The Crises of US War-Making, Past and Present

Corey R. Payne, University of Richmond

Growing opposition (at home and abroad) to its role in Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, combined with supply chain woes and depleted weapons stockpiles from its defense of Ukraine, raises the prospect of a major crisis of war-making for the United States. This paper compares the present moment with the last major crisis of US war-making, which unfolded amidst defeat in Vietnam. By the turn of the 1970s, widespread opposition at home challenged the military’s ability to wage war via a mass mobilization of the citizenry. Abroad, the Soviet Union seized on the quagmire as a demonstration of weakness and barbarity that undermined US leadership. This paper aims to identify the contours of this crisis and make sense of how officials responded to it. Drawing from the Foreign Relations of the US and the Digital National Security archives, I find that officials successfully navigated both the domestic challenges to military legitimacy and the external challenges to US power by embracing a series of organizational “fixes”—from the end of conscription to the rise of high-tech weapons—with the explicit goal of removing constraints on elites’ freedom of movement. The result was a military apparatus that wages war with little participation from citizens, setting the stage for the endless wars of the twenty-first century. Like the 1970s, today’s crisis presents an opportunity for dramatic transformations in war-making. Yet the same “fixes” are no longer available to elites—indeed, it is now the very regime of war-making created by the “fixes” that is on the brink. Unlike the 1970s, today’s elites are unable to change course in the face of crisis. On the one hand, this has created a dangerous situation of escalating militarism. But, on the other, it may yield a more favorable balance of forces to anti-militarists than in the past.

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 Presented in Session 3. Crises, Transformations, and Resilience in Historical Perspective: Insights from Global Comparative Research