Drift

"When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it's easy to be at war--not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don't have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay."

This is the most important point in Rachel Maddow's book Drift, which documents the evolution of the military and war-making in American history. The liberal MSNBC host shows how we went from a nation reluctant to go to war to one that is almost itching for a fight, mainly because the country has been so inured to sky-high defense budgets and peopling the military with volunteers that frequently have no better offer than to sign up.

The book is full of factual information that is frequently enlightening, and shows that Maddow spent a long time with her nose in government reports. "Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I don't know about other countries, but that's what we admit to." Or, "the United States spend as much on national defense as every other country in the world combined." Maddow, to anyone who has watched her show, is at heart a wonk, and bases her arguments on facts--which means she is not simply the liberal counterpart to people like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, who more often base their arguments on emotion.

Maddow frames her argument cogently. The founding fathers did not believe in standing armies. If they were alive today they'd be shocked at us having military bases around the world. They also explicitly wrote into the Constitution that congress had the power to declare war, not the President. Why? Because they wanted to make it hard to go to war, not easy. This was not just an 18th-century thing. "Within eighteen months of the conclusion of World War I, Congress had completely dismantled the American Expeditionary Forces and reduced the active-duty military from four million soldiers back to the prewar number of less than three hundred thousand."

What changed? According to Maddow, it was Ronald Reagan, who firmly held on to a belief even if shown the plain facts. He was fiercely against the Panama Canal treaty, even when no less a conservative hero than John Wayne tried to convince him otherwise. His anti-communism caused him to ratchet up the defense budget, tripling it, and plunging the nation into debt: "what is demonstrably clear and empirically measurable is the damage that our country suffered from the enormity of the defense spending of the Reagan presidency. David Stockman's initial dire deficit projections, it turns out, were rosy: Reagan's annual budget deficit ballooned from 2 percent to a record 6.3 percent of the GDP in his first two years in office, a fiscal sinkhole it would take us nearly twenty years to climb out of."

Maddow then takes us through the military adventures of the past thirty years: Grenada, Iran-Contra, the Gulf War, the Balkans, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (she doesn't even touch on Somalia). Slowly, through chicanery and legal double-talk, the wheel turned so that presidents started wars, not congress. She also discusses drones, and that now the CIA is effectively another branch of the military, but one that is above oversight, claiming national security.

But it's the notion that wars are taking place without anyone noticing them that I think is her most salient point. During World War II, everyone pitched into the war effort. During Vietnam, the news was front page every day, and because of the draft it was likely that everyone knew someone who was over there. That's different now, such as when George W. Bush banned photographers from Dover Air Force Base, where coffins carrying the dead soldiers came, or when Nightline was pilloried for listing the dead on its show. "While America has been fighting two of its longest-ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. 'Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,' according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, 'has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.' Half of the American public says it has not even been marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We've never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting civilian life."

I'll raise my hand--I do not know anyone personally that is serving overseas. In fact, I don't think I know of anyone who has a relative over there.

While Drift is a book full of facts and figures, Maddow has chosen to make her prose folksy. It's a little off-putting to be reading a book like this and encounter words like "oops," "whoopsie," and "chickenshittery" (even if that is a great word). At one point she writes: "This country developed a serious war jones." This must have been a conscious choice between her and her editor, and while it makes it seem like one of her opening monologues on her show, sometimes if gives the writing a tinge of amateurism. Also, leaving out Somalia is interesting, and though there is a chapter on the outsourcing of military operations to private contractors, which led to scandals such as employees buying sex slaves in Serbia, nothing is written about the epidemic of sexual assaults in the military, so vividly described in the film The Invisible War.

Still, this is an important and thought-provoking work. When I was a teenager, a young man still had to register for the draft. After much soul-searching, I did register, though I scrawled the letters "CO" (conscientious objector) on the form. I'm far too old to serve now, and I can't believe I'm writing this, but it might be time for the draft to be re-instituted. The one benefit is that men in suits won't be so quick to push the country into war if anyone can end up getting shot at, not just the poor.