“We don’t make the choice, we do what we are told.”[1]
While individual service members do not make the choices,
however, they are the ones that deal with the lasting consequences.
After studying a range of national security topics, here I extrapolate a few lessons that are important to me individually and should be of particular interest to US national security. I will use an interview conducted with an Iraq veteran as a case study emphasizing the human costs of war. The lessons from the case study will then be tied to broader issues of maintaining the force, treatment by Veterans Affairs and the Weinberger Doctrine. In accordance with the Weinberger Doctrine, I assert that the United States only goes to war when the mission is worth the causalities. Acting on the contrary results in a ‘fiasco’ on both a large and a very personal scale.
The experience of the veteran that I interviewed, unfortunately, is not unique; many aspects are representative of the larger population of veterans. A similar story is found in the memoir: The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. Both accounts are of a college student, less than a semester from graduating, deployed to Iraq, prepared to do what he signed up to do and coming back changed forever.[2] The psychological costs of war are real; the veteran I interviewed is battling PTSD from events that occurred over a decade ago. He is plagued by flashbacks of a suicide car bomb that occurred at the checkpoint he was manning.
I ask: Did those that determined to initiate the Iraq war evaluate the human costs ex-ante? From Fiasco, I gather that decision makers disobeyed Murphy’s Law and were far too optimistic in how the war would progress. It did not take long for the Iraqi people to see the international forces as occupiers instead of liberators.[3] This failure to plan strategically for what would happen after the Saddam regime fell was a key component to the rise of the insurgency; an insurgency that raised the costs of the war exponentially.
The Weinberger Doctrine is a realist perspective on foreign policy. Born out of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War and the 1983 bombings in Lebanon, it limits when military troops should be used. Ironically, General Collin Powell (who played a key role in the formation of the Weinberger Doctrine) was used to sell the Iraq war to the UN.[4] In the case of Iraq, the criterion “U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning, otherwise, troops should not be committed”[5] was ignored. Had the criteria of the Weinberger Doctrine been evaluated in determining if the military was to be used in Iraq, a fiasco would have been diverted.
From my case study, the veteran interviewed has received treatment by the over-worked Veterans Affairs. He related that overall the care has been adequate but had he been diagnosed with PTSD upon returning home, he would have been able to deal with the issue much earlier and consequently progressed further on his road to recovery. The need to maintain the force shines through on a number of levels.
“The military is very good at systematically building people up to be soldiers but they don’t then systematically bring them back down to be human again.”[6] The inability to reintegrate servicemen and women back into society is unacceptable and adds to the costs of war. PTSD, while the terminology may be contemporary, has been around forever, but those that fight the United States’ wars are still coming home without the support they need.
Maintaining the force is normally looked at from two perspectives. In regards to lengthening deployments from a year to fifteen months, President Bush presented somewhat of a callous perspective when he stated “Why do people join the military if they don't want to fight and defend the country.”[7] The other side is overly reverent for military service and is presented in an Executive Summary: The U.S. Military: Under Strain and at Risk, where on a number of occasion lauds the military service as superb.[8] The latter viewpoint is consistent with the idea presented in The Tragedy of the American Military by James Fallow, that the lack of proximity to the military leads to the inability to constructively criticize and evaluate performance.[9]
Due to his experiences, I suspected that the veteran I interviewed would choose the route many veterans take: a dove approach to foreign policy and even become anti-war. The individual interviewed, a reservist, was attached to a Special Forces unit and related that he understood that the US is conducting operations throughout the world at any one time. Due the security threats that the United States faces, it is not realistic to not engage in military force.
Therefore, in a world where military force is needed, the Weinberger Doctrine must factor into decision-making. When the criteria are met and force is needed, maintaining the forces is essential. Failure to do so raises both the financial and psychological costs. The costs are real and personal. Following the Weinberger Doctrine has dual benefits. It places you only in conflicts that are winnable, but also allows service members to better assimilate into civilian life upon returning from war. Veterans, like the rest of society, need to feel they have a purpose. The Weinberger Doctrine not only prevents getting tangled in an never ending conflict, but also sends the clear message that the mission is worth the sacrifice, even the ultimate sacrifice.
[1] Interview with veteran on April 12, 2015
[2] John Crawford. 2005. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account Of The War In Iraq.
[3] Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. 98.
[4] Ricks, 90.
[5] Caspar W. Weinberger. “The Uses of Military Power”. November 28, 1984.
[6] Interview with veteran on April 12, 2015
[7] Robert Gates. Duty: A Memoir of a Secretary at War.
[8] The U.S. Military: Under Strain and at Risk A paper for the National Security Advisory Group II Executive Summary. Jan. 2006
[9] Fallows, James. "The Tragedy of the American Military." The Atlantic. December 28, 2014. Accessed April 16, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/.
