What We Owe Our Troops: To Spend Their Lives Wisely

That's not the only thing we owe our troops, but it should certainly be at or near the top of the list.  Those who have joined the military have placed their lives and bodies at our disposal, to be used as our President, with the concurrence of Congress, sees fit.  The least we can do is take that commitment seriously, particularly by:

• Understanding what the stakes look like to the people in the country we're going to war in, rather than what they look like from our generally distant perspective;
• Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of both our allies and our enemies;
• Understanding what the true obstacles are likely to consist of;
• Determining whether our objectives are achievable without war, and achieving them peacefully if possible;
• Not getting into a war for domestic political reasons;
• Not staying in a war due to fear of domestic political fallout;
• When it becomes clear that a war is placing inordinate burdens on our volunteer army, spreading the burden via conscription if popular support for the war remains, or wrapping things up and getting out if it doesn't; and
• Acknowledging when we've reached the point where if we were going to achieve our goals and be able to exit on our desired terms, we'd have done so already, and acting on that acknowledgement by winding things down and getting out.

I'm sure you folks can think of others to add to the list.  Basically, they boil down to going to war (and continuing to fight) for the right reasons, and having a clue about what's going on in the war.

We haven't done very well by our troops, have we?  We've basically thrown their lives away by the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the tens of thousands in Vietnam before that.  The best that can be said for any of these wars is that we might've been able to wrap up our involvement in Afghanistan fairly quickly, if Bush, Cheney & Co. hadn't had Iraq on their minds.

Someday, somebody ought to apologize to our troops who fought in these wars, and their survivors, for our wanton waste of their lives.  Nobody will, of course, because not even the soldiers whose bodies have been mangled, or the survivors of those who were killed, want to hear that their lives were basically wasted.

I can't say I blame them.  But I can't come up with any other conclusion about the meaning(lessness) of their sacrifice.

This Memorial Day, we ought to commit ourselves to no more wars where we don't have a clue about what we're getting into, and no more lives sacrificed in such wars.  It's about the only way I can think of to honor the sacrifices already made by our troops in recent years.

Comments

[Eric Wilde]

Truth

[Lex]

Not to link-whore too much, but I wrote this almost seven years ago, and it remains sadly relevant.

[Sir Charles]

l-t c,

Good and timely piece.

Lex,

That's a good post -- especially about the inherent dangers in this work. I remember my father telling me that when he served in the Marines on the U.S.S. Missouri -- between WWII and Korea -- that they always brought coffins on maneuvers as guys just got killed from the exercises alone, even without an enemy shooting at them.

[oddjob]

guys just got killed from the exercises alone, even without an enemy shooting at them

Always. During the Korean War my dad flew as the radar operator on a radar patrol plane. He never suffered but he almost did once when the catapault didn't launch their plane with its usual force and they nearly ended up in the ocean. Flight operations on a carrier deck are very dangerous.

[Bill H]

I mostly agree with the sentiment, but a couple of the points strike me as being a bit off.

"Understanding what the stakes look like to the people in the country we're going to war in, rather than what they look like from our generally distant perspective"

We don’t need to be fighting wars in other countries unless we are fighting that war against that country, in which case we don’t need to care how they see anything. We just need to make them surrender. This whole idea of fighting in some other country for that country’s benefit is insane.

"When it becomes clear that a war is placing inordinate burdens on our volunteer army, spreading the burden via conscription if popular support for the war remains, or wrapping
things up and getting out if it doesn't"

Basing a decision to stay in a war or end it on popular support for the war is utterly insane. If we are even considering popular support then whether popular support is there or not an immediate exit should be made. Wars need to ba based on policy, not public sentiment.

[oddjob]

Presumably the policy meets with popular support?

[low-tech cyclist]

Bill: I'd say our intervention in the Balkans during the Clinton years is a good counterexample to your first point.

To your second, as a small-d democrat, I just have to disagree. Something as serious as involvement in a war needs the support of the electorate. As we've noticed, wars can cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of furriner lives, and trillions of dollars, and can be damned hard to get out of, under the best of circumstances. That's just too big a decision for our elites to make without the consent of the governed.

I'd go so far as to say that to go to war, we need a country that's fairly united in support of the war's goals and potential costs; a bare majority really doesn't suffice, because as we've seen, that level of support can be ginned up in a hurry, and go south equally fast.

Not that I expect it to happen in my lifetime, but I'd love to see the Constitution amended to require 2/3 support of each house of Congress to put troops into a combat situation abroad.

[kathy a.]

the brother of a friend (and 46 others) died when a gun turret exploded on the USS iowa during a training exercise.

we should have learned something from the vietnam war, which lurched on for years and years before saigon fell and we finally got out.

apparently the take-away lesson for the shrub administration was that wars get unpopular faster when lots and lots of people's kids are being drafted as cannon fodder. so, our recent and current unpleasantness has been conducted with the volunteer military serving multiple tours, and using reserves and national guard units in large numbers. a PR decision was made to not enlist the nation to make shared sacrifices. (not immediately; the war went on the credit card, so now we are supposed to cut everything else to pay the debt.) these wars were to be nothing to worry our pretty little heads about. we were to go shopping.

in the case of iraq, the announced policy justification was based on lies (WMD, iraq involved with 9/11); and the real policy justification (get saddam hussein) was not offered publicly except to the extent it reinforced the lies. does public sentiment about that situation not matter?

bill, i disagree with the idea that we need not care about the people of a country where we are fighting. it is unjust to indiscriminately harm civilians. it is stupid to barge in with no idea of the culture, no way to know who is the enemy, no wish to cultivate and protect intelligence sources.

finally, another lesson from the VN war, which so fractured our nation that returning military were often reviled, or simply dismissed as damaged goods. the soldiers and sailors are not to blame for the decisions made up the chain of command -- or for enduring the visible and invisible injuries that war imposes. even if pressed into service involuntarily, they have attempted to do duty to country, often under horrible circumstances.

[nancy]

In 1966, before heading off to France to serve his country by serving the Mormon Church, here we see Romney's Vietnam War and draft stance. I'd very much like to see him pressed on this, since a) he didn't serve, and was of age, but objected quite publicly to other's protestations and objections, and b) during the conflicts of recent years, no member of his family, five sons also of age, has volunteered to do so. (As far as I can tell, info at link is accurate.)

Yet he and good friend Bibi have more war plans in mind, expecting more sacrifice on the part of our military -- in which they've no personal or familial investment as far as we know. I think that's more evidence of Romney's easy abstraction of real people he knows nothing about. Nor the consequences of his pandering blather.

[low-tech cyclist]

Sounds like Mitt was a true precursor of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders of the past decade, in being strongly pro-war, but believing they had more important things to do with their lives than actually fight in the wars they advocated for.

Al Gore and John Kerry served in Vietnam. Mitt and GWB dodged service in that war. Now that the WWII-Korea generation has largely gotten too old for public service, is there any prominent Republican besides John McCain who's served in any of our wars since then?

[oddjob]

Not among the loudest warmongering neoconservatives. Almost to a person they are de facto "chickenhawks" who had "other priorities" when it was their time to serve.