Book review for USNI Proceedings—August 2000
Edited by Charles C. Moskos, John Allen Williams, and David R. Segal
Oxford University Press, 2000
Reviewed by Captain Larry Seaquist, USN (Ret.)
Finally, a book by authors with something on their minds other than technology, analysts with a horizon which stretches beyond the Pentagon. We all know the military is changing. It is a pleasure to turn to thinkers—eighteen of them in this case—able to delve into the ways in which military professionals and their institutions are changing, and changing in different ways in different countries.
For years now, our post-Cold War reading diet has been confined to high-fat servings from the technology group. The shelf of recent military books overflows with breathless tales of a new, high tech military (American of course) engorged with “dominance”: information dominance, maneuver dominance, and certainly, ego dominance. Admiral Bill Owens’ recent effort, Lifting the Fog of War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2000) stands out as a singularly dreadful example of this “Revolution in Military Affairs” puffery.
As originally envisioned by Andrew W. Marshall, the Pentagon parent of the RMA, the profound changes afoot in late 20th Century armed forces-changes which he expected to crop up all over the world-would be most evident in altered military institutions and in changed professional thinking. However dazzling, the new information technologies would be mere enablers, not the revolution itself. Helpfully, The Postmodern Military lays a path toward these more fruitful investigations.
On this topic Moskos, Williams, and Segal are definitely the “go-to guys.” Professors all three, they lead the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. With its loose organization and eclectic interests, IUS is itself a post-modern structure: an international gathering of scholars and practitioners who pivot off a central interest in military sociology. (Full disclosure: I am an IUS member.) The three co-editors have tapped their IUS colleagues for chapters in this survey of trends in twelve different countries.
Moskos supplies the book’s conceptual toolkit. His analysis of how America’s armed forces have changed across three eras sets a framework for each of the other national surveys. Moskos is a prominent and influential figure whose work describing the U.S. Army’s advances in equal opportunity crystallized a national recognition that our military led the desegregation of American institutions. Here he discerns three eras: a pre-Cold War modern period stretching from 1900 to the end of WWII, a Cold War late modern phase, and the current postmodern stage opened in 1990. U.S. force structure, for example, evolved from the mass army of conscripts used in WWII through the large, professional army of the all-volunteer Cold War to the smaller professional army of today.
Moskos hangs many other transitions on his tripartite paradigm. The dominant U.S. military professional, he asserts, shifted from the “combat leader” of WWII to a Cold War “manager-technician” and on to a current “soldier-statesman; soldier-scholar” model. Here we discover one value of the book: it furnishes rocks we can toss at each other’s ideas. Let me throw just one for practice: Much as I would like to see Moskos’ forecast come true, there is little evidence of increasing political and academic sophistication among our senior officers. If anything, one can claim the opposite trend. Technical curricula dominate Navy’s post-graduate school and a innocence about security strategy and the political calculus for the use of force seems almost a prerequisite for high command. The book’s strength is that it lets us compare those issues with the dynamics in other armed forces.
Next door in Canada, we learn, the retreat from a homogenized uni-service back to land, air, and naval forces has been followed in our postmodern times with top-management “layering”. A mostly military operational layer works under a corporate layer in Ottawa where civilian and military officials infuse a business planning climate. The Canadian trend toward a military which increasingly incorporates civilian norms is not unique. The book’s international authors report new civil-military blends in many countries.
The book’s most prominent thread is the search for a military raison d’être absent a big foreign threat. Some armies have adopted peacekeeping and stability operations as their core competency. All seem to struggle with the attendant political and professional adjustments. The Dutch and the Canadians have undergone especially wrenching experiences in the aftermath of professional failures on peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and Somalia. In South Africa the profound changes after apartheid are yet in their early stages. In Israel, we learn, the army has shed some of its earlier, postmodern character as a citizen’s military. This force, which we see on television these days more than any other, is by some measures becoming more of a traditional, warrior- and threat-centered institution of professionals, opposite to the changes in many other countries.
In his thoughtful closing essay, Professor Williams urges us to study these other cases closely. “Decision makers in the U.S.,” he admonishes, “make a grave mistake if they assume that experiences of other militaries are irrelevant….” We may hope that military professionals and the new political leaders in Washington will take that advice as they plan the next stage in America’s military history.
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Larry Seaquist assists governments and communities in the developing world to mount practical conflict prevention and peacebuilding strategies. He also works with youth in American cities to develop strategies of violence reduction and personal success. See www.strategygroup.org.