Military

CARNAGE AND CONNECTIVITY: HOW OUR PURSUIT OF FUN WARS BROUGHT THE WARS HOME

In 1984, at the mid-point of the Reagan era, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger laid out the rudiments of the Weinberger doctrine on the use of force by the United States in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The gist of it:

• Wars should be fought only when there is a high degree of public support for them;
• Wars should only be fought in the pursuit of interests that are vital to the nation; and
• Wars should be fought to win — quickly, decisively, and in a spirit of massive commitment of effort to victory, howsoever defined.

It does not require supernatural abilities to see the grim specter of the Vietnam War animating this set of foreign policy principles. The American defense establishment’s memory of its hellish experience in southeast Asia still gnawed its consciousness at that time — even while, by the mid-1980s, it was beginning to recover its sense of selfbelief. A passage from the memoirs of Gen. Tommy Franks, American Soldier, that describes the army of the 1970s, serves well to illustrate the nadir of the mood to which they wished never to return...