In today’s military the first thing any service member learns
when he or she begins training is that they are professionals and
are expected to act accordingly. These are professional warriors
who have volunteered for their job. They have not been torn from
the bosom of civilian life by a national conscription. Civilian
comparisons to their job can be made with law enforcement, fire
fighting and emergency medical services, among others. Why then has
there been a growing cry concerning the so-called
non-representational character of military service?
The answer lies in great part in the unwillingness of people
against the U.S. invasion of Iraq to recognize that the job being
done by service personnel is a life they have chosen — the
profession of arms. One expects the civilian world not to
understand the character of that form of career, but not
individuals such as Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Ret., principal aide
to Colin Powell when the latter was Secretary of State.
Apparently continuing earlier feuds with Pentagon and White
House staff, Wilkerson has been widely quoted recently for his
remarks aimed at emphasizing a separation of the nation’s
socio-economic classes to the detriment of those young people
currently in the military. “It’s like watching a different
reality,” he’s said. “Nothing could better illustrate the
alienation of America’s armed forces from the college-going
Americans.”
One wonders exactly the intent of Wilkerson’s statement. It
appears there was a calculation to have an impact on the debate
over the plan to “surge” more troops to Iraq as opposed to swiftly
reducing the force currently there. Apparently he wished to
underline the inappropriateness of the war on the basis that those
fighting it didn’t involve what he considered a proper cross
section of the military-age American public. Where has Wilkerson
and his media friends been since the creation of the all-volunteer
armed force?
The entire point of having a volunteer army was to satisfy the
need for a capable military without maintaining the Selective
Service draft, which had caused such division during the war in
Vietnam. It’s been a successful, albeit extremely expensive, system
for thirty years. The enlisted personnel are nearly all high school
graduates and the officers are virtually all college graduates, at
a minimum. This is a very costly, but elite, segment of
military-age American women and men.
As pointed out in a recent
column by Edward Luce in the American edition of the
British-owned Financial Times, casualty lists show a
predominance of white servicemen and women from small town America.
By implication, Luce seems to suggest white people from small
Midwestern and Southern communities had been forced through social
and financial disadvantage to join the military. This, according to
Luce, is supposed to reinforce Wilkerson’s sense of socio-economic
disparity rather than crediting the strongly patriotic and
well-educated aspect of middle America.
Perhaps retired Col. Wilkerson is not personally politically
motivated and did not intend to insult our Army enlisted personnel
by referring to current IQ requirements as “one level above
imbecility,” as he is quoted in the FT article. Perhaps
Mr. Luce was just amazed to find that poor minorities had not been
disproportionately sacrificed as the press often has suggested.
Perhaps the devoted service of middle class Reserve and National
Guard troops, in particular the various technical cadre and heroic
medical contingents, did not come to their attention. And certainly
these two individuals cannot be faulted for not recognizing the
proportionately high, though still classified, casualty count among
our extraordinarily well-educated special operations troopers.
Perhaps we should excuse stupidity and willful
mischaracterization. Perhaps we should, but perhaps we shouldn’t.
And perhaps we just can’t!
