The New American Militarism

Read for research on Network Imperialism and as a consideration of American Militarism & Imperialism.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Bacevich, Andrew 2005. The New American Imperialism: How Americans are seduced by war. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Introduction

 * New American militarism revives an phenomenon "that C. Wright Mills in the early days of the Cold War described as a 'military metaphysics' - a tendency to see international problems as military problems and to discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means" (2)


 * Warning from James Madison:
 * "Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprise and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes as the known instruments for bringing the many other the domination of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." (7)

War Club

 * Largely a history of the recent Intellectualization of American War policies


 * Bernard Brodie in 1946 -> the chief purpose of the military in the age of the bomb is to avert war (149)


 * Brodie advances the principle of deterrence "threatening force in order to persuade would-be adversaries to forego misbehavior, with success masking the actual use of force unnecessary" (150)


 * "With others joing Brodie, that calling formed the basis of a new profession, its members known as defense intellectuals. It gave birth to new institutionss, such as the RAND corporation..." (151)


 * "The Pentagon was not, in fact, funding the research undertaken by Brodie and his colleagues in a high-minded search for ways to prevent the recurrence of Hiroshima. From the outset, the object of the exercise was entirely pragmatic: to perpetuate the advantages that had accrued to the United States as a consequence of Hiroshima and to use those advantages to advance vital American interests, without triggering World War III." (152)


 * Re:Wohlsetter -> "To ensure that the United States possessed the ability to retaliate after absorbing and attack by the Soviet Union or any other adversary was, in his judgement, to decrease the likelihood of any such attack in the first place." (160)


 * Beginning in 1988 (in published report from RAND) -> "Ultimately, this technology-driven revolution held out the prospect of 'the strategic use of non-nuclear weapons' meaning that the United States could accomplish through conventional means and at a tolerable cost the same objectives assigned since 1945 to (essentially unusable) U.S. nuclear forces." (162)


 * Re: Andrew Marshall "In the computer age, Marshall believed, such armies and such methods were rapidly becoming obsolete. In their place, he advocated the creation of forces that were lean, nimble, and, above all, 'smart'". (167)


 * RMA -> Revolution in Military Affairs


 * "The amalgam of ideas informing this zeitgeist included the 'end of history,' globalization, virtual reality, the CNN effect, the New Economy, the discovery of gender as a mere social construct, and the role of the United States as 'indispensable nation.'" (169)


 * "In the end the priesthood turned out to be a war club" -> Bacevich began by characterizing the Defense intellectuals as a priesthood.

Part of At Cambridge