If we needed to be re-awakened, the PBS Series “The Vietnam War” reminded us that men and women who served in Vietnam were certainly treated differently by the American people than those currently returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, Niger, and wherever. Disrespect was expressed towards many of those who returned from Vietnam, even though few had anything to do with defining the mission. Most were drafted, and they certainly deserved a pass, particularly from citizens such as me who found ways to avoid the military.

There is little doubt that a man or woman who serves in the military deserves special respect. Short of going to prison, they cede more personal freedom than virtually all others in our work force. In many cases, they put their lives in danger. The psychological tolls of sacrificed individual liberty and high personal risk are demonstrably high.

If we cast our gaze only on those who serve in the military, then it might make sense to place them on a pedestal. But as difficult as their lives may be, most of the rest of us face difficult challenges and often overcome them. Standard practice is not for us or our families to be given stars of any color for our service, even though we contribute as much or more towards enriching our society.

For a moment, think of the United States as being the 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers. This is the team with the best regular season record in the Major Leagues. They may well win the World Series to cap this outstanding season. But let us not forget that near the end of the season, they lost eleven games in a row and sixteen out of seventeen.

A reality check shows that when it comes to the post- World War II military record of the United States against under nations, it is not that different from the low-point of the Dodgers’ 2017 season. Korea may have been a very honorable draw, particularly at a time when we did not know whether the concept of “bleeding red communism” was a potential threat or a real one. Even with Vietnam, there was still uncertainty about the threat of communism.

But Vietnam became a loss for the United States, and it appears to be a compounded loss because we seemingly have not learned some clear lessons from the war. Perhaps the most succinct way to view these lessons is to apply the U.S. experience in Vietnam to major tenets of the Just War Theory, a concept that has withstood the test of time over several millennia.

1. War should be a last resort policy

Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted or are clearly not practical. It may be clear that the other side is using negotiations as a delaying tactic and will not make meaningful concessions.

2. There should be proportionality in war

The anticipated benefits of waging a war must be proportionate to its expected evils or harms.

3. War must be fought for a just cause

The reason for going to war needs to be just and cannot therefore be solely for recapturing things taken or punishing people who have done wrong; innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life.

4. War must achieve comparative justice

While there may be rights and wrongs on all sides of a conflict, to overcome the presumption against the use of force, the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other.

5. War must be fought with the right intention

Force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose—correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain or maintaining economies is not.

6. In war, there must be a high probability of success

Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;

With virtually all of these factors, the U.S. has made serious mistakes in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. It’s as if the Just War Theory had never been written and no one tried to learn lessons from Vietnam.

Part of the collateral damage of misguided American overseas ventures is that we bend over backwards to not associate the men and women in uniform with their missions. We want to give them a break which includes not attaching them to the foolishness of some of what they do. We would do better to help them earn their honor through purposeful missions.

Some Republicans have said that we should not discuss US policy in the wake of the tragic deaths of four soldiers. These are the same voices who are saying that we cannot discuss gun control in the wake of mass shootings.

Policy must always be on the table, regardless of gold stars, guns, or a host of other items that often prohibit us from improving the quality of life for Americans and others around the world.  In the meantime, the U.S. should concentrate on being like the Dodgers and putting more stars in the ‘W’ column, a column that hopefully does not involve war.

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Robert Redford’s latest movie, “The Company You Keep,” didn’t make me stand up and cheer, but it did make me think. The movie tells the tale of a group of former anti-Vietnam-War protesters, still on the run from the law more than 30 years later. One of the goals of the radical protesters of the 1960s and 1970s that the movie alludes to was to end the military draft. It was unfair—offering too many “easy outs” to privileged people like Dick Cheney [he had “other priorities” at the time], George W. Bush [he got a cushy assignment—which he may or may not have completed—in the reserves], and even Bill Clinton [who wangled his way out, too.] It was the mechanism that sucked an endless stream of 18- to 21-year-olds into the meat grinder of a futile war.

Eventually, we got our wish. In 1973, at the end of combat operations in Vietnam, America ended conscription and established a large, professional, all-volunteer military force.

But that fulfilled wish has had unintended consequences. The military now operates and lives in a world mostly isolated from civilian life, and war has become a spectator sport for most Americans. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t spark the same intensity of protest that we saw in the Viet Nam years.

Why? In an op-ed published in the New York Times [May 22, 2013], entitled “Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart,” a former Army commander in Afghanistan and an emeritus history professor spell out some of the reasons, and offer arguments for reinstituting a modified military draft—and other ways to re-integrate civilian and military life.

What’s wrong with the all-volunteer model?

The all-volunteer military is failing America in several ways, say the authors—Karl W. Eikenberry and David M. Kennedy. In the absence of a military draft, Americans have become disengaged from the economics and the experience of war. Civilians are insulated from the military: Fewer serve, and a vastly reduced portion of Americans have contact with, help produce, or profit from the sale of war materials. We’re simply not as connected to the military as we once were, and our awareness of the issues involved in military service—and, of course—war itself—is dramatically diminished. It’s somebody else’s job, somebody else’s risk, somebody else’s war.

Eikenberry and Kennedy note that:

The modern force presents presidents with a moral hazard, making it easier for them to resort to arms with little concern for the economic consequences or political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans are happy to thank the volunteer soldiers who make it possible for them not to serve, and deem it somehow unpatriotic to call their armed forces to task when things go awry.

In other words, in the days of the compulsory military draft, more of us had skin in the game. Most civilians knew someone who was serving in the military. We could see the costs—economic, physical and emotional. We protested the Viet Nam war because we and our friends were at risk, as well as because the war itself was unwinnable—and therefore immoral—and ill-advised.

Moving toward a better system

Eikenberry and Kennedy offer several suggestions, such as:

-Institute a lottery draft:

[Such a s system would]…reintroduce the notion of service as civic obligation. The lottery could be activated when volunteer recruitments fell short, and weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled Americans, providing an incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters.

-Re-establish the Total Force Doctrine

This philosophy…shaped the early years of the all-volunteer force, but was later dismantled. It called for large-scale call up of the reserves and National Guard at the start of any large, long deployment. Because these standby forces tend to contain older men and women, rooted in their communities, their mobilization would serve as a brake on going to war because it would disrupt their communities.

-Give Congress a larger role in war-making

Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Eikenberry and Kennedy say:

It’s high time to revisit the recommendation, made in 2008 by the bipartisan National War Powers Commission, to replace the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires notification of Congress after the president orders military action, with a mandate that the president consult with Congress before resorting to force.

-Pay for wars in real time

This is a lesson we are learning the hard way, in the wake of the economically disastrous, unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eikenberry and Kennedy say:

Levying special taxes, rather than borrowing, to finance “special appropriations” would compel the body politic to bear the fiscal burden—and encourage citizens to consider war-making a political choice they were involved in, not a fait accompli they must accept.

The authors also suggest ways to break down the wall between civilian and military life, such as:

-Decrease reliance on contractors for non-combat tasks, so that the true size of the force would be more transparent

-Integrate veteran and civilian hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, which would let civilians see war’s wounded firsthand.

-Shrink self-contained residential neighborhoods on domestic military bases, so that more service members could pray, play and educate their children alongside their fellow Americans. We need to break down the civilian-military barrier and reinforce a sense of duty that that is critical to the health of our democratic republic, where the most important office is that of the citizen.

Of course, the best solution would be no wars–or at least no dumb wars and no trumped-up wars– and no need for a military or any kind of a draft. But that’s a utopian dream. If we must live with the reality of a military, we should at least try to do it better.

The post We ended the military draft. Maybe we need it again. Or something like it. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It may be too strong an adage to say the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same things with the expectation of different results. One question with U.S. foreign policy is whether its presence in Afghanistan is essentially the same as it was in Vietnam.

There may well have been justifications for going into both Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the case of Vietnam, there was a fear of the spread of communism. In 1950 when North Korea unexpectedly and viciously invaded South Korea, the U.S. convinced the United Nations to take immediate action because the aggression was blatant. This was just a year after the Soviet Union had developed and tested its first atomic bomb. China loomed above North Korea as the world’s largest nation. Also, in 1949, it had changed dramatically, when the communists drove the nationalists off the mainland and onto the island of Formosa.

The U.S. was concerned about losing any territory to the communists and had a fear of the so-called “domino the,ory,” in which, after one country was defeated, its neighbor would fall like a domino. Country after country would fall, like a row of dominos until there was a natural or human barrier to stop the falling.

In the case of Korea, there was a natural barrier with the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. But when communism was making headway in Vietnam, the row of dominos included Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and possibly India and Pakistan.

France had held Vietnam as a colony prior to World War II and tried to regain control after the war. It also tried to stop the hemorrhaging of communism in Southeast Asia. However, by 1954, it was clear that their efforts were fruitless, and they withdrew.

We’ve recently heard more about the theory of “American exceptionalism.” It’s the idea is that the United States is capable of doing things that other countries can’t. It’s true in some regards, but not all. When it came to Vietnam, the U.S. may have fought with more commitment, better strategy, and more skill from its armed forces, but the result was essentially the same as the French. American exceptionalism failed.

Now we are in Afghanistan. Our motives were initially sound, trying to track down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, perpetrators of the horrific nine eleven attack. The U.S. actually was successful at first, nearly caught bin Laden, and inflicted considerable damage on al Qaeda and its partners in the Taliban. But then President George Bush and his neo-con friends did the inexplicable. They essentially gave up on Afghanistan and redirected their focus and forces to Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with nine eleven. One of the costs of the American incursion into Iraq was that valuable time was lost in Afghanistan and the United States was not accomplishing its goals.

President Barack Obama largely fulfilled his promise for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq, albeit at a slower pace than many wanted. However, for reasons that baffled progressives, he escalated the American presence in Afghanistan long after the war had become unwinnable. Even with remarkable hi-tech equipment and dedicated troops, the best that could be said of progress was that it was at a stalemate.

It was on his watch that Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed. But in retrospect, that had little to do with Afghanistan. Bin Laden had been hiding out in Pakistan for more than five years. American intelligence found him, though there was some doubt if they had it right. Obama did give the green light for the capture or kill operation, and due to remarkable work by Navy Seal Team Six, bin Laden was found and “neutralized.”

While the number of American combat troops in Afghanistan is being reduced, a new projected end point is 2024. The question remains, what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan? Has the U.S. not learned the lessons of Iraq and of Vietnam as well?

Part of the American experience in Afghanistan has involved horrible atrocities. As Scott Camil reports in a special opinion piece to CNN, similar acts of brutality and inhumanity occurred in Vietnam. Is that the nature of war, particularly one in which “victory” is only a possibility and difficult to define?

There is a multitude of differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan, beginning with the terrain. But both involve corrupt governments, questionable soldiers for the “host countries” and a lack of support from many American civilians.

As journalist Dan Rather said in his recent book,  Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News:

I wish I could say that Afghanistan is better. Perhaps we might have learned in Vietnam how difficult if not impossible it is to remake a society. Now that we are in our second decade in Afghanistan, however, the familiar echoes of Vietnam are sounding louder and more haunting. We are fighting massive government corruption, trying to revamp the Afghan legal system, trying to teach literacy, trying to improve the status of women, trying to oversee free elections. We are once again hearing about the need to win the hearts and minds of the people. Afghanistan and Vietnam are different. The only thing that is the same is the mistakes we made in both situations. How quickly we forget.

Barack Obama is considered intelligent and cautious. It appears that in the case of Afghanistan, caution is trumping intelligence. He certainly is knowledgeable about what Vietnam did to the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. As always, he may know far more than any observers. But there is still tremendous doubt that staying longer in Afghanistan will render any more success than it did in Vietnam. It will be interesting to see how he handles this issue, both as president, and in his future memoirs.

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