service doesn’t just make an impact on local
communities and provide skills and benefits to the individual doing the
service, but it also has the potential to get more young people interested in
careers in foreign policy and national security. There are a wide array of
service programs, some of which develop skills that would be extremely
beneficial to the next generation of security and foreign policy leaders. There
are many individuals who may be interested in serving their country, but are
either not qualified or interested in joining the military. Exposing young
people to service programs like FEMA Corps, Global HealthCorps & Peace
Corps can expose them to crisis response here at home and working to address
various challenges in countries around the globe.
Without private-public partnerships and investment, we will
never be able to get to the transformative vision towards which the Franklin
Project and its National Service Alliance are working. Americans have a strong
desire to serve, but right now there simply aren’t enough full-time
opportunities to meet the demand. For example, just one in three Peace Corps
applicants are able to serve and hundreds of thousands are turned away from
AmeriCorps. Just last week, national service funding has been put at risk on
Capitol Hill. The House and Senate are each considering bills that would reduce
the budget of the Corporation for National Service, or CNCS, by up to $370
million, a 34 percent reduction over the previous year. These proposed cuts
would remove AmeriCorps members from schools and communities, and would
eliminate several core programs that serve millions of seniors, at-risk youth,
veterans and people with disabilities. These bills would destroy the
public-private partnership approach of national service that last year
generated $873 million in outside resources to increase community impact and
stretch the federal dollar. CNCS funds should not be cut. Investing in national
service yields significant return on investment for our nation – not just in
the problems it can help us to address – but in terms of economic savings.
Every federal dollar invested in national service yields $2.20 in savings to
other government programs. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?sz=600x300&c=525346080&iu=%2F617%2Fdefenseone.com%2Fsection_ideas%2Fcontent%2Fpid_116872&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3Dwww.ask.com%26pos%3Ddefenseone-instream%26level%3D0
The Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute recently
launched its own corps of ambassadors to serve as powerful voices on national
service in local communities around our country. For the United States, at the
most basic level, the role of our ambassadors around the globe has been to
represent the interests and policies of our country. Similarly, The Franklin Project Ambassadors Program has
selected 45 individuals around the country based on their service experience
and demonstrated leadership to help advance the Franklin Project vision in
local communities across the country – in 35 cities across 25 states. These
ambassadors encourage discussion of national service in the 2016 election
conversation, increase service year positions in their communities and foster
the next generation of national service leaders. These leaders will also be
executing a local event in their respective cities over the upcoming year. This
month, these ambassadors traveled to the Washington DC area to participate in
an intensive 3-day training to prepare them for this mission.
National service has traditionally been a bipartisan issue.
Presidents on both sides of the aisle have played a role in advancing service
in our country through the creation of new programs and the expansion of
existing ones. Let us this July 4th ask all those candidates aspiring the
presidency to make a similar public commitment to national service.
Building a next generation of American foreign policy and
national security leaders requires new options for national service.
2da youngbloods NOT going to
sacrifice 4 flag and nation- It's 2016 folks and we are in a f**king mess... UN
is worse than Leage of Nations.... and nations at war same as when time
began... we need education and prosperity for all not hate and war.... so let's dump the politicos and $$$ men and
let nations look after nations.... links
-------------
#BarackObama4SecretaryGeneralUN - clean that filthy house up.... u'd b perfect
Apr 12, 2016 ... Who is in the running to succeed Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general of the UnitedNations? ... Just as Campaign 2016 could end up with the election of the first female US president, there's a strong possibility that the next head of the UN will become the organisation's first female .... Obama laughs at WHCD ...
www.frontpagemag.com/.../why-obama-un-secretary-general-very-unlikely-daniel-greenfield - Cached - Similar
12 Jan 2016 ... Even OIC support would be far from certain now that the Saudis and their ... This is the sort of job that Kerry is insane enough to want. ... what Obama and Netanyahu are doing than any American or Israeli ... If Obama becomes UN Secretary General, that is the final ... He needs to pay the price of traitors.
To become UN Sec GeneralObama must 'Solve' the Existence ... the beginning of a runfor UNSecretaryGeneral, ... Obama’s orders when he runsfor UN ...
---------- THE CRUELTY OF THE GOOD ONES... who have had their souls stolen by the vicious hate and cruelty in the real world of truly evil hate... and when the come home... the haunting begins... and their comrades who died right there by them.... Canada's Soldiers of Suicide- and this is how Canada treats her sons and daughters who souls are 2 haunted to live.... CANADA'S SOLDIERS OF SUICIDE... PTSD-
Left behind
After an army captain took his life, his family turned to a scholarship program for children of fallen soldiers. They didn’t get the help they expected, Renata D’Aliesio reports
Sherri Elms and her children Jake and Stephanie looking through old family photos at their home in Kingston.
JOHNNY C Y LAM/FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Sherri Elms was walking to her office when she received a much-anticipated e-mail from Canada Company, a charity that has the ear of the military and federal government and the backing of some of the country’s most prominent business leaders and wealthiest people.
A pharmacist and military wife, she had inquired about the organization’s scholarship program for children of fallen soldiers. Her husband, a respected infantry officer who did tours in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Afghanistan, had died nearly five months earlier, on a chilly overcast morning in Kingston, in November, 2014.
The sudden death of Captain Brad Elms of the Royal Canadian Regiment shook many in the Canadian Forces. The country’s top commander, General Jonathan Vance, then a lieutenant-general, flew in for his funeral.
“Your husband, and his enormous contribution to our nation, is an account of both great pride and tremendous tragedy for all of Canada, an account that very few Canadians will ever understand,” read the first part of the e-mail to Ms. Elms from Canada Company president Angela Mondou.
Ms. Elms was told her inquiry was carefully considered. But the charity’s three-member scholarship committee – which includes philanthropist Garfield Mitchell, Bay Street legal titan William Braithwaite and Canada Company founder Blake Goldring – concluded that her two children were not eligible for the education fund because the circumstances of her husband’s death did not meet the organization’s scholarship criteria.
The rub is this: Capt. Elms did not die a war hero in Afghanistan. The 51-year-old soldier, one of about 40,000 who served in Canada’s longest military operation, took his life five years after returning from the Kandahar battlefront. He had been treated on and off for major depressive disorder for about a decade. His family believes he also had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he never sought a diagnosis because he worried it would destroy his army career.
“It just crushed me that Brad’s service was so discounted,” Ms. Elms says, her children, Jake and Stephanie, by her side in their old brick house near Queen’s University. “How is 33 years of service, four tours, any less honourable?”
Captain Brad Elms and Governor General David Johnston.
COURTESY SHERRI ELMS
Capt. Elms is part of a growing list of casualties that had long been hidden. Officially, 158 Canadian soldiers died on the Afghanistan mission, which ended in 2014. What had not been public until recently was that at least 62 military members and veterans have killed themselves after returning from the gruelling operation, swelling the war’s toll to 220, a continuing Globe and Mail investigation has found.
The Afghanistan mission was a contributing factor in some of the suicides, although it is unclear how many. A military board of inquiry determined that Capt. Elms’ death was attributable to his military service. Veterans Affairs concluded his service-connected mental illness was “the underlying cause of his death.”
Even so, the fact that Capt. Elms killed himself means his legacy and his family are treated differently in a number of ways. His name – and those of the 61 others – is not on Afghanistan war memorials. There is no grand public thank-you for their service or collective embrace for their loved ones’ grief.
Captain Brad Elms and his son, Jake.COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
For Ms. Elms, the scholarship rejection from Canada Company landed like a sucker punch. She stood on the sidewalk and cried after reading the charity’s e-mail on her phone on March 31, 2015. What stung was the message – and what it symbolized about military suicide. It made the family feel as if others thought the army captain’s death was shameful, and that he was less of a soldier because he took his own life. The rejection seemed out of step with the Canadian Forces’ evolving thinking on suicide and with the public’s increasing awareness of PTSD. It was a harsh reminder of the discord between the ideal of military strength and the reality of mental illness.
“It was like rubbing salt into the wound,” Stephanie, 21, says of Canada Company’s decision. “They don’t want to see this nitty-gritty suicide thing. It doesn’t fit with the narrative of the glorified soldier.”
No members of Canada Company’s scholarship committee were available to comment to The Globe, after repeated requests over six weeks. Ms. Mondou, who was a captain in the air force and worked as a logistics officer in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf War, says the issue of suicide was not contemplated when the scholarship program was created in 2007, at the height of Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan. The query from Ms. Elms was the charity’s first scholarship request from the family of a soldier who died this way.
Your husband, and his enormous contribution to our nation, is an account of both great pride and tremendous tragedy for all of Canada, an account that very few Canadians will ever understand.
General Jonathan Vance, then a lieutenant-general, in an email to Sherri Elms
Ms. Mondou notes that Canada Company’s education fund is finite and was established specifically for children of Forces members killed while on a military operation. She adds that donors provided funding on the basis of this mandate, and that the scholarship program has not received government money.
“We have a commitment to our donors to support the children of Canadian soldiers who … have been killed while serving in an active role in a military mission, and we take that very seriously,” Ms. Mondou says. The scholarship committee’s decision was fully supported by the charity’s board of directors, Ms. Mondou adds. Donors, she says, were not consulted about Ms. Elms’ request.
Canada Company has made exceptions to its eligibility criteria in the past for children of parents killed in training mishaps in Canada and while on leave from overseas operations. The charity’s education fund, valued at nearly $2.6-million at the end of 2014, is one of largest private scholarship programs for children of military members.
Family photo of Captain Brad Elms, his wife Sherri and his son Jake.
REPRODUCED BY JOHNNY C Y LAM/COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
The Globe surveyed 21 other private and government education-assistance programs available to children of fallen veterans and found that only one other – the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Fallen Heroes Scholarship – does not include students who lost a parent to suicide. In one other case – the Project Hero scholarship that is offered at about 60 colleges and universities and affiliated with Canada Company – the participating institutions have no common policy on inclusion of deaths by suicide.
“It is crass and has to be completely changed,” he said while in Toronto for a screening of the Afghanistan war film Hyena Road. “The children of those who are suffering from PTSD are living in hell, and there is next to no support for them,” he added. “You have an organization that could, in fact, pull them out of that and give them a breath of hope.”
After Canada Company’s rejection, the Elms family did not apply for other military-related scholarships. Ms. Elms says they just could not endure another battle after what they went through in Capt. Elms’ final years, in which the proud and caring soldier, father and husband unravelled after his return from Afghanistan. He was, by the end, scarcely recognizable.
Broken bootstraps
Tall, smart and pragmatic, Brad Elms was also a tremendous athlete who won the army’s version of the Ironman race.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
Capt. Elms was once a poster boy for the superhuman. At the age of 29, he won the military’s version of the Ironman at the Petawawa base, northwest of Ottawa. The punishing race starts with a 32-kilometre run in combat boots and a 40-pound rucksack on the shoulders. Next, contestants must carry a canoe over their head for four kilometres and make their way to the Ottawa River for an eight-kilometre paddle before a six-kilometre push on foot to the finish – still in combat boots, still hauling the rucksack.
Capt. Elms was “a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-and-get-on-with-it” kind of man, Ms. Elms recalls. “‘That’s how you win an Ironman,’ he would say. ‘Put one foot in front of the other and keep going – no matter what.’”
The couple were teenagers when they met on the dance floor of a bar near the Gagetown base in New Brunswick. Sherri McHarg, a bright, sweet-looking pharmacy student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was visiting her father for the summer. Capt. Elms was a private then, fresh into his military career. The Ontario-raised soldier was tall, smart, eloquent and pragmatic. He was an emotional rock with a soft side, courting his future wife with song.
He enlisted in the army right after high school. He did not come from a rich military family background, but he had found a sense of belonging in the cadets program during a difficult stretch in his teen years. His first overseas deployment was to Somalia in December, 1992, with the Canadian Airborne Regiment. The country’s residents were starving; a United Nations peacekeeping mission was organized to thwart the theft of international aid.
Brad was a pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it [kind of man]. ‘That’s how you win an Ironman,’ he would say. ‘Put one foot in front of the other and keep going – no matter what.’
Sherri Elms
Canadian troops won praise for distributing humanitarian supplies and helping establish civilian police in their area of responsibility. But the horrific torture and killing of a 16-year-old Somali boy who had sneaked into a Canadian military compound cast a shadow over the country’s efforts. Two soldiers were charged in the slaying and one was convicted of manslaughter. The federal government later disbanded the Airborne regiment.
The Somalia tour left a deep mark on Capt. Elms. He lost a close friend on the mission. Corporal Michael Abel was shot and killed on May 3, 1993, when a fellow member accidentally discharged his rifle while cleaning it. Capt. Elms was nearby, and Cpl. Abel had been like a little brother to him.
Cpl. Abel’s death was one of several “emotionally traumatic events” that Capt. Elms was exposed to during his deployments, according to a partly censored military board of inquiry report on his suicide. Details of the traumatic events were blacked out in the 18-page report provided to his widow in August, 2015. What exactly he witnessed and experienced in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Afghanistan is a mystery to his family. Like many soldiers, he did not talk about the harsh realities of war or peacekeeping with his spouse and kids.
Captain Brad Elms and his son Jake.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
Based with the Royal Canadian Regiment in Gagetown from 1994 to 2005, Capt. Elms was diagnosed with clinical depression after his Bosnia deployment. But it was not until he returned from a seven-month tour in Afghanistan in the spring of 2009 that his family noticed a big change in him. He started drinking heavily. His son and daughter, who were teenagers at the time, began tiptoeing around the house for fear of setting him off.
He would get angry at everything and nothing. He would yell if a cup was left on the kitchen counter or if the house did not look clean enough. Jake often intervened in screaming matches between his father and mother.
“I had to keep yelling him down,” Jake, 23, remembers. “His reaction to things was totally disproportional to what was actually happening.”
The honours student struggled to cope with his new home life. It became harder to remember the father that was. Capt. Elms used to take his children camping and hiking. He got them into running and helped them with their essays. He had encouraged them to excel, in and out of the classroom.
Capt. Elms never hit his wife or children, but he did not have to lay a hand on his family to hurt them. He was an imposing figure – husky with a deep voice. His words cut deep.
“The person that I grew up with and went camping with in New Brunswick was not the same person,” his daughter explains at the family’s dining table. “It wasn’t because my dad suddenly realized he was going to be an asshole for the rest of his life. It was because he was so, so sick.”
Dire choices
Eleven months before his death, Capt. Elms wrote a list of options for his future: divorce; no divorce, just leave and send money; get out of the military; stay; and suicide. Suicide was listed first.
He then wrote that he would never do any of the above because he was “a crazy, angry, abusive, fuck-up.”
Ms. Elms found the note after his death on a clipboard in his woodworking section of the garage. “It was full of self-loathing,” she says. She shredded the paper.
“He never felt it was his illness,” his daughter notes. “He felt like he had done all this awful wrong in his life.”
In my view, those who commit suicide and it is deemed caused or contributed to by service to Canada, their children must be treated like those of casualties that are caused by direct physical action. Mental injuries are every bit as devastating as physical ones and we [should] look after their survivors in an appropriate manner.
Retired general and former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier
In his last year, Capt. Elms confessed to his wife that he had been thinking about taking his life. But he tried to dissuade her from mentioning it to his commanders. He told her, “You can’t use the S word, Sherri, because if you use that, I will not be deployable. And then I might as well be dead.”
Worried about his safety, Ms. Elms told his boss, padre, family doctor and friends that he was not well and was thinking about suicide. He denied it when they asked him. The weekend before he died, Ms. Elms wanted to take him to the emergency department for treatment. He told her to go ahead and try – he would just lie again.
Capt. Elms was smart, but did not have a diploma or a degree. He feared seeking help would end his military career and he did not know what else he could do for a living. About 15,000 members have been dismissed from the military for medical reasons since 2001, when the 9/11 attacks triggered the Afghanistan war. Some are too ill to work or have not found steady employment.
The battered captain began spending a lot of time at home in the final days of his life. He had left the family earlier that year for a woman about 15 years his junior with a young child. The relationship did not work out.
Captain Brad Elms and his daughter Stephanie during a marathon run.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
The former Ironman winner and marathon runner looked drained. He sat in the basement and cried in front of his daughter. He had dropped about 30 pounds and was down to 167 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame. “He was a shell of a man,” his daughter says.
Capt. Elms’ suicide stunned the military. He was a methodical and meticulous infantryman who polished his boots with ritualistic care. The inquiry into his death found that “he was respected by those he worked with and had a reputation as an intense and highly dedicated soldier.”
But he also hid the true extent of his condition. The inquiry report notes that he minimized his mental-health concerns when dealing with his commanders and medical professionals to avoid a negative impact on his ability to deploy. He was worried about his future after the military and frustrated with his reversion to captain after filling in at the rank of major, the inquiry found.
“He was operationally focused and a significant part of his self-worth was tied to his life as a soldier and his ability to conduct operations,” the report states.
Capt. Elms never received the urgent care he needed.
His family is working to come to terms with his suicide and years of living with his undiagnosed PTSD. All three are in therapy. They hope lessons from Capt. Elms’ death will bring changes. They want the Forces to overhaul its post-deployment screening process for combat and peacekeeping missions. Instead of asking soldiers whether they are experiencing mental-health problems after an operation, the Elms believe the military should assume they are and treat them pro-actively.
They also want military doctors to involve soldiers’ families in their care, so they can offer the truth if members lie about their mental health. Other families and veterans’ groups have recommended this before, but privacy concerns have stymied change. Soldiers are treated by the military’s medical system, while their families fall under provincial health care.
“He was, in his soul, a soldier’s soldier. He kept going when nobody else could,” says Ms. Elms, who works in the department of family medicine at Queen’s. “They have to recognize that you train these people to be soldiers, so it’s going to be harder to treat them. It’s going to be harder to get to them. It’s going to be harder for them to stop moving forward and admit that they have a problem, because you’ve trained them to walk until they die.”
A lingering stigma
A military board of inquiry determined that Capt. Brad Elms’ suicide was attributable to his 33-year military service.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
At the Toronto Market Exchange on a recent sunny morning, a group of bankers, traders and veterans’ advocates gathered to set off the market’s opening siren and announce a new scholarship program for children of military members.
The Wounded Warriors Canada education fund is the first in the country specifically designed for children of members with PTSD or other service-connected mental illnesses. Phil Ralph, the charity’s national program director, hopes it will help children heal.
The fund has netted $40,000 in donations so far and is supported by The Bay Street Children’s Foundation, CIBC, RBC and the Investment Technology Group (ITG). In the program’s first year, eight children will receive up to $5,000 each for the first year of their postsecondary studies. Students whose parents died by suicide will be eligible.
“The stresses and things that these guys are going through when they come back sometimes will lead to suicide. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, and that … shouldn’t exclude any of their children,” says James Duncan, who is director of sales and trading at ITG and founder of The Bay Street Children’s Foundation, which helped launch the new scholarship program. Suicide, he adds, is “not a dishonourable thing, in my mind. This is another one of the problems that come out of battle.”
Captain Brad Elms and his wife Sherri in Paris.REPRODUCED BY JOHNNY C Y LAM/COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
Before Ms. Elms sent her query to Canada Company in February, 2015, she did her homework. She looked up the charity’s previous scholarship winners. The organization appeared to apply a broad brush to the condition that a member must have been “killed while serving in an active role in a military mission” since Jan. 1, 2002. The organization granted scholarships to the children of a father who died in a moped accident in Greece while on a three-day leave from his Kosovo tour in 1999. In three other cases, exceptions were made for training accidents on home soil.
In all, the charity has awarded 87 scholarships to 33 children since its fund was established in 2007. Students receive up to $4,000 per year during their studies, for up to four years. Many of the recipients lost a father in the Afghanistan conflict – to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and firefights. The scholarship program has made a big difference in their lives and fostered a community among the children of the fallen.
“We have a lot of companies and organizations that say they support the troops, but some don’t do anything,” says scholarship recipient Jocelyn Ranger, whose father, Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girouard, was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in November, 2006. “Canada Company has been incredibly good to me and my family.”
The Toronto-based charity has amassed an impressive list of influential members and financial backers in its decade of operation. Created at a time when Canadian soldiers were dying in theatre at a rate not seen since the Korean War, the organization has pledged to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with military members and to raise awareness in the corporate world about their work and sacrifices.
Captain Brad Elms and his children Jake and Stephanie.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
The scholarship program was Canada Company’s first major initiative. Financial supporters include CIBC, TD Bank Financial Group, Scotiabank, BMO Financial Group, RBH Inc., W. Garfield Weston Foundation, AGF Management, Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk, Paul Desmarais Jr. of Power Corp., and Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research In Motion and current chairman of the Council of Canadian Innovators. Senior military officials have attended Canada Company’s scholarship ceremonies. So did Peter MacKay in 2012, when he was defence minister in the Conservative government.
The charity’s focus has since expanded to include assisting released military members find civilian jobs. That program operates in partnership with Veterans Affairs and the Canadian Forces and has helped connect nearly 1,300 vets with jobs. The charity is also spearheading a federally sponsored program to convert decommissioned light-armoured vehicles into 250 monuments to be installed in communities across Canada. The armoured vehicles were used in the Afghanistan war.
Canada Company is one of many veterans’ groups included in stakeholder meetings with Veterans Affairs. The Globe requested several times over six weeks, through charity president Ms. Mondou, to speak with Canada Company founder Blake Goldring, but did not hear from him. An e-mailed request was also sent to AGF Management, where Mr. Goldring is CEO.
Mr. Goldring, who is chairman of Canada Company’s board of directors and a member of its scholarship committee, has received numerous honours for his charity work, including a meritorious service medal from the Governor-General and a Vimy Award from the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. In 2011, he was appointed the first Honorary Colonel of the Canadian Army.
Ms. Elms’ scholarship query was reviewed by both the scholarship committee and the board of directors, Ms. Mondou says. All three scholarship-committee members are on the 12-member board. On March 12, 2015, Ms. Mondou told Ms. Elms in an e-mail that her request was a high priority for the charity and that a final decision would be provided in about two weeks.
On March 31, that decision was relayed: Stephanie and Jake were not eligible for the scholarship program because their father did not die on a mission. Suicide, Ms. Mondou explained to The Globe, was not part of the original mandate of the scholarship fund and never has been.
“The reality is we still have many children remaining who are eligible,” Ms. Mondou says. “To expand beyond our current mandate could deplete the fund or impact those current children who are on the eligibility list as of now.”
When the scholarship program was created, the charity estimated about 100 students would apply, based on the mission deaths in Afghanistan and the number of children left behind. With $346,000 in financial support already awarded to one-third of that group, about $2.6-million remains to support the others. The fund has grown over the years, from $1.7-million in 2011 to $2.6-million in 2014, according to Canada Company’s annual reports.
Your company motto is, ‘Many Ways to Serve.’ Well, there are many ways that service kills. My husband died in a way that no one speaks of – he took his life in Canada, close to home, and left more devastation in his wake than an IED on a roadside in Afghanistan ever could.
Sherri Elms in an email to Canada Company
Devastated by the charity’s decision, Ms. Elms wrote to the ministers of defence and veterans affairs. In e-mails to Ms. Mondou, she pressed the charity for an explanation and told Canada Company its position ran counter to the message she had received from National Defence: that dying as a result of an operational stress injury, such as clinical depression or PTSD, was no different than being killed in an explosion on a mission.
“Your company motto is, ‘Many Ways to Serve,’” Ms. Elms wrote to Ms. Mondou. “Well, there are many ways that service kills. My husband died in a way that no one speaks of – he took his life in Canada, close to home, and left more devastation in his wake than an IED on a roadside in Afghanistan ever could.”
After her e-mails, and after e-mails and voice mails to Canada Company from the widow’s friends, Ms. Mondou told Ms. Elms that Mr. Goldring had agreed to hold an urgent meeting of the scholarship committee to review its decision. Ms. Elms said the family did not want the case re-examined. Jake and Stephanie, who both just finished their third year of studies at Queen’s, receive aid for their education from Veterans Affairs. Ms. Elms said she only applied for the Canada Company scholarship because a peer support worker suggested it. She told Ms. Mondou her children would not “beg for something that is not freely given.”
Instead, she asked the charity to further explain its mandate and why it viewed suicide differently than deaths in combat and training. She urged the charity to include deaths like her husband’s in its eligibility criteria. The Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs had both determined his death was service-related, she told Ms. Mondou.
Canada Company’s board of directors weighed Ms. Elms’ questions and request, but the charity’s position remained unchanged. Ms. Elms urged the organization to spell out its stand in its terms of reference so no other family would endure a similar rejection. And so the charity rewrote the terms of reference for its scholarship program last year, adding authorized training missions to its eligibility criteria. It also included this line: “Eligible candidates do not include children of Canadian soldiers whose deaths result from suicide.”
The Elms family feels the charity’s position further stigmatizes suicide and mental illness. More military members have taken their lives since 2002 –– at least 213 – than were killed in the Afghanistan war or in training accidents.
The Globe e-mailed questions to nine scholarship-fund donors listed in Canada Company’s media releases, but most did not respond. Of the three who did, none answered the question of whether they support extending the program to suicides linked to military service.
A spokesman for CIBC, which kick-started the education-assistance fund with $1-million in 2007, said Canada Company has done “incredible work” delivering on its mandate.
“We recognize that the understanding of the needs and issues facing our military families continues to evolve,” the spokesman, Kevin Dove, said in an e-mail. “We are proud of our affiliation with Canada Company and we will continue to engage with them as it continues to develop programs that support our military families.”
Among the 22 education-assistance programs for children of deceased military members examined by The Globe, there is variation in how the words “active role,” “active service” and “on duty” are viewed. Both Canada Company and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton apply a narrow definition, saying a death must occur while the person is physically on a mission or at work.
Some, such as the Canadian Hero Fund and Brandon University’s Afghanistan Mission Memorial Award, follow the approach taken by the Canadian Forces. If a suicide is determined to be “attributable to military service,” it is also deemed as a result of “active service.” Other scholarship programs do not ask how applicants’ father or mother died.
The Project Hero scholarship program, which was started by businessman Kevin Reed and retired general Rick Hillier, a former chief of the defence staff, has been affiliated with Canada Company since 2010. Project Hero does not rely on a pool of donations, like Canada Company’s program. Instead, about 60 colleges and universities have agreed to waive tuition for children of soldiers killed while serving on a military mission.
The Globe contacted all the schools listed as offering Project Hero on Canada Company’s website. The survey showed that 15 would consider suicide deaths, while most said they were not sure whether suicides qualified. Several directed The Globe’s questions to Canada Company.
Mr. Reed and Mr. Hillier said they would like children who have lost a parent to suicide included in Project Hero, although it is unclear who is responsible for modifying the program’s criteria. Both are no longer involved in the administration of Project Hero.
“In my view,” Mr. Hillier told The Globe in an e-mail, “those who commit suicide and it is deemed caused or contributed to by service to Canada, their children must be treated like those of casualties that are caused by direct physical action. Mental injuries are every bit as devastating as physical ones and we [should] look after their survivors in an appropriate manner.”
Canada Company did not respond to questions on who would consider clarifications to Project Hero’s criteria. Leah Jurkovic, spokeswoman for Colleges and Institutes Canada, said the advocacy group does not have an ongoing role in the scholarship program or in establishing the eligibility criteria.
“Certainly no one would be opposed to revisiting the criteria, but it wouldn’t be our role to ask for this,” she says.
Without the help of Canada Company and Project Hero, Ms. Ranger does not think she could have afforded to study business at Algonquin College. She was newly married with a young child and reeling from her father’s death in the Afghanistan war. Canada Company also aided her two brothers with their education.
Ms. Ranger, a mother of three whose husband is in the military and served in Afghanistan, believes the scholarship programs that helped her should be extended to children whose parents have died by suicide.
“I just think with the prevalence of mental illness now in the military, it’s something that needs to happen,” she says. “As families of fallen soldiers, we know the jobs that they do and the pain that they suffer, and I really don’t think a distinction should be made.”
Best quote: You guys try to put all of your fear aside when deciding to join our
forces. Whether you manage to live well with it or not is not why I write these
words. it is to thank for trying to be courageous enough to stand guard! Thanks
and Merci.
Canadian Armed Forces - Canadian
Anthem - O Canada
