Newsreal: The army of the right

The Wall Street Journal's defense correspondent investigates today's military and finds it becoming an increasingly right-wing institution.

By Jonathan Broder

Jan 6, 1998 | WASHINGTON -- Last November, Assistant Army Secretary Sara Lister was forced to resign after her description of U.S. Marines as "extremists" raised howls of protest in the Pentagon and Congress. "Wherever you've got extremists, you get some risk of total disconnection with society, and that's a little dangerous," she said at an Oct. 26 seminar sponsored by Harvard University's John T. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies in Baltimore.

For Thomas E. Ricks, defense correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Lister's comments were not all that wide off the mark. In his just-published book, "Making the Corps" (Scribner), Ricks takes a long, hard look at today's military and comes up with some disturbing conclusions. While the U.S. military still produces highly trained fighters, it also turns out often slovenly, undisciplined support troops. For Ricks, the current spate of military sex scandals comes as no surprise. He quotes one soldier writing to his recruiter in New York, saying: "Sir: You told me there would be no sex at Fort Jackson (South Carolina). BOY, WERE YOU WRONG!"

Most disturbing, however, is Ricks' conclusion that the theoretically nonpartisan U.S. military has become a bastion of right-wing Republicanism. Ricks, a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military relations, finds that the politicization of the armed forces goes far beyond the military's contempt for its current commander in chief. It extends to the way the military sees itself standing in opposition to an increasingly degenerate civilian society. And in that gap, Ricks warns, lies the threat of American-style militarism that is not going to disappear with the next election.

Salon spoke with Ricks about the rightward drift in America's first line of defense.

You say that the military is becoming politicized across the board. But where is it most apparent?

I find it especially intense among the junior officers, which is to say lieutenants, captains and majors, and especially among white male junior officers.

Politicized in what way?

It's an expressly partisan politicization, where the identification is expressly with conservative Republicanism, where there is a disdain for the Democratic president, even though he is the commander in chief. But more broadly, it is a cultural conservatism that believes that American society is going to hell in a handbasket, that this is a degenerate society, that this is society in collapse.

Do you agree with former Assistant Army Secretary Sara Lister's comment that the Marines are full of "extremists"?

Certainly, there are Marines who carry these views to extremes. So you get the statement that I read in the Marine Corps Gazette a couple of years ago: "The next war we fight will be on American soil."

Has this politicization affected how the military does its job?

There is now less of a willingness, when the military loses the policy debate, to salute smartly, move out and follow that order. You saw that in Bosnia a lot, where the military dragged its feet and actively sought to undermine national policy.

In what way?

The military never bought into the administration's policy, which held that the Bosnian Muslims were the victims of aggression. The military constantly argued that all sides were equally guilty of aggression, that there were no good guys. Well, when you look at the indictments handed down by the International War Crimes Tribunal, that's not the case.

What are the roots of this politicization?

They go back to the Vietnam War, which resulted in the end of conscription. We got instead an all-volunteer force that self-selects among people who want to be in the military. You no longer have the leavening influence of the draftee who becomes an officer -- or the guy who becomes an officer to avoid the draft. Our last chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, was a draftee. The guy before him, Gen. Colin Powell, was an ROTC kid, who came out of the very unmilitary City College of New York.

The second thing the Vietnam War did was to destroy the pro-defense wing of the Democratic Party. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party showered so many goodies on the military that it made the military feel really wanted and relieved after going though a very bleak couple of decades. So there was a natural identification with Reagan Republicanism.

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