The debacle of the US-sponsored Afghan puppet government has inspired countless obituaries of American imperial might. These obituaries are premature.
The antiwar movement should be under no illusion that the era of US imperialist warfare has come to an end with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. What is taking place is no more than a reload and update of the lessons that were drawn from Vietnam, with a view to achieve smarter management and higher cost-effectiveness of US military engagements — not back away from the global dominance of US imperial power.
The United States’ defeat in Vietnam, concluded by the withdrawal of US troops in 1973, led to a major revision in military strategy that prepared the United States for the wars of the digital age. The domestic impact of Vietnam was enormous, especially the massive aversion to war that developed among the US population, particularly the youth. Imperialist warmongers called it “Vietnam syndrome,” seeing a disease in what was actually a very healthy public wariness toward the power elite’s inclination to launch imperial expeditions.
After Vietnam, it became imperative to avoid another protracted war ending in failure against a backdrop of antiwar mobilization at home. The United States’ post-Vietnam strategy was honed during the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush years, but it was largely disregarded in the era after 9/11, with the result that the United States repeated many of the same mistakes in George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
Now Joe Biden is signaling a return to the post-Vietnam strategy. It may mean fewer ground troops, but don’t mistake that for the end of US imperial aggression.
A Revolution in Military Affairs
Post-Vietnam military strategy was framed by two factors: the termination of the draft in 1973, and the “revolution in military affairs” during the Reagan and Bush Sr years.
The end of conscription and the shift to an all-volunteer professional army meant a massive reduction in personnel. In proportion to the American population, active-duty personnel are today less than half what they were in 1973 (though they are still the fourth-largest body of troops in the world, after China, India, and North Korea). Ronald Reagan tried to compensate for the military’s reduction in size with the most impressive surge in military expenditure in the absence of war that the United States ever witnessed. Military spending peaked at 7 percent of the GDP during Reagan’s second mandate. The strategic aim of this massive expenditure was to research, develop, and produce a new generation of sophisticated weapons that would highly increase the “destructivity” of US weaponry to compensate for the reduction in US personnel.