Patriot shell games

This past Monday, Professor Uwe Reinhardt wrote a column in which he branded all those who support armed intervention and "wax romantic about America's epic struggle against evil" but do not serve in the military as "chicken hawks." He especially singled out college students who choose not to volunteer for the armed forces. Since I have written several columns doing what he condemns, I will venture to respond.

My first problem is with the factual accuracy of this political slur. Sean Hannity, Reinhardt's only example of a chicken hawk, is too old to enlist in the army and has been since 1996. Hannity is also too young to have served in Vietnam. His failure to enlist seems less cowardly when one realizes that 1) he can't enlist now and 2) he was never of age during a major armed conflict.

Reinhardt also addresses campus chicken hawks when he asks how one can sleep at night while others die due to the policies we support. I, for one, consider myself ineligible for military service due to an extended history of massive head trauma. Reinhardt however suggested that this would not necessarily excuse me from "[driving] a supply truck in Iraq." That displays a remarkable misunderstanding of how to fight insurgent armies that lack a front line, in which every truck driver must be ready to instantly transform into a rifleman. Since I know Reinhardt is at least partly aware of the fluid nature of combat in Iraq, I wonder why he chose to ignore that reality.

Reinhardt does make one excellent point. I would agree that our nation is experiencing a drought of civic duty. Students generally don't feel an obligation to serve our country. While true, I think this misses a larger point, which is that students still feel a responsibility to serve and improve society. That this commitment has not been harnessed is a national tragedy.

This commitment is all around us. Every year, approximately 10 percent of incoming freshmen participate in Community Action, which is a weeklong community service program. Most Princeton applications are plastered with references to volunteer work, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity or tutoring. The University offers dozens of ways for students to give something back, and many students take advantage of those opportunities. Our social conscience is alive and well. For the most part, however, it is directed away from traditional forms of national service such as the military. This is far from surprising considering the relative lack of emphasis our nation puts on the military.

That may seem a strange statement in a time of flag-waving patriotism and bloody combat. The left and right wage political warfare primarily over actual combat; death and mayhem in Iraq are constantly in the press. However, our country has yet to make a truly sizeable investment in actually winning this war. The current defense budget as a share of GDP is less than half of what it was at the height of Vietnam, and there is no draft. If we are trying half as hard as we were in Vietnam and a tenth as hard as World War II, why is it surprising that young elites aren't drawn to the military? Our leaders have by their actions made it clear that national priorities lie elsewhere, and the best and the brightest are disproportionately drawn to those other fields.

The blame should fall on those who have never bothered asking for sacrifice, not on the elites they failed to ask. Washington's motto is essentially, "ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you." Consequently, we are fighting hard enough only to stave off defeat. Our military is designed to fight a lightning war, to engage and smash enemy forces in a battle of short duration but extreme intensity. Five to 10 years of medium grade fighting is not something our armed forces can easily take, and to fight such a war, we need to make a substantially greater investment in the military.

The acknowledgement that our current situation is unsustainable is what in the end drives Reinhardt's anger. The problem with his column is that vilifying and attacking domestic opponents distracts us from the common mission of defeating our enemies abroad. Only when our country unites can we make the painful decisions necessary to win this war; only when we stop insulting each other can we come together enough to actually find a solution to seemingly intractable problems. Barry Caro is a sophomore from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.