I’m an admirer of Mark Lilla’s writing, but I was disappointed by this passage from his short op-ed in the Columbia Spectator:

It’s true that in the Vietnam Era detachment from military life led the upper-middle class to oppose a war that did not affect them directly (though dogmatically and without much thought given to the consequences for Southeast Asia). In 2003, though, the tables turned and that same class acquiesced to the foolhardy Iraq war, for the same reason: it did not affect them. Their detachment played right into the hands of the war’s planners, many of whom escaped the Vietnam War with student deferments at places like Harvard and Cornell and Princeton. We mustn’t forget that the military officer corps was skeptical of the war’s purported justifications—they knew battle first-hand. But the civilian pro-war faction counted on the fact that so long as the conflict didn’t enter the consciousness or affect the daily lives of middle-class Americans, they would be free to conduct it as they wished. All they had to do was invoke 9/11, outsource much of the fighting to private firms, and hire dirt-poor kids in need of a paycheck to do the fighting. They guessed that such a war would face no serious opposition, and they were right. [Emphasis added.]

Though it is easy to see why many are drawn to the idea that the military is composed of “dirt-poor kids in need of a paycheck,” the truth is that, as Bruce Berkowitz observes in his book Strategic Advantage, fewer than 30 percent of the 2 million Americans who become eligible for military service each year are considered fit for military service, and the military recruits around a sixth of this eligible population. There was an effort to relax recruiting standards at the height of the fighting in Iraq, but large numbers of Americans remained ineligible all the same. And it is safe to say that it was less affluent kids who were more likely to fall short.

Rural areas and the South are overrepresented in the military. African Americans have gone from being slightly overrepresented to slightly underrepresented. And young people from the poorest as well as the richest deciles of the population are underrepresented. The picture is considerably more complicated than Lilla allows. It would be more convincing to suggest that Americans join the military for many reasons — it was common for people to join the military to gain job skills, particularly those from minority backgrounds, but the effective transformation of logistical support roles into something akin to frontline combat roles in terms of physical danger in the course of long insurgencies titled the balance of costs and benefits. One gets the strong impression that many young people join the military in light of family tradition and an embrace of the martial life. Many of Lilla’s readers will find the idea that many Americans find military service psychically rewarding repellent, but it happens to be true. The military really is a powerful engine of upward mobility for many Americans. But the kids in the aforementioned 30 percent generally have other options.

But more to the point, does Lilla really believe that the “civilian pro-war faction” was this cynical, leaving aside the fact that his description of who was doing the fighting is off-base? I remember those years, and I’m pretty sure that the civilian pro-war faction believed that Iraq was a threat to America and the world and that an armed intervention was the least bad option.

Lilla continues with the broad brushstrokes:

Historically, democracies with strong civilian control of, and wide participation in, the military are less likely to conduct wars than countries with a distinct military class. We are quickly developing such a class today, with uneducated soldiers drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of the country, and officers drawn heavily from areas of the South and West that are narrowly religious, suspicious of educated elites, and without access to our best universities. At the same time we are shielding students at our best institutions from any contact with military life, which only deepens their ignorance of political realities and encourages their single-minded focus on getting rich. It’s a very unhealthy situation.

All I’ll say is that Lilla might profit from more contact with contemporary soldiers and military officers.