Conservative trojan horse

COMMENT: The Petraeus Doctrine, by Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2008

Good piece worth reading. Bacevich clearly falls into the "conservative"/big-war camp, with his unstated (at least here) fear being that, if we develop the small-wars/COIN/"crusader" vision of a SysAdmin force, then America will be tempted to use it.

Now, simply calling it the "crusader" force versus "conservative" is a big tell: my norms are good (conservative) and yours are bad (you frickin' nutcase crusader!).

In that sense, Bacevich views big war as deterrence: have the capacity and you'll never need to use it--truly conservative. But it's also quasi-isolationist in this timeframe of frontier-integration. It's isolationist because, as I've argued, the Gap gets shrunk--no matter what--over the next several decades. Mr. and Mrs. Chindian Middle-Class will demand it--plain and simple. If we're not involved, then other great powers--along with their militaries--will be forced to get involved. I'm not against that, per se (in fact, I welcome their help, properly channeled). I just want us in the picture, because if we're totally missing in action, prepping our big-hammer force, we'll start to interpret the interventions of others as constituting (or re-constituting, to use an old Pentagon term) great power-on-great power war threats, when they'll be nothing of the sort. That will lead to all sorts of pointless arms racing (a favorite of this conservative camp) and brinkmanship that will be ultimately diverting, accomplishing nothing vis-a-vis the Gap and only raising the potential for globalization's pointless partition. In effect, the conservative tack does more to raise the specter of great power war than to quell it because it does not address the root causes for such conflict in this age: the perception of a re-colonialization of the Third World--a chimera, given the economic connectedness across the Core, if ever there was one. Since nukes continue to kill great power war as a feasible concept, the only alternative is proxy wars inside the Gap, where--duh!--the "crusader" position would still make more sense than the "conservative" one.

So I find Bacevich's arguments to be a trojan horse: he simply doesn't want America involved in "empire" as he sees it. He wants a big-war force precisely because it's unusable. Fine for us and the military-industrial complex, bad for anyone living inside the Gap left to the tender mercies of those great powers that will come and will fight because they have no choice. Bacevich is a smart guy, but this is cloaked isolationism, not smart grand strategy. He needs to be more honest in his arguments.

(Thanks: Tim Lundquist)

Comments

[Lexington Green]

"He wants a big-war force precisely because it's unusable."

Right. And he attacks what he calls Crusader, which is very roughly what you call SysAdmin, because it cuts in on his Big War force.

What you don't mention, but which Bacevich's article implicitly calls for, is the very step he does not want to take: Dividing the force by function. We need the big hammer: Leviathan. We will not destroy it and turn it into the big Babysitter if and only if we create an institutional home for the lower and broader spectrum capabilities. It cannot be either/or, since we do not get to pick what kind of wars we will fight. "Events, dear boy, events" -- the actions of other actors frequently determine what kind of war we will be drawn into, or what pre-war situation we have to deal with to prevent things from getting worse. So it has to be both/and not either/or.

The DoEE -- in one form or another -- is the only way to do both/and. It is the only way to keep the full range of capabilities, the one we have traditionally had, Thor's hammer that pushes everyone else out of the conventional box into lowerr grade types of threats, AND preserve and build up the other capabilities our people have bled and died trying to build now.

[stuart abrams]

Seems that if you tweak Bacevich a bit, you get Chalmers Johnson. Both have some legitimate critiques of the neo-cons, but they come at it from a perspective that is basically reactionary and backwards-looking. Ironically, the end-result comes out pretty much the same as the neo-cons. Bacevich might be an isolationist, and Robert Kagan might be an interventionist, but they both operate out of the same frame of reference, namely, that great power military conflict is the really "important stuff" in the world.