Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power Paperback – March 5, 2013

Drift describes the process by which, since Johnson's administration during the Vietnam War, war-making powers have moved more and more into the hands of the President, acting alone. This isn't what the authors of the U.S. Constitution intended, nor is it what that document explicitly states: only Congress has the power to declare war, and only Congress has the power to approve the funding to make war. Somehow, we've gotten away from that. We've only declared war a handful of times in our history, and the last time we did so was in 1941. Yet we have gone to war innumerable times since our founding -- by one count, 200 times, in wars large and small. How did this happen?Maddow starts her story in 1964. During Johnson's administration, the president was reluctant to call up the National Guard or the reserves in order to prosecute his escalating war in Vietnam. He didn't think it would last long, he thought he could win it just by using the regular armed forces, and most of all he didn't want to get Congress involved. A cornerstone of Maddow's argument is that Congress was much more willing to go along with Johnson as long as the National Guard and Reserves weren't mobilized. The Guard and reserves were made up of civilians -- airline pilots, salesmen, teachers, plumbers -- who were actually likely to vote. Draftees, on the other hand, were younger, poorer, much less likely to be white, and much less likely to vote. So he never asked for a formal declaration of war, or a call-up of the Guard and the Reserves, and Congress never insisted on one.Thus, the war was instead fought mainly by the regular Army and Marines along with hundreds of thousands of young draftees. Maddow thinks that this somehow isolated the war from the mainstream of society, so that we never truly wholeheartedly went to war as a country. I'm not sure this thesis really holds water, and seems to me the weakest part of her argument. It was far from clear that the Vietnam war made any strategic or moral sense, and there was certainly nothing approaching a national consensus that this war was worth fighting and dying for.Maddow really hits her stride in describing the shenanigans of the Reagan regime. By the 1980's, Reagan was in office, it was morning in America, the birds were singing, and the lessons of Vietnam had been willfully forgotten barely five years after the last US troops and diplomats had been chaotically evacuated by helicopter from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon as the North Vietnamese closed in. Shunning big wars, Reagan instead eagerly embraced bite-sized wars to assert his military power: Panama, Grenada, and Lebanon, to start with. He then went off in search of other easier fields of glory, and hit on Central America. Here he chose to fight his wars mainly by proxy, by arming the dictatorships of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.After Somoza's Nicaraguan dictatorship fell to the Sandinista insurgents, Reagan turned to arming dissident Nicaraguan ethnic groups, peasants unhappy with Sandinista land reforms, and ex-members of Somoza's army and security forces -- mainly based in neighboring Honduras. One problem with the Nicaraguan adventure was that Congress had explicitly forbidden him to do so. This posed little difficulty for Reagan, who funded his operation by shipping arms to the Israelis, who in turn sold them to a member of the "axis of evil", Iran. The profits from this were channeled to Swiss bank accounts, and then used to fund the contra guerillas in battling the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. This scheme violated multiple pieces of legislation and Reagan's own declared policies of dealing with the Axis of Evil.Inevitably, Reagan was caught, and the result was the Iran-Contra scandal that marred his second term (and should probably have resulted in his impeachment). Others took the fall for Reagan while he himself took refuge behind the faulty memory of an old man, and washed his hands of any real responsibility: "mistakes were made." After the fact, Reagan also took refuge behind the claim that he was within his Presidential powers in taking these actions anyway. As Maddow points out, the extreme secrecy under which Reagan attempted to carry out these activities makes clear that not even he actually believed that.Even if Reagan didn't really believe it, his successors apparently did, most notably the second President Bush. With Dick Cheney as his hound, Bush asserted a notion of presidential power that effectively claimed that war was whatever he defined it to be, and he had all the authority he needed on his own to commit US troops to battle. It took some torturing of constitutional law to come to this conclusion, of course.In parallel with this pushing outward of the bounds of presidential war-making power, two other developments greatly aided the process, argues Maddow. The first was the massive increase in the outsourcing of military functions to private companies providing logistics (transport, food preparation, construction etc) and soldiers-for-hire, known as mercenaries in the rest of the world. The second factor is the massive increase in the use of flying killer robots, a.k.a. Predator drones. Using these, we can make war without committing any troops whatsoever, not even a single pilot. The President now has a armed strike force under his command, largely funded by a black ops budget, and with no US body bags being flown home to Dover Air Force Base.The central point repeatedly made by Maddow is that this transfer of war-making power to the President is a very bad thing, and was recognized as a very great danger by the Founders such as Madison and Jefferson. Presidents are very prone to start wars, if they can do it all on their own. It has to be made difficult for the country to go to war, and that's why this decision was put in the hands of Congress, not any single man. Whatever its faults, Congress is far less likely to rush into new wars than is the President. But this system of restraint has almost entirely broken down, and Maddow has a few recommendations about how to fix it. Some of the key ones are:* If we go to war, we should pay for it out of current taxes.* No more secret military arm in the CIA.* Get the vast majority of the contractors out of our armed forces. They're not saving us any money and they're not accountable (think Blackwater killing Iraqi civilians).* Let's put Congress back in charge of the decision to make war or not. Where war is concerned, the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, not the king.All in all, this was a great book. It wasn't as deep an analysis as perhaps that of Andrew Bacevich (see for example his book  Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project) , among several he has written on the subject) or of Kenneth Hagan's  Unintended Consequences: The United States at War . But it's well-researched, told with a compelling and witty narrative, and analyzes the evolution of presidential war-making power over the last half-century superbly.

I really enjoyed reading this short little book; and I will definitely consider assigning it as a supplemental text the next time I teach a course on American foreign policy or national security policy. It does a brilliant job of showing just how and why our nation's attitudes about the use of military force, and the politics of going to war, have changed over time; and it does so with tremendous wit and an engaging style that is sure to entertain as well as inform. Rachel Maddow brings the same blend of intellect and lightheartedness to her writing that she exhibits each weeknight on her TV show. She proves here, as she does there, that it is possible to thoroughly discuss serious topics without ever being pedantic or boring. She's a natural storyteller who has a remarkable talent for weaving together a series of fascinating, and often amusing, anecdotes to illustrate the points she is trying to make. And she does that to great effect in this, her first book. The end result is a quick, fun, easy-to-read account that can be understood and appreciated by a general audience with no particular background in political science.The topic Maddow addresses in this book is the gradual transformation -- or "drift" -- in the American way of war over the years. The United States was founded by cautious liberals like James Madison (the father of our Constitution and Bill of Rights) who were extremely wary of executive power and its potential for abuse, and who feared that standing armies and continual warfare posed a much greater threat to liberty than any foreign enemy ever could. Today, America has the most powerful military and the most far-reaching clandestine services the world has ever known (supplemented by a growing number of private contractors who have come to take on many of the roles traditionally handled by the military or by various government agencies during wartime); and they are deployed all around the globe, fighting undeclared wars and conducting countless overt and covert operations, under the direction of a single commander-in-chief who is able to use these forces essentially at his own discretion, with minimal congressional oversight. How did we get from there to here? How did we end up with such a huge professional military? Why did we stop relying on citizen-soldiers who would be recruited from the general population at the start of a war and sent back home to their civilian lives as soon as the war was over? How did we, as a society, come to accept a nearly constant state of American military activity around the world? Why has Congress apparently abdicated its constitutionally-mandated responsibility for declaring war? How has the President of the United States been able to assert the authority to conduct military and covert operations on his own initiative without first obtaining congressional authorization; and why has Congress not pushed back more forcefully against this executive overreach? This is what Maddow aims to explain in this book.Rejecting the overly simplistic, yet impractically complex explanations of the conspiracy theorists, Maddow demonstrates that the expansion of executive power and the creation of the modern national security state were not the fault of any single individual, group, or party, but were actually the unforeseen end-result of a long chain of events that occurred over the span of several decades, with each incremental change being an "it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time" response to some particular challenge our nation faced at that precise moment in history. Maddow is not shy about assigning individual blame for specific acts of bad judgment where some measure of blame is clearly due; but she does so without rancor. This book is not an indictment of anyone. Rather, it is an explanation of how we got where we are, and an examination of the consequences of how our nation wages war today. I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in U.S. foreign and national security policy, and American politics in general.

I love Rachel Maddow reviews. So factual an in time consequence.

A well researched and compelling criticism of an unconstitutional shift that no longer seems to be questioned, but that presidents and companies that stand to benefit from it are beginning to see as the norm. Time to walk it back. Rachel Maddow's style makes the subject an easy read.

J'adore Rachel Maddow et ce bouquin résume les follies de plusieurs presidents américains récents. Un must pour ceux qui aiment son emission sur MSNBC

This is a must read in today's America. To understand that the populace has been had, the war machine is breaking the countries back financially and that President Eisenhower's words about the rise and danger to our Democracy by the Military-Industrial Complex ring clear with an exclamation point!Starting with LBJ;increased manifold by Reagan and taken to new heights and dangers under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as well as continued under Obama.The book is well thought out and researched and leaves the reader with the very important statement to not trust her words alone but to do your own research based on what she found. (She even tells you where you can look!)All in all a great read and not at all boring or heavy.Several points are given at the end showing how the people can regain control over the Military policy of the country by involving ourselves in the system and it's workings and begin to turn back the changes wrought in the past forty years. There is still hope if we get involved and begin now to educate ourselves in the workings of our government.Rachel Maddow has done a great job.A good follow up to this would be Andrew Feinstein's " The Shadow World- Inside the global arms trade"He takes the problem several steps further and really gets into the "who's who" nitty gritty of the arms trade and the amount of money being spent on it each year. World estimate 2010: $1.6 Trillion. 43% by the U.S.A.

Rachel has a way of taking complicated issues and turning them into stories that are more understandable. Very interesting read and educational!