Our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom
George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like
those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work
largely for wages and benefits - a compensation package that may not always be
commensurate with the dangers in store, as current recruiting problems testify.

by David M. Kennedy

The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired
from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited
to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's
volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits
- a compensation package that may not always be commensurate with the dangers in
store, as current recruiting problems testify.

Neither the idealism nor the patriotism of those who serve is in question here.
The profession of arms is a noble calling, and there is no shame in wage labor.
But the fact remains that the United States today has a military force that is
extraordinarily lean and lethal, even while it is increasingly separated from
the civil society on whose behalf it fights. This is worrisome - for reasons
that go well beyond unmet recruiting targets.

One troubling aspect is obvious. By some reckonings, the Pentagon's budget is
greater than the military expenditures of all other nations combined. It buys an
arsenal of precision weapons for highly trained troops who can lay down a
coercive footprint in the world larger and more intimidating than anything
history has known. Our leaders tell us that our armed forces seek only just
goals, and at the end of the day will be understood as exerting a benign
influence. Yet that perspective may not come so easily to those on the receiving
end of that supposedly beneficent violence.

But the modern military's disjunction from American society is even more
disturbing. Since the time of the ancient Greeks through the American
Revolutionary War and well into the 20th century, the obligation to bear arms
and the privileges of citizenship have been intimately linked. It was for the
sake of that link between service and a full place in society that the founders
were so invested in militias and so worried about standing armies, which Samuel
Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."

Many African-Americans understood that link in the Civil War, and again in World
Wars I and II, when they clamored for combat roles, which they saw as stepping
stones to equal rights. From Aristotle's Athens to Machiavelli's Florence to
Thomas Jefferson's Virginia and Robert Gould Shaw's Boston and beyond, the
tradition of the citizen-soldier has served the indispensable purposes of
sustaining civic engagement, protecting individual liberty - and guaranteeing
political accountability.

That tradition has now been all but abandoned. A comparison with a prior
generation's war illuminates the point. In World War II, the United States put
some 16 million men and women into uniform. What's more, it mobilized the
economic, social and psychological resources of the society down to the last
factory, rail car, classroom and victory garden. World War II was a "total war."
Waging it compelled the participation of all citizens and an enormous commitment
of society's energies.

But thanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call the
"revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and
information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest
profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is,
proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won
World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic
product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.

The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can
now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does
so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and
daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve. Modern warfare lays no significant
burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.

This is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing
invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly
feared was the greatest danger of standing armies - a danger made manifest in
their day by the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Jefferson described as
having "transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military
arm."

Some will find it offensive to call today's armed forces a "mercenary army," but
our troops are emphatically not the kind of citizen-soldiers that we fielded two
generations ago - drawn from all ranks of society without respect to background
or privilege or education, and mobilized on such a scale that civilian society's
deep and durable consent to the resort to arms was absolutely necessary.

Leaving questions of equity aside, it cannot be wise for a democracy to let such
an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and
accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy - like dealing
out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the
assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be
accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy.

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make
demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and
death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge
army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the
form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one
option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military
sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be
left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's
business.