The New Citizen Armies

Israel's Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective

Stuart A. Cohen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135169558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This edited book constitutes the first detailed attempt at a comparative international analysis of the transformations that are currently affecting the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their place in Israeli society.

Focusing primarily on deviations from the traditional norm of universal military service, the book compares the emergence of a new type of "citizen army" in Israel with the formats that have in recent decades become evident in other western democracies. In addition, these essays correct the conventional tendency to concentrate almost exclusively on the influences stimulating military institutional change in the West, and thereby to overlook the equally important factors that retard its momentum. By contrast, this volume deliberately highlights the brakes as well as the accelerators in current processes, thereby presenting a far more faithful picture of their complexity.

This book will be of much interest to students of Israeli politics, military studies, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR in general.

Stuart Cohen is a senior research associate of the BESA (Begin-Sadat) Center for Strategic Studies and also teaches political studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His most recent book is Israel and its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion (Routledge, 2008).

Part I
Continuities and their manifestations

1
The enduring citizen-soldier tradition in the United States

Ronald R. Krebs¹

The conventional wisdom is that the citizen-soldier tradition in the United States is today at its historical nadir. Leading scholars of civil–military relations often argue that the installation of the all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973 marked the end of – or even, as they sometimes boldly claim, severed – the link between citizenship and military service. Manpower trends over the ensuing three decades – an increasingly long-serving and professional force, combined with greater reliance on private military contractors – are thought to have rendered that link still more remote. Notwithstanding the ritual of Selective Service registration, Americans do not expect their national government to call on them to sacrifice for the nation, and they do not believe that their rights as citizens do, or should, hinge on their willingness to die for the nation. Whether this conclusion is warranted is of no small import. The demise of the citizen-soldier tradition is associated with a host of purported ills: a corrosive culture of rights; American national disunity; and an unstable social system in which national burdens are not equally borne.

But these conclusions do not follow if the premise is faulty. Is the citizen-soldier tradition a thing of the past, as so many maintain? Or has its demise, to invoke Mark Twain, perhaps been greatly exaggerated? Students of civil–military relations often explicitly or implicitly advance a homology between military recruitment systems and political culture: we know that the citizen-soldier tradition is no more because the mass army is no more. But if the citizen-soldier as a cultural phenomenon exists independently of its presumed institutional manifestation, then it can survive institutional change. In fact, the citizen-soldier tradition is more usefully thought of as a set of rhetorical conventions that, at least at one time, generally commanded assent among both elites and masses in the United States. The configuration of rhetorical commonplaces that constitutes the citizen-soldier tradition has historically been associated with a variety of military recruitment systems. To claim that the end of the peacetime mass army marks the end of the citizen-soldier is to mistake a contingent relationship for an invariant one. By reconceptualizing the citizen-soldier tradition, we become open to the ways in which it remains vibrant in the United States. Ironically the resilience of the tradition since 1973 may plausibly be ascribed in part to the challenges of raising a large standing volunteer military: in other words, the AVF did not condemn the citizen-soldier to death, but gave the citizen-soldier a new lease on life.

The rest of this chapter proceeds in three moves. First, it critically reviews common claims among scholars of civil–military relations about the citizen-soldier tradition in the United States and the effects of the end of the mass army. Second, it reconceptualizes the tradition as a set of specific rhetorical conventions that situate the citizen-soldier opposite the mercenary – or, in contemporary parlance, the employee-soldier of the “occupational” model of military service. Third, the chapter explores whether, viewed through this prism, the citizen-soldier tradition is dead in contemporary America and concludes that it is not. In short, the citizen-soldier lives.

Obligation, occupation, and the lessons of history

According to many leading observers of US civil–military relations, the citizen-soldier has departed the American scene. Elliot Abrams and Andrew Bacevich emphatically assert that “the mythic tradition of the citizen-soldier is dead.” Daniel Moran notes, more broadly, that “the legend of the levée en masse has, to all appearances, lost its grip upon the Western imagination.” David Segal concludes that military service in the United States has been redefined “from being an obligation of citizenship in a community to being an obligation of national citizenship and, most recently, to being a job.” James Burk writes that, with the end of the draft, the United States “abandon[ed] the ideal of the citizen soldier, conscripted into the mass army.” Eliot Cohen suggests that the citizen-soldier is in his “twilight” (Abrams and Bacevich 2001: 18; Moran 2006: 4; Segal 1989: 45; Burk 2007: 444; Cohen 2001: 23). Many ascribe this development to the change in military format and recruitment – from the mass army to the AVF (Segal 1989; Cohen 2001; Bachman et al. 1977: 153–5; Morgan 2003; Moskos 1993).

Yet what is the citizen-soldier, and how is his rise and demise related to the recruitment system? Charles Moskos famously argued that, with the introduction of the AVF, the citizen-soldier was replaced by homo economicus, motivated by the skills, salary, and educational benefits that military service bequeaths, rather than by patriotism or obligation (Moskos 1986). Burk similarly observes that “the charisma of the citizen-solder was routinized and diminished as the choice to perform military service became much like a choice to fill any job” (Burk 2002: 19). The army recruitment slogans of recent memory – “Be All That You Can Be” and “An Army of One” – capture these individualistic motives. More importantly, they allegedly reflect a changing model of military service: from an institutional to an occupational model, from service as an obligation to service as a job (Moskos 1977; Moskos et al. 2000).² “The abandonment of conscription,” Moskos maintained, “jeopardizes the nation’s dual-military tradition, one-half of which – and truly its heart – is the citizen soldiery” (Moskos 1993: 85). Thus he recommended a short-term enlistment option that would not only boost recruitment but, more importantly, inculcate a certain (republican) vision of citizenship: “the grand design is that the ideal of citizenship obligation ought to become part of growing up in America” (Moskos 1981: 34).³

In Cohen’s formulation, the citizen-soldier tradition suggests a force that is, at least in theory, demographically and socioeconomically representative of society at large; comprised of soldiers whose service is motivated by a sense of duty to the nation; and constituted by soldiers whose primary identity is that of citizens, temporarily in uniform. In Cohen’s view, universal conscription is necessary and sufficient to give rise to the citizen-soldier.⁴ Volunteer militaries, he suggests, differ along all three dimensions. In a volunteer force, the demand for service comes from below: even if motivated by patriotic stirrings, service in no way suggests the fulfillment of obligation. Not even in theory is such a military force representative of society. Finally, members of the armed forces are, far down the chain of command, long-serving professionals with training, expertise, and a corporate identity that sits alongside, and at times even supplants, their civilian identity (Cohen 2001; also Callahan 1999; Burk 2000). As the experience of military service becomes concentrated in one societal segment, the social and cultural distance grows between warriors and the privileged classes: Josiah Bunting III has observed, through the prism of the Iraq War, “how distant all things military, all the appurtenances and actions and needs of war and warriors, have become from the informed and thoughtful consideration of those to whom our commerce and culture have given the most” (Bunting 2005: 15).

These scholars suggest that the demise of the citizen-soldier has contributed to the dilution of American citizenship.⁵ Citizenship refers to the mutual claims that authorities and populations may make upon each other, to rights that must be respected and to obligations that must be fulfilled by both (Tilly 1995). In the contemporary United States, some lament, citizenship has become a bundle of rights, a one-way street in which citizens make claims on the state but do not tolerate authorities’ claims upon them (Janowitz 1980; Glendon 1991). Put differently, Americans have grown enamored of a liberal model of citizenship, which lacks a persuasive basis for civic obligation: liberals, focused on the priority of non-interference, may of course perform civic functions, but they do not accede to binding commitments that would limit their freedom of action (Sandel 1984; Viroli 2002: 35–43). In these scholars’ view, the AVF played a signal role in this process, for military service is one of the few concrete demands that states make on their populations, and its potential cost goes beyond paying taxes, serving on a jury, or voting. When military service becomes just a job, it suggests that civic virtue is no longer a preeminent value. When meaningful sacrifice is not part of citizens’ lives, a culture emerges that is neither accustomed to nor appreciative of obligation (in addition to Moskos’ various works cited above, see Cohen 2001; Strauss 2003; Morgan 2003). Critics of the AVF would find illuminating the summation of Bernard Rostker, a former director of Selective Service: “Today the all-volunteer force is one that values the individual, and through increased levels of retention, individuals signal back that they value the all-volunteer force” – but, revealingly, not the state or their fellow-citizens (Rostker 2006: 10, emphasis added).

In their view, mass armies suggest an alternative, republican model of citizenship. Republicans, like liberals, focus on the preservation of individual liberty, but they conceive of such liberty in terms of freedom from arbitrary interference. They, therefore, “do not view state action, provided it is properly constrained, as an inherent affront to liberty,” and they welcome state action that addresses relations and structures of domination. Republicans value active participation in democratic politics not for its own sake, but because it fosters a political culture of public-spiritedness that protects liberty. The republican tradition has long emphasized the importance of civic virtue in sustaining republican institutions, and it has historically identified the good citizen as one willing to die on the battlefield for the political community (Pettit 1997: 148 and passim; Pocock 1975: 194–218, 535–9; Viroli 2002: 35–43).

What is at stake in these divergent conceptions of citizenship? Why does it matter if contemporary America tilts toward liberal individualism? First, the Founders saw the citizen-soldier as the guarantor of the republic, for he and his fellows possessed the skills and values needed to prevent tyranny from again rearing its ugly head. Standing armies, in contrast, would serve the executive or monarch, not the people, and could be used to silence protest. The bearer of the musket rules, and thus the Founders put their faith in the militia, in which the common man bore arms to preserve not only the state’s security but ultimately his own liberty. Second, communitarians have argued that the well-intentioned effort to safeguard individual liberties has harmed the quality of democracy by nurturing a citizenry focused on the pursuit of private goods rather than service of the public good. In the absence of a more deeply participatory citizenship, populaces become disengaged from politics, and the result is the erosion of political community (Bell 1993; Etzioni 1998). Political community is the basis for collective political action, and a renewed emphasis on public service might reinvigorate American democracy. Third, to counter vital threats to their security, states sometimes do require great sacrifice, and a society for which sacrifice is not an ingrained habit – that is, a society dominated by liberal citizenship discourse – is a society that may not be capable of meeting the challenge when great needs arise.

Point of critical entry 1: idealized motivations

One point of critical entry is the idealized portrait of American soldiers before the AVF: Moskos and Cohen, among others, define the citizen-soldier by, or at least associate him with, a willing and swift obedience to the call to arms. Yet Peter Karsten has observed that there is little evidence of “consent theory” in the history of US military recruitment (Karsten 1982, 2001; Segal 1986). Even during the later colonial period, when the citizen-soldier ideal supposedly was most unproblematically given practical expression, the middle and upper classes gladly paid fines to avoid militia service. Even at the height of the Revolution, generous recruiting bounties – in today’s argot, signing bonuses – were needed to procure sufficient forces for the Continental Army. The Continental Congress saw long enlistments as valuable but unfeasible: John Adams observed that in Massachusetts not more than a regiment “of the meanest, idlest, most intemperate, and worthless” would have signed up for the war’s duration. Contrary to the usual narrative, during the Revolution, volunteers normally failed to come forward and fill Congressionally imposed quotas on the states; states desperate to fill their quotas competed with each other for recruits, offering plentiful cash and land bounties and promising to make legal troubles disappear; and the payment of fees (commutation) and the hiring of replacements (substitution) to avoid service were common practices among those who could afford them. George Washington was disappointed by the “dirty, mercenary spirit” that he perceived to move his fellow Americans, complaining to the Congress of an “egregious want of public spirit” (Mahon 1983: 37, Chs 2–3; Kreidberg and Henry 1955: 11, 13, and Chs 2–3).

The Civil War witnessed much the same. As battlefield losses piled up, state militias could not meet the manpower needs of either army, and a federal draft followed in the Confederacy in 1862 and in the Union the following year. In both settings, however, conscription was notable for its ineffectiveness, which in turn led to the distribution of enormous bounties. By one account, “bounties cost about as much as pay for the Army during the entire war; exceeded the quartermaster expenditures for the war; and were twice as great as the cost of subsistence and five times the ordnance costs,” and “bounty-jumpers,” who enlisted and deserted repeatedly, were rife, as were substitute brokers. A spirit of sacrifice and civic duty seems to have been distinctly lacking (Kreidberg and Henry 1955: 109–10, 112, and Ch. 4).⁶ Over 30 percent of those examined in the Union’s July 1863 draft exploited commutation and substitution to evade service, and another 65 percent were declared exempt. The unequal burden led to widespread draft riots in Union cities, and another 14 percent of those called failed to report: whatever obligations citizens perceived came in a distant second to the priority of equity. In the four subsequent applications o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Continuities and their manifestations
• PART II Change: causes and constraints
• PART III Israeli dilemmas and experiences
• Index