Patriotic Dissent: How a Working-Class Soldier Turned Against ‘Forever Wars’
by Daniel Sjursen
(Heyday, £17.28)

WHEN it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016.

Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”

President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head-feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion (£565bn).

As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes: “Endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries [and] Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically.”

When the National Defence Authorisation Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 per cent reduction in military spending so that $70bn (£54bn) could be redirected to domestic programmes and Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350bn (£267bn) worth of Department of Defence cuts.

Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740.5bn (£573bn) on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bipartisan resistance. Thus, in the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics with military credentials are invaluable allies.

Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, is one such a critic. He skilfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment and the military’s own current generation.

His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans and civilians is rooted in an 18-year military career and his powerful voice, political insights and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful and disastrous our post-September 11 wars have been.

Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism, he looks to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace, About Face: Veterans Against the War and Bring Our Troops Home.

Each in, its own way, seeks to “reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism.” But, Sjursen affirms, actually taming the military-industrial complex will require “big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike,” on a much larger scale.

One obstacle to that is the societal divide between the vast majority who have chosen not to serve in the military and the one per cent on active duty, who then become part of “an increasingly insular, disconnected and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community.”

Not many on the left favour a return to conscription. But Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the US replacing “citizen soldiering” with a tiny professional warrior caste, created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam war inside and outside the military.

“Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless wars, an entire generation — or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973 — has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of US foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality,” he stresses.

At a time when the US “desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave” sweeping over the country, we have instead a “civil-military” gap that, Sjursen believes, has “stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so.”

That’s why his own mission is to find more “socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars” who are willing to “step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalised patriotic dissent.”

This is an edited version of a review which first appeared in Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/24/patriotic-dissent-how-a-working-class-soldier-turned-against-forever-wars/