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198 President George Bush’s stint in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War became an issue in the presidential election of  when critics contended that Bush used connections to secure a cushy position and avoid combat duty in the Vietnam War. It is one of the deep ironies of Bush’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq that the administration’s plans relied on the National Guard and reserves to an unprecedented degree. This reliance prompts questions of both explanation and evaluation. How did the U.S. military come to rely on its citizen-soldiers in a war on foreign soil? Does such reliance promote democratic norms of military accountability, or does it constitute a pernicious form of substitution? Who is the contemporary citizen-soldier? According to a  Office of Army Demographics report, women make up . percent of the Army National Guard, . percent of the active-duty army, and . percent of the army reserves. Nonwhite soldiers (defined by the army as “black, Hispanic, Asian and other”) make up  percent of the Army National Guard, . percent of the active army, and . percent of the army reserves (Maxfield ). Some  percent of the nearly , U.S. troops in Iraq in  were members of the National Guard and reserves (Finer ). Furthermore, a USA Today investigation found a higher casualty rate ( percent higher) for Army National Guard soldiers than active-duty, full-time members of the army (Moniz ). A higher death rate for National Guard soldiers is unprecedented. The investigation concludes with the following comment from Richard Stark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: “It’s a changed paradigm. We have completely crossed the line in terms of what it is to be a citizen -soldier” (Moniz ). As I show in this chapter, reliance on National Guard and reserve forces can be traced to the fallout from the Vietnam War. Furthermore, this reliance 11 The Citizen-Soldier as a Substitute Soldier Militarism at the Intersection of Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism LEONARD C. FELDMAN ——————————————————————— ——————————————————————— CH011.qxd 5/29/08 10:22 AM Page 198 attempts to cover over deeper tensions concerning military obligations in a liberal , “contractarian” society. The National Guard and reserves incorporate aspects of both liberalism (military service as voluntary) and civic republicanism (military service as an aspect of citizenship). However, this combination does not work well. The National Guard and reserves are considered citizen-soldiers, but the status “citizen-soldier” is an elective, voluntary one, not an obligation of citizenship. By combining the rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice and instrumental market rationality, the United States, in its reliance on National Guard and reserve forces, partly reflects and reinforces the intersection of the two main currents of New Right ideology: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The citizensoldier has traditionally been a racialized and gendered category (Snyder ), and the “volunteer” soldier has traditionally been a volunteer partly by virtue of class inequities (the poor fighting in place of the wealthy). Such markers persist; what is new, however, is the intersection of these two political rationalities, which rearticulates the citizen-soldier as a voluntary, “market-rational” substitute . The citizen-soldier is, in a sense, a substitute soldier, a substitute soldier shaped by neoliberal imperatives of governmental efficiency and privatization. Liberalism, the All-Volunteer Army, and the Substitute Soldier A variety of liberal political theorists wrote during and after the Vietnam War, critiquing conscription or defending the right of conscientious objection (Carter ). The political theorist who has done the most to explore these issues is Michael Walzer. In his  collection, Obligations, Walzer tackles head-on the morality of conscription with a thought experiment about choice: Native-born young men are not obviously different from young aliens. . . . Before they are conscripted, then, they ought to be asked, as aliens traditionally were, whether they “intend” to become citizens, that is, whether they intend to exercise their political rights. If they say no, then we must at least consider the possibility that they be allowed, like aliens again, to avoid the draft and continue their residence, that is, to become resident aliens at home, acknowledging their obligation to defend society against destruction, but refusing to defend or aggrandize the state. (, ) Native-born males might elect the package of rights and obligations of citizenship or elect to give up both. This would make the citizen-soldier ideal, as it is putatively realized in conscription, consistent with a liberal norm of voluntary consent. Walzer ultimately rejects this approach for a couple of reasons...

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