Barely a generation separates two milestones in the history of the US military: In March 1973, the last US combat troops left Vietnam, demoralized standard-bearers of the nation's most ignominious modern failure at arms. Thirty years later, US forces this past March began an invasion of Iraq that will likely be remembered as one of the most rapid conquests ever of a large nation. Between these two events lies an extraordinary story of regeneration and adaptation.
A full accounting of how the post-Vietnam military, a "hollow army," in the famous phrase of General Edward C. Meyer, became a world-bestriding force has yet to be written. It is a work in need of an author not least because military might has become an outsize aspect of US power. Other Western countries have generous welfare states; the US alone has a military that can project force anywhere on the globe, fight and win.
America's technological advantage in warfare has become so large that, despite the ritual references to coalition forces, the Pentagon finds it more of a burden than a benefit to have allies in combat. (It demonstrated this by turning down offers of assistance for the fighting in Afghanistan. The Department of Defense's desire for assistance in peacekeeping is another issue entirely.)
Remarkably, the Bush administration shows no sign of resting content with the current enormous superiority to all conceivable rivals. Defense spending has been rising for the last five years, and Congress is currently putting the final touches on a national security budget of US$400 billion, or about 10 percent more in real dollars than the US spent in an average year in the Cold War. That does not include the US$75 billion cost of operations in Iraq.
In America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of US Military Engagements: 1975-2000, Peter Huchthausen has written a prelude to this subject, surveying the period that began with the Mayaguez incident, in which Khmer Rouge forces seized a US merchant container ship, and ended with NATO's defeat of Serb forces in Kosovo. The title, adapted from the diplomat John Milton Hay's description of the Spanish-American War, is ironic, as the author acknowledges. With ample chapters devoted to debacles like Desert One, the failed effort to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, and the 1992-93 deployment in Somalia, little splendor is on display.
These sections are accompanied by others covering eight more engagements, including interventions in Grenada, Bosnia and Kosovo, the reflagging and escorting of merchant ships in the Persian Gulf, the hunt for Manuel Noriega in Panama and the 1991 Persian Gulf war. In clean and economic prose, Huchthausen, a retired Navy officer, delivers a historical background to each engagement of the US military and a concise narrative of the action.
The author takes a traditionalist's approach and dwells on those episodes in which shots were fired -- or should have been -- instead of ones that saw US troops involved in peacekeeping or nation-building, as in the substantial deployment to Haiti. Many of his vignettes are thoughtful and thorough, recapitulating, for example, the largely forgotten political struggles on Grenada that helped trigger US intervention and describing in its full horror the experience of the Marines in their 1982-83 deployment in Lebanon, where they came to serve no function except as a target for hostile militias and terrorists.
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