http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2270473&page=1Thanks to Sen. John McCain's youngest son checking into Marine Corps boot camp, the number of Congress members with enlisted children will skyrocket a whopping 50 percent. He joins the armed forces with two other enlisted and a few officer children of those serving in Congress in this nation at war, meaning that in all, about 1 percent of U.S. representatives and senators have a child in uniform. And the Capitol building is no different from other places where the leadership class of this country gather — no different from the boardrooms, newsrooms, ivory towers and penthouses of our nation. Less than 1 percent of today's graduates from Ivy League schools go on to serve in the military.
Why does it matter? Because, quite simply, we cannot remain both the world's great power and a robust democracy without a broad sense of ownership — of all classes but particularly the leadership classes — in the military. Our military is too consequential, and the implications of our disconnect from it too far-reaching. We are on the wrong path today.
Those who opine, argue, publish, fund and decide courses of action for our country rarely see members of their families doing the deeds these leaders would send them to do, deeds which have such moment in the world. These deeds hardly begin and end with the Iraq War — 200,000 U.S. troops are deployed in 130 other countries around the world, keeping it "flat," in Thomas Friedman's phrase. They train other nation's security forces, help keep the peace, provide humanitarian assistance, rescuing Americans from Lebanon, standing ready to go to Darfur if sent, to go wherever the country calls on them for assistance — in short they do the complex work of the world's sole superpower. Yet these doers are strangers to most of us, and the very missions they do are mysterious.
When the deciders are disconnected from the doers, self-government can't work as it should. Most of these decisions about whether and how to use the U.S. military are hard, and we need to be as best equipped to make them as possible. We need to be intellectually capable — have real knowledge about what the military in fact does, but we also need to be morally capable, which means we need a moral connection to those Americans we send into harm's way. Moreover, we need the largest pool of talent from which to draw those troops. Military work must not simply become fee for service.
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Kathy Roth-Doquet co-wrote "AWOL, The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country" (Harper Collins, 2006).
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