Drift

littler, but just as nasty, country.

Solidarity, we need it now, not division, but solidarity.

I reject the argument that says Congress must support the president, right or wrong. We have our own responsibility to do what is right, and I believe that war today is wrong. At this historic moment, it may well be that only Congress can stop this senseless march toward war.

I think it’s time for Congress to help rather than hinder the president. I think it’s time for the Congress to join with the president and get behind him and our young men and women over there sitting in the sand and show that we’re willing to back the use of force.

If we do nothing, and Saddam pays no price for swallowing up the country of Kuwait, destroying people’s property, torturing, raping, and killing innocent men and women and children, we are as guilty as he is.

War is about fire and steel and people dying. If the sons and daughters of all of us, of the president, the vice president, the Cabinet were all over there in the Persian Gulf right now, right up on the front line and were going to be part of that first assault wave that would go on into Kuwait, I think we’d be taking more time. I think we’d be working harder on the sanctions policy. I think we’d be trying to squeeze Saddam Hussein in every other way that we could, short of a shooting war.

If we fail to act, there will be inevitably a succession of dictators, of Saddam Husseins—of which around this globe there are an abundance, either in reality or would-be. And those dictators will see a green light, a green light for aggression, a green light for annexation of its weaker neighbors. And, indeed, over time a threat to the stability of this entire globe.

When the talking was over, virtually every member of Congress stood up and was counted as being for a war in the Persian Gulf or against it. It was a narrow margin—the Senate was 52–47—but Congress (which is to say the nation) voted to go to war.

Agree or disagree with the outcome, the system had worked. Our Congress had its clangorous and open debate and then took sides. We decided to go to war, as a country. This in itself was kind of a miracle, given how dismissive the Bush White House was of Congress’s responsibility for such decisions, and congressional leaders’ inclination to shirk those responsibilities. What forced this national debate was not humble respect for the Constitution or the founders’ intent to make any decision to go to war difficult, deliberate, wrenching, and collective. No, what forced us to do the right thing was the last surviving structural barrier to war making—the Abrams Doctrine. The sheer need to call up a huge number of troops to mount any military operation of any significance anywhere in the world. Even in the face of radically reimagined presidential power and the precedent of secret war and congressional irrelevance, the call-up had fixed the country’s eyes on the real possibility of war, had made it all but impossible for the president to conduct any serious war business alone, and had ultimately forced Congress to shoulder its burden. By the time of the George H. W. Bush presidency, the Abrams Doctrine was doing a lot of work in keeping the country from drifting too easily into war.

Which is why we probably should have had a real debate—or at least thought twice—before we got rid of that, too.

CHAPTER 7 Doing More with Less (Hassle)

IT WAS THE TODDLERS WHO DID IT… TEETHING, SLOBBERING, paste-eating, ungovernable, ever- dependent tots. In the decade that followed the Gulf War, preschool kids ended up being among the most effective shock troops in the assault on the last remaining constraints keeping us from going to war all the time. The little darlings were terribly dear. Not dear as in cuddly, but dear as in expensive. They demanded resources. A Pentagon study in 1995 figured it cost $6,200 per toddler, per year, to provide day care for the youngest military dependents. And there were 575,000 preschool children in US military households around the world. As an employer, the military had to accept all those dependents as its responsibility; they were an enormous chapped-bottom drag.

The demographics of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps had changed drastically since the Vietnam War. By the mid-1990s, twenty years after we had gotten rid of the draft, the all-volunteer military was steadier, more professional, more able, more educated; it was also more reflective of the civilian world at large. The number of women in uniform, for example, had increased exponentially. Well over half of the nation’s servicemen and -women were married. And like the rest of the country, which by the mid-’90s had been enjoying relative peace and ample prosperity, the military was part of a national wave of fecundity.

But as in the country at large, having kids didn’t automatically give military families an Ozzie and Harriet makeover. The number of single parents raising children alone had trended up on military bases as it had all over. Two of every three soldiers had spouses who worked full-time outside the home. And so something like 80 percent of the preschoolers on the military’s dependent list needed full-time day care so Mom and Dad could keep the family afloat. Not only that, but military parents had come to expect a reasonable safety net for their children. “Military people stay in the service because they like being part of something special,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John M. Shalikashvili, in May 1995. “They won’t stay long, however, if families aren’t treated well.”

Long experience taught that open-ended deployment could be crushing to military families: instances of child abuse, substance abuse, divorce, and check kiting at commissaries all increased. It didn’t take the broad survey by researchers at the US Army Research Institute for Behavioral Sciences to convince commanders that “family separation” was a main reason for enlisted troops and officers alike to leave the service.

“Sir,” one Air Force sergeant stationed in Germany told a Pentagon researcher, “we are ready to go anywhere as long as you take care of our families.”

The House and Senate had passed legislation that set up all sorts of standards for how the military was supposed to handle its tots, but then they badly underfunded the provision of those services. Much of the money needed to make up the gap came from base commanders raiding their tiny pots of nonappropriated funds, leaving unmarried soldiers to bitch and moan that the kiddies were stealing the money intended to keep up bowling alleys, golf courses, and other recreational goodies. If the best hope for commanders was robbing from the base bowling alley, the Pentagon’s stated aim of meeting 80 percent of the military-family child-care demand by 1999 (up from a mere 52 percent in 1995) was clearly beyond reach.

And these goals took into account only the troops on active duty. What about all those Guard members and reservists? In the Gulf War, more than a quarter million had been called up; 105,000 had been shipped to the Saudi desert for months. And thirty-one days into active-duty deployment, the benefits kicked in for those soldiers: health care, housing allowances, employer reimbursements, tuition credits… day care!

This was a tremendous headache to the Pentagon planners. The operative budgetary mandate in the 1990s was to reprioritize the shrinking defense budget to get back to the important business of weapons procurement