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collateral damage
Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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Collateral Damage in Afghanistan: America's Soul
Oct 19, 2015
On the night of October 3, 2015, an American attack helicopter bombed and strafed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. At least 22 medical staff and patients, including three children, were killed. Twenty-four are still missing. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights suggested it might be a war crime.
On October 15, almost a year and a half after he announced the war's end, President Obama again extended American military operations in Afghanistan. Now, our soldiers are to remain at least into 2017.
Over 26,000 Afghan citizens have been killed as a result of our invasion, adding to the growing number of the world's people who hate Americans. The killing will continue.
The US Army initially claimed that the assault in Kunduz was an accident. Then, it was done to protect American soldiers. Then to protect Afghan government soldiers. Then, the US forces may not have sufficiently followed the Army's "rules of engagement," although it has declined to tell us exactly what those rules are. The President and the US commander in Afghanistan apologized and promised an investigation that "will hold those responsible accountable."
Don't hold your breath. As Amnesty International has reported, throughout this war the US government has consistently stonewalled investigations of the thousands of Afghan civilians killed in "night raids by US Special Operations forces, air strikes, drone strikes and torture". The episodes are shrugged off as "collateral damage", the unintended consequences of warfare.
Implicit in this notion of collateral damage is that war absolves its participants of murder. The moral logic is that you cannot blame a 20-year-old recruit who is trained to kill, armed with savagely destructive weapons, and sent into the terrifying fog of war for mistaking a wedding guest for an enemy sniper. But the excuse of collateral damage also lets those who sent him or her to war off the hook. It reinforces the illusion that it is possible to wage a crime-free war, i.e., that with more human rights training in the military, better battlefield discipline, and smarter weapons, we can invade a nation without murdering and maiming innocent civilians.
Wars of aggression never were and never will be free of atrocities. The decision to invade another nation is a decision to kill those who resist and get in your way -soldiers or civilians. Smarter bombs can certainly slaughter with more concentrated effect; in Kunduz, the hospital's emergency and intensive care units were obliterated, while a ward ten yards away was untouched. However, such systems are hardly precise regarding whom they kill. As classified Army documents for 2011-13 just made public by Wikileaks reveal, the "vast majority" of US drone strike casualties in Afghanistan were not the intended targets.
The real crime in Afghanistan lies in continuing a war that has long lost any legitimate purpose. An honest search for "those responsible," therefore, would follow the evidence up the chain of command through the Pentagon to the Democratic White House and the Republican Congress that keep our troops in a conflict that cannot be won and cannot be continued without raining more death and destruction on an impoverished faraway land that poses no threat to the American people. The inquiry would go even one step further: to the ultimate authority in a democracy - we citizens.
After 14 years of fighting -at a cost of over 2200 American lives, 20,000 seriously wounded, countless mentally damaged, and a trillion dollars - it is obvious that we cannot accomplish our stated objectives. The Taliban cannot be destroyed, and the Afghan people will not support a US-imposed government. Yet virtually every evening, whether it's on Fox News or PBS, pundits and politicians tell us that with just a little more military training, our corrupt, dysfunctional, and opium-dealing puppet Afghan regime could achieve victory.
You don't have to be a military expert to know this is nonsense. The problem isn't that Afghans don't know how to fight; they are a culture of legendary warriors. The problem is that they don't want to fight for us.
Today, the Taliban controls or is contesting more territory than at any time since the war began. Outside Kabul and a few other areas where mountains of our money buy molehills of temporary allegiance, the government's army and police are hated for their oppression and human rights abuses. Its courts are crooked and criminally unresponsive, while Taliban justice -- although harsh -- is swift, works without bribes and legal fees, and is honestly administered. Warlords, paid for and armed by the CIA and the Pentagon, indulge in brutal behavior toward their people, including a delight in raping children, which the US Army orders its soldiers to ignore. It's just more unavoidable collateral damage.
This wretched experience tells us that unless we are willing to continue fighting forever in Afghanistan, the major force in that country's future is likely to be the Taliban, whose Muslim fundamentalism, by the way, was not a problem for us when the CIA was supplying it with weapons to fight a Russian supported secular regime in Kabul.
Moreover, the longer we stay, the greater the chances that what comes after us will be much worse than the Taliban. ISIS, with its truly savage Wahhabi fanaticism (exported from our allies in Saudi Arabia), is now operating in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
Today, the prospects of our governing class pulling out after Obama leaves the White House are nil. Potential Republican presidential candidates are balloons of patriotic bombast, demanding that the war be further escalated. The Democrats speak more moderately, but in the recent debate, no candidates were willing to say, "We've had enough. It's time to go home."
As for the voters in whose name this war is being fought, a majority tells pollsters that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake. Yet they support the decision to keep our troops there.
There are many reasons why we have no serious anti-war movement in this country and why we, Americans who claim to despise and distrust big government, are willing to give it the right to murder in our name. One is the absence of a draft, which allows us to keep our children safe.
Still, we consider ourselves an exceptionally moral people. Our presumed good intentions allow us to rationalize destroyed hospitals, pulverized houses, and children's corpses as preventable accidents, so long as we promise to try hard to avoid such errors during the next blitz. The atrocities are, therefore, conveniently removed from the implicit moral cost/benefit calculation for which citizens in a democracy are responsible when it comes to issues of life and death.
If the war is morally costless, it matters less that it has lost its purpose. Our consciences are thus cleared for maintaining the cynical and soulless post-Viet Nam bargain between we voters and those we vote for: they will not draft our children; we will not oppose their wars.
So, by all means, let us urge the President to find out what happened that night in Kunduz. But let the search continue up the ladder of power. When the investigation reaches those ultimately responsible, we look in the mirror.
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