War. With the 1950’s and 1960’s, the United States faced a new civil-military situation. In
the past, the professional military had been a small, distrusted, peripheral organization,
hardly seen as essential to the national defense (given few threats from abroad and the
predominant emphasis on militias for local security.) The Cold War, however, brought
the military to the fore. Not only was a significant portion of the populace tied to the
military by past personal service, but the nature of the Cold War gave the armed
services a new, preeminent position in American society as the main instrument for
defeating communist aggression. From inherent distrust, American opinion had changed
to regard the professional military as a fundamental component of the society itself.
Vietnam- A Respite Curtailed
The detrimental effects of the Vietnam War on American civil-military relations
more than balanced the positive influences of World War II, for it was with Vietnam that
we began to develop our contemporary civil-military culture gap. Rather than belabor the
how and why of American intervention in the Vietnamese conflict, we must instead
review the war’s domestic effects.
The end of Vietnam heralded the end of the United States’ system of military
conscription that had endured since World War II. Numerous exemptions (and abuses of
those exemptions) had conveyed that conscription was an undue burden imposed on the
less educated and affluent segments of American society. These abuses, combined with
the unpopularity of the war, extinguished the concept of military service as an obligation
of American citizenship. 1973 brought a return to the older American tradition of an All
Volunteer Force (AVF) without bringing a parallel return of emphasis on local militias. At
the same time, however, the end of the Vietnam War did not diminish America’s role as
a superpower or the American military’s central role in the Cold War. In comparison,
while the professional American military of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
9
Convention