Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

presidents wouldn’t have the option Johnson chose. The next time America went to war, it wouldn’tbe the military out there alone, “kicked off the goddamn cliff” as Webb’s NCO would say. Officially, the post-Vietnam restructuring of the military was called the Total Force Policy; unofficially, everyone called it the Abrams Doctrine.
    Creighton Abrams was the US commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972, while troop strength there went from more than half a million to one-fifteenth of that number. Then he returned to Washington, where he served as Army chief of staff from 1972 until he died in 1974. And as chief, while winding down that increasingly unpopular and costly war, Abrams restructured the United States Army in a way that made it harder for a commander in chief to go to war, or at least harder to fight a war without having first sought the support of the American people for that war.
    It’s hard to make the case that Abrams began his reorganization with the intent to remake the nation’s political structures, or with the express purpose of closing off options available to America’s elected officials. He certainly never talked about it that way. His overriding concern was the restoration of the institution to which he’d devoted his entire life: the United States Army. Vietnam had bled that institution dry. Its combat readiness around the world had been greatly diminished; the Seventh Army in Germany had become little more than a pricey replacement depot for Southeast Asia. The Guard and Reserves were in shambles, viewed as a haven for shirkers. And Abrams had seen firsthand how even the soldiers who had served honorably and proudly in Vietnam were demoralized. He personally knew the sting of civilian criticism: Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, had trouble hiding his contempt for Abrams. In 1971, Nixon said to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Abrams “had his shot” to win a military victory in Vietnam, “and he’s not going to get any more.” The following year, he wrote to Kissinger ofAbrams, “Our military leadership has been a sad chapter in the proud military history of this country.”
    As commander on the ground of a hated war, Abrams grew to love the Army and its soldiers all the more. “In a changing world, changing times and changing attitude and the various political motivations that have thrust themselves upon our country,” he told the First Infantry Division in their last hours before returning home, “[you] represent a constancy of those essential virtues of mankind: humility, courage, devotion, and sacrifice. The world is changed a lot, but this division continues to serve as it had in the beginning. I choose to feel that this is part of the cement and the rock and the steel that holds our great country together.”
    Abrams’s passion as Army chief at the end of Vietnam was to manage the nation’s demobilization from that conflict in a way that protected the military. Even as wartime appropriations dried up and the size of the Army shrunk dramatically and the now-hated draft was abolished, Abrams wanted a big national investment in military readiness. He had served in three American wars, and he described how calling up an unprepared Army out of an unprepared nation meant shedding too much American blood when it came time to fight: “We have paid, and paid, and paid again in blood and sacrifice for our unpreparedness.… I don’t want war, but I am appalled at the human cost that we’ve paid because we wouldn’t prepare to fight.”
    His solution was elegant in its simplicity and its financial efficiency. Under Abrams’s Total Force Policy, the Guard and Reserves would no longer be shelters to avoid service but rather integral parts of the nation’s fighting capacity. It would be operationally impossible to go to war without calling them up. Abrams wove the Guard and Reserves into the fabric of the active-duty military; he made those