After following a platoon of Marine recruits through boot camp training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see when they returned home on post-graduation leave how alienated they were 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 a 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, Md., was "horrible. The train was filled with smoke, people were drinking and their kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some people."1 Pvt. 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 during a week of training in the woods, proved to be an odd letdown. "You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight, and a little sloppy," said Pvt. Hoover.

Pvt. Jonathan Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile, Ala. "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, Md., 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 20's, he said, "They're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not studying."

In Pittsburgh, Pvt. Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday night party and also called two old friends "losers." "Everything feels different," he said. "I can't stand half my friends no more."
Pvt. Frank DeMarco attended a street fair in Bayonne, N.J. "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.'"
Only half-jokingly, Pvt. DeMarco's buddy John Hall called civilians "a bunch of freaks." His mother, listening to this conversation, looked astonished. "Do you really feel like that?" she asked. He considered for a moment, and then said, "Yeah, I do."

Black members of the platoon suffered less shock than did the white members--not because they were any less estranged, but because they long had been alienated from the mainstream of American society. "Defending my country?" said Pvt. Christopher Anderson. "Well, it's not really my country. I may live in America, but the United States is so screwed up."

Yet the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was Daniel Keane, probably the one from the most privileged background. The son of a Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain as he was interviewed in the living room of his parents' house in Summit, N.J. When he first arrived home from Parris Island, he said, "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," said the 18-year-old Marine. 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 `til you get to the party instead of hiding on the end of a back porch?' 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"--that is, the Marines' School of Infantry.

Like many members of 3086, Pvt. Keane felt as if he had joined a new cult or religion. "People don't understand, 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 30 seconds."

I think that the Marines of Platoon 3086 experienced in personal microcosm the widening gap between today's military and American society. To be sure, their reaction was exaggerated by the boot camp experience, in 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 of leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor noted that, "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, Depot Sgt. Maj. Harold Moore, currently the senior sergeant on Parris Island, commented that 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 a society today, I see a group of young people without direction because of the lack of teaching of some of those things. 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 American society is hardly new. For much of the nation's history, noted Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State, the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged minority."2 A decade ago, the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained civil-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure--America's Armed Forces, 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."3

But because of changes both in society and in the military, that "divorce" or "gap" appears to be more severe now than it frequently was in the past. There are two overarching reasons for this. First, after 20 years without conscription, the ignorance of American elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the Cold War is indeed considered to be 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 underway in society and in the post-Cold War military threaten to widen this gap in the coming years, further isolating and "de-civilianizing" the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional Soldier, Morris Janowitz confidently concluded that there wouldn't 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."4 But with the end first of the draft and then of the Cold War, the conditions that shaped the military observed by Prof. Janowitz no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but likely that the U.S. military over the next 20 years will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a separate society and subculture.

Seen in this light, the Clinton Administration's frictions with the military--over gays in the military, the supposed "dissing" of a uniformed general by a White House aide, military resentment over the administration's hamfisted handling of the later phases of the Somalia mission, and military resistance to U.S. interventions in Haiti and Bosnia--are not the unique product of the personal histories of one president and his advisers, but rather a preamble to future problems. As Harvard political scientist Michael Desch concluded in a preliminary assessment of post-Cold War politico-military decision making in the U.S., it appears that "civilians are now less able to get the military to do what they want them to do compared with previous periods in recent U.S. history."5
Three broad areas of movement need to be examined to understand why this gap appears to be widening. They are, first, changes in the military; second, changes in society; and, finally, changes in the international security environment.

By far the most important change in the military is the termination of the draft in 1973. Twenty-three years later, the consequences for the military of this shift 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-World War II demobilization, for example, the current post-Cold War drawdown is being met with fear and loathing by many in the military, because all volunteered to be there, and indeed are fighting to stay in.

Partly as a result of the end of conscription, the last 15 years especially have seen the rise of a professional military, even in the enlisted ranks. While better trained as soldiers and more stable as a society, this professional military also is vastly expensive, because it brings with it a "tail" of families and all the social infrastructure that entails, from health care to substance abuse counseling to on-base higher education. John Luddy, a Senate Republican aide, estimates the total family-related costs of the Defense Department to be more than $25 billion a year.

Especially on newer bases, such as the Army's Fort Drum, in upstate New York, the quality of infrastructure far outstrips the world outside the base gates. Last year, for example, I interviewed a typical soldier, Spec. Marc Walker, a member of a medical support unit. At age 22, he and his wife, also a soldier, have a purple Camaro and a black Isuzu Trooper parked in the driveway of their two-bedroom pastel blue apartment in Fort Drum's Remington Village. They pay no rent, and no bills for their electric heat, gas stove, and water. Inside, their home had a powerful stereo with Bose speakers, a 27-inch television, two leather couches, and a nursery awaiting the birth of their first child. With its trimmed lawns, lack of litter, and safe parks, Remington Village is the nicest place in which Marc Walker, a native of southside Chicago, has ever lived. Even policing is different. When Fort Drum's regular military police unit was deployed to Haiti in 1994, it was replaced by a reserve unit manned by California police officers. Base residents were unaccustomed to the rough handling meted out by the Californians. "They were extremely overzealous, very jumpy," said Col. Kenneth Ellis. Unlike civilian police, Fort Drum's MPs have the time and power to practice preventive policing: If they are called to a domestic dispute, they will require one spouse to leave the house for the night. (In the District of Columbia, by contrast, the police in 1996 sometimes take up to six hours to respond to active threats, such as a violent person beating on an apartment door.) Compared to his old world, said Spec. Walker, "It's almost make-believe."

It isn't clear that this strong social safety net will be sustained--and, if it isn't, what the implications will be for the effectiveness of the all-volunteer force and for civil-military relations. In fiscal 1995, for example, the Defense Department paid out some $260 million to subsidize its 346 day care centers. (If it were a for-profit organization, that chain of facilities would make the Defense Department the nation's fourth-largest private day-care operator.) Given today's conflicts and force structure, good day care centers make sense in that they do more to enhance military readiness by supporting deployed personnel than would, say, an additional B-2 bomber.

Yet with a defense budget "train wreck" looming in the late 1990's, the vast social infrastructure constructed by the military is likely to come under severe attack by Congress. The military, and especially the Army, which is the most vulnerable of the services on force structure issues, face a dilemma in addressing those cuts. The powerful social safety net appears necessary to supporting a professional military with a high "operating tempo." But to find the funds to maintain that net, the Army likely would be required to take cuts in personnel far beyond what it considers desirable. Either course--curtailing support for personnel, or curtailing the personnel themselves--likely will engender resentment in the military.

The post-draft professionalization of the military also has wrought cultural changes. The officer corps today acts and feels differently than it did during the Cold War, argues Richard Kohn, a former chief of Air Force history who now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "I sense an ethos that is different," he said. "They talk about themselves as `we,' separate from society. They see themselves as different, morally and culturally. It isn't the military of the `50's and `60's, which was a large semi-mobilized citizen military establishment, with a lot of younger officers who were there temporarily, and a base of enlisted draftees." What's more, as Prof. Huntington observed in The Soldier and the State, the American people have never been comfortable with professional militaries, 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 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.6

The second major area of change in the military is its post-Vietnam rebuilding. In this area, as in some many other aspects of defense nowadays, the U.S. Marine Corps appears to be a leading indicator. During the 1970's, the Marine Corps was a disaster. Drug use was rampant, and discipline ragged. There were 1,060 violent racial incidents in the Corps in 1970.7 Jeffrey Record noted in Proceedings that during that 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."8

Today the Marines Corps, like the rest of the U.S. military, has drastically reduced its discipline problems. It is largely drug free, running positive rates of under 4% in random urinalysis tests. And while racial tension still exists, the military, and especially the Army, has probably done about as good a job of minimizing race as an issue as is possible in the American context. There are now some 9,700 black officers in the U.S. Army. As Charles Moskos has observed, the U.S. military is still the only place in American society where it is routine to see black people bossing around white people. (This may be one reason the black drill instructor has become a stock figure in American popular culture, from films such as Officer and a Gentleman, Major Payne, and In the Army Now, to commercials for beer and long-distance telephone services.)

In addition, two related post-Cold War trends in the U.S. military infrastructure may carry overlooked consequences for civil-military relations. These are the process of closing unneeded bases, and the privatization of many logistics and maintenance functions.

The base closing process may have a side effect of increasing the geographical and political isolation of the military--or, to put it another way, of returning the military to its pre-World War II condition. "Before World War II, the majority of military posts were located in the South and in the West," notes Prof. Janowitz.9 This was also an era when the South was disproportionately represented in the ranks of senior officers--some 90% of Army generals had a "southern affiliation" in 1910, Janowitz reports.10 The base closing process so far has hit especially hard in the Far West and the Northeast--areas that have the twin characteristics of being more liberal and more expensive than the rest of the nation.

An odd result of the base closing trend is that, by my count, the majority of major Army bases in the continental U.S. now are named after Confederate officers: Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Benning in Georgia, Fort Rucker in Alabama, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and Fort Hood in Texas. In addition, there are minor installations like Fort Gordon in Georgia and Fort Lee and Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. It would be interesting to find out if black officers in the Army feel any unease about honoring this Confederate heritage, or believe it should be balanced by naming, say, a Norfolk, Va., facility dedicated to teaching insurgency or "escape & evasion" techniques after Nat Turner, who led the South's only sustained slave rebellion in southern Virginia in 1831 and then evaded capture for six weeks.

The moves to privatize some logistics and much of the military's huge depot structure may also contribute to the social and political isolation of the military. One of Prof. Janowitz's key conclusions was that the military inextricably was becoming "civilianized" by new technological tasks:

Occupational specialization since the Civil War demonstrates that the skill structure of the military has become not only more complicated, but also more transferable to civilian society. Military-type occupations for enlisted men accounted for 93.2% of the personnel in the Civil War, but after the Spanish-American War civilian-type occupations began to predominate. By 1954, only 28.8% of the Army enlisted personnel were engaged in purely military occupations.... (T)his trend is present in all the armed forces and reflects the expansion of logistical and maintenance functions.11

Faced with the need to cut personnel, and seeking to preserve its warfighting "tooth," the U.S. military in the post-Cold War has sought to privatize much of its support "tail." This privatization, which promises to reduce the number of soldiers in "civilian-type occupations," is occurring not only on in the U.S., where maintenance work is being farmed out to corporations, but also in expeditionary situations. In Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, for example, Brown & Root Corp. 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 for shipment home the bodies of soldiers killed in firefights.12 This trend accelerated so much in the 1990's that it began causing friction between the military and Congress, to whom the 89,000 civilian jobs at 30 military depots represented good, high-paying work that--unlike private sector work--couldn't easily be moved out of a given congressional district. Rep. Glen Browder, an Alabama Democrat who has both a doctorate in political science and a seat on the House National Security Committee, recently complained that "now the Pentagon seems determined to contract out all its depot work."13 The result of extensive civilian contracting is that military personnel are less likely to be serving in occupations that have civilian equivalents, and are more likely to be locked into positions where they specialize primarily in military skills that are not transferable to the civilian sector or well understood by civilians.
These isolating trends are occurring in the context of broader cultural changes in the military. The most notable of these is the relative politicization of the officer corps. Of course, there has always been a conservative streak inherent in U.S. military culture, just as there is an element of anti-authoritarianism inherent in American journalism. I suspect, however, that today's officers are both more conservative than in the past, and more politically active.

The evidence in this sensitive area is admittedly hazy, partly because the data are skimpy, and partly because the definitions of "conservative" attached to the data are unstated but almost certainly shifting. Nonetheless, the few indications available today are striking in how contrary they are to the conclusions reached by Prof. Janowitz. In his 1954 survey of 576 Pentagon staff officers, he found that 21.6% identified themselves as conservative, 45.3% as a little on the conservative side, and 23.1% as a little on the liberal side.14 That conservativism, he found, tended to take a non-partisan form, with military honor requiring the professional soldier to avoid "open party preferences."15 He found the military becoming more representative of society, with a long-term upward trend in the number of officers "willing to deviate from the traditional conservative identification."16 And he detected a correlation between rank and intensity of conservative attitudes.17

Today the evidence that is available indicates that all these trends have reversed. There appear to be vastly more "little conservatives" than "little liberals" in the military. The military appears to be becoming less politically 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. By contrast, the junior officer corps, aside from its female and minority members, appears overwhelmingly to be hard-right Republican, largely comfortable with the views of Rush Limbaugh.

A variety of recent formal and informal surveys point toward those conclusions. At Annapolis, midshipmen, who in 1974 were similar in their politics to their peers at civilian colleges, are now twice as conservative as the general population of students, 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," concluded one person involved in conducting the survey.

Similarly, Army Maj. Dana Isaacoff, who taught at West Point in the early 1990's, routinely surveyed her students on their politics, assessing about 60 students during each of six semesters. In a typical section, she reported, 17 would identify themselves as Republicans, while none would label themselves Democratic or Independent. She concluded that to today's cadets at West Point, being a Republican has become part of the definition of being a military officer. "Students overwhelmingly identified themselves as conservatives," she reported.18 Here the definition of conservatism is important, for this doesn't appear to be an identification with the compromising, solution-oriented politics of, say, Sen. Bob Dole. "There is a tendency among the cadets to adopt the mainstream conservative attitudes, and push them to extremes," said Maj. Isaacoff. "The Democratic-controlled Congress was Public Enemy No. 1. No. 2 was the liberal media....They firmly believed in the existence of the Welfare Queen."

These tendencies toward right-wing attitudes aren't limited to malleable students at the military academies. A 1995 survey of Marine officers at Quantico, Va., found similar views. It should be noted here that the Marines aren't the most representative example, but rather--because they are the most tradition-bound and unabashedly culturally conservative of the services--the most dramatic. They should be viewed not as an indicator of where the U.S. military is today, but instead 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 as they too become smaller, insular, and expeditionary.

In the Quantico survey 50% 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% identified themselves as conservatives. In a striking indication of alienation from the larger society, an overwhelming proportion of the Basic School lieutenants--some 81%--said that the military's values are closer to the values of the founding fathers than are the values of society. At the Command and Staff College, where students generally have at least 10 to 15 years of military experience, the proportion of those agreeing with that statement was 64%. A majority of officers also agreed that a gap exists between the military and society, and stated that they expected 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 Maj. Robert A. Newton, who conducted the survey and analyzed the responses in a study titled "The Politicization of the Officer Corps of the United States."19 "In particular, I believe these results indicate a growing alienation of the officer corps from society. Instead of viewing themselves as the representatives of society, the participating officers believe they are a unique element within society."

Not only do today's officers appear to be more conservative than in the past, they also appear to be more active in politics, both in their identification and their voting behavior. This change is all the more striking because, while conservatism has long been present in the American military, political involvement is something of an anomaly. During the Civil War, reported Prof. Huntington in Soldier and the State, "Not one officer in 500, it was estimated, ever cast a ballot."20 In Once an Eagle, an illuminating novel about the 20th 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."21 In a similar novel, A Country Such as This, James Webb has his hero, a Naval aviator, grasp his brother by the shoulder and emphatically state, "I ain't any Republican. I ain't a Democrat, either. I'm a Navy man, that's all. I go anywhere in the world they tell me to go, any time they tell me to, to fight anybody they want me to fight."22 As Prof. Huntington emphatically concluded, "the participation of military officers in politics undermines their professionalism, curtailing their professional competence, dividing the profession against itself, and substituting extraneous values for professional values."23

Nowadays that defining characteristic of U.S. military professionalism also appears to be reversing direction, which is troubling both for the military and the nation it serves. After historically shying away from voting, military personnel for the last decade have been voting in greater percentages than that of the general population.24 In his survey of Marine officers, Maj. Newton found that, "Although a 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." He concluded that "these results could indicate potential long-term problems for the nation's military."
In this context, it is worth noting that the last two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have injected themselves into election-year debates over issues touching on the military. During the 1992 election, Gen. Colin Powell twice spoke out against military intervention in Bosnia, which the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, was proposing.25 More recently and less noticed, his more retiring successor, Gen. John Shalikashvili, spoke out, as he put it in his speech, "in the midst of the presidential primary season," against isolationism and anti-immigration rhetoric--two major issues for Republican candidate Pat Buchanan.26

Suspicions about politicians are hardly new to U.S. military culture. But they take on new meaning when they emanate from a more politically active military. An odd little book titled Clint McQuade, USMC: The New Beginning is unintentionally revealing in this area, far more so than the sophisticated novels by Myrer and Webb cited above. Reading this novel privately published by the author, a retired Marine major, feels like taking a spelunking trip through the collective unconscious of the Corps. Indeed, the author, Gene Duncan, states at outset that much of it "springs from my subconscious, over which I have no control."27 The book turns on an intriguing literary device: A retired Marine master gunnery sergeant is reborn with the body of a 16-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 states as matter of course--essentially that American society is decaying, corrupted, misled by its elected officials, and deserving of resentment by the Marines who protect it. "Americans are selfish people," McQuade explains to his buddies.28 Later, expanding on that point, 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."29

In a postscript to Clint McQuade, the author states his that his "purpose in writing these books is to give the reader a sense of the heart of the United States Marine Corps." He flatly concludes that he tries to show the Marines to be "special people with special hearts who serve a seemingly ungrateful nation."

The novel is significant because is effectively represents part of the military talking to itself when it doesn't think it is being overheard. Though obscure to the outside world, Gene Duncan is 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 for his works. In a more official endorsement, General Military Subjects, the textbook used to train all recruits at Parris Island, begins by quoting Duncan on its inside cover. (The job of a drill instructor, it quotes him as saying, is to undo "18 years of cumulative selfishness and `me-ism.'")30 Then, following the table of contents, the textbook gives Mr. Duncan another full page. The only other person honored with even one full-page "stand-alone" quote in the entire 199-page textbook is President Bush.31

These isolating attitudes, while perhaps most extreme in the Marines, are also found in varying degrees elsewhere in the U.S. military. "There is a deep-seated suspicion in the U.S. military of society. It is part of the Vietnam hangover--`You guys betrayed us once, and you could do it again,'" observed Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. 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. With the end of the draft, it has been 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 also meant the end of its leavening effect: People from non-military families frequently were conscripted, or spurred by the draft to enroll in ROTC, and found they actually liked military life. Gen. Powell, for example, came from a non-military background and attended the distinctly non-military City University of New York. His successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Shalikashvili, was himself a draftee. There were spells in the early 1990's when the majority of the members of the Joint Chiefs came from public universities well outside the traditional routes of West Point and Annapolis. But that generation of draft-era officers is now retiring out of the military, and it is a virtual certainty that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs 20 years hence will not be a draftee. All this will makes it easier for the military and the liberal professionals of the middle class to look upon each other with contempt.

There is, of course, much in American society today deserving of contempt. But it is another matter to propose that it is the role of the U.S. military--especially an all-volunteer, professional military oriented to a conservative Republicanism--to fix those problems. Yet that is what some are doing. "It is no longer enough for Marines to `reflect' the society they defend," retired Col. Michael Wyly advised in the Marine Corps Gazette. "They must lead it, not politically but culturally. For it is the culture we are defending."32

It is legitimate to ask whether it is possible to make too much of this. After all, isn't the U.S. military really just reverting to its pre-World War II, pre-Cold War stance--socially isolated, politically conservative, and geographically located primarily on bases in the South and West? In that context, military contempt for civilian society is nothing new. In The Professional Soldier, Prof. Janowitz stated that, "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."33

There are two key differences in the way the U.S. military is reverting to its pre-Pearl Harbor form. First, it is far larger--some six times the size of the 244,000-man active-duty military of 1933. It also appears to be more politically active. It is being used frequently as an instrument of national policy, with large deployments to Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia occurring in recent years. A third possible major difference is the quality of the U.S. military. For the first time in the nation's history, it generally is regarded as the best in the world. If, as now appears likely, the size of the U.S. military is cut significantly over the next 10 years, frustrated officers may express their resentments in more politically direct ways than in the past. It would be surprising if all were to revert to the stance of Gen. Omar Bradley, who, in a passage quoted by Prof. Janowitz, commented that, "32 years in the peacetime Army had taught me to do my job, hold my tongue, and keep my name out of the papers."34

The changes in society are, as in the military, more a matter of culture than of politics. Although there are disagreements over the implications of the changes, I think there is widespread agreement that over the last several decades American society has become more fragmented, more individualistic and arguably less disciplined, with institutions such as church, family and school wielding less influence. These changes put it at odds with the classic military values of unity, self-discipline, sacrifice, and placing the interests of the group over those of the individual.
Related to this, and deepening the split, is the fact that while the U.S. military has addressed effectively the two great plagues of American society, drug abuse and racial tension, American society has not. From the military perspective, says Col. Douglas Hendricks, commander of the Recruit Training Regiment at Parris Island, "There has been a separation of cultures."
In addition, the U.S. military is doing a better job in other areas where society is faltering, such as education. 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, the Army especially does well in this area. Younger enlisted soldiers and Marines frequently exude an air of competence that is rare in today's 18- and 19-year-old civilians. America's high schools, by contrast, don't seem to infuse youth with that sort of confidence. Marine recruiters in Boston, for example, report that they no longer recruit from certain high schools, such as Madison Park and Dorchester, 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.
Second, the end of the draft has altered the way society looks at the military. Charles Moskos, the Northwestern University military sociologist, traces the American people's supposed intolerance of casualties to the end of the draft: Because the elites aren't sending their own offspring in harm's way, the American people don't trust them to send everyone else's children into battle. I disagree with this analysis, and instead am persuaded by the alternative explanation put forward by James Burk of Texas A&M that the American people won't tolerate casualties in situations where they dislike a policy or don't understand it, as with Somalia.

But I think Prof. Moskos is pointing in the right direction: American political and economic elites generally don't understand the military. Nor is such understanding deemed important even when involved in the making national security policy. Consider, for example, the conspicuous lack of staff members with military experience at the Clinton White House--an administration that has proven 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 suggestions from Pentagon officials that a person with a military background be appointed to a senior post at the National Security Council.35 To not understand the military is dangerous both for the military and the nation. Nowadays, I think, civilian 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, to revitalize its counter-drug efforts. Overestimating the military is probably even more dangerous than believing it is peopled by incompetent buffoons, as the Baby Boomer generation seemed to believe in the 1970's.

This uncertain grasp of military affairs is likely to characterize policymaking for the foreseeable future. Even as late as the Vietnam War, two-thirds of the members of Congress were veterans. Today, almost two-thirds are not. For most, what they know of the military is what they saw on television during the Gulf War. They took two lessons away from that war: That high technology weaponry works, and that the U.S. needs missile defenses. Partly because the Army effectively blacked out media coverage of its Gulf War triumph, the Congress didn't come away with a lot of interest in training or personnel issues or ground forces in general.36 So, despite the expectations of many in the military that the Republicans would be their allies, it should have been no surprise that after the Republicans won a majority in Congress in 1994, they pushed missile defenses and B-2 bombers while trying to cut military pensions. In March of this year, several younger members formed "the Republican Defense Working Group," which, they said, would "scour the defense budget for savings."37 As Andrew Bacevich has observed, it will be interesting to see how the political beliefs of the officer corps change when it realizes that to be "conservative" is no longer necessarily to be "pro-defense spending."

But the most salient point about Congress and defense nowadays is the relative lack of congressional interest 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 staffer noted, "Back home, they'll ask, `If you're on the committee, why couldn't you do something about it?'"38 Hence, in the congressional class elected in 1992, 19 of the new members requested seats on the Science and Technology committee, historically a backwater, while only 7 asked for Armed Services.

The biggest single change in the security environment is the end of the Cold War. With the evaporation of the Soviet Union, a lot of Americans don't understand why the nation needs a large standing military. Arguably, 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. This has huge implications for how the Army relates to the Congress and the American people. It suggests that the Army itself will become more like the Marines--small, expeditionary, and, for the good of the institution, better at explaining itself to the Congress and the media. Even so, the peacetime trends of American civil-military relations point toward huge budget cuts in the coming years. Recently, for example, Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, proposed reducing defense spending to $210 billion in 2001, down from the current $263 billion. The Electronic Industries Association recently made a similar prediction, forecasting a 2005 defense budget of $214 billion.39 The Army is likely to absorb a disproportionate share of the resulting cuts, most of them aimed at personnel (rather than the procurement or operations & maintenance accounts).

Also with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. 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." Gen. Charles Krulak, the commandant of the Marine Corps, argues, for example, that "when we go into the 21st century, warfare as you and I know it will occur maybe 10% of the time. The other 90% is going to be chaos."40 At the other end of the chain of command, Sgt. Darren Carey, one of the drill instructors for Platoon 3086, the unit I followed home from Parris Island, taught the platoon that "today the threat is the low-intensity things, the 911, that you never know what's going to happen--it's Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia. I'd also teach that the threat is the decline of the family, the decline of morals."

As Sgt. Carey's comment indicates, it is easy when defining the threat as "chaos" 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 same 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.," commented one Marine colonel involved in both operations.
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 Maj. Timothy Reeves argued in a paper at the Marine Command and Staff College with the evocative title "The U.S. Marine Corps and Domestic Peacekeeping" 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.41 The trouble, he continues, is that a variety of U.S. laws inhibit execution of the mission. "These restrictive policies are in direct conflict with the overall tactics of peacekeeping in a phase level IV response, which require forces to detain suspected enemy and search and confiscate weapons."

In Los Angeles, Maj. Reeves notes, when faced with violating doctrine or violating federal law, some Marines chose the latter course, and detained suspects and conducted warrantless searches. Indeed, with characteristic Marine Corps bluntness, the major states that, "In interviews with Marine officers involved in domestic peacekeeping missions and with officers responsible for articulating the Marine Corps' policy on domestic peacekeeping, it became apparent to the author that Marines took whatever action was necessary. At times, these actions required Marines to violate U.S. law." (Similarly, Marine Capt. Guy Miner reported that Marine intelligence units were initially worried by the need to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens, which would violate a 1978 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."42

To enable the Marines to execute these new domestic missions in the same way that they do abroad, Maj. Reeves calls for major alterations in U.S. law. These proposed changes, incidentally, could carry long-term consequences for U.S. civil-military relations. "Experience from the Los Angeles riots," he warns, "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 asked some Marines to cover them while they confronted an armed suspect barricaded in his residence, Maj. Reeves reports, the Marines laid down covering fire, shooting approximately 30 rounds into the building before the police stopped them.
Maj. Reeves' thoughts about a domestic role for the Marines could be dismissed as the isolated ruminations of a mid-career officer on a one-year lark at school. But I think they are representative of a strain of thinking within the Marine Corps that remains a minority view but is gaining new adherents. For example, Mr. Duncan, the Marine novelist and commentator, predicted in a 1992 column that the United States is moving toward "violent revolution."43
More prominently, in a December 1994 article in the Marine Corps Gazette, William S. Lind, a military analyst who has been influential on the doctrinal thinking of the post-Cold War Marines, wrote with two Marine reservists that American culture is "collapsing":

Starting in the mid-1960's, 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 industries (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.44

There is little remarkable about that paragraph, which reads like standard right-wing American rhetoric of the `90's, not all that different from Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan on a prolix day. Its significance lies in the conclusion that Mr. Lind and his co-authors draw from their analysis: "The point is not merely that America's Armed Forces will find themselves facing non-nation-state conflicts and forces overseas. The point is that the same conflicts are coming here." So, they conclude, "The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil."

As a coda to this, retired Col. Michael Wyly, another influential Marine thinker, added a few months later in another Gazette article that, "We must be willing to realize that our real enemy is as likely to appear within our own borders as without."45 He then swipes at the two fundamental principles of U.S. military professionalism: unwavering subordination to civilian control and non-participation in politics. "If our laws and self-image of our role as military professionals do not allow for this"--the recognition that the real enemy may be within--"we need to change them." He goes on to raise the possibility of the Marines refusing to enforce certain laws. Specifically, if Congress were to restrict gun ownership, then Marines 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 common-sense response to the Lind article from Maj. Mark Bean: "America is made of tougher stuff than the authors would have us believe."46

This "culture war" trend of thinking seems at odds with the ethos of American military professionalism. Instead, it is closer to the stance taken recently by an Italian military officer in a commentary in Proceedings: "(T)he military is one of the few professions truly aware of the dangers surrounding the country," wrote Commander Paolo Bembo.47
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," warns Maj. Newton at the conclusion of his report on "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."

A U.S. military coup remains extremely unlikely. Prof. Huntington seems closer to the mark when he attributes the civil-military turbulence of the Clinton Administration to the process of seeking out a new post-Cold War equilibrium in the civil-military relationship.48

But not all equilibria are equal. As Prof. Huntington noted in the opening paragraphs of The Soldier and the State, "Nations which fail to develop a balanced pattern of civil-military relations squander their resources and run uncalculated risks."49 The United States may be in danger of doing just that by drifting into a situation in which the military is neither well understood nor well used, yet--unlike in previous eras of military estrangement--is large, politically active, and employed frequently on a large scale in executing American foreign policy. Developing the semi-autonomous military described by Michael Desch isn't a healthy situation 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. For all the Clinton Administration's ignorance of military affairs, for example, its estimate of the costs of invading Haiti appears to have been far more accurate that those done by the Pentagon. Similarly, in the Bosnian deployment, after five months, none of the military's grim warnings about the U.S. military suffering widespread casualties as it became entangled in a guerrilla war have been realized. This is a testament in part to the professionalism of today's American soldier. But it also should cause future Pentagon estimates of the human costs of possible operations to be viewed with great skepticism.

Mutual distrust between the nation's political elites and military leaders ultimately could undercut American foreign policy, making it more difficult to use force effectively. Indeed, this unease may contribute to the U.S. Army's reluctance to take a more activist stance in the Haiti and Bosnia missions, and instead to fret publicly about "mission creep." To repair the relationship, several steps could be taken.

First, consideration should be given to somehow reinstating a draft. Along the lines of the current German system, this could be combined with National Service under which youths could perform, say, 18 months of military service, or two years of alternative work.
But resumption of conscription appears unlikely for the foreseeable future, so several other steps should be considered to engage the military with civilian society. For example, ROTC programs should be vastly expanded, especially at elite institutions. In the same vein, the service requirement attached to attending one of the three military academies might be shortened in order to encourage more former military officers to pursue careers in civilian society--which, among other things, eventually should lead to more people in Congress with military experience. More civilians could attend the military's war colleges, but whenever possible, military officers pursuing higher degrees should be sent to civilian universities, even if this means closing some military schools. As Eliot Cohen has suggested, there may even be ways of bringing people into the military later in their lives, even in ranks as high as lieutenant colonel.50 The skills of reservists could be used far more imaginatively by the military, especially in an era when civilian technologies are outpacing military developments.

But the most important change that should be made involves the military only secondarily. This concerns the separation of professional Americans, or the upper middle class, from the broad concerns of society. Ignorance of the military is, I think, primarily 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. In this context, America's military problem is not unlike that facing parts of the former Soviet Union. Reviewing the depredations of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous militias in 31 new states and "ministates" in the old East Bloc and the former Yugoslavia, Charles Fairbanks recommended that to assert public control over those forces,"It is particularly important to involve the new middle class . . . in military service."51 America would do well to take that advice.

1 Except as noted, quotations used in this paper are from interviews conducted by the author.
2 Samuel Huntington. The Soldier and the State. Belknap, 1957. p. 268.
3 Arthur T. Hadley. The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure--America's Armed Forces. Random House, 1986. p. 22.
4 Morris Janowitz. The Professional Soldier. Free Press, 1975. p. xiii.
5 Michael Desch, Soldiers, States, and Structure: Civilian Control of the Military in a Changing Security Environment (forthcoming), chapter 2.
6 Huntington, Soldier and the State, p. 154.
7 J. Robert Moskin. The U.S. Marine Corps Story. Third revised edition. Little, Brown, 1992. pP. 683.
8 Jeffrey Record. "Where Does the Corps Go...Now?" Proceedings, May 1995. p. 91.
9 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 176.
10 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 88.
11 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 64.
12 See article by Thomas E. Ricks, The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1995, p. 1.
13 Rep. Glen Browder, "Ending the Depot Dilemma," Armed Forces Journal, April 1996, p. 71.
14 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 238.
15 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 233 and p. 139.
16 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 235 and p. 242.
17 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 239.
18 In a talk presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 14 February 1996.
19 Posted on the Internet through the Marine Corps University homepage.
20 Huntington, Soldier and the State, p. 258.
21 Anton Myrer. Once an Eagle. Dell, 1970. p. 39.
22 James Webb. A Country Such as This. Bantam, 1985. p. 260.
23 Huntington, Soldier and the State, p. 71.
24 Maj. Robert Hahn. "Soldier-Citizen: New Roles for Military Officers in American Society," paper presented at biennial meeting of Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, Baltimore, Md., Oct. 1995. pp. 16-17.
25 Gen. Colin Powell, "Why Generals Get Nervous," New York Times, Oct. 8, 1992, p. 35. See also Michael Gordon, "Powell Delivers a Resounding No on Using Limited Forces in Bosnia," New York Times, Sept. 28, 1992, p. 1.
26 Bryan Bender, "Shalikashvili Blasts Isolationist Rhetoric of Primaries," Defense Daily, March 21, 1996, p. 434.
27 Gene Duncan. Clint McQuade, USMC: The New Beginning. Gene Duncan Books, 1990. From introductory note, no page number.
28 Duncan. McQuade. p. 62.
29 Duncan. McQuade. pp. 143-44.
30 U.S. Marine Corps. General Military Subjects. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.
31 Marine Corps. General Military History. p. 51.
32 Michael Wyly. "Fourth Generation Warfare: What Does It Mean to Every Marine?" Marine Corps Gazette, March 1995. p. 58.
33 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 248.
34 Janowitz, Professional Soldier, p. 396.
35 Retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock makes the interesting suggestion that because of the lack of a draft, the military activism of the Clinton Administration isn't sustainable. In an unpublished paper titled "Class Politics and the All-Volunteer Military: Constraints on U.S. Global Activism," he predicts that, "the arrangement by which the United States must raise military forces cannot over the long term withstand the burden which a heavily activist policy of frequent military intervention would place upon 21st-century American society."
36 For a thorough discussion of the Army's self-defeating handling of the U.S. media in the Gulf War, see John Fialka. Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War. Johns Hopkins, 1991.
37 Press release by Rep. Mark Foley, March 14, 1996.
38 Thomas E. Ricks, "With Cold War Over, the Military-Industrial Complex is Dissolving," The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1993, p. 1.
39 Defense Daily, March 27, 1996. p. 466.
40 John G. Roos, "General Charles C. Krulak," Armed Forces Journal, Jan. 1996, p. 22.
41 Maj. Timothy Reeves. "The U.S. Marine Corps and Domestic Peacekeeping," downloaded through Marine Corps University homepage.
42 Capt. Guy Miner, "Intelligence Operations in Los Angeles," Marine Corps Gazette, Oct. 1992, p. 56.
43 Gene Duncan. Politically Correct! NOT!!. Gene Duncan, 1994. p. 176.
44 William Lind, Maj. John Schmitt, and Col. Gary Wilson, "Fourth Generation Warfare: Another Look," Marine Corps Gazette, Dec. 1994, p. 37
45 Wyly, "Fourth Generation Warfare: What Does It Mean to Every Marine?", p. 55.
46 Maj. Mark Bean, "Fourth Generation Warfare," Marine Corps Gazette, March 1995, p. 53.
47 Paolo Bembo, "God Bless America," Proceedings, March 1996, p. 91.
48 Samuel Huntington. "An Exchange on Civil-Military Relations," The National Interest, Summer 1994, p. 25.
49 Samuel Huntington. Soldier and the State. p. 2.
50 Eliot Cohen, "Making Do With Less, Or Coping With Upton's Ghost," U.S. Army War College paper, May 1995. Pp. 13-14. Several other of the suggestions made here also lean on, or are lifted in whole from, Prof. Cohen's illuminating discussion.
51 Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., "The Post-Communist Wars," Journal of Democracy, Oct. 1995. p. 33

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