| > If the military remains the most-trusted branch of government that's a bad thing. Agreed, but I think the thing driving it isn't really the size of the defense budget. I think it's the All-Volunteer Force. During the Vietnam era, U.S. military spending was much higher as a percentage of total GDP than it is today -- around 10%, compared to ~4.5% today (see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020...). But the military's reputation for competence was much lower then. Why? Because back then lots of Americans had first-hand experience with the military, or knew someone within one degree of separation who did. So they knew that people in the military were just like people anywhere else -- that generals could be principled or venal, officers clever or clueless, soldiers motivated or lazy. They knew it because they'd lived alongside all these people in the ranks, and personal experience doesn't leave a lot of room for mystique. We're now more than four decades in to an all-volunteer force, though, which means that the days when a broad slice of the population had seen the realities of the military up close are slipping out of living memory. Today's average American knows the military only at a distant remove, heavily mediated by hoorah propaganda (just watch an NFL game) that emphasizes the idea that Soldiers -- who we are supposed to refer to with a capital S now, just to drive home the point -- are a breed apart from ordinary workaday people. As a civilian who grew up in a military family, I see this happening and it worries me profoundly. History has not been kind to democracies that turn their soldiers into a remote, unaccountable elite. They tend not to be democracies for too much longer. |
Your third paragraph reminded me of this article.