The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Hardcover)

by Andrew Bacevich (Author) "THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was an age of massive conceits, devised by ideologues who entertained heady dreams of bending history to suit their will..." (more)
Key Phrases: other neoconservatives, tanker war, senior military leaders, United States, Cold War, Persian Gulf (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"An unusually perceptive observer and a committed patriot." -- -Reihan Salam, The New Republic

"Bacevich has an authoritative background...his judgments and his point of view are evenhanded...Bacevich's analysis is acute and unsparing." -- Andrew Day, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[Bacevich] has a very important story to tell and tells it well...Every thoughtful American should read this book." -- -Chalmers Johnson, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Review

"Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic.... He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune to criticism. What he writes should give them pause.... His conclusion is clear. The United States is becoming not just a militarized state but a military society: a country where armed power is the measure of national greatness, and war, or planning for war, is the exemplary (and only) common project."--Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books
"Every thoughtful American should read this book.... He has a very important story to tell and tells it well.... Bacevich's main argument...is the most powerful and compelling part of his highly original analysis.... He concludes with a chapter on what to do, which is utterly sound if politically impossible."--Chalmers Johnson, San Diego Union-Tribune
"A concise, sinewy book that looks at the emperor and concludes that indeed he has no clothes.... Bacevich makes the case calmly but with piercing clarity.... His judgments and his point of view are evenhanded and steady.... Acute and unsparing."--Andrew Day, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A valuable account of the paradoxical consequences of the U.S. effort to recover from Vietnam.... Bacevich--a Boston University professor, West Point alumnus and Vietnam veteran --demonstrates a fine grasp of past debates on military matters and an ability to relate them to today's events and personalities."--Lawrence Freedman, Washington Post Book World
"Intellectually serious. Writing very much as a Vietnam veteran, he worries that both major political parties have become too trigger-happy, too keen to dispatch troops abroad. Bacevich takes a dim view of Bush's rhetoric about freedom and argues that the United States' dependence on oil is why it is fighting in the Middle East. He thinks that what some neo-conservatives call World War IV didn't start on 9/11 but in 1980, when Jimmy Carter, having failed to persuade Americans to cut down on their use of gas, declared that any attempt by an 'outside force' to take over the Persian Gulf would be met by a US military response. Bacevich details America's inglorious history in the region to illustrate his point."--James G. Forsyth, Boston Globe
"A provocative book.... Anyone with an interest in U.S. military, diplomatic, or political history, or in civil-military relations, or in current military policy should seriously consider Bacevich's argument and proposals, and the book should be required reading for all students at the nation's staff and war colleges."--Military History
"Brilliant, abrasive, important.... The epitaph for a blindly ideological, overly militarized, and self-defeating imperialism. His bravely outspoken book will enlighten many and infuriate more than a few."--Richard J. Whalen, Across the Board
"Some of the most trenchant and original criticism of the trajectory of U.S. foreign and military policy that has surfaced since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003."--Inter Press Service
"Andrew Bacevich has become perhaps the leading critic of America's preoccupation with military power. As a former professional soldier, he writes with great understanding of the military as an institution and of the path its leaders have taken since Vietnam. Bacevich explains trenchantly how, over the past 30 years, America's political and intellectual elites have all contributed to this country's overemphasis on war, soldiers and military solutions." --James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
"Buy this, read this, and make others do the same, but only if you are open to new perspectives. Bacevich brings a gimlet eye to an array of subjects. Here are some of the freshest observations available on contemporary American military affairs, political life and popular culture--indeed, probably too fresh and challenging for many readers, right and left." --Thomas E. Ricks, Military Correspondent, The Washington Post, and author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty
"A superbly researched, articulate book that compellingly challenges the basic assumptions of the use of American military power in the turbulent years since World War II. A clarion call for reform, The New American Militarism offers a blueprint for the 21st century that should be compulsory reading for the military establishment, Congress, the White House, and for every citizen concerned with how the United States wages war."--Carlo D'Este, author of Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life and Patton: A Genius For War


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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195173384
• ISBN-13: 978-0195173383
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #410,627 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

363 of 392 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How We Got Here, March 20, 2005

By	William Brennan "Wildbill944" (Northern Virginia) - See all my reviews

Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism: How Americans Are seduced By War, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-19-517338-4, is the most coherent analysis of how America has come to its present situation in the world that I have ever read. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton. And he is retired military officer. This background makes him almost uniquely qualified to comment on the subject.

Bacevich admits to an outlook of moderate conservatism. But in ascribing fault for our plight to virtually every administration since W.W. II, he is even handed and clear eyed. Since he served in the military, he understands the natural bureaucratic instincts of the best of the officer corps and is not blinded by the almost messianic status that they have achieved in the recent past.

His broad brush includes the classic period, the American Revolution - especially the impact of George Washington, but he moves quickly to the influence of Woodrow Wilson and his direct descendants of our time, the Neoconservatives. The narrative accelerates and becomes relevant for us in the depths of the despair of Vietnam. At that juncture, neocon intellectuals awakened to the horror that without a new day for our military and foreign policy, the future of America would be at stake. At almost the same time, Evangelical Christians abandoned their traditional role in society and came to views not dissimilar to the neocons. America had to get back on track to both power and goodness. The results of Vietnam on American culture, society, and - especially - values were abhorrent to both these groups.

The perfect man to idealize and mythologize America's road back was Ronald Reagan. Again, Bacevich does not shrink from seeing through the surreal qualities brought to the Oval Office by Reagan to the realities beneath them. The Great Communicator transformed the Vietnam experience into an abandonment of American ideals and reacquainted America with those who fought that horrible war. Pop culture of the period, including motion pictures such as Top Gun and best selling novels by many, including Tom Clancy completely rehabilitated the image of the military.

The author describes how Evangelical leaders came to find common cause with the neocons and provided the political muscle for Reagan and his successors of both parties to discover that the projection of military might become a reason for being for America as the last century closed.

One of his major points is that the all volunteer force that resulted from the Vietnam experience has been divorced from American life and that sending this force of ghosts into battle has little impact on our collective psyche. This, too, fit in with the intellectual throw weight of the neocons and the political power of the Evangelicals.

Separate from but related to the neocons, Bacevich describes the loss of strategic input by the military in favor of a new priesthood of intellectual elites from institutions such as the RAND Corporation, The University of Chicago and many others. It was these high priests who saw the potential that technology provided for changing the nature of war itself and how American power might be projected with `smart weapons' that could be the equivalent of the nuclear force that could never be used.

So it was that when the war we are now embroiled in across the globe - which has its antecedents back more than twenty years - all of these forces weighed heavily on the military leaders to start using the force we'd bought them. The famed question by Secretary of State Madeline Albright to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" had to have an answer and the skirmishes and wars since tended to provide it.

Bacevich clearly links our present predicaments both at home and abroad to the ever greater need for natural resources, especially oil from the Persian Gulf. He demolishes all of the reasons for our bellicosity based on ideals and links it directly to our insatiable appetite for oil and economic expansion. Naturally, like thousands of writers before him, he points out the need for a national energy policy based on more effective use of resources and alternative means of production.

It is in his prescriptions that the book tends to drift. The Congress must do its constitutionally mandated jobs or be thrown out by the people. Some of his ideas on military education are creative and might well close the gap between the officer corps and civilians that he points to as a great problem.

But it is the clearly written analysis that makes this book shine. It should be a must read for those who wonder how we got to Iraq and where we might be heading as a society. The nation is in grave danger, and this is a book that that shows how we got to this juncture. Where we go from here is up to us. If we continue as we are, our options may narrow and be provided by others.

READ THIS BOOK

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Baedecker on the road to perdition, December 5, 2005

By	Andrew S. Rogers (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I was sorry to see Andrew J. Bacevich dismiss Chalmers Johnson's 2004 The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) quite as quickly as he did (on page 3 of the introduction, in fact), because I think these two books, taken together, provide probably the best -- and certainly the most historically-informed -- look at the rise and consequences of American empire. I endorse "The New American Militarism" as heartily as I did "The Sorrows of Empire."

Bacevich's capsule summary of Johnson's work notwithstanding, both these books take the long view of America's international military presence and are quick to grasp one key point. As Bacevich notes on page 205, "American militarism is not the invention of a cabal nursing fantasies of global empire and manipulating an unsuspecting people frightened by the events of 9/11. Further, it is counterproductive to think in these terms -- to assign culpability to a particular president or administration and to imagine that throwing the bums out will put things right."

In several insightful chapters, Bacevich traces the rise of militarism over the course of several administrations and many decades. A former Army officer himself, the author is particularly insightful in charting the efforts of the military's officer corps to recover from the stigma of Vietnam and reshape the *ethos* of the armed services as an elite intentionally separate from, and morally superior to, the society it exists to defend. But the officers are only one of the strands Bacevich weaves together. He also looks at the influence of the "defense intellectuals;" the importance of evangelical Christians and how their view of Biblical prophecy shapes their understanding of politics; the rise of (yes) the neo-conservatives; and even the role of Hollywood in changing America's understandings of the "lessons of Vietnam" and the re-glamorization of the military in films like "Top Gun."

The author is a sharp-eyed analyst, but also an engaging writer, and he gives the reader a lot to think about. I was intrigued, for example, by his discussion of how "supporting the troops" has become the *sine qua non* of modern politics and how doing so has replaced actual military service as an indicator of one's love of country. More fundamentally, his identification and analysis of "World War III" (already over) and "World War IV" (currently underway, and declared [surprisingly] by Jimmy Carter) struck me as a remarkably useful lens for interpreting current events.

In tying his threads together, Bacevich is not afraid to make arguments and draw conclusions that may make the reader uncomfortable. As the passage I quoted above makes clear, for example, someone looking for a straightforward declaration that "It's all Bush's fault!" will have to go someplace else. As a further implication of the above passage, Bacevich argues that the "defense intellectuals," the evangelicals, and even the neocons were and are doing what they believe are most likely to promote peace, freedom, and the security of the American people. "To the extent that we may find fault with the results of their efforts, that fault is more appropriately attributable to human fallibility than to malicious intent" (p. 207). Additionally, Bacevich is unashamed of his military service, holds up several military leaders as heroes, has some choice words for the self-delusions of leftist "peace activists," and even argues that federal education loans should be made conditional on military service.

This doesn't mean the president and his fellow conservatives get off much easier, though. Bacevich is roundly critical of Bush and his administration, including Colin Powell; dismisses the Iraq invasion ("this preposterous enterprise" [p. 202]); and in a move that will probably get him crossed off the Thayer Award nominations list, suggests officer candidates be required to graduate from civilian universities instead of West Point (his alma mater) or Annapolis -- intellectually-isolated institutions that reinforce the officer caste's separation from civil society.

So this book isn't one that will blindly reinforce anyone's prejudices. In part for that reason -- but mostly for its trenchant analysis, readable prose, and broad historical view -- I'm happy to list "The New American Militarism" as one of the best and most important books I've read in some time. Perhaps even since "The Sorrows of Empire."

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Thought-Provoking Account of the 20th Century American Military Experience, March 24, 2006

By	Charles R. Bowery Jr. (Bad Windsheim, Germany) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Dr. Bacevich offers a provocative and well-argued thesis, that Americans since Vietnam have become ever more eager to use military force as a blunt political object. I found his discussion of the evolution of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines especially interesting. As a serving Army officer, I also enjoyed the chapter on the revitalization of the American military profession after Vietnam. One may agree or disagree with his thesis concerning the motives of the 1980s officer corps, however. I would like to see a bit more documentation for his assertion that Abrams and others were driven more by a desire to re-assert the primacy of the professional soldier than by a desire to prepare for war with the Warsaw Pact. Regardless, from my studies of the period I agree that the desire to put Vietnam and counterinsurgency out of our collective memory also drove the reforms of the 80s. For another view on this period, I would also recommend _Prodigal Soldiers_ by James Kitfield.

I would encourage anyone with an interest in contemporary military affairs to read this book. Dr. Bacevich has strong opinions and he offers them with verve. It is all too typical of the political Right in this country that when an author or commentator takes any position critical of the administration in power, he is immediately accused of "liberal bias". Any honest assessment of this book will see the scathing critique of the Clinton Administration and GEN Wesley Clark as well as the Bush Administration. Again, highly recommended; would make an excellent "book club" selection.