23 Quotes by Andrew J. Bacevich

Call it habit or conditioning or socialization: The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.

American warriors may not win wars, but they do perform the invaluable service of providing their countrymen with an excuse to avoid introspection. They make second thoughts unnecessary. In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism. In.

One result has been to contrive a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier.

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post–Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers like Sullivan were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action.

What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power that he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding.

As for diversity within the military itself, highly publicized instances of tokenism – female officers becoming fighter pilots or graduating from the army’s Ranger School – divert attention from gaping inequities related to class.

The Weinberger Doctrine created a series of tests, in essence preconditions for any policy decision that might put American troops into harm’s way.

The war that the officer corps prepared itself to fight was the war in which the prospects of actually having to fight were most remote. This made perfect sense.

The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 that seemingly redeemed the military profession was also the event that vaulted Powell to the status of national hero.