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

in-your-neighborhoodcitizen-soldiers responsible for functions without which we could not wage a major military campaign. And in weaving the Guard and Reserves into the active-duty military, he also wove the military back into the country.
    John Vessey, who worked under Abrams during the restructuring, remembered the general’s central focus: “He thought about [the kind of nation America was] an awful lot, and concluded that whatever we’re going to do we ought to do right as we are a nation. Let’s not build an Army off here in the corner someplace. The Armed Forces are an expression of the nation. If you take them out of the national context, you are likely to screw them up. That was his lesson from Vietnam. He wasn’t going to leave them in that position ever again.”
    And so the political threshold for going to war was raised. The Abrams Doctrine—the Total Force Policy—put American politicians in the position of being “designed out” of waging war in a way that was dislocated from the everyday experience of American families. Remember Russell’s advice to Johnson when the president wondered whether he’d have to address a joint session of Congress about a huge escalation in Vietnam:
“Not as long as you don’t call up any Reserves I wouldn’t.”
With the Abrams Doctrine, calling up the Reserves would no longer be optional, and therefore neither would that pilgrimage to Congress. The president’s hand was forced: if America was to fight a war, the life of that “airplane driver for United” would have to be profoundly disrupted, civilians would have to be pried out of their civilian jobs. What Johnson had resisted as “too dramatic” in the last war would become the political price of admission to the next one.
    The loudest story of the summer and fall of 1973 may have been the Senate slowly tightening the noose of Watergate aroundPresident Nixon’s neck, but at the same time Congress was also busy writing “A Joint Resolution Concerning the War Powers of Congress and the President.” The War Powers Resolution of 1973 would be an explicit reassertion of the prerogative spelled out under Article 1, Section 8, “to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States” that Congress—and Congress alone—had the power to declare war.
    The framers had been voluble in their rationale for and in their defense of Article 1, Section 8. “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,” wrote James Madison, “that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” Even that suspected monarchist Alexander Hamilton saw the wisdom of keeping the power to declare war out of the hands of a single executive. Madison, Hamilton, and their fellow framers were building structural barriers against what they saw as the darker aspects of human nature. The lures to war—personal hatreds, political glory, material spoils, and the simple atavistic enthusiasm for violence—might be too enticing for one man to resist, and might be too easy to promote “by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory,” as a later congressman, Abraham Lincoln, put it, “that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.” Madison wrote in his notes during the constitutional debates that Virginia delegate George Mason “was for clogging rather than facilitating war; but for facilitating peace.”
    The framers clogged up the works by making the decision to go to war a communal one. By vesting it in the Congress—a large, slow-moving deliberative body of varied and often competing viewpoints—the Constitution assured that the case for any war would have to be loud, well argued, and made in plainview. The people’s representatives would be forced to take time and care to weigh the