But the military brass is not an independent force. They will do what they are trained to do — organize the use of U.S. military might according to the needs of the ruling class, in the world as it exists today. The officer corps does not have different views from the main political currents in the ruling class; it is part of those currents.
Like every privileged bureaucratic layer in bourgeois society, the brass try to get more meat for themselves. They want a higher budget for the Pentagon. The officer caste is a wretched group, the greatest enemy of the citizen-soldier. They genuinely consider the Uniform Code of Military Justice to be higher than the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and they consider their interpretation of the Code to be higher than that of any court. But they have no independent political line on anything.
When officers of bourgeois armies lose out in the military pecking order, they often become bitter, Bonapartist demagogues and turn to the ultraright. That has been the history of those in the officer caste throughout the modern history of capitalism. If they advance in the officer caste, they sometimes become successful bourgeois politicians, maybe even president of the United States — there have been a good number of those in U.S. history, most recently Dwight Eisenhower — or chairman of the board of a big corporation or university. That is all there is to it. Losers fade away. General MacArthur faded away soon after the Korean War. General Norman Schwarzkopf faded away barely a year after the war in the Gulf.
There can be sharp conflicts with the officer corps in ruling circles around particular military questions, because the bourgeois armed forces are rigid when it comes to adjusting to social changes. That is part of their bureaucratic structure. That is a consequence of the character of bourgeois military discipline, which is an imposed obedience (plus "go along to get along"), not the discipline from political conviction of the cadre of a proletarian combat party or a revolutionary army.
There is a myth in bourgeois public opinion, for example, that the army is an advanced institution on race relations. That is simply a lie. The U.S. armed forces was the last place in the United States where a powerful social institution — the officer caste — continued to insist there were biological, psychological, genetic differences between the races. If Jim Crow segregation was not maintained in the military, they insisted, even if it was being gotten rid of in the rest of society, the armed forces would be destroyed. The armed forces were the last institution to finally come around.
How many years ago was it that you finally no longer had to be a Filipino under 5 foot 7 inches in order to be an officers' steward on a ship in the U.S. Navy? Not many. Watch newsreels of officers being served on Navy ships. You won't believe it. Or look at who made up the burial details during World War II — there are newsreels of that too. They were usually all Black. That is the United States armed forces. The Navy is still the worst, if there are slight differences among them.
At the same time, it is against the interests of the ruling class for the armed forces to get too much out of step with the concessions the rulers have had to make to social struggles. They sometimes have to shove the officer corps a little bit to get it to change course a few degrees. For example, the ban on women in a whole number of combat operations will begin being phased out this month; women will be permitted to fly combat aircraft and serve on warships for the first time, although still not in ground combat units. Adjustments such as these will be made by the brass, even if not readily or early. Others they will resist, but if they fight for very long, you can rest assured it is with the support of large layers in the ruling class. We will soon know the outcome of the dispute that has broken out with those in the officer corps and Congress who oppose Clinton's campaign promise to end the ban on gays in the armed forces.
Let me make two final points in this regard.
First, we are not seeing preparations for a military government today; that is premature in the United States. Instead, the sharpness of some of the public debates involving the officer caste reflects the growing centralization of government power in the executive branch as capitalism declines. All state structures become slightly more Bonapartist-like in the United States, as well as in other imperialist countries. The president, the executive branch, asserts more and more power over decisions on war and peace, on the use of force, on the deployment of resources, on other policy matters. The powers of the U.S. Congress and bourgeois parliaments become more limited over time.
Second, this tendency toward centralization, toward a stronger executive branch — toward what has been dubbed "the Imperial Presidency" even by some in the big-business press — does open the door at a certain stage to preparations for an attempt at a military coup. It does open the way, as crisis conditions deepen, for the establishment of a true Bonapartist regime. The veteran SWP leader Farrell Dobbs used to say that if anybody thinks we are not going to see every one of these alternatives attempted by sections of the rulers as class battles heat up in the United States, then they are dead wrong and will never build a revolutionary workers party in this country. We will see every one of those alternatives tried.
But that is not happening today. Right now, the political conflicts in which certain military officers may figure are a reflection of the more immediate danger — the growth of executive power, the power of the presidency, in the United States and other imperialist countries. We hear complaints now and again from politicians in both parties, for example, about the 1973 War Powers Act, which was adopted by Congress in the wake of Washington's defeat in Vietnam and the mass popular opposition to that war. It supposedly requires the president to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of sending U.S. troops into combat, as well as congressional approval for any deployment of U.S. forces for more than sixty days. The truth is, however, that the War Powers Act has never once been invoked by Congress — not once. Not when U.S. forces landed in Lebanon in 1982, nor in Grenada in 1983, nor in Panama in 1989, nor in the Gulf two years ago. Every administration, both Democrats and Republicans, has given the back of its hand to the act, and the bipartisan Congress has fallen in line well after the die was cast in combat.
Ten years after the fact, the press is now running exposés about U.S. government involvement in massacres in El Salvador — which everyone already knew about. But they got away with it at the time. Remember what Oliver North always says to both Democratic Party liberals and his former Reagan administration cohorts when either of them try to finger him for Washington's secret arming of Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s. Financing and equipping the contras to bring down the Sandinista government was a bipartisan effort, North insists. Scores of Democrats and Republicans in Congress knew what was being organized out of the White House, and they never did a thing to stop it. It was a bipartisan effort in El Salvador, too, and U.S. imperialist foreign policy continues to be bipartisan.
Whenever the rulers have to use large-scale armed forces in combat anywhere in the world, it creates a problem for them in this country. There will be resistance, and over time it will grow and become connected to other social struggles. As the conflict drags on, citizen-soldiers, the ranks, will begin to put their stamp on opposition to U.S. military actions. At some point, workers struggles will begin to coincide with the resistance by antiwar youth and soldiers. That is what we began to see during the Vietnam War. And we will see it again under conditions marked by depression and rising class tensions, unlike the relative capitalist prosperity and stability of the 1960s.
Opposition to capitalist austerity, to imperialist wars, and to growing rightist violence will go hand in hand in the years that lie ahead.
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