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The civilian must accept his or her role in world events and decisions. Elected representatives appropriate money and approve U.S. activities in other countries and in our own.
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Solders go where they are ordered by their commander.
Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military. Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.
“FOREIGN POLICY”
“Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves:
As we face novel security threats from novel quarters, emanating from civil unrest, pandemics non-state terrorist networks from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks.
But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.
Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.
“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.”
If the civilian wishes change, then change can be at hand if the elected official is contacted and a strong input from the citizenry makes the demand heard. Violence is deafening and self-defeating.
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