Blogotional

On Wednesday, Hugh Hewitt interviewed Robert D. Kaplan on his book Imperial Grunts: The American military on the ground. Kaplan has spent years embedded with the American military around the world to write this book, and is one of the most knowledgable guys on the military I have ever heard, outside of the military. The interview transcript is here, it is worth the effort to read every letter and punctuation mark.

I; however, want to focus on one specific thing that Kaplan said:

HH: ...that really interested me in the civilian/military divide that he worried about. Do you see that growing or narrowing?

RK: I see it growing, because this is the first time in history where you have an intellectual media governmental elite, where people don't have anyone...where have very few people who've served in the military within their own social circle. One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.

There are two really important points to emphasize out of this exchange. The first is Kaplan's acknowledgement of a growing gap between the civilian and the military. I agree and this concerns me. Historically it is the stuff that military coups are made of. We are a long way from that so that is not an immediate concern. What is an immediate concern in the issue is that service to the nation is the best means of building citizen loyalty to the nation. As the gap grows, and I think we are already there to some extent, people will come to view themselves as living in and not necessarily being a part of their nation. That is problematic.

I reflect on the oft-quoted scene from the movie A Few Good Men - you know the one, Tom Cruise tricks Jack Nicholson into confessing to a crime on the stand. "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH -- I provide you with a way of life by standing on a wall..." Now, of course, director Rob Reiner, being who he is, intends the scene to illustrate the contempt that many in the military have for the average citizenry, but in reality that's a two-way street. There is a great deal of truth in Nicholson's tirade, particularly in a nation with a growning militay/civilian gap.

Which leads me to the second thing I want to emphasize from the exchange. Kaplan ackowledges what a critical role email has played in keeping Americans informaed about what is going on in theater. That's a major reason I have reproduced emails I have received from soldiers on this blog whenever I could. I cannot help but think that this may be the most efficacious thing blogging can accomplish. Godblogging, my raison d'etre, is good, but it's effectivness is limited by a number of factors -- but nothing can make more of a difference in military effort than making sure as many people as possible know exactly what is happening from as close to the horse's mouth as we can get.

I will go so far as to say that email and milblogging are the reasons the current efforts at pre-mature withdrawal are failing, thankfully.

Blogging has been a large part of my personal effort to keep the gap small. Not so much because of what I have passed on, though I hope it has helped, but becasse of the relationships I have developed with those deployed and what I have read.

I hope you do something to close your gap today. Read a milblog, better, email someone you know in the military, best, adopt a soldier at Soldier's Angels. It matters as much to you as it does to the soldier.