A blistering critique of the gulf between America’s military and the society that sends them off to war, from the bestselling writer of The Limits of Power and Washington Rules

AMERICA has been ‘at war’ in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. Yet as battle has become normalized, a yawning distance has opened up between America’s troops and veterans as well as the culture in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of protection Robert Gates provides acknowledged, equipped about Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Troops and Their Country conflict is becoming an ‘abstraction’ and armed service assistance ‘something for other folks to do.’

In Breach of Trust, bestselling author Andrew J. Bacevich takes stock from the parting between Americans and their military, tracing its roots towards the Vietnam era and discovering its pernicious implications: a country with an abiding hunger for war waged at tremendous expense by a standing up army demonstrably unable to achieve victory. Among the guarantee casualties are beliefs once considered central to democratic practice, like the theory that responsibility for defending the country should rest using its citizens.

Citing figures as diverse as the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as the marine-turned-anti-warrior Smedley Butler, Breach of Trust summons Americans to restore that principle. Instead of something for ‘additional people’ to do, national protection should end up being the business of ‘we the people.’ Should People in america refuse to shoulder this responsibility, Bacevich warns, the prospect of endless battle, waged by a ‘foreign legion’ of professionals and contractor-mercenaries, beckons. Therefore too will bankruptcy-moral aswell as fiscal.