--Most Rev. Thonmas Gumbleton, Catholic Bishop of Detroit

America's Military Today: The Challenge of Militarism

by Tod Ensign
The New Press

Contributors: Christian G. Appy, Martin Binkin, Dan Fahey, Linda Francke, George and Meredith Friedman, Charles Sheehan-Miles, and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network

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"I can say from personal experience in Iraq that our commanders often make soldiers carry out orders that have nothing to do with reconstruction efforts or peacekeeping. Their clear purpose is to instigate firefights so that officers can get their combat experience, medals, and the glory they need to climb the military ladder." - Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an activated Army reservist from the Florida National Guard. America's Military Today provides an eye-opening survey of the way the modern US armed forces enlist, train, and deploy their all-volunteer force.

Book Review:
America's Military Today

By Michael Uhl

The conditions of daily life in the military are largely invisible to a majority of U.S. citizens who've never served a day in the armed forces. This fact is something of a paradox, given the centrality of military imagery in American cultural life, from the ubiquity of honor guards in public parades and ceremonies to the virtual saturation of televised sporting events with glitzy recruitment ads, not to mention the steady flow from Hollywood of films dramatizing the nation's wars and military exploits, past or present, fact or fiction. Certainly there is a general level of public acceptance, largely unexamined, of the need for uniformed forces within a highly disciplined and regimented institution to carry out the mission of American defense and, when necessary, to fight America's enemies. But the actual details of military life experienced by the average service person under everyday circumstances -- not just in the context of warfare -- are seldom a topic of probing journalistic interest or popular concern.

America's Military Today, written by Tod Ensign along with several collaborators, provides an antidote to such neglect. In truth, no better primer on this subject exists in print today for a general readership. But America's Military Today will serve most valuably perhaps as a resource and reference for the activist community in which Tod Ensign (and Citizen Soldier, the organization he heads) has played a leading role for decades as watchdog of American militarism, and advocate for the human rights of GIs and veterans.

Through such activist networks, this work will ideally find its way into the hands of young Americans currently presented with the option of military "employment." It is this population that would reap immediate benefits from a read of at least half the book's chapters, those in particular which describe in generally objective language the contemporary recruitment scene, and provide a fascinating account of what basic training looks like in today's all volunteer force, as compared with the draft-based military of the Vietnam era. From the outside, today's military actually looks like a job with a competitive pay-scale (at least if you're single) and living conditions that are closer to a college dorm than a barracks. But, in reading Ensign's book, a potential recruit might also learn -- ideally before, not after, signing an enlistment contract -- that a recruiter, especially an unscrupulous one, can promise a chosen area of training, but not deliver on it for reasons of "military necessity," a Catch 22 that trumps any individual claim or expectation, and from which there is no redress.

Separate chapters treating the special -- often disadvantaged -- experiences of minorities, women, and gays and lesbians, are warning signs for those within these cohorts who buy the hype about discriminatory cultures and practices being absent in today's military, or whose fantasies about military life are fixated on the outward bound-idyll portrayed in those sexy TV recruiting spots. In fact, for anyone joining the military today, in the context of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience is a bit like checking into the Roach Motel: it's easy to get in, but harder and harder to get out (assuming you keep your skin in tact). Stop Loss, a policy much employed of late by the Defense Department, can legally extend a service person's obligation beyond the terms of his or her enlistment contract. And, given how the reserve component of a service person's commitment is interpreted these days, even those returned to civilian life remain vulnerable to recall, a little known, but all the more draconian element of the often-called back-door-draft.

Many enlistees today must be prepared to serve, possibly fight, in a war zone. From the letters of such fighters currently in Iraq, Ensign has fashioned a chapter that painfully demonstrates how, like their Vietnam counterparts, many of today's American combatants haven't a clue of what they're supposed to accomplish in Iraq, other than to wreck havoc and destruction. A chapter on the Gulf War Syndrome reveals a second disturbing parallel between Vietnam and Iraq, mapping a new episode in the impact of the toxic battleground on the long term health of vast numbers of returning veterans. In Vietnam it was agent orange. Now it is feared that tens of thousands of Gulf War vets, and no doubt many more Iraq War veterans to come, have, or will have, ingested doses of damaging radiation from shells fabricated with depleted uranium (DU), whose exploded particles are blown helter-skelter about the war zone. It need hardly be said that the numbers of Iraqi victimized from such exposures could, in the years ahead, reach epidemic proportions.

America's Military Today may find its primary use as a anti-recruitment handbook, but the book's other half takes the reader well beyond a nuts&bolts account of the conditions and problems faced by contemporary GIs, and into areas of military structure and policy that threaten immediate pan-societal consequences. In his essay, "Filling the Ranks," Ensign examines the potential for a service-wide personnel crunch, resulting from spreading U.S. troops too thin in Iraq, and throughout the world, that could replace today's volunteer military with a new draft. Ensign's discussion is comprehensive, but he recognizes that any prediction on the outcome of this debate is still premature. One thing is for certain, should a new draft come, it will take women as well as men, and might even go beyond the military to universal service for all individuals of draft age, with few of the exemptions that formerly made military service the disproportional burden of minority and white working class males.

In "Policing America," Ensign, a lawyer, writes knowledgeably on a trend advanced by the Patriot Act in our post 9-11 national security environment toward weakening the time honored doctrine of posse comitatus which limits the military's role in domestic law enforcement. At issue here, ever in the minds of generations of American lawmakers from the framers onward, has been the commitment through such traditional safeguards to prevent the military from ever posing a challenge to the institutions of civilian control. What may be the book's most important essay, "Military Justice," is co-written by Ensign and Louis Font, an experienced courts-martial trial attorney. Here the two advocates take aim at the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), exposing the pattern of systematic violations of civil and human rights that pervades the military justice system by virtue of the arbitrary, often unassailable, powers of judicial authority invested at every level of command. If a reader who has not served in the armed forces reads only this chapter, he or she will grasp the most singular distinction between the rights of
civilians, and the rights of those in service: when you join the military, your ass belongs to Uncle Sam, and you can basically kiss due process goodby.

Michael Uhl is a writer living in Maine.