The New American Military by Andrew J. Bacevich deserves a careful read. I personally get tired of criticism from the churchly left - mainly because they have not done their homework. We should all pay attention to Andrew Bacevich, a soldier and scholar. Here is an extended quote from Lawrence Freedman's review in the WaPo.
"Of course, the military professionals were at the fore, but they were not particularly interested in promoting a belligerent foreign policy. Rather, they were determined to regain their standing and self-respect. The first step was to end the widely disliked Vietnam-era draft, making it possible for the general population to support the military without actually having to get involved. This shift made reservists more important because it proved hard to keep the military's numbers up solely through volunteers, who tended to be those with few alternative career choices. By making any actual fighting dependent on these reservists, the generals deliberately made it harder for the politicians to go to war.
This may seem counterintuitive, but institutionally it had its own logic. The generals did not want to be used as the national solution for all types of international problems. They wanted to dissuade civilians from using the military in a cavalier fashion. They also wanted to prevent excessive civilian interference in operational matters, for which the senior brass blamed the failure in Vietnam. The aim, therefore, was to maintain a sharp focus on the forms of warfare with which they felt most comfortable: conventional campaigns against other great powers. Big wars had the advantage of requiring lots of expensive firepower and combat-ready troops, while also being the least likely type of fighting to erupt.
By the same token, involvement in lesser conflicts was discouraged; these would not involve "proper" soldiering, could not be won through decisive battles and were likely to lose public support. The professional military -- then led by Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- was not even keen on taking on Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, a conflict that was largely fought on conventional lines and did much to restore the military's reputation.
The military, therefore, has not really been a promoter of militarism. If anything, Bacevich argues, rather than trying to impose military values on all of American society, career soldiers have celebrated their own distinctiveness as something the rest of U.S. society should admire, and they have shown no great interest in going to war."
It's on my reading list.
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