Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power is frank analysis by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow of the recent rise in American militarism. Fans of her television show will immediately recognize her snarky voice and can-you-believe-this incredulity, which translate effectively to the page. 
Maddow’s stated goal is encouraging a genuine debate about the role of the military in American life and foreign policy, the usefulness of which is echoed by many of the journalistic elite whose reviews grace Drift‘s covers, including Ira Glass, Tom Brokaw, and even Roger Ailes. I seriously question whether she’s laid on the disdainful snark a bit too thickly for this purpose — skeptics might be turned off rather than engaged — but the book is well researched and smoothly written. At the last, Maddow is hopeful rather than dejected. This creeping militarism, she concludes, is not the result of a conspiracy, but rather the cumulative effect of boneheaded but generally well-meaning politicians and officials doing their inadequate best to try to protect us. And as a result, the damage is reversible. We just need to frankly discuss what has happened.
Starting with a review of the vigorous debate had during the Constitution’s framing about whether even to have a standing army, Maddow quickly takes us through a history of major American military engagements. A common pattern emerges: righteous indignation over this or that controversy stirred the citizenry to action, temporarily swelling the army with reservists and enlistees (and sometimes draftees) who did battle and returned to their homes victorious.
But all this changed with Vietnam. Never officially declared by Congress or acknowledged by an executive until far late in the game, Vietnam also differed from previous wars in that Johnson stubbornly refused to call in the Reserve and the National Guard because he didn’t “want to blow this thing up.” Trying to fight a war “on the cheap” without actually bringing the nation, unified, to war, led to popular anti-war and anti-veteran sentiments — the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome”. That the cause for the war purely was ideological certainly didn’t help matters, to say nothing of the Pentagon Papers.
All this set the stage for the main character of Maddow’s narrative: Ronald Reagan. Reagan was able to leverage his acting ability during the Second World War as a star of training and propaganda films. He drank the Kool-Aid himself and would use what he learned to sell anti-Communist war-mongering to the American people 40 years later. And Kool-Aid was really all he used. In her review of the disaster of an operation that was the rescue of allegedly threatened American students on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, Maddow quotes then Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neil on Reagan as interviewed by the New York Times:
He is wrong in his policy. He’s caused us continuous harm… He only works three and a half hours a day. He doesn’t do his homework. He doesn’t read his briefing papers. It’s sinful that this man is President of the United States. He lacks the knowledge that he should have, on every sphere, whether it’s the domestic or whether it’s the international sphere.
One group that was informing Reagan’s policy was the so-called Team B. Maddow’s claims about it were so incredible that I had to look into the group. Formed in the dying days of the Ford Administration as an independent body to oversee the CIA’s strategic analyses, Team B was little more than hysterical anti-Soviet fear mongering. Their reports concluded that, contrary to the National Intelligence Estimates and due to a “grave and dangerous flaw” in that body’s methods, the Soviets were secretly gearing up for a nuclear first strike. How did Team B know this? A “large body of soft data” which included, according to the team’s own leader Richard Pipes, “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.”
These same people helped to inform Reagan’s foreign policy in the next decade. Equally influential was Reagan’s disdain for public debate about warmaking, which Maddow paraphrases (only somewhat hyperbolically) from his diary thus:
According to Reagan, having a spirited argument about where, when, and why to put United States soldiers in harm’s way (as well as how long to keep them there) and forcing a president to engage in a real argument about the wisdom of his foreign policy initiatives, to make his case in public, was akin to giving aid and comfort to the enemy — to Communists and terrorists.
This view helped justify Reagan’s illegal and disastrous adventures in Nicaragua with the Iran-Contra scandal, which Maddow explores in significant detail. She amusingly quotes then-Represenative Newt Gingrich: “He will never again be the Reagan he was before he blew it. He is not going to regain our trust and our faith easily.”
A second major player in Maddow’s narrative enters at this point in defense of Reagan’s actions in Iran-Contra. Dick Cheney, then a Representative from Wyoming, defended the President on the grounds of the Unitary Executive theory, which Maddow somewhat cloyingly declares is based on “a make-believe version of the Constitution”. Cheney became Secretary of Defense under Bush 41 and used the same argument to commit US forces in Kuwait without clear consent from Congress, even holding forth under formal inquiry from Senator Ted Kennedy. But Maddow returns to her thesis:
It’s not a conspiracy. Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals, have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance… [not] to fundamentally alter the country’s course but just to get around understandably frustrating impediments to their political goals.
Note that Maddow doesn’t target only Republicans in this analysis. She explores the Clinton administration’s role in privatizing and outsourcing components of the Armed Forces. Aside from often (and counterintuitively?) worse outcomes from so doing, another interesting result from this shift was a profound drop in oversight, accountability, and efficiency. One particularly chilling anecdote concerned the case of DynCorp, a subsidiary of Halliburton, that the government contracted among other things to maintain aircraft in Bosnia. Beside hiring grossly incompetent staff, the firm became embroiled in a sex trafficking scandal that involved sometimes underage girls bought from the Serbian mafia. A site supervisor — and former military man who retired to a more lucrative corporate contract for the same job — lamented the new guard:
The bottom line is that DynCorp has taken what used to be a real positive program that has very high visibility with every Army unit in the world and turned it into a bag of worms.
But by the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, all this questionably legal, obviously mismanaged, and arguably counterproductive warmaking machinery was par for the course. The explosion of the defense state that followed the 9/11 attacks isn’t even surprising given the creeping rise of militarism during the cold war. Maddow does briefly address the last decade, particularly noting the unaccountable but lethal Joint Special Operations Command that has arisen to seek out and destroy suspected terrorists; but the abuses committed in the name of the War on Terror deserve a second volume to themselves. But this observation warrants mention (emphasis mine):
While America has been fighting two of its longest-ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.” Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-solider, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life…
With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians’ control, the idea was for us to feel it — uncomfortably — every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumberances to war [the founders] left us — of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public not only from the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it’s happening — war has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.
Maddow goes on to analyze some of the soul-crushingly boneheaded realities of the nuclear cold war that still technically rages, but for those details you should seriously consider reading the book. I think this is a good place to leave my analysis is with Maddow’s closing argument:
We all have an interest in America having an outstanding military, but that aim is not helped by exempting the military from competition for resources. With no check on its growth and no rival for its political influence, the superfunded, superempowered national security state has become a leviathan… In Econ 101 they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it’s butter versus margarine — guns get a pass.
Overall, we’re weaker for it, and at enormous cost.
But not all is lost. The same political architecture that enabled this drift is equally capable of reversing it. All that matters is building political will to do so. That means educating the electorate and spurring them to action. Maddow even includes a ‘to-do list’ of urgently needed reforms. Get the book to read them and write your congressman. She might be snarky, but she’s right.
Published 2012, 261 pages.