January 07, 2005

Robert Kaplan: An Empire Wilderness - Fort Leavenworth

An excerpt from the prologue of "An Empire Wilderness". In the prologue, Robert Kaplan visits Fort Leavenworth, to talk to people, to learn. It is from that point that he begins his journey through America.

Kaplan writes:

Colonel Jerry Morelock's walls are clustered with US military iconography: a dogged U.S. Grant, the father of total, unheroic war, leaning against a tree at City Point; Robert E. Lee after Appomattox; and so on. For a computer screen'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">computer screen saver, Morelock uses a photo of Ike, George Patton, Omar Bradley, and other generals taken in May 1945 in Germany, after V-E Day. Morelock, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and whose gray hair'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">gray hair has begun to recede, lives with his family in "The Rookery", the oldest house in Kansas, built in 1832. MacArthur lived here when he was on post in the early 1900s. A typical title on Morelock's bookshelf is Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian Wars 1866-1891. He salutes the flag every day at five o'clock, he told me.

"Fifty years after V-E Day, the US has history's strongest military. But it has eroded tremendously since 1991. And that is nothing new." Morelock then explained to me how following every conflict, including the Revolutionary War (after which the twenty-thousand-man Continental Army was disbanded and replaced by a "regiment" of seven hundred militiamen), military cutbacks ensued as memories faded. This was true of the periods following not just the First and Second World Wars, but also the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. "After every war, everyone declared the end of war. Though now we talk about lots of smaller wars, what's to prevent a really big conflagration? The record of history indicates that a new and great threat is certain." The task for officers here is daunting: imagine being at Leavenworth after 1898, when the United States was flush with victory following its defeat of Spain, and trying to predict the rise of Hitler at a time when the words "totalitarianism" and "fascism" had yet to be coined. The horrors of the next century may not even have names yet. [Sheila's note: You're right about that, bub. But they sure as hell have names now.]

Through most of our history, we have had a weak central government and a small volunteer army. The military draft has been strictly a wartime thing, a radical departure from most empires of the past, especially Rome's. (Nor were the antiwar protests of the Cold War-Vietnam era unique. The Mexican War, for instance, caused dramatic protests whose pacifist rhetoric could be mistaken for that of 1960s demonstrators. Poet Robert Lowell opposed Vietnam, just as his great-granduncle James Russell Lowell, the first editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly, opposed the Mexican War.) The United States, in fact, did not have an adequate standing army until the twentieth century. World War II, the Cold War, and the persistence of a military draft through 1973 masked the reality of a weakly governed, brawling, fractious society. Now two oceans may not seal us off from disintegrative forces elsewhere.

Posted by sheila
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