Military Invalidators
Many liberals and progressives feel that the only way to generate sustained public pressure against overspending on the Pentagon budget (now heading for the trillion-dollar mark) is to get military validators, ideally high-ranking officers, to weigh in. This was possible in the past, as in the Vietnam War years, when Admirals Gene Larocque and Eugene Carroll founded the Center for Defense Information, an indispensable resource for opponents of massive Pentagon budgets and misguided wars.
Its important to remember, however, that the use of military validators can go terribly wrong. This was certainly the case in 1983 when President George W. Bush sent General Colin Powell, whose approval rating was then 20 points higher than his, to the United Nations in February 2003 to make a case for Iraq's alleged (but, in fact, nonexistent) arsenal of nuclear weapons, a month before the U.S. invaded that country. It was certainly good theater, but many of his points would prove to be sheer fantasy.
There were also prominent retired generals like Lee Butler and James Cartwright who called for sharp reductions in, or the total elimination of, all nuclear weapons globally, including the American arsenal. Butler, a former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, signed a 1998 statement, organized by the group Global Zero, that called for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally. And Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of United States nuclear forces, endorsed a 2012 report by Global Zero arguing that nuclear deterrence could be maintained with a far smaller U.S. nuclear arsenal of 900 total warheads, versus the current stockpile of thousands of them, either deployed or in reserve.
But high-level military officers able and willing to criticize Donald Trumps current global strategy and this country's still rising military spending levels are an ever-shrinking cohort. Little wonder, given that, as a Quincy Institute report found, 80% of all three- and four- star generals who retired in a recent five-year period went to work for yes, of course! the arms industry in one capacity or another.
And although mid-level officers and those below them in the ranks are the likely backbone of a growing movement for peace and racial, gender, and economic justice, they simply cant do it alone, even if their voices are crucial for reaching certain key audiences.
And heres a reality of this moment: Given the torrent of threats to basic rights now emanating from Washington, movements of resistance need all the help they can get. In that grim context, antiwar veterans will certainly be crucial allies in the struggle for peace and justice, but there will also have to be a cultural and psychological shift, weaning many Americans from their attraction to war as a way to solve problems and their sense of themselves as citizens of the most powerful country in the world.
Americas increasingly dysfunctional relationship to war is analyzed in detail in 26-year Army veteran Gregory Daddis's new book, Fear and Faith: Americas Relationship with War Since 1945. He believes that this countrys martial bonds have been informed by deep-seated frictions between faith in and fear of war and its consequences. In his concluding chapter, War for Wars Sake, Daddis underscores the stubborn commitment to war that prevails among many Americans, despite the costly and disastrous wars of this century. War, he writes, remains with us because we have inherited Cold War tendencies toward viewing the world in black-and-white terms, where every threat seems existential to the global American project Americas faith never truly wavered, even after the debacle in Vietnam. Calls for military crusades against evil still resonate.
Daddis believes that a twisted relation with faith and fear, if left unbroken, can only preordain the nation to a militarized way of life bounded by the grimness of war.
In light of the devastating impact of Americas post-9/11 wars, as documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University the loss of $8 trillion, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, millions of people driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans suffering physical wounds or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) calls for peace through strength and ever higher Pentagon budgets should ring increasingly hollow.
Isn't it finally time for a respectful national dialogue about what constitutes an adequate defense and how to balance military preparations with other urgent national needs? Of course, having any such conversation, given the present deep divisions in American society, will be a challenge in its own right. But the alternative is a continuation of some variation of the devastating wars of the post-9/11 period, and such new and perilous conflicts will involve boots on the ground, air strikes, or the endless arming of repressive regimes.
Copyright 2025 William D. Hartung
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