Softball Stuff

Bob Bateman says:

Max,

It's been a while since I've had the time available to get caught up on your site, and when I finally do, you have a vast amount for me to digest all at once, which slowed me.

Anyway, a few points for you to consider.

– “Soft Power” is merely the most current term for something that the US military has been used for over at least the past 60 years. It's been in the quiver for that long, but the degree to which it has been deployed has gone up and down over the decades. So what you were seeing with, for example, the Kearsarge is really not that different from similar efforts in, say, South Korea in 1947, or Central American nations in the '70s. The difference was often in the “who” (was doing it). So, for example, a lot of people our age, serving in the US Army's National Guard (of various states) would find themselves in, for example, Guatamala, building small bridges or running a dental/health clinic in a remote area for their “one month in the summer” training. In the past 8 years the greater weight has been picked up by the Navy, in no small part because they're not fully committed elsewhere (as the Army and the Marines are), and also because more people in uniform have come to see it as viable.

– “Why use the military”: That one is simple, at the top level, but more complex the deeper you get. The bottom line, for some situations today, is “because the military is the easiest, fastest, and most potent answer to fast-breaking situations” (think: tsunami or hurricane or earthquake). We have a budget, capabilities, and the resources to deploy 20,000 people halfway around the planet on a day or three of notice, and when a ship like the Kearsage arrives it comes with helicopters (useful when the coast is destroyed), hundreds of tons of food, the ability to make tons of pure clean water per day, and advanced medical facilities. (A ship like the Kearsage has a full-up operating suite, a 17 bed ICU, and space for up to 250 or 300 in recovery.) That's not inconsiderable, and in all of the rest of the world, no nation anywhere has created a civilian ship that can do anything like that for use in disaster relief situations.

But at a deeper level (putting my historian's hat on for the moment), I subscribe to Andrew Bacevich's thesis from his book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press Inc, USA, 2005) ISBN 0-19-517338-4, which I stongly recommend. Over the past 40 years at least, and probably since 1939, this nation became increasingly militarized at the domestic level, and then that became exacerbated due to domestic US politics. The byproduct is circular. It became impossible, politically, here to criticize my profession. (That is also why so few generals have been fired the past 50 years as well.) That, in turn, tied to the Cold War as well, meant that we had ever more capabilities…many of which, as I pointed out above, have dual uses.

– Finally, I also think you're underestimating how long and how deeply the military and academia have been intertwined. I'd place that startpoint somewhere back in the 50s at the latest. HTS and Minerva, as programs, are merely the most recent incarnations of an interaction which stretches at least back to 1941. (Prior to that, at least for the “soft sciences” the armed forces of the US in general, and the Army in particular, were much more insular.)

Bob Bateman