Book Review: The Unmooring of American Military Power

In Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Rachel Maddow—yes, that Rachel Maddow—looks at the modern American national security establishment and asks how did we get here? While not a work of academic social science, this reviewer suggests the book is nonetheless a useful resource for scholars. Maddow’s thesis is that America has become a nation too comfortable with war. She argues that the use of American military power, and the outlay of money to fund the national security establishment, has developed its own momentum without the American public noticing. Maddow traces the roots of this development to two key trends: first, the separation of the American public from the costs of war, and second, the shift in war-making power from the legislative to the executive branch. As Maddow writes, “This book is about how and why we’ve drifted” from the Founders’ efforts, in building the new U.S. government, to constrain military adventurism. “It wasn’t inevitable. And it’s fixable” (p. 8).

The book unfolds in roughly chronological order. Maddow begins by asserting that the constraints the Founders put in place were largely successful through World War II: “When the United States went to war, the entire United States went to war. And no nation’s military demobilized with such verve and velocity when the fighting was over” (p. 10). Maddow argues that this “Jeffersonian prudence” (p. 10) began to crack when President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight in Vietnam, avoiding the need to ask Congress and the American people to fully support the conflict. She writes that this decision “tore the military from the heart of the country, and it tore the country from the heart of the military” (p. 17). Maddow does not explicitly address the draft’s failure to play this connecting role—a role that many assume renewed conscription would play today ¹ —but alludes to the lack of political and socioeconomic power among those unable to avoid the Vietnam Era draft. Maddow concludes her discussion of Vietnam on a hopeful note—the resulting Total Force Policy ² enmeshing the Reserve and Active Components of the military, and the War Powers Resolution reasserting Congressional authority over troop deployments were sure to restrain military adventurism in the future.

Maddow then fast forwards to Ronald Reagan who plays a starring role in four of the book’s nine substantive chapters. Maddow argues that, after spending World War II making propaganda films for the U.S. military, Reagan understood better than his recent predecessors the political potency of focusing the public on an enemy that threatened America. Maddow’s account of Reagan’s foreign policy includes detailed retellings of the debates over the Panama Canal treaty, U.S. military operations in Grenada, the aftermath of the Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon, and the Iran–Contra scandal. In the Reagan White House’s efforts to shape legal precedent, and experimentation with the plausible deniability afforded by foreign policy privatization, Maddow sees the foundations of creeping executive power seen in more recent administrations.

In the post–9/11 era, Maddow finds evidence that the constraints installed after Vietnam worked in the lead up to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, arguing that the need to mobilize the reserve component ensured robust public and Congressional debate before troops were committed to combat. But Maddow suggests this success was short-lived, as the ballooning overhead costs associated with the All-Volunteer Force led the government to turn more and more to private contractors. She highlights the degree to which outsourcing enabled Bill Clinton’s deployments of U.S. troops to Bosnia and Kosovo. Maddow also criticizes the secret drone war begun under George W. Bush and intensified under Barack Obama, arguing that the use of both private contractors and the Central Intelligence Agency allowed these programs to escape public accountability. Maddow argues that despite extended “boots-on-the-ground” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier” (p. 202).

Maddow’s last substantive chapter focuses on the costs of maintaining America’s extensive nuclear arsenal, including nuclear accidents and near misses. While this chapter provides many of the book’s most memorable anecdotes, it feels a bit tacked on to the overall argument. Maddow concludes with an epilogue suggesting ways to correct the drift, all of which are much easier said than done: increase the degree to which the public bears the financial and human costs of war, increase transparency, reduce privatization, refocus the military on truly military missions, and reassert congressional control.

While Maddow has a doctorate in political science from Oxford University, the book is clearly intended as a work of journalism aimed at mass audience. Maddow supplies a compelling argument, but not one that is rigorous in the academic sense. She ties together cause and effect via narrative rather than what social scientists would count as quantitative or qualitative empirical testing. Maddow writes stories the way she tells them on television, drawing her audience in with an entertaining anecdote that ultimately leads them to her real point. There are no citations in the text—only notes on sources by chapter at the end of the volume. Maddow relies primarily on presidential papers and biographies as well as declassified government reports and contemporary media coverage.

While Drift may sound like an unlikely source for academic researchers, the book can be immensely useful to scholars of U.S. civil–military relations, requiring only a small investment of time and effort to get through. Maddow’s storytelling approach provides the academic researcher with a wealth of research questions to investigate—questions that have the benefit of being relevant to current policy debates and public discussions—and points toward avenues for historical research. In fact, this reviewer has used it in precisely this manner. Scholars of civil–military relations will likely be particularly interested in Maddow’s narrative about the evolution of the American military from citizen-soldier to warrior class disconnected from society. ³ While this narrative is certainly not unique to Maddow, she tells the story in a compelling and accessible way, with more focus on military recruiting and the role of the reserve component than most. The researcher who digs in to the data behind Maddow’s stories will find much to explore—for example, one might be surprised to learn that the 2011 Pew Research Center study Maddow cites as finding that half of Americans say their lives have not been affected by nearly a decade of war (p. 202) also finds no significant difference in response to this question between those who have an immediate family member who has served in the military and those who do not, complicating the “civil–military gap” hypothesis. ⁴

Drift is now more than 5 years old, but of renewed relevance as a change in presidential administration has revived public discussion of executive power and brought renewed assessment of American military missions overseas, particularly in Afghanistan. The book is especially interesting as a counterpart to a number of recent books that examine the evolving role of the military in U.S. foreign policy: Eliot Cohen’s The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (2016), Rosa Brooks’s How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (2016), Derek Reveron’s Exporting Security (2nd ed., 2016), Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray’s edited volume Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy? (2014).