Cohen, Eliot A.

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The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters Volume 31 Number 2 Parameters Summer 2001 Article 5 5-7-2001 Twilight of the Citizen-Soldier Eliot A. Cohen Follow this and additional works at: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters Recommended Citation Cohen, Eliot A.. "Twilight of the Citizen-Soldier." The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters 31, 2 (2001). https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol31/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by USAWC Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters by an authorized editor of USAWC Press. Twilight of the Citizen-SoldierELIOT A. COHEN© 2001 Eliot A. CohenFrom Parameters, Summer 2001, pp. 23-28.What is the citizen-soldier? The question demands something beyond the obvious answer, any soldier who is also acitizen. Judged by that criterion, the citizen-soldier is alive and well in the United States and, for that matter, mostother countries. Soldiers, more than ever before, vote: in the United States, base commanders are evaluated on the basisof their success in generating large turnouts for national elections. Free speech is most certainly alive and well. Servicemen and women write, call, or email their representatives in Congress, who duly probe into accusations ofmistreatment, malfeasance, or abuse. There are newspapers for each of the services, and overseas (Stars andStripes)that delight in ripping into the high command, and local papers are filled with letters from uniformed membersof the armed forces, openly identifying themselves as such. A military legal system operates that gives the accusedrights which are comparable to, and in some cases superior to, those of the civilian legal system.And yet, I think, most of us would agree that the American military is not, in fact, a citizen-soldier force. It issomehow qualitatively different from the armies that fought the Civil War and the World Wars (Korea and Vietnamare already, I suspect, transitional wars). The term seems archaic, even quaint--except, perhaps, as applied toreservists. Why? How is a military composed of soldiers who are certainly citizens somehow not composed of citizen-soldiers?Viewed legally, we have an army of citizen-soldiers; viewed historically and philosophically, we do not. The truecitizen-soldier is distinguished from his professional or semi-professional counterpart in three ways, all of whichsuggest that military service follows from true citizenship. The first is his motivation for military service. In the case ofthe true citizen-soldier, military service is either an obligation imposed by the state or the result of mobilization forsome pressing cause. Democratic states generally impose only two kinds of forced labor upon their citizens--jury dutyand military service. The former serves the administration of justice; the latter serves the purpose of defense. Thesetwo high and essential objects of government ennoble coerced service--and this is the reason why obligatory schemesof nonmilitary service, which have much weaker justification, will find it hard ever to succeed in countries like theUnited States. In the absence of conscription, mobilization for a particular struggle is the other way in whichcitizenship elicits military service. The state is embarked upon some great crusade or adventure, and in the spirit ofancient Athens, citizens make the highest contribution to it by offering their service as soldiers. For the normalvolunteer of today, neither motivation applies. Patriotism, a desire for personal challenge, monetary or careerincentives--all mold the young man or woman who joins today. But in all cases (except perhaps that of patriotism), thelink between citizenship and service is thin.The true army of citizen-soldiers represents the state. Rich and poor, black and white, Christian and Jew servealongside one another in similarly Spartan surroundings--at least in theory. The idea of military service as the greatleveler is part of its charm in a democratic age, one of whose bedrock principles is surely the formal equality of allcitizens. The voluntary military, by way of contrast, is very rarely representative. To be sure, in the contemporaryUnited States recruiters attempt to maintain some rough balance among ethnic groups, although even here it is clearthat minority groups are overrepresented. Recruiters pay no heed, however, to socioeconomic, religious, or other kindsof ethnic diversity in the ranks. That the children of millionaires almost never serve or that a bare handful of IvyLeague graduates don a uniform is not even a matter for comment.Third, and perhaps most important, the true citizen-soldier's identityisfundamentally civilian. However much he mayyield to the exigencies of military life, however much he may even come to enjoy it and become proficient in militaryskills, he is always, in the core of his being, a member of civil society. His participation in military life is temporaryand provisional. For the volunteer, and certainly for the multiterm soldier, sailor, airman, and marine, the militaryidentity coexists with that of the citizen. The issue is one of identity, and not solely length of service. There arereservists who are, in fact, merely part-time professionals, and in the great wars of the last century there were thosewho served for five years and remained civilians at heart. The term citizen-soldier acts as a useful replacement for anoxymoron, the "civilian-soldier."Using the admittedly rough and ready criteria described above--motivation, representativeness, and identity--one canstill conceive of a variety of military systems built around the citizen-soldier. Militia systems, for example, such asthat of the Swiss, exemplify one kind of citizen-soldier military; the mass volunteer armies of the early Civil Warrepresent another; and the scientifically selected and mobilized hordes of World War II, yet another. In each case, thecitizen-soldier appeared not only in the ranks, as draftee or volunteer, but also as officer and leader. Indeed, the figureof Cincinnatus, the Roman peasant general, exemplifies a kind of citizen-soldier familiar throughout history fromNathanael Greene or Daniel Morgan in the American Revolution, to John Logan or Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain inthe Civil War, and even to the colonels and naval captains of my parents' generation, who provided virtually all of thejunior and much of the mid-level leadership of World War II.The Disappearance of the Citizen-SoldierSince ancient times, armies of citizen-soldiers have contended with counterparts of various types--professionalvolunteers, mercenaries, or hybrid systems. In the 19th century and through the end of the last, they dominatedwarfare. The age of mass--in education, industrial production, and logistics--made numbers the dominant fact in war,and armies of citizen-soldiers are large. But since World War II the citizen-soldier has been on the wane, for a varietyof reasons. Technology certainly played a large role: nuclear weapons at one end of the spectrum, and expensive,sophisticated conventional weapons at the other made the mass concept if not obsolete, then questionable. Sheernumbers played a role as well. As military organizations shrank in size, it became more difficult to sustain conscriptionon a universal basis, even for countries in straits as dire as those in which Israel finds itself. When most young men donot serve in the military, those who do are not fulfilling a common obligation of citizenship, but are merely unlucky.And, as sex differentiation retreated in the workplace, the inevitably male-oriented world of military service(particularly in ground combat organizations) made an identity between citizenship and military service difficult tosustain.Armies of citizen-soldiers are best suited to desperate struggles and wars of mass mobilization. To the extent that thelate 20th century was a time of limited war, the citizen-soldier system was maladapted to the strategic challenges ofrisks run for ambiguous or second-order purposes. Not surprisingly, by 2000 most European powers had abandonedconscription or were on the verge of doing so, replacing their short-service conscript and volunteer forces with thoseof long-service professionals.In 2001 the American military is, like its counterparts around the world, largely a professional force. And yet the mythof the citizen-soldier is alive and well. Consider, for example, Hollywood. Steven Spielberg's smashingly successfulmovie Saving Private Ryan depicted the quintessential citizen-soldiers commemorated in historian Steven Ambrose'sbook Citizen Soldiers. Captain John Miller's men, like Miller himself, are present as a result of obligation; they are infor the duration, but only the duration of the war; they represent much of the ethnic richness of American life; aboveall, they are civilians at heart, dreaming of wives and sweethearts left behind.The magic of Saving Private Ryan lies not only in the movie's intrinsic power--and no movie about the all-volunteerforce comes close to it in dramatic force--but in the American military's reaction to it. The director received a galacelebration and decoration from the United States Army; troops in Korea interviewed by reporter Tom Ricks insistedthat they too were like Miller's band of reluctant warriors. But the US Army is no longer composed of Millers, Ryans,and Horvaths; it no longer faces the kind of desperate struggles that characterized Omaha beach; and its men (and now,women) no longer worry about overcoming an enemy in order to return to their normal lives--military service is theirlife.The charm, if that is the right word, of the citizen-soldier does not end here, however. The astounding popularity ofGeneral--now Secretary of State--Colin Powell, a general who self-consciously titled his memoir My AmericanJourney, reflects a yearning for the Cincinnatus type--paternal but folksy, sturdily reassuring, and easily imagined in avariety of civilian settings, including the Oval Office. General Powell's own writings reinforce the sentimentalizedview of the citizen-soldier reflected in Saving Private Ryan. In an essay for Time magazine on the G.I. as the "personof the century" he wrote as follows:As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I referred to the men and women of the armed forces as "G.I.s."It got me in trouble with some of my colleagues at the time. . . . I persisted in using G.I.s and found I wasin good company. Newspapers and television shows used it all the time. The most famous and successfulgovernment education program was known as the G.I. Bill, and it still uses that title for a newergeneration of veterans. When you added one of the most common boy's names to it, you got G.I. Joe, andthe name of the most popular boy's toy ever, the G.I. Joe action figure. And let's not forget G.I. Jane. G.I.is a World War II term that two generations later continues to conjure up the warmest and proudestmemories of a noble war that pitted pure good against pure evil and good triumphed.The victors in that war were the American G.I.s, the Willies and Joes, the farmer from Iowa and thesteelworker from Pittsburgh who stepped off a landing craft into the hell of Omaha Beach. . . . They wereAmerica. They reflected our diverse origins. They were the embodiment of the American spirit of courageand dedication. They were truly a "people's army," going forth on a crusade to save democracy andfreedom, to defeat tyrants, to save oppressed peoples, and to make their families proud of them.The volunteer G.I.s of today stand watch in Korea, the Persian Gulf, Europe, and the dangerous terrain ofthe Balkans. We must never see them as mere hirelings, off in a corner of our society. They are our best,and we owe them our full support and our sincerest thanks.[1]Powell's characterization of the G.I.--the citizen-soldier of World War II--is roughly right, if sentimentalized; what isremarkable, however, is his insistence on retaining the appellation "G.I." for young men and women who, howeveradmirable, are fighting no crusades, who have enlisted rather than been drafted, and who are far from being a crosssection of American society. But the myth of the citizen-soldier persists.The Consequences: The Unremarked Demise and the Unnerving Rebirth of the Citizen-SoldierThere are various possible explanations for the persistence of the ideal of the citizen-soldier years after hisdisappearance as a real phenomenon. We may have here the lag inevitable as a generation that grew up with onepowerful and evocative reality is unwilling to set it aside. It is possible that the notion of the citizen-soldier issomehow rooted deeply in the nature of democracy itself. Conceivably, as well, Americans may be unwilling toconfront in a direct way the consequences of having a large and powerful military--the military, after all, that policesthe world--which is not composed of citizen-soldiers. But the disjunction between perception and reality has realconsequences for America's role in the world, two of which stand out.The first is America's perceived, and real, reluctance to take casualties in any large number in conflict, a reluctanceoften ascribed to a tender regard for the life of American citizens. In recent years it is clear that this has become a realconstraint on the ability of the United States to exercise power, to the point that military commanders have gone intothe field with the injunction that "the first mission is force protection" ringing in their ears.Recognition of the plain fact that ours is no longer an army of citizen-soldiers should make us question thisexplanation of American casualty sensitivity. The truth is that armies of citizen-soldiers have been far more likely tosuffer deaths and wounds in vast numbers than smaller, professional forces. The army of citizen-soldiers fighting a warfor great causes has proven itself far more willing to bleed profusely than the army of highly trained, expensiveprofessionals fighting for ambiguous goals. There is indeed good evidence that casualty sensitivity stems not fromsocial pressure to care for the life of citizens but from the military's own changing scales of human values.A more recent, deeper, and perhaps more worrisome trend is very different. It is an assertion of all the rights ofcitizenship by professional soldiers, most notably in the open participation of recently retired general officers inelectoral politics by endorsing presidential candidates, but also in the rash of partisan commentary by officers shortlyafter the election of President Bill Clinton. The defense of such behavior is that soldiers in uniform are, after all,citizens, and so long as they obey orders they retain all the rights of expression of their counterparts in the civilianworld--and most certainly so the moment they doff the uniform.This is a remarkable inversion of the citizen-soldier concept; instead of subjecting the individualism of civilian life tothe discipline of military life to serve the larger ends of society, it becomes a means of softening the rigors of militarytradition in order to allow free expression to serve the preferences of individuals. Thus, even as the citizen-soldier--Colin Powell's G.I.--has indeed disappeared into the twilight, a new kind of citizen-soldier has emerged: the politicallyengaged professional officer, who abates none of his rights to freedom of expression despite military discipline.The dangers here are, or should be, obvious. They stem not from the demise of the citizen-soldier, however, but froman unwillingness to examine closely his replacement: the volunteer professional, thinking afresh about his rights andresponsibilities, and the constraints of law and custom put upon those who wear a uniform. In this enterprise nostalgiafor the Minutemen, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Sergeant York, or Captain John Miller, understandable though itmay be, will serve only to confuse an issue that is complicated enough.NOTE1. Colin Powell, "The American G.I.," Time, Special Issue, "Time 100," 14 June 1999, internet,http://www.time.com/time100/heroes/profile/gi01.pdfl, accessed 27 March 2001.Dr. Eliot A. Cohen is professor of strategic studies with the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.Reviewed 7 May 2001. Please send comments or corrections to carl_Parameters@conus.army.mil

Twilight of the Citizen-Soldier

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Twilight of the Citizen-Soldier

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