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The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. By Andrew J. Bacevich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19517338-5. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 270. $28.00.
In the early 1990s Edward Luttwak, Russell F. Weigley, and Richard Kohn published essays in which they argued that there was a crisis in civilmilitary relations in the United States. More recently books by Kohn and Peter Feaver, Andrew Bacevich, and Eliot Gohen have expanded on this theme. All, to one degree or another, concern themselves with the politicization of the late twentieth-century American military. Bacevich's most recent work, The New American Militarism, however, turns the argument on its head: rather than focusing on the politicization of the military, Bacevich outlines the militarization of American politics and culture.
Alfred Vagts posited that "An army that is so built that it serves military men, not war, is militaristic; so is everything in an army which is not preparation for fighting, but merely exists for diversion or to satisfy peacetime whims." Bacevich depicts a post-Vietnam military whose actions fit Vagts's definition: hamstringing civil authority by structuring the military so that the nation could not go to war without the Reserves and National Guard; the military leadership's role in developing the Weinberger Doctrine; the Weinberger Doctrine's subsequent manifestation, the Powell Doctrine; and the military's insistence on preparing for two "Major Regional Contingencies" at a time when one MRC seemed increasingly unlikely; all appear to match Vagts's criteria. More importantly, the military, according to Bacevich, ignored the lessons of Vietnam, preferring to focus on the...