The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War. Mara E. Karlin. Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 2022.

Mara E. Karlin’s new book, The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War, is a sobering yet necessary read. In looking at the effects of the post-9/11 wars on the U.S. military, she asks—and proposes answers to—two questions. First, “[h]ow did the most capable military in U.S. history—indeed in the history of the world—fight to, at best, a draw in its longest contemporary conflict?” And second, “why has this not been the subject of greater reflection and debate.”[1]

Karlin largely blames the dreadful state of civil-military relations in the United States, of which the military is part. Her answer to the latter question is that clear-eyed self-reflection is tremendously difficult, both for individuals and for institutions. Nevertheless, she argues, the U.S. military needs to engage in critical analysis of its own mistakes rather than passing all blame to civilians. Failure to do so, she claims, “neuters the history of what has transpired,” breeds “inconclusiveness,” and “could be ruinous” to preparedness for future conflicts.[2]

According to Karlin, civilian leaders have either inappropriately deferred to military leaders or asked of them the impossible.

The book’s thematic organization is complex. Karlin first draws on Karl von Clausewitz’s “social trinity”—the military, the people and the government[3]—to frame three crises that she sees as the military’s most consequential and lasting inheritance from the last two decades of war.[4]  First, the military, both as an institution and as an assembly of individuals, faces a crisis of confidence. The best trained, best equipped armed force in the world seemingly could not win a decisive victory. The resultant cognitive dissonance has left personnel at every level scrambling for explanations that often take the form of seeking someone else to blame.  Second, the American public faces a crisis of caring, as a multigenerational war has barely registered in most people’s lives. Americans have largely abdicated their civic responsibility to act as a check on military and civilian leaders. Instead, many have uncritically venerated military institutions as intrinsically blameless. Such civic abdication of responsibility has been compounded by the fact that, third, the government faces a crisis of meaningful civilian control. According to Karlin, civilian leaders have either inappropriately deferred to military leaders or asked of them the impossible.

Although each of these three crises receives its own chapter, they are interrelated and they exacerbate each other. On this subject, it is worth quoting Karlin at length: 

The crisis of confidence and the crisis of caring both interact with and shape the crisis of meaningful civilian control. The first has meant that civilian leaders have repeatedly sent the military to deal with problems it could not reasonably solve on its own. The second, in which the public elevated an increasingly alien military over other forms of public service while largely abdicating its own civil duty, has made the military feel increasingly isolated but means it hasn’t had to face the costs of strategy failures abroad. Aggravating each of these legacies of war—harming the military’s inability to understand its purpose and inhibiting the public’s ability to shape what is being done in its name—impedes civilian control of the military.[5]

In other words, a legacy of the post-9/11 wars is a jumbled system in which the public trusts the military too much, the military does not trust the public or the civilian government enough, and the civilian government has been too dysfunctional—under Republican and Democratic administrations, alike—to exert proper control.

After framing the problem, Karlin devotes five chapters to the growth and effects of these crises on the U.S. military. To do this, she looks through five lenses: how the military goes to war, how it wages war, who serves, who leads, and the military’s preparedness for future conflicts.[6] Taken together, these five chapters bring the ad hoc nature of the post-9/11 wars into focus. Information was not shared freely between senior civilian and military officials during the planning phases. Congress initially wrote a blank check, allowing leaders to buy “prime rib on the credit card,” and then opened and closed the funding spigot seemingly randomly throughout the conflicts.[7]

On a more individual level, Karlin is full of praise for servicemembers of all ranks and at all echelons, but she points out the weaknesses in the systems of who serves and how accountability in leadership is assessed.

Each of the military service branches struggled to balance the practical needs of the conflicts at hand, maintain force readiness for future conflicts, and navigate the reality of a detached public. Tactical responsibility was shifted disproportionately to U.S. special operations forces and drone strikes without properly accounting for the strategic (or personal) consequences of relying on these types of warfare. Army and Marine leadership surrendered to a “growing aversion…to taking operational risks” for fear of incurring unacceptable casualty rates.[8] The Air Force, thanks to delayed modernization and “in lieu of” assignments that put airmen into joint forces ground positions, “came out of this war hollow” while the Navy faced an identity crisis sparked by conflicts fought primarily on land and in the air.[9] None of the branches, argues Karlin, emerged from two decades of war in a better position than where it started.

On a more individual level, Karlin is full of praise for servicemembers of all ranks and at all echelons, but she points out the weaknesses in the systems of who serves and how accountability in leadership is assessed. Military service, as scholars have pointed out for years, is not evenly distributed and has only become more stratified over the decades.[10] Because military service has become a “family business,” where service runs in families, there are three points of danger—the well could run dry, a homogenous force is a less adaptable force, and uneven distribution of service only deepens the crisis of caring.[11] Meanwhile, military leaders are part of the U.S.’s sprawling, increasingly politicized, civil-military bureaucracies. They are therefore enmeshed in a culture of “micromanagement, politicization, and ethics,” that has further left them mired in “accountability soup,” whereby collective responsibility barely exists.[12] In the words of one of Karlin’s interview subjects:

Everyone can look at [the failures of the post-9/11 wars] and it’s a Rorschach test. The Army can say we won the operational piece, but we were let down by policymakers…the Marines, too. The Air Force can say we delivered precision airpower and tore apart our force. Civilians can say we tried. The Administrations can say we’ve been eating different types of shit sandwiches and every time we try to pull out, the military says no. It’s like a weird and bad Thanksgiving dinner happens in a family and everyone in that family has a different perspective about what was the original sin…Everyone’s got their own different opinion about where it started and who is to blame.[13]

 The picture is not pretty.

One of the book’s major strengths is its source base. Karlin integrates a wealth of recent scholarship and makes excellent use of other available sources, including the satirical website Duffle Blog. But most importantly, she conducted almost 100 interviews with current or recently retired generals, flag officers, and civilian officials from the Department of Defense. Although they have been anonymized in the text, their candid observations and recollections provide the meat of the book. Interview subjects very clearly said the quiet parts out loud.

Clear-eyed assessment at every level of every phase of the post-9/11 conflicts is necessary to truly move forward into the future.

The book’s argument is dense. I am not sure its organizational structure does it any favors. There is some repetition, and some of the “lenses” are more clearly developed than others. Nevertheless, this book needed to be written, especially by someone with as much experience as Karlin. Recent history shows that the military has a habit of forgetting conflicts that were less than successful or at least of only remembering the lessons it chooses to.[14] But such an approach does no one any good. Clear-eyed assessment at every level of every phase of the post-9/11 conflicts is necessary to truly move forward into the future. And, as Karlin points out, this includes acknowledgement on the part of the military half of the civ-mil equation that it made mistakes too.

Overall, this book is a plea for better communication between and among multiple parties—individual service branches, the Joint Chiefs, the offices of the Department of Defense, Congress, executive offices, and the American public. Dialogue, Karlin writes, can help those who waged the post-9/11 wars process their experiences; reestablish civilian authority to “baseline” the interactions between diplomacy, domestic politics, and military force; and give the military an opportunity to honestly debrief how the wars shaped “its conception of warfare.”[15] The purposes of foreign policy and of national security are too important to do anything less.

Amy J. Rutenberg, Associate Professor of History, Iowa State University and author of Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance. She is currently working on a book on peace activism and military service.

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Header Image: Untitled, Mililani, Hawaii 2020 ( Thomas Ashlock).

Notes:

[1] Mara E. Karlin, The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2022), xiv-xv.

[2] Karlin, 2, 6.

[3] https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/11/12/the-trinity-and-the-law-of-war, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/10/31/disruption-in-the-trinity

[4] Karlin, 4.

[5] Karlin, 50.

[6] Karlin, 3.

[7] Karlin, 88.

[8] Karlin, 116.

[9] Karlin, 123, 124.

[10] Worries about the makeup of the all-volunteer force have ranged from Thomas S. Gates, Jr., The Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force ((Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1970) to the very recent textbook, Katherine Carroll and William B. Hickman, eds.,Understanding the U.S. Military (London: Routledge, 2022).

[11] Karlin, 144.

[12] Karlin, 162.

[13] Karlin, 162=163.

[14] See, for example, David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

[15] Karlin, 217-218.