Examining the Declining Utility of Military Force

In this elegantly written and insightfully argued book, Andrew J. Bacevich argues that the United States should reexamine the militarism that has increasingly come to characterize its national security policy. A professional soldier, Bacevich criticizes what he describes as a “marriage of military metaphysics with eschatological ambition ” (3). Indeed, he defends the conservative credentials of his opposition to militarism—rooted, he argues, in the outlook of the founders—while condemning the radicalism of so-called neoconservatives. Resurgent Militarism Although I am hardly a specialist in security studies, I would argue that a national security strategy that centers on military power makes pragmatic sense (whatever its moral wisdom) when: A country’s central objectives are more easily realized through its deployment; or A country faces an external threat to its national security or vital interests, the character or gravity of which legitimates a forceful response. The wave of colonization that the 1884 Berlin Conference sanctioned, for example, meets the first criterion: in the late 19th century, acquiring foreign territories was an important component of national power projection.1 For this essay’s purposes, however, it is the second criterion that merits close scrutiny. Indeed, the pressing question now facing American policymakers is whether current threats—in particular, the threat of decentralized terrorist networks, often operating with only nominal affiliations to al-Qaeda—lend themselves to military response (Friedman 2005: 28). 1 From November 1884 to February 1885, amidst the wave of industrialization that was then sweeping through the West, representatives of 14 European countries convened in Berlin to discuss investment prospects in Africa, which possessed an abundance of raw materials. The principal result of their conference, the Berlin Act of 1885, awarded “spheres of influence ” to the participants, setting in motion a particularly rapacious period of colonization