An interesting piece by Scott Beauchamp (yes, that one) in the Guardian:
But before we pat ourselves on the back for having a progressive military that’s “on the right side of history”, a parallel and equally profound change should complicate our adulation: millennials are content to send their gay, female and Sikh friends to die on their behalf without a willingness to sacrifice themselves.
The seemingly honest efforts of the Department of Defense to make the composition of the military vaguely resemble a slice of the actual American populace are undermined by the fact that most Americans of military fighting age don’t serve. More precisely, they don’t want to serve. Which wouldn’t be hypocritical if they didn’t also want a “boots on the ground” military response to the Islamic State.
According to a poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 60% of people between the ages of 18-29 support the commitment of American combat troops to fight Isis on the ground. At the same time, 62% of those same people say they wouldn’t join the fight themselves. The military doesn’t have an inclusivity problem. Americans, specifically millennials, have a military exclusivity problem.
***The director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, John Della Volpe, gave his explanation of the poll he led earlier in December of why millennials don’t want to fight in a war that they support as being indicative of “a deep distrust … about all things relating to the government”. Which seems facile, considering they support the government waging the war in the first place.
A more accurate interpretation might be the exact opposite, that after more than a decade of relying on a minuscule 0.5% of Americans to serve in the military, and during that same time using the military as a blunt, multi-purpose tool to solve America’s problems overseas, has led millennials to see the military as a force that constantly engages foreign enemies without requiring any direct sacrifice from them personally. When President George W Bush suggested that Americans prepare for war by shopping, he untethered an entire generation from the wars being waged on its behalf by a negligible number of its cohorts.
Even though millennials’ attitudes about war are handed-down, there still exists a moral imperative to reject the inheritance. Supporting the rights of women, LGBT and religious minorities to serve in the military is fine, but asking that they kill and die on behalf of a war that you yourself refuse to participate in is, to resuscitate a word, dishonorable.
An interesting point- if you distrust the government so much, why are you so willing to trust them to send other people off to war? Additionally, this just exacerbates the civilian/military divide. When I was on active duty decades ago, there was already an us v. them mentality about the them not understanding. It’s grown even worse, and this sort of thing exposes part of why that is the case.
I’ll let Sooner and Adam chime in with their thoughts and update this post if they have any.
———-UPDATE 12:38 AM———-
Adam L Silverman: John asked for Sooner or me to put our thoughts in, and I just got through the comments, and am now adding my take. I think there are several overlapping issues going on – and they are ones that the military is itself concerned with. My experience with this is mostly on the Army side, so please keep that in mind. The first is the separation of the Force from the citizenry. The worry is that Americans will not just see military service as something others do, but will view the military as, essentially, a permanent, self selecting/all volunteer mercenary force. This certainly goes against how the military sees itself. Military personnel, especially those who are making the military a career (and in some cases have attained sufficient rank to see a bigger picture in their chosen profession) understand themselves to be part of the Profession of Arms.* And this is, to be honest, what was so wrong with how the Bush 43 Administration approached using the military after 9-11. By telling everyone that the best thing they can do is go shopping because the All Volunteer Force (AVF) has got this, it disconnected the citizenry from those who went to Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Moreover, the fact that this is the first time I know of that war has been waged and taxes or a dedicated revenue stream (war bonds) have not been implemented further signaled that what was taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan was not something most Americans needed to worry about.