How the U.S. military became like a one-stop shop for lazy government

The Pentagon building in Washington, D.C. During one of the interviews, I given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.

The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-andpop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: they’d look for a niche, appeal to neighbourhood sentiment, maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory-soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: when Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.

Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small momand-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform than the State Department or USAID — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars, but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.

We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war, or how the military operates.

It’s not too late to change all this.

We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S. targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional war/peace distinctions. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign policy institutions.

After all, few military leaders want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: they fear that, in the end, the nation’s overreliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian “competition” but the military itself. They worry that the military, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find itself able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.

Ultimately, they fear, the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items, strewn haphazardly around the aisles.