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.

The imperial role is self-assigned. Its historical rationale lapsed with the end of the Cold War. No doubt Russia and China could eventually (re)establish the weaponry of global power, but this is a distant prospect, and the prospect that either would want global confrontation is yet more remote. That China should want regional influence is predictable and reasonable, and in itself constitutes no threat to the United States (other than to a United States set on controlling China).

Civilian issues overwhelmingly dominate America's relations with the world today: matters of trade, finance and investment, information exchange and intellectual property concerns, myriad other commercial issues, and human rights concerns. Relevant power is civilian power: economic, financial, technological, industrial, intellectual. This is why "Europe" is a serious international rival to the United States today, even though its conventional military power is slight in comparison. Nonetheless, the prominence of military institutions in the United States and the availability of overwhelming force tend to influence the formulation of policy in ways that invite military remedies, even when these may be irrelevant, leading to the misuse of the military instrument by civilian authorities.

Many, if not most, policy professionals would agree that the threats currently enumerated to justify the existence of this imperial army are often exaggerated for partisan political reasons or to serve established institutional or industrial interests. A certain paranoia marks much discussion of "rogue nations", mass destruction terrorism and the threat posed by China (as it did the feared Y2K fiasco). There is a record of serious American overestimation of threats, as with the grossly exaggerated global significance of the communist uprising in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s (and of the prospective consequences of American defeat there), and with communism in Central and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1989-90, even as the Soviet system was disintegrating, U.S. policymakers remained convinced that the Soviet state still constituted an international power in some sense equivalent to the United States itself--a global political, ideological and military threat to liberal democracy--when it was actually an ideologically exhausted, economically collapsing system undergoing a deep, internal moral and political crisis.

That error might have prompted subsequent reflection on how realistic the country's conception was of the international scene beyond the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, but it did not. There was, instead, self-congratulation. The Soviet Union's collapse (from its internal contradictions, as Marx might have understood) was audaciously appropriated as America's victory (Star Wars did it). There was no reappraisal of the degree to which we had collaborated for a half century in a Russian millenarian fantasy, validating it by the scale and intensity of our response, turning Russia's fantasy to the support of a certain millenarianism of our own, which still survives.

Since then, the Pentagon has promoted a strategy of "preponderance" over any possible military rival or combination of rivals. Congress has voted to continue the pursuit of defensive missile systems and prepare for what presidents, their advisers and various official commissions have announced as dramatic new threats to the nation. These allegedly stem from electronic, bacteriological, chemical and nuclear terrorism, wielded by rogue states and rich Saudi Arabian merchants. The United States began the new millennium as the most heavily militarized nation on earth, and possibly the most frightened.

The imperial role is self-assigned. Its historical rationale lapsed with the end of the Cold War. No doubt Russia and China could eventually (re)establish the weaponry of global power, but this is a distant prospect, and the prospect that either would want global confrontation is yet more remote. That China should want regional influence is predictable and reasonable, and in itself constitutes no threat to the United States (other than to a United States set on controlling China).

Civilian issues overwhelmingly dominate America's relations with the world today: matters of trade, finance and investment, information exchange and intellectual property concerns, myriad other commercial issues, and human rights concerns. Relevant power is civilian power: economic, financial, technological, industrial, intellectual. This is why "Europe" is a serious international rival to the United States today, even though its conventional military power is slight in comparison. Nonetheless, the prominence of military institutions in the United States and the availability of overwhelming force tend to influence the formulation of policy in ways that invite military remedies, even when these may be irrelevant, leading to the misuse of the military instrument by civilian authorities.

Many, if not most, policy professionals would agree that the threats currently enumerated to justify the existence of this imperial army are often exaggerated for partisan political reasons or to serve established institutional or industrial interests. A certain paranoia marks much discussion of "rogue nations", mass destruction terrorism and the threat posed by China (as it did the feared Y2K fiasco). There is a record of serious American overestimation of threats, as with the grossly exaggerated global significance of the communist uprising in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s (and of the prospective consequences of American defeat there), and with communism in Central and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

The policy community debates the merits of "traditional leadership", or "multilateralism", against those of global primacy (hegemony being excluded from a politically correct vocabulary)--to the advantage, during the second Clinton administration, of the last-named, a global program of U.S. power assertion. Confirmed in its self-esteem, proud of victory in the Cold War and the singularity of its power, Washington proclaimed the United States the "indispensable nation. One says "Washington" advisedly, since all this is primarily an affair of the governing and policy classes, rather than of the public, relieved to be rid of the Cold War.

IN SEPTEMBER 1939, when Europe went to war, the U.S. Army (including the Army Air Corps, which did not become a separate service until 1947) numbered 174,000 men. The nation had an old and principled hostility to "standing armies", believed to be a threat to democracy. That sentiment was explicit in the Constitution, whose drafters delegated to Congress the authority "to raise and support armies", but made that power subject to the condition that "no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years." The standing military force was constitutionally confined to a "well-regulated militia" in the individual states. A militia is a body of civilians who have received military instruction and can be called up for service in a national emergency. Today that militia is the National Guard, normally under the authority of state governors. John Hancock said in 1774 that from a militia "we have nothing to fear; their interest is the same as that of the state."

Currently, the United States has 1.4 million persons in its "standing army", members of its regular navy and air force included (but excluding the Coast Guard), and a ready reserve and National Guard force of nearly 2.5 million. The population has roughly doubled since 1939. The standing army has increased by a power of eight. If reserves are counted, it is 22 times the size of the 1939 force. Today's force holds itself prepared to wage two simultaneous major wars in different parts of the world, even though the United States faces no serious military challenge. It is the United States, rather, that poses the military threat to others.

As of 1999, according to the New York Times, the United States still maintained some 2,300 nuclear warheads on alert, with an explosive power equivalent to 44,000 Hiroshimas. In 1998 the Clinton administration programmed more money for modernization and simulated testing of the nuclear force than, on annual average, was spent during the Cold War to build the force. The rationale for this is difficult to discern.

In his authoritative book, A History of Militarism, Alfred Vagts wrote that militarism is the domination of the military man over the civilian, an undue preponderance of military demands, an emphasis on military considerations, spirit, ideals, and scales of value, in the life of states. It has meant also the imposition of heavy burdens on a people for military purposes, to the neglect of welfare and culture.²

This inadequately describes America's situation today. The matter is more complicated, as Feaver and Kohn (and Cohen) suggest. The military man does not dominate civilian authority in a direct way and has no ambition to do so, even though the Joint Chiefs of Staff has successfully imposed unprecedented limits on civilian authority.

When General Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he gave an interview to the New York Times, in which he courteously but firmly set forth the conditions (in terms of casualty risk and the political definition of the military objective) under which he and his colleagues were prepared to carry out presidential orders (the "Powell Doctrine"). This action would in an earlier time have been regarded as gross insubordination, and General Powell would have been reprimanded or dismissed.

Civilian government's loss of influence is undoubtedly due in part to the particular circumstances of the Clinton administration, in which the President has felt compelled to defer to military authority because of his own evasion of military service in the Vietnam War. However, the next president--and at the time of writing it is not known who it will be, Al Gore or George W Bush--will not be in a strong position to re-establish civilian authority.

The argument for maintaining U.S. military forces on their existing scale holds that this is essential in order to deal with a resurgent Russia or with China, which many in Washington perceive as a potentially hostile state. The first is not only a remote prospect, but the view that a successfully restored Russia must be an enemy is speculation, and rather dangerous speculation. The United States has no conflict of essential interests with China, only a rivalry for influence, although Washington has an obligation to see to Taiwan's security and other alliance matters in East Asia.

The Taiwan issue is essentially political and will be resolved, one way or another, when China experiences its long overdue crisis of regime, which will weaken China for the foreseeable future. Even a rash attempt by Beijing to impose a military solution would hardly constitute a threat to the United States. China has no way to attack the United States, other than with strategic nuclear weapons that it does not yet possess, may or may not possess in the future, and against which the United States already deploys a massive deterrent force.

Russia poses no conventional threat either to the United States or to its allies. A conceivable Russian nuclear threat (successfully deterred for the past half century) would actually be increased by ending certain existing arms limitation agreements. This has been contemplated by the Clinton administration and advocated in the Republican campaign platform for the 2000 election, in order to build a technologically implausible but (probably) psychologically and politically irresistible national missile defense, a seeming promise of invulnerability that responds to the nation's essential isolationism.³

Civilian militarism in the United States consists chiefly in the uncritical recourse to military measures to deal not only with foreign policy crises but with such civil society issues as terrorism and the drug trade. As nearly everyone would concede, the latter amounts to a politically motivated, external projection of what is fundamentally a domestic social problem. Military intervention in Colombia, for instance, is feasible, while the domestic drug problem seems insoluble. That the Colombian intervention will have virtually no effect on the real problem (and have negative effects of its own) is disregarded because of the imperative to do something.

Much is made of the threat from weapons of mass destruction wielded by rogue nations" ("states of concern", as we are now enjoined to call them) or civilian terrorist groups. A federal advisory commission report in September 1999 asserted that the terrorist threat will increase over the next twenty-five years, although it cites little to demonstrate that this is so. It said that, as the United States is unprepared for terrorism, there would be "more pressure on the military to expand its scope into domestic law enforcement, as the line between foreign and domestic threats is blurred."⁴

William Cohen, President Clinton's secretary of defense, made the astounding forecast that a terrorist nuclear, chemical or biological attack upon the United States is "not only possible, but probable" before 2010. Yet the actual evidence that a major foreign terrorist threat exists tends to be anecdotal and highly, if not irresponsibly, speculative--"scenario-dependent", as the planners say.

The domestic terrorist threat in any case is fundamentally a police problem, whatever its sources in foreign relations. The rogue nation threat is that of an "irrational" one-off attack. If it cannot be deterred by the same measures that prevented Cold War nuclear disasters, it is unlikely to be deterred at all. America's bombing of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's Libya in 1986 did not, as is usually claimed, deter terrorism, but, according to the assertions of the U.S. government itself, provoked the Libyan government to have a bomb placed aboard Pan American flight 103 two years later, whose explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 persons, most of them Americans.

Also neglected in most discussions of terrorism is the fact that the greater part of the international terrorism of the postwar period has had its source in five decades of Middle Eastern war or tension. If there were to be a final and fair settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conflicts, followed by a withdrawal from U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf (predicated on the canonical American belief in market solutions, which logically argues that Middle Eastern oil, being indigestible in itself, would under virtually any conditions find its way to the only people who need to buy it, the industrial West), normalization of U.S. relations with the Islamic world would follow and the principal terrorist threats could be expected to disappear. Needless to say, neither hypothesis seems likely today.

THE RESEARCH published by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), which Feaver and Kohn cite, notes that, "[a]t least since 1816, there has been a very durable pattern in U.S. behavior: the more veterans in the national political elite, the less likely the United States is to initiate the use of force in the international arena."⁵ The twenty-first century finds World War II and Korean War veterans nearly all gone from U.S. political life and the number of Vietnam veterans in decline. This implies that in the future America's political class will possess even fewer internalized inhibitions about the use of force than is now the case.

The TISS studies also found that the absence of civilian leaders with military experience has tended to draw military leaders out of their traditional constitutional role as disinterested professional advisers to civilian authority, and has contributed to turning them into "policy advocates and decisionmakers." Military officers now are routinely given assignments in the civilian chain of command, or when retired move to civilian government. It is widely thought that George W. Bush would make General Colin Powell his secretary of state.

It has been demonstrated that civilian leaders without military experience tend to have a more aggressive view of the utility of military force than do military leaders themselves, which is why, as Feaver and Kohn write, "a majority of elite military officers today believes that it is proper for the military to insist rather than merely to advise (or even advocate in private) on key matters, particularly those involving the use of force."

Another aspect of this is that the Pentagon has in recent years established an apparatus of relationships with foreign armies and navies, which allows it to conduct what amounts to a foreign policy parallel to that of the State Department or Congress. The Pentagon's system of military commands (or CINCs, referring to the commanders-in-chief who head them), covering the major regions of the world, has been greatly strengthened since the end of the Cold War, in part because the Clinton administration found the CINCs to be more flexible instruments of foreign policy than the civilian agencies. Dana Priest recently described them in the Washington Post as "the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire's proconsuls: well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of U.S. foreign policy", which in the past decade have

enjoyed a budgetary boom unscrutinized by Congress. There is no reliable accounting of the hundreds of millions of dollars the CINCs spend each year, and congressional oversight committees have not asked for one. The Pentagon intentionally keeps its classified, piecemeal version of their budgets out of Congress's hands,

even though their headquarters budgets outside Washington are today twice what they were when the Cold War ended. According to Priest, "they travel nonstop, oversee multimillion-dollar foreign study institutes and round-the-clock intelligence centers, host international conferences and direct disaster relief."⁶

The CINCs have become more important agents of U.S. foreign policy than the embassies in their regions because of their wealth and their lack of congressional and press scrutiny. They have also become generators of policy, as they hold regional responsibilities and are the primary U.S. contact for foreign military establishments, which in many non-Western countries are the principal centers of power. At a recent Bahrain conference where 70 U.S. civilian and military officials met several hundred regional officials, the U.S. Central Command CINC, General Anthony Zinni, was placed in the lead car in the official reception, even though six U.S. ambassadors present officially outranked him.

The CINCs are accused of having maintained, through subterfuge, programs with Indonesian and Central American armies that Congress had voted to suspend because of human rights violations (the CINCs renamed the programs). Their rationale for such initiatives is that they see problems in a way that Washington cannot see them. In an interview with the Washington Post, General Zinni, whose theater prior to his retirement included twenty-five countries, expressed concern that the foreign policy system

is badly broken.... If I go over to the State Department, I have four bureaus to visit. We need to revamp the entire engagement program.... Everybody thinks we're going to help in reordering the world.... Washington reacts to Beltway issues [that] don't mean anything out here.