George Packer saying, something-or-other about the civil-military relationship

Dave Dilegge at SmallWarsJournal.com links to this post by journalist George Packer, Guns and Brains Interesting Times blog 07/20/07:

I grew up during the Vietnam era and belong to a generation of educated liberals who came of age with a visceral dislike of the military. In the seventies and eighties, it was almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister. At the same time, on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor, a subscription to The New Yorker the mark of an oddball, and the words “liberal” and “academic” terms of abuse.

Here’s a crude generalization: after the sixties, intellect and patriotism went separate ways, to the detriment of both. This mutual hostility made intellectuals less responsible and soldiers less thoughtful. We’ve come to think of this antagonism as natural and inevitable, as it is between cats and dogs, but in fact it was a product of recent political and cultural changes in American life. The estrangement was compounded by professionalization on both sides and the adoption of inward-looking and jargon-ridden specializations: the all-volunteer military and the social-theory crowd became equally isolated American subcultures.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to close the divide. (my emphasis)

I'll bleep over any discussion of how exactly Packer considers himself a liberal. He's the author of one of the best books about the Iraq War so far, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, and he's done some very good reporting. His continued faith in the Iraq War enterprise does puzzle me, though.

But how crude is his "crude generalization". Pretty much, I would say.

Now, I suppose we'll have to take Packer's criticism on the autobiographical details that he felt "a visceral dislike of the military". If that's even what he meant to say; technically, he says that he belongs to "a generation of educated liberals" who felt that way.

But the picture he paints is more a conservative "culture war" concoction that a description of sentiment against the military on campuses during the later Vietnam War period. It's also important to distinguish between management, e.g., generals, and employees, e.g., private and sargeants. Packer specifically mentions Ivy League schools, saying that it was "almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister".

I don't know what the Bush kids and their peers at Ivy League schools may have thought in that regard. But antiwar activists interacted with soldiers and veterans, and veterans like John Kerry were always active in the antiwar movement, and became more and more its leaders as the Vietnam War dragged on. In other words, those who were actively opposing the Vietnam War didn't show much evidence of regarding "anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister".

It's also worth noting that there were then and still are substantial questions about the nature of the relationships between universities and other institutions, including corporations and the military. I certainly think it makes a lot of sense to restrict the ways the military can recruit on college campuses, especially around final exam time, which can be particularly stressful for many students.

And those questions continue. At Stanford University during the Vietnam War, for instance, student protesters objected to the university's organizational connection with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which had military contracts for practical tasks. Those kinds of questions are still coming up. I posted recently about a Tom Hayden blog post that challenged the particular way that Harvard's Carr Center on Human Rights interacted with the military, although his argument on that particular case didn't convince me.

But that's something very different than the "visceral dislike of the military" Packer describes, which supposed led Ivy League students (and presumably professor) well into the 1970s and 1980s "to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister."

It widely recognized that since the Vietnam War, there has been more of a pronounced separation between the active-duty military and society in general. I've posted numerous times about what people like Wesley Clark and Andrew Bacevich have had to say about this phenomenon. And it was apparently common during the Vietnam War for officers to tell their soldiers that the dirty hippie war critics back home hated them.

But does this mean that "on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor" and that "liberal" became a dirty word? It's true that over time, up to 90% of the officer corps became Republican. But educational standards for recruits went up over time until the Iraq War forced some relaxation of them. And for officers, education was respected and encouraged. The service war colleges have maintained solid academic standards. I often quote studies from the service colleges because they are some of the best material available on military issues, edited according to demanding standards.

The whole framing that Packer uses on this seems odd to me. Maybe he's writing with reference to particular experiences of his own. But as a generalization, it hardly makes sense. It sounds like some kind of warmed-over conservative culture-war script to me.

Tags: george packer