Memes

America is about to pass the biggest peacetime military budget of any nation in history. And yet, as the excellent Van Jackson (@WonkVJ) notes, American militarism is not in a happy place. “It is wild that the House is appropriating $886 billion for the defense budget … and NOBODY is happy with it.”

With good reason Van Jackson concentrates on the grand strategic issues. As he points out, in an increasingly multipolar world, the demand that the US should be able to beat anyone, anywhere, any time, is a recipe for frustration. As he puts it in another tweet “In a multipolarizing world, there is no real-world force that can close the gap … generated by a (global) primacy strategy.” The litany of gigantic, over-budget weapons projects (F35) and prestige military objects of dubious value (carrier groups) attests to this fact.

At the same time as the external demands are excessive, the domestic political foundation of US militarism are fraying as well. In recent years it was something of a cliché that the one thing that a divided US polity could agree on was more military spending. Now, not even that is true, at least not without “culture war” riders.

In Congress the GOP are holding the defense budget and senior appointments to ransom. Amongst the wider American public the image of the military has sharply declined. Meanwhile, the newest branch of the US armed forces.- the Space Force - launched in 2019 by President Trump, is quite literally a laughing-stock. At a moment of world historic confrontation the politics of American militarism are, all at the same time, a matter of deadly seriousness, blatant pork barrel vote-buying, supercharged culture wars and kitsch. You might say that it has ever been so. It is a myth to imagine a once-clean militarism. Actually existing militarism is always “messy” - a conflict zone of social, economic and political forces. But America’s current cocktail is both particularly potent and particularly toxic.

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The most conspicuous example of this fraying are the remarkable antics of Congressional Republicans. As the Washington Post commented:

For decades, bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the annual defense authorization bill ... That long-standing practice collapsed this week … The House narrowly approved the National Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 219-210. Four Democrats supported it; four Republicans opposed it. Last December, the defense authorization cleared the House by 350-80, when Democrats held a slim majority in the chamber and the GOP’s far-right Freedom Caucus held little sway. There is no realistic chance that the Democratic-controlled Senate will go along with the House version approved Friday, which includes limits on abortion, transgender transition treatment, diversity training and other matters. The Senate is almost certain to return to the House a defense bill stripped of those controversial Republican amendments. The bill would then face an uncertain future as some House Republicans who pushed through the amendments have vowed to hold the line …

On the same issues - above all abortion - Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has been holding up hundreds of Pentagon promotions for high-ranking officers. The result is to sabotage the circulation of military elites. As the New York Times reports: “More than half of the current Joint Chiefs are expected to step down from their posts during the next few months without a Senate-approved successor in place”.

No doubt a procedural work-around will be found to ensure that the US military has a command chain in place. But the attitude of the far-right to the US military leadership was well articulated back in the spring by Tuberville. When challenged on his blockade of senior appointments, Tuberville shot back: “Experts have known for more than a decade that the military is top heavy. We do not suffer from a lack of generals,"

For many on America’s right-wing the emblem of the “top heavy”, liberal minded, “political” leadership of the US military is Mark Milley, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2020 Milley clashed with President Trump and felt forced to make contact with his Chinese counterparts to convey “reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.” Since then Trump has accused Milley of “TREASON.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wants him “immediately” fired and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants him court-martialed.

It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this escalation between the US military top brass and the radical right-wing of the Republican party. If Trump were to take office again in January 2025, how would he act in relation to a military command chain with which he was so conspicuously at odds?

Milley went on to rub salt in the wound with his robust defense of a military curriculum at West Point that included works on Critical Race Theory. In response to criticism by the likes of Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) Milley replied: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist … what is wrong with understanding … the country which we are here to defend?”

The question, of course, is precisely what country is Milley defending? The vision of the United States defended by Florida Republicans does not encourage the reading of Mao, Marx or Lenin. High-profile Florida Republican Matt Gaetz responded to Milley’s remarks by tweeting contemptuously: “With Generals like this it’s no wonder we’ve fought considerably more wars than we’ve won.”

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Of course, Tuberville, Gaetz and Waltz are attention-seekers. But the fact that they court such controversy points to the fact that there is a groundswell of right-wing opinion, which see the US military leadership not simply as defenders of America, but as “political” and as complicit with a liberal agenda that is anathema to conservative Americans. This is revealed by striking polling figures compiled by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. These show that though the US military retain more trust than any other institution in American society, that trust has dwindled dramatically in recent years.

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From a high of 70 percent in 2018 the share of Americans expressing a great deal of trust for the US military plunged to 45 percent in 2021 before recovering to 45 percent in 2022. The singles biggest cause for this collapse is the perception on the part of conservative Americans that the military leadership has become “politicized” and complicit with the liberal agenda they identify with “woke”. These domestic political issues and in particular the suspicions of conservative Americans far outweigh any negative judgements about military competence or failure in Afghanistan.

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Strikingly, when you ask which security risks Americans are most afraid of, what, in other words, they need defending against, what came top in 2022 were not foreign threats, but “political divisions within the US leading to violence.” 85 percent of Americans are concerned about that scenario and this fear of domestic political violence was shared by both sides (88 Democrat v. 85 percent GOP). Unsurprisingly, Democrats were also more concerned about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Asked to prioritize Russia and China 56 % of Republicans ranked China first, against only 19 percent who put Russia top. 42 % of Democrats put Russia top v. only 32% prioritizing China. Really big gaps opened up, not over Taiwan (69 v. 75), but over the risk of actual war with China, which concerned 59 percent of Democrats v. 79 percent of Republicans. Likewise there was a giant gap on climate change which ranked top for Democrats (91%) v. only 41 % for Republicans.

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Since the American military is an all-volunteer force public opinion matters not just as political background. To be confident of being able to regularly refresh its ranks, the US military needs not just public affirmation, but also a general conformity between the lifestyles of young people and martial expectations. In this regard too, the disconnect is getting progressively wider.

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