Suicides among U.S. Army troops rose again last year and are at a nearly three-decade high, senior defense officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data has not been formally released.

Such a jump in the rate reveals the stress of a military now entering the sixth year of war in Iraq, the eighth year of war in Afghanistan, and the eight year post-9/11. Those years have witnessed a intense operational tempo with units going out of country for multiple tours of a year or more. Combine that with the stress of combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan where the front line is a fluid and changing place, and the recipe for stress is complete. Unfortunately, there is no similar tracking system for Americans who have left the service, and thus it is unclear if they too are killing themselves in larger numbers

Other signs of this stress abound. The divorce rate in the military is up, especially among female service members:

Divorce rates for its personnel have been on the rise since 2003, the first year of war, when they were 2.9 percent. In 2004, divorce rates in the Army soared to 3.9 percent, propelled by a sharp rise in divorce among the usually much more stable officers corps.

A final signal of the stress has been the difficulties that the Army has had in retaining its officers. Mid-career officers, the backbone of the officer corps, are leaving at much higher rates from the Army than from other services, leaving the force with shortfalls. As a 1997 General Accounting Office (GAO) report (warning: PDF file) put it:

The Army, which continues to be heavily involved in
combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, faces many retention challenges….It projects a shortage of 3,000 or more
officers annually through FY 2013. While the Army is implementing and
considering initiatives to improve officer retention, the initiatives are not
integrated and will not affect officer retention until at least 2009 or are
unfunded. As with its accession shortfalls, the Army does not have an
integrated strategic plan to address its retention shortfalls.

Army officers and potential Army officers are voting with their feet. The latter are not attending the United States Military Academy or joining Reserve Officer Training Corps at college, and the former are leaving the service early in their career.

All of these factors show a military–and particularly an Army–under stress. The services have begun programs to deal with these signs of stress, but these are treating the symptoms rather than the problem. Until the commitments of the military are reduced, the systemic stress will remain and lead to severe and multiple problems.

Part II (Air Force) here

The services remain largely stuck in their efforts to transform for the 21st century. The Army, though moving closer towards developing an institutional knowledge of counterinsurgency, remains wedded to purchasing high technology equipment and weapons more suited for large conventional war. The Air Force has attached itself to the F-22 air superiority fighter and now, rather than regrouping, spends much of its time desperately seeking an enemy or a mission for that fighter. The Navy has made a few, intermittent steps towards revamping itself, but without any overarching strategic vision.

This slow transition has made the United States vulnerable. Most particularly, in Iraq, the inability of the Army to handle—at least at first—an insurgency meant that the United States was bogged down in that country for several years. Only as the Army developed counterinsurgency tactics on the fly did the situation improve. But the slowness meant that one of the original goals of the Iraq invasion—to serve as an object lesson to states that might oppose the U.S.—was utterly undercut. Iran and North Korea—for example—knew that there was and is no realistic chance that the U.S. will invade them in the near future and risk the same sort of protracted war as in Iraq.

The slow transition also has the potential to make the United States vulnerable in the future. War often sees revolutions in tactics and strategy that catch militaries unaware. The machine gun in WWI, blitzkrieg and the aircraft carrier in WWII were all game-changing weapons that left the old ways of war in the dust and mud (quite literally in the case of the battleships of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor). Should another such revolution happen while the U.S. military continues at least to glance back to the Cold War, America could find the military superiority it takes so for granted to have disappeared.

There are hints that such a revolution is in the offing. The rise of unmanned vehicles, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles, could potentially alter the balance of power in the air. UAVs have numerous advantages over manned vehicles, most importantly range and maneuverability. They have developed quickly in capability over the last decade and have the potential to displace manned planes within the next 10-20 years. Should they do so, and the United States falls behind in their development, we face the possibility of regional powers such as India or China being able to rival American forces. Military revolutions are unforgiving in their effect, with little credit for past performance or current position.

The challenge that the Obama administration thus faces is not only to deal with external military issues, like Iraq or Afghanistan, but to figure out how to redirect and refigure <I>internal</i> military issues as well. The services do not have the same immediate hostility to a Democratic President that they did in 1992 when Bill Clinton came into office. Eight years of George W. Bush’s disasters have put paid to Republican superiority on military matters, at least temporarily. But the military remains skeptical of a Democratic administration, and that skepticism will likely deepen if Obama pushes them to reconsider their attachment to conventional Cold War verities. The senior officers would ratherbe “preparing –and procuring — for the big, conventional Russia-China scenario the U.S. military institutionally prefers,” as one anonymous Pentagon official put it (Hat tip to <a href=”http://washingtonindependent.com/18335/productive-obama-military-relationship-possible”>The Washington Independent</a>).

Obama does have potential allies within the services, none more so than the Army, where a growing cadre of officers, head by General David Petraeus, are trying to remake the force from one exclusively focused on conventional warfare to one focused on a range of different military scenarios, from peacekeeping to counterinsurgency to conventional. Obama’s visit with Petraeus in July of this past year gave both men a chance to size each other up. Getting Petraeus on his side would go a long way towards assuring that Obama has a successful relationship with the military, perhaps the most important institutional relationship a President has. President Obama is faced by an institution still at least partly caught in the paradigm of the Cold War. He, the first genuinely post-Cold War President, has to pull that institution forward into this century. The kaleidoscope of threats that face the United States demands nothing less.

That coalition was decisively fractured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican exploitation of disaffected white southerners. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” effectively started to split the Solid South away from the Democrats. Slowly, over the next several decades, the southern realignment meant the disappearance of southern Democrats at all levels. Southern Democratic Senators and Representatives lost elections, left for the GOP, or retired. By the late 1980s, the south was consistently voting Republican at a national level (with several exceptions). Pushed out of their traditional base, the Democratic Party faced an enormous challenge to establish a new base from which to fight elections. Without such a base, the Democrats would go into each Presidential cycle at a built-in deficit to the Republicans, as both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis discovered.

The Democrats did have one advantage. The two bookend states of the electoral college, California and New York, were trending Democratic, and they brought with them nearly 100 electoral votes. Add to that midwestern states like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats had the start of a new coalition, one centered in the northeast, the middle west, and the west coast. But it took time to build it, and the GOP had a headstart with the South. In a preview of this new coalition, a Democratic candidate like Bill Clinton in 1992 could manage to win by taking the northeast, the midwest, and the far west, while still pulling a few southern states into the blue side (Georgia and Kentucky, for example). But eight years later, Al Gore could not even win his home state of Tennessee and the entire south went for George Bush (albeit Florida with some shadiness). The south (especially the Deep South) was redder than red. The northeast, west, and midwest were trending Democratic but there were still states that waffled. Thus New Hampshire in 2000 went for Bush. Thus Iowa in 2004 went for Bush. The Democrats had the bones of a coalition in place, but the body remained to be filled out.

The election of 2004 confirmed the delicate balance. George W. Bush won by holding the states of the South, Great Plains, and Mountain West, and defeating John Kerry in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. He won no states on the west coast. He won no states in the Northeast. Most ominously, he lost Pennsylvania, which suggested that the Democratic coalition was beginning to expand ever so slightly southward. In addition, the races in several mountain west states, like New Mexico were close enough to suggest Republican vulnerability. The realignment continued in 2006, albeit at the Congressional level. Republicans in Northeastern states at both the House and Senate were clobbered. The northeastern states were becoming bluer than blue. Most critically and surprisingly, the Democrats managed a strong showing in some border states of the Old Confederacy, most notably Virginia, where Jim Webb eked out a Senatorial victory. Combine that with Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, which pushed the Democratic Party to compete in all the states of the union, 2006 presaged a Presidential election in which, for the first time in a generation, the Democrats would have an advantage.

Barack Obama played that advantage masterfully. What is particularly notable about the campaign is the fact that Obama had several pathways to victory, instead of the essentially constrained choices of John Kerry. Spared the expense of defending much of the northeast and west coast (as the Republicans were spared the cost of defending the South), Obama could pour money, time, and effort into Florida and Ohio and Indiana and New Mexico and Colorado and Virginia. In all of those places, the Democrats dominated the airwaves and built massive ground operations. In addition, the new Democratic electoral base consisted of states which are among the wealthiest and most populated in the United States, and Obama’s fundraising reflected that wealth and population.

The realignment helped create a Presidential race in which the Republicans were on the defensive from the start, and reduced to a narrow set of possible victory scenarios. By the end of the campaign, McCain had to sweep the table of toss-up states to have any chance to win. Last night, McCain did not only not sweep the table, but he lost states that a Republican had not lost in a generation, including Virginia and (seemingly) North Carolina. Pennsylvania went convincingly for Obama, as did Florida and Ohio and a bevy of western states. If Jimmy Carter was the last gasp of the old Solid South coalition and Bill Clinton was the candidate of a transitional coalition, Barack Obama is the president-elect of the new alliance of east and west and middle, a Democratic coalition decades in the building.

Part II (Air Force) here

Like the Army and Air Force, the Navy avoided moving away from the comfort of its Cold War strategy. During the first post-Soviet, the admirals clung to the philosophy that had driven acquisitions during the Cold War. That strategy had been based on controlling the sea, following the precepts of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Navy built a large fleet that would, when war started, wrest control of the oceans from the USSR and her communist allies. The main theaters of battle were the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf. The main threats were Soviet attack submarines, missile-armed surface ships, and attack planes flying from land. To fight in these theaters and against this enemy, the Navy built a fleet of aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and cruisers optimized to defend against air attack. Allied to that was submarines carrying a larger proportion of the American nuclear deterrent, whose job was to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the Navy responded to shrinking defense budgets by reducing the fleet rather than changing it. Thus, instead of 15 aircraft carriers, the Navy went down to 11. Similar reductions occurred in the number of attack submarines, cruisers, and ballistic missile submarines. This was the Cold War strategy, miniaturized. Despite the fact that no other nation in the world has anywhere near the naval power needed to dispute American control of the oceans (the sum total of the world’s aircraft carriers are fewer than the number the United States currently deploys), the U.S. still operates a fleet aimed at fighting exactly such a battle.

The conventional wars fought by the United States since 1991 have illustrated the oddity of this. The Iraqi Navy in both 1991 and 2003 was insignificant and easily handled. Serbia did not have a navy and neither did Afghanistan. In all those wars, planes from the aircraft carriers proved crucial in bringing American military power to bear. The rest of the fleet, however, was relatively uninvolved. Both submarines and cruisers did fire cruise missiles at Iraq as part of the initial air campaigns, but that was hardly the full measure of their capabilities. In essence, the Navy was gold-plated, with capabilities and costs far in advance of requirements. No longer was it as important what the Navy could do *at sea.* Instead, the critical question was what could the Navy do onshore *from the sea.*

To its credit, the naval leadership did try to respond to the changing situation, albeit in a somewhat confused way. First, and most effectively, the service started to build more and more amphibious warfare ships that could bring American military power not only up to the coast but bring it ashore as well. Second, the Navy began to build “Littoral Combat Ships” (LCS) designed to go into shallow waters and deal with the threats—mines, suicide boats, and so on. Finally, the Navy began to build a major warship, the Zumwalt class, whose primary emphasis was its ability to project power on shore.

But here the Navy has run into continuing problems. The methods used to acquire weapons and equipment by the Pentagon is fundamentally flawed. The acquisitions program suffers from two continuing problems. First, most contracts are awarded on a “cost-plus” basis, which means that the companies awarded the contract get paid whatever it costs them to make the equipment plus a markup for profit. Essentially, the belief is that the cost of highly advanced weapons systems tends to be unpredictable and contractors should not be punished for it. There is some reason behind this, but “cost-plus” opens the door for dramatic cost overruns without any punishment. The second major acquisitions problem has been with the services themselves. They have a tendency to gold-plate its weapons, to add multiple revolutionary features to each new weapon, and, worse, continually to add new features during the building. The first tendency means that each program is dependent on not one new technology being built and deployed, but several. If just one goes badly wrong, the entire weapons system gets hung up. The second tendency (the addition of new features late in the process) means that the contractor has to go back and figure out how to fit the new feature into an already finished design, something that costs money and time.

This is true for all the services, but is exacerbated for the Navy by the sheer size and cost of ships. A new Ford-class aircraft carrier is likely to cost $12 billion in 2008 dollars. Overruns and problems in ship acquisitions are thus more costly and more noticeable. Both of the new ship classes—the LCS and the Zumwalt class—ran into cost overruns. In addition, the Navy added features, including the idea that the Zumwalts would, in addition to their littoral activities, be able to participate in a ballistic missile defense mission. The results, not surprisingly, have been that these programs for new ships have been delayed time and again, come in at a much higher cost than estimated, and have not demonstrated the capabilities for which the Navy asked. In essence, by 2008, none of the new ships that the Navy was building was working out well. The result has either been the decision to curtail both programs substantially. The Navy will likely build many fewer Zumwalts and Littoral Combat Ships than it had planned.

The danger of course, is that the requirements did not disappear. To give one example, Iranian naval strategy in the Persian Gulf is predicated on exactly the kind of tactics the Littoral Combat Ship is designed to defeat. Without an effective LCS, the Navy is forced to use other ships, less well-suited, to carry missions out in that body of water. Thus the Navy has rethought its mission, to a certain extent, but has found it difficult to put into practice. In the constrained funding atmosphere of the post-financial-meltdown United States, a Navy that cannot effectively build ships—surely a foundational competency for the service—means increased Congressional scrutiny and skepticism. Congressional willingness to budget for a service that faces no Cold-War-level threats when the Army and the Marines are fighting not one but two counterinsurgency wars could easily wither. The Navy may end up finding itself with an idea of what kind of ships it wants, but without the ability or funds to build them.

Why is Barack Obama winning this election? Just over a week before the election, the Democratic nominee enjoys substantial leads in most polls, popular and electoral both. That is no guarantee of ultimate victory: the only poll that counts is November 4th, as George Dewey found out to his cost in 1948, but nonetheless, right at this moment, the Illinois Senator is clearly ahead.

How did he get to this point?

There is an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine from this past weekend, looking at the inner workings of the McCain campaign and the five different narratives that they’ve tried to push to the American people since summer 2008. None of them have caught hold, leaving the McCain people scratching their heads. But what is absent from the article is any sense of WHY none of these narratives have worked. The reporter quotes the McCain as thinking that the media is in the tank for Obama, makes note of Sarah Palin’s horrendous inexperience, and indirectly points to McCain’s baffled and angry performances in the debates. But there is no sense that the Obama campaign may have played a role. The article imputes that it is the McCain campaign’s mistakes that are responsible. In this formulation, McCain is losing, rather than Obama winning.

I write this post to argue with that formulation, by focusing on one particular strategy of the Obama campaign. Before I talk about that, though, let me look at the larger, systemic factors that are hindering the Republicans this election cycle. First, the nation is undergoing a partisan realignment. In the 1970s and 80s, the South realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans. 1976 was the last gasp of the old Democratic “Solid South.” (Look at Jimmy Carter’s winning electoral map and imagine a Democratic candidate getting that layout today). The 2000s have been about the northeast and far west solidly realigning to the Democrats. In the 1950s and 60s, California was reliably Republican. Now, it is just as reliably Democratic. In the 1990s, more and more northeastern states have become reliably Democratic, to the point that a Republican Congressperson from a northeastern state is a rare bird, indeed (see Clinton’s electoral map in 1996). That partisan realignment is helping Obama. Also helping Obama is, of course, President Bush, who has the lowest approval ratings of any President in modern history, and has historians arguing whether he is the worst President ever or only in the top-5 worst.

More, Iraq has become firmly entrenched in the American mind as a disaster, and such a formulation takes a long time to dislodge. It took years after 2003-05 for the U.S. public to swing against the war, but once having swung, that public is not going back. This, despite the fact that American efforts in Iraq have substantially toned down the violence there. The public has decided and they’re not going to change their mind easily. Finally, of course, the financial crisis of the last few months have put a spotlight, as did Hurricane Katrina, on the venality, greed, and sheer impressive incompetence of President Bush and the disastrous economic polices of his administration.

With all that, however, the Obama campaign has run a strategically masterful and tactically smart campaign. I want to highlight one particular aspect of that campaign by looking at Obama’s personality. During the primaries, Obama built his image as a charismatic orator whose soaring speeches elevated and inspired. In this sense, his political persona echoed that of many early African-American figures, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr. But that image proved vulnerable to counterattack in several ways. First, the soaring rhetoric, for many white Americans, echoed the language not of Martin Luther King, Jr., but of Jeremiah Wright, an association that did not help Obama. Second, Obama’s speechmaking was different from modern Presidents who, if they were good speakers, have adopted a faux-traditional American style of “just plain folks.” Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, the two best post-1945 Presidential speakers, both used a conversational speaking approach that pushed the message that they were regular guys. Obama’s speeches did not. Since (fairly or not) Obama was also surrounded by a perception of alienness (both because he was African-American, and because he had lived outside the U.S. for a substantial period), that lack added to another of his weaknesses. Finally, Obama’s charisma opened the door for the McCain campaign to attack him as a shallow, inexperienced celebrity, the Paris Hilton of American politics, a line of attack that was resonating over the summer of 2008.

It stopped resonating, however because after his convention speech Obama changed his political persona substantially. The convention speech itself signaled the change by being both soaring and uncharacteristically wonkish. And in the three debates, there was little trace of the charismatic orator. Instead, Obama was sober, unruffled, and at pains to be deeply conversant with specific policies and policy ideas. The contrast was remarkable, and even more so when you consider that _McCain_ came off as the firebrand.

Clearly, the Obama campaign had realized the vulnerabilities listed above and decided to preempt them. What had worked to rally the base was not what was needed in the general election, and so Obama changed his strategy. Instead of charisma, the message was one of steadiness; instead of celebrity, it was of seriousness. Before the convention, Obama frequently appeared in suit and tie. After the convention, he almost always appeared in a suit without tie, or a tie without the suit coat. The message, as was the careful language and personality, was that Obama was a regular guy. Here he was not a working Joe, but a middle-class man with middle class concerns about family and health care and retirement. He was, in a word, ordinary. He was not alien, or strange, or other, but ordinary. And it is that strategic shift that has left the McCain campaign flailing, not merely their own mistakes. You can’t sell celebrity as the tag for someone ordinary. You can’t sell radical leftist for someone ordinary. You can’t sell terrorist for someone ordinary. None of the narratives that the Times’ article listed have resonated with Americans so far because they have seen the careful, measured Barack Obama for themselves and believe him, above all, to be familiar. That shift—not an easy one to make in the middle of a campaign—undercut every Republican argument against Obama and left them groping every few weeks for a new narrative. That shift—not an easy one to make in the middle of a campaign—was genius.

The United States Air Force has been the poster child for avoiding the cold war transition. Perhaps more than any other service, the USAF has insisted on purchasing weapons and promulgating doctrines that would be just as applicable in 1978 as in 2008. The capabilities have changed, but the mind set has not. The “fighter mafia” within the Air Force, still aglow after its decades-ago triumph over the “bomber mafia,” has acquired more and more technologically advanced fighter planes, such as the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Advanced Strike Fighter, brimming with Mach-speed capability and stealth features, and designed to dominate the air against any and all comers.

The problem has been several fold. First, there aren’t any “comers.” There are no rivals to the United States for air superiority anywhere in the world. The Russian Air Force is a generation out of date, with pilots who get little in the way of training flights. The Chinese Air Force is better, but is a handmaiden to the dominant Chinese Army. Nowhere in the world is there an air force that could offer a sustained challenge to the current USAF, let alone the next generation. Second, the programs have fallen prey to the same procurement issues that dogged the Army and Navy. A lack of effective contractor oversight, allied with the continual addition of expensive new features by the Pentagon far into the acquisitions process, has sent the price of new planes skyrocketing. An F-15 Eagle, the previous generation air superiority fighter, cost about $43 million dollars per plane (in 1998 dollars). The F-22, its successor, costs roughly $187 million (2006 dollars), about four times as much.

Third, and most important, the Air Force is vulnerable to a revolutionary transformation now underway, one which the top brass of the service are ignoring or downplaying. Like the battleship commanders in the 1930s tried to ignore the rise of the aircraft carriers until it was too late, the current Air Force is trying to sideline a paradigm shifting air weapon that could displace most current planes. I speak of the unmanned aerial vehicle, remotely controlled by a ground-based controller. UAVs have continuing and spectacular advantages over manned planes. Keeping pilots alive and comfortable requires a lot of equipment and weight in current planes. It limits the maneuvers they can undertake. It shortens the time those planes can be aloft. UAVs suffer little from those limitations. They can be smaller, maneuver more quickly, and be in the air longer. At the moment, UAV development is still deeply in its infancy, akin to manned flight in the years after the Wright Brothers carefully lifted off from Kitty Hawk. But it will progress rapidly, as did aviation. Within the next few decades it is likely that unmanned planes will have displaced manned planes as the dominant aerial weapon. Other countries, like India think so.

If the Air Force (like the Navy) stays locked into its Cold War mindset, it risks getting leapfrogged by countries like India or China. Neither of those is likely to catch up to the United States in conventional planes, so they have every incentive to try a game-changing play by committing wholesale to UAVs. Low-cost remotely controlled vehicles could present a serious threat to American air superiority and air operations through sheer numbers, let alone the advantages that each UAV would have in maneuverability and range. And the United States military has gotten deeply used to having air superiority; so used to it that they now assume it to be the case. Such an ominous scenario is not likely anytime soon, but in the medium term it is all too likely. The Navy discovered the dominating value of carrier aviation on December 7, 1941, much to America’s cost. It would be wise for the Air Force to avoid such a similarly harsh lesson.

I haven’t adjusted to the 21st century yet, so I still approach blog posts like Ralph Ellison working on novel #2. Which is to say: it takes me forever to write them. I thought the Biden-Palin face-off tonight would be an opportunity to get in touch with my inner Joyce Carol Oates and start writing faster. But I couldn’t bring myself to watch the bloody thing, much less to do so in the spirit needed to write about it.

So instead I thought I’d live-blog about why I didn’t watch the debate. Here goes….

1. I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Someone, I forget who, recently wrote that watching Palin lately has been like watching a drunk relative give a toast at a wedding reception – you’re pretty sure it’s going to go badly, but you don’t know when, or just how embarrassing it will be. This is nerve-wracking, even if you don’t care for the woman or her politics.

2. I couldn’t bear the anxiety, part 2: Joe Biden’s foot hasn’t hung out with his mouth in a while, and they’re due for a reunion.

3. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, as one question would trump all others in my mind: is it me, or has Biden’s forehead undergone a Kerry-like transformation, and become as tight as the head of a snare drum? Or was I just not paying attention before?

4. I can’t get over the fact that the polls are still close. I mean, it sometimes seems that the GOP isn’t even trying this time (and with W’s messes to clean up, why would they?). But public opinion is still pretty evenly split. Which makes me alternately irritated, annoyed, and depressed. None of these emotional states, it turns out, is particularly conducive to registering and reflecting on a live debate. Having appealed to the polls, though…

5. …I resent being seduced into thinking about serious politics in horse race terms. Or into thinking about horse races instead of serious politics and policy. As I’ve said here before, polls have their place, and if they work for you then God bless. But the media conversations around the debates tend to focus obsessively on how the candidates’ performances move the poll numbers, rather than on what the candidates’ performances and arguments reveal about their fitness to govern. And resentment isn’t great for analysis either. Now, as long as I’m busting on the media…

6. …every time I turned on the news this week, the obligatory lead stories about the financial ‘bailout’ quickly turned into punditizing about the politics of the bailout – instead of, I dunno, providing some detail on various elements of the various plans, and inviting economists to think aloud about how they would work. And then, as quickly as possible, they started punditizing about this dadblasted debate. So by airtime tonight, I was already sick of the bloody thing.

7. Continuing with the resentment vibe: I resent being sold a slickly produced commercial for the two establishment parties, and being told that it’s an exercise in, or instrument of, democracy. If you want a real debate, add the veep candidates for the greens and the libertarians to the docket. To go old school for a bit, and channel John Stuart Mill, or Darwin: pitting the Republocrats against a wider variety of alternative perspectives would only strengthen them. It would make them defend certain basic assumptions that have for too long enjoyed a free pass – assumptions about, for example, the role of corporations in defense policy and managing the economy, and about the centrality of the military, or of militarists, in setting priorities for foreign policy and domestic spending. And third party challenges would help legitimate the ruling parties in the eyes of the public – if they survived the challenges, that is. Instead we get people who disagree about many things, it’s true, but who also agree on many things, and things of substance, from same-sex marriage to Israel and the Pentagon budget – and the larded-up bailout package that passed the Senate today.

8. Over the past week I’ve read bits of a biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, and smaller bits of a semi-biographical study of the radical activist Claudia Jones. Irrespective of whether one agrees with these women on the issues, their struggles and ambitions effectively indict the narrowness and meanness of our politics today. People are homeless, hungry, and dying, here in the US but also in Iraq, in Haiti, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, thanks in part to the shortsightedness of our policies. (Precision bombs and structural adjustment programs, anyone?) And we’re talking about pigs and pit bulls? (That last sung to the tune of the old Allen Iverson favorite, ‘We’re talking about _practice_…?’)

Presidential candidates, for good or ill, are crucially defined by war. Perceptions of the candidate and, less obviously, perceptions by the candidate are influenced by their experiences of war. In recent elections, the images of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were shaped by their relationship to World War II. Similarly, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John Kerry found themselves defined by the Vietnam War. And it is not just any war that does the defining. Instead, it is the generational war, the dominant war of a particular era: Vietnam, for example, rather than Panama.

What wars define the candidates of 2008? For Senator John McCain, the answer is easy: Vietnam. His years as a POW are foundational to him, and the McCain campaign and McCain himself highlight those experiences as much as possible. Senator Barack Obama, by contrast, came of age in a military era that, as much as anything, was about recovering from Vietnam. The two candidates’ differing martial experiences has led to a media narrative that gives the advantage of experience to McCain.

But what is not discussed as often is how the wars shape not just the perceptions of candidates, but their outlooks. Wars mold how candidates view the world. The war that shaped President Bush’s viewpoint and those around him—Cheney and Rumsfeld particularly—was the Cold War, the decades-long struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, almost immediately after 9/11, the administration looked for a nation to blame. The target became not Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but Iraq. This was a classic Cold War reaction, when guerrilla or terrorist movements around the world were fronts for one side or the other. So the Bush administration found itself simply unable to believe that Al Qaeda had acted without some kind of state support. There had to be an “axis of evil.” Iraq would become an example of the perils of being part of that axis.

We have seen how that turned out. Iraq surely became an example, but one of imperial hubris. So the question for 2008 is not just what war shapes each candidate’s image, but also what war shapes each candidate’s outlook? In this case, McCain’s major war is not Vietnam, but—just as it was for Bush—the Cold War. The Senator from Arizona came to adulthood in the 1950s, the era of a growing nuclear threat and the Berlin Wall. His service in Vietnam was the suspended animation of a POW. His command experience afterwards was defined by the confrontation with the Soviet Union. McCain views the world with the same Cold War perspective that the Bush administration brought to the table, characterized by a continuing fixation on nation-states. Witness the two foreign policies about which McCain is insistent: staying in Iraq and confronting Iran. McCain, like Bush, cannot understand our deeply fractured world without reaching for the comforting simplicity of the Cold War, a reaction notably on display when Russia invaded Georgia. Experience leads McCain to take refuge in a vision driven by a comforting fantasy, not by the dangerous reality.

Obama’s outlook, by contrast, was defined in a more complex period. The late 1980s and 1990s, when the Senator from Illinois came of political age, was an era of collapse and confusion. The fall of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War seemed to usher in a period of American dominance, only for a wave of terrorist attacks to reveal a world dominated less by nations and more by ideologies and movements that cross international boundaries. Obama’s focus on Afghanistan and desire to wind things down in Iraq are reflections of a world in which war has become globalized and personalized, and where states are less important than global networks: Al-Qaeda, rather than Iraq.

McCain has more experience than Obama, but it is the experience of a previous generation, whose comprehension of the world coexists uneasily with the radically-changed facts on the ground. “9/11 changed everything” was repeated endlessly after the towers fell. In 2008, only one candidate behaves as if that is true.

None of the three main Democrats in the primary campaign had any substantial military knowledge. Rather than attempt to run another war hero, the Democrat voters decided that Iraq would neutralize the national security issue. But that required a candidate who was not tainted by Iraq. Hillary Clinton voted for Iraq war in 2003 in order to shore up her credentials on the military/foreign policy side, but in 2008 that vote haunted her during her primary campaign, especially as her main rival, Barack Obama, had voted against it. But the same problems remain: the most important name on Obama’s National Security advisory group is former Senator Sam Nunn, a Southern Democrat in the Scoop Jackson mould. To find military expertise, Obama was essentially forced to reach back to a dying breed of conservative, southern Democrats, because there are currently no senior Democrats with anywhere near Nunn’s credibility on defense matters. But Nunn is 69 years old, barely younger than John McCain, and is of an older generation of Democrats which means that he carries substantial political baggage within the party.

The result for the 2008 has been that Obama has had to establish his credibility on national security issues as quickly and effectively as possible. The trip to Europe was an attempt to do that for foreign policy (and by proxy national security). The picking of Joe Biden as Obama’s VP candidate brings some needed experience in foreign policy and national security. But, though the Obama campaign has put forth a detailed national security program, its message is complex and drowned in bullet points. There is no simple, easily comprehensible vision of national security, except for withdrawal from Iraq.

Nonetheless, having said that, the nomination of Obama is critical in another sense. He is a generational candidate, the first post-Vietnam Presidential candidate, and one who had no part (however small) in the domestic chaos that marked that war. He symbolizes the healing of that split, a healing that can also be seen in the growing number of Democratic candidates who served in the military. Moving past the Vietnam division is a critical start for the Democrats if they are to stop conceding the national security issue to the Republicans. With Obama, they have started.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have retreated further into the fantasy. Though a fair number of veterans of Iraq have run as GOP candidates, at the upper level the Republican vision has looked firmly backward to the comforting truths of the Cold War. Nominating John McCain, who came of age during the pre-Vietnam/Vietnam era, is a step back to earlier verities that—no matter how outdated—are still soothing. Such a quest led to Bob Dole’s nomination in 1996, as the Republicans sought the reassurance of the Cold War and the “Greatest Generation” of World War II. McCain’s approach to national security is, if anything, worse than the current administration’s. McCain combines a rigid commitment to the American presence in Iraq, echoing the Bush administration, with a determination to view the rest of the world through Cold-War tinted glasses. The recent Russian invasion of Georgia had nothing to do with a resurgence of the Cold War, but for McCain it might have been 1950 and Korea all over again. While the Democrats are moving forward from the divisiveness engendered by Vietnam, the Republicans are moving back.

Whether or not McCain wins, it is not a good omen for the United States that the GOP has tied its flag to a candidate shaped—as Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were shaped—by his experiences in a world that no longer exists. The military challenges facing the United States during the Cold War were daunting but they are not the trials the United States faces in the era of 9/11. That only one of America’s major political parties seems to be shifting to recognize that is ominous, indeed.

The political dialogue surrounding matters military is fundamentally skewed by the fixations of both political parties. The Democrats and the Republicans, largely because of the corrosive domestic effects of Vietnam, have adopted delusional or ineffective methods of dealing with the Pentagon, with Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the larger issues of America’s military. Those delusions have fed into the situation in Iraq, helping to create that ongoing debacle, and will continue to cripple U.S. military efforts in the future. One party has descended into fantasy; the other, renunciation.

The Democrats

The Democratic party settled on renunciation.

The party, which had come up with the most effective military policy of the 20th century (the “containment” policy of the Cold War), was undone by Vietnam. South East Asia split the party between the doves, typified by George McGovern and the hawks, typified by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. In 1968, it led to violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The nomination of George McGovern for President in 1972 was a victory for the dovish wing of the Democratic party, but his shellacking by Richard Nixon in the fall showed clearly that that triumph would not translate to a national election. Jimmy Carter, in 1976, was a compromise. As a graduate of the Naval Academy, with an impressive naval career, Carter had strong links to the military and to military affairs. Having said that, he came to office promising to refocus American foreign and military policy away from the Cold War and towards the issue of human rights. He thus bridged the gap between the doves and the hawks.

Carter’s disastrous Presidency, marked in military terms by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis, undid Carter’s military credibility, however, and Ronald Reagan was able to use the issue successfully against him. Ever since the Reagan presidency, the Democrats have essentially avoided the issue, largely renouncing any interest in military matters as military matters. They have been willing to emphasize military affairs when they fit into larger foci such as economic and social issues: veterans’ benefits, wage and salary issues, or the status of women or gays in the military. But what they have not done is focus on explicitly military issues of strategy, procurement, and operations. The Democrats have largely ceded policy making in those areas to the Republicans or (when a Democratic President was in office) the military itself. This—along with the defection of the southern states from the Democratic to Republican party, which carried along with it states with a disproportionate military presence—has meant that the cadre of senior Democrats with military expertise has shrunk substantially over the last two decades.

Thus Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988, had served in the Army for two years, but had no special military competency or interest. His credentials as Governor of Massachusetts were impressive but entirely non-martial. William Jefferson Clinton, the Democratic nominee in 1988, had even less experience in or with the military than Dukakis. Al Gore was slightly different, in that he had served in Vietnam and had some interest in military affairs. Nonetheless, Gore’s campaign did not emphasize national security issues in any effective way. The ongoing problem for the Democrats, however, was that military issues were critically important in Presidential elections. Dukakis lost soundly to George H.W. Bush in 1988, Clinton scraped a victory over Bush in 1992, aided by the end of the Cold War and the divided vote created by H. Ross Perot’s candidacy, and Gore lost to Bush in 2000. None of these elections were solely defined by military issues, but military issues weighed heavily in all of them.

Such weight only grew after 9/11. The nomination of John Kerry in 2004 seemed an attempt to overcome the Democratic military deficit by nominating a decorated war hero. In addition, the recruitment of retired soldiers like Wes Clark was an effort to raise the volume of the Party’s voice on national security. But Kerry, like almost all senior Democrats, was handicapped by the decades-long avoidance of military issues and had severe troubles articulating a convincing military vision for the United States. Clark, like most senior military men, was unused to the give and take of politicking and proved to be an ineffective campaigner, though in 2006 veterans at lower electoral levels—Jim Webb in Virginia, Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania—did have success.

The 2006 elections did not necessarily offer the Democrats a new way forward. The horrendous mishandling of Iraq neutralized the Republican advantage on national security and the shaky economy gave priority to what had been a traditional Democratic strength. The result was a Democratic landslide that handed the House and Senate back to the party. But the election did not require nor did it offer a way for the Democrats to make up their deficits on national security. “Iraq bad” was a useful electoral message in 2006 but not a coherent long-term message or policy. Thus, the Democrats entered the primary campaigning season for the 2008 Presidential election in a similar situation to where they had been in 2004; looking for a candidate who gave them credibility on national security or one who overcame that deficit in other ways.

(Next: The Republicans)