Archive for July 19th, 2012|Daily archive page
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
author: Rachel Maddow
name: Paul
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/18
date added: 2012/07/19
shelves: history, new-in-2012, non-fiction, politics
review:
I’m not a fan or follower of Rachel Maddow, as I tend to shy away from talking-head pundits of any political stripe, finding them all insufferably extremist, adding little to the national discourse. However, I decided to check out Drift as it is not (on the surface) a catch-all “Here’s My Worldview” type of book, but rather a focused examination of the United States’ military as it exists today, with an eye cast to the historical series of events that resulted in the current state.
I will say that Ms. Maddow’s politics are hardly hidden here, but she admirably refrains from digressing from the topic at hand and stays focused on the expansion of military spending, the changing face of how war is waged since Vietnam and the increased reliance on long-term, low-impact conflicts aided not by sacrifice from the populace at large but by private para-military contractors. She is very thorough in her dissection of the way this all came about, though you can kind of feel the pull of her personal opinion in the way she chooses to levy the responsibility (or is that blame? it’s not spelled out, but it’s heavily implied) of the shift from citizen-soldier run combat and national burden to deficit-funded and unilaterally mandated on Reagan. I can’t say I fully buy that the title’s drift began the moment Reagan took office (if nothing else, Eisenhower’s speech in 1961 warning of the dangers of the military industrial complex indicates that some of this framework was in place twenty years prior to Reagan), but Maddow makes a pretty convincing case that no matter where it started, war today is almost indistinguishable from what it was less than a century ago.
It’s particularly telling that Maddow devotes dozens and dozens of pages to both Reagan and George W. Bush’s role in the slide from war as a difficult, national decision to one made by the guy at the top but she skims the surface of the roles Clinton and even Obama have played in this transition. Not that she lets them off the hook, far from it. But considering the depth of her dive into the Grenada invasion, Iran-Contra, Desert Shield/Storm and then the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq (again) and Afghanistan, it does induce some eye-rolls to note how little (other than the Balkans) time she devotes to military action during Clinton’s eight year term.
The most compelling pat of the book is Maddow’s description of the state of our nuclear arsenal, now aging and no longer necessary from the perspective of what it was assembled to accomplish (arranging the mutually assured destruction deterrent against the Soviet Union), including the number of mishaps and mishandling mini-calamaties that are, perhaps, inherent in trying to maintain 5,000 true WMD, some of which date back sixty years. This is a chilling account of past mistakes, current dangers and policy nightmares that make this an ongoing concern—where “concern” is the lightest possible term for something that ought to be a sort of systemic panic but is really more of a casually shrugged-off low-priority issue. Perhaps books like this one will shine some much-needed light on the pressing need for disarmament, a point in which I find myself in full agreement with Ms. Maddow.
Drift is a book that I’m not sure I can use the word “enjoy” to describe my experience with; it is certainly interesting and well-written with Maddow’s casual-but-earnest style that makes it easy reading. More so than anything, I find this to be a book I’d recommend because it invites (perhaps demands is the better word) thought and discourse, which is something that I think both Maddow and I would love to see more of in our politics, especially when it comes to questions of how we exert our military might, how we make those decisions and what we do going forward.