IN THEIR recent article in these pages on civil-military relations in the United States, Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn observed that "the lack of an urgent and immediate threat to the nation's existence, of the kind that during the Cold War forced military and civilian elites to reconcile their differences, may now foster a much higher level of civil-military conflict" than in the past, given that ours "is the first period in American history in which a large professional military has been maintained in peacetime."1 They do not, however, question the wisdom of maintaining a huge military establishment in a period when there is no threat to the United States that can be compared with the one that existed, or was not unreasonably assumed to exist, during the Cold War--indeed, that is maintained when there is virtually no threat at all to the nation of the kind for which military force provides a solution.
In his article in the same issue, "Why the Gap Matters", Eliot A. Cohen describes the deep differences between the nature of the "imperial" U.S. Army of today--the demands placed upon it by "ambiguous objectives, interminable commitments and chronic skirmishes"--and the mass democratic armies of the past, raised to win wars. He too does not address the fundamental question as to whether this imperial role that the United States has assumed is justified in the international political circumstances of the present day or of the reasonably foreseeable future, and thus whether the post-Cold War military instrument the country possesses remains the appropriate one.
