Book Review: The Limits of Power

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The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. By Andrew J. Bacevich. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. 206 pages. $24.00. Reviewed by Colonel Gian P. Gentile, Chief, Military History Division, US Military Academy. He commanded a cavalry squadron in West Baghdad in 2006.

Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism is an important book because it explores the links between American military power, culture, and politics. Those links, as Bacevich shows, are not functioning correctly and for the health of American democracy are in need of immediate reform.

Bacevich's book should be at the top of every Army commander's reading list. It should be read before Galula, Sorley, and the numerous other favorite texts that Army officers try to use as templates for the future. Why? Because a close reading of Bacevich will demonstrate that there are limits to what American military power can accomplish. This is an essential point for the US Army.

The idea of limits is no small matter since some in the ranks are crusading into the future armed with the belief that the American Army can "change entire societies." The recent experience in Iraq and with the Surge has convinced a group of true believers that the American military is unstoppable and can accomplish any mission in any part of our unstable world.

Bacevich argues that recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan expose as "illusory American pretensions to having mastered war." The Limits of Power is a call for humility, a call to get back to basics, a call to reconnect the American people with their military and the government that conducts war. These reconnections have to be made, according to Bacevich, because the "central paradox" of our times is that while defending American freedom seems to require more interventions abroad, the very culture of freedom in the United States-or a culture of mass consumption-undermines the ability to carry out the crusade for freedom in a volatile and evolving world.

The book is broken into three extended essays that explain discrete and related "crises." The first is "The Crisis of Profligacy." Bacevich notes that if one word was selected to characterize today's America it would be "more." The author is a historian, and he grounds the book in a textured and scholarly understanding of American history. So when he uses the word "more" he provides a clear historical path to how we got to where we are today. Abundance-or having lots of material things (land, money, products, etc.)-has always been a condition of American history, with links to the nation's conduct abroad. But Bacevich shows how the condition of abundance has turned into a belief that having "more" is an entitlement that has come to define American freedom. To maintain the "more" the United States has committed itself to a foreign policy premised on the need for an unending supply of Middle Eastern oil. This unquenchable demand for foreign energy, however, came at the same time that the United States, following the Vietnam War, could no longer produce the national power required to carry out that policy.

In order to resolve this basic contradiction the nation needs its political system to function efficiently. Unfortunately, as Bacevich explains in the next section, "Political Crisis," it does not. The dysfunction of the current American political system makes it incapable of reining in the culture of consumption and bringing US foreign policy goals in line with the limits of its power. The dysfunction revolves around the Congress's abdication of its constitutional duty in the conduct of war and the design of foreign policy. In one paragraph Bacevich delivers a scathing critique of the Bush Administration and its dysfunctional political system. He argues as specious the notion that:

. . . the forty-third President has broken decisively with the past, setting the United States on a revolutionary new course. Yet this is poppycock . . . . Bush's main achievement has been to articulate that ideology with such fervor and clarity as to unmask as never before its defects and utter perversity.

The perversity being the existential commitment of American military power in the world's troubled spots while internally the United States can no longer afford these military adventures.

Bacevich's third section on the "Military Crisis" that America faces aims to pull away the curtain that conceals the truth of the Wizard of Oz. He lays bare the foolhardiness of believing that these military adventures can succeed if this method is modified, or if the draft is reinstated, or if those pesky civilian masters would just start listening to their generals, or the right generals are picked to lead. Yet all of this is a chimera. In fact, the essential point of this last section, which the US Army should pay close attention to, is the hubristic notion that war itself can be mastered by means of clever doctrine and superior generals. It cannot, and the facade of such thinking has to be removed if we are to reveal the limits of what military power can accomplish.

The Limits of Power resonates from the author's historical sensibility, his keen eye regarding American culture, and his appreciation of those limits that can only come from study, reflection, and experience. Sadly, Bacevich understands the cost of doing business this way. He dedicates the book to his son, Andrew John Bacevich, First Lieutenant, US Army who was killed in action in Iraq on 13 May 2007. So when Bacevich asks, "What costs does the exercise of freedom impose [and] who pays?" he knows the answer, as a scholar and as a father.

War is not a game. It is not a social-science project conducted by experts, but instead as the great Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz teaches, it is a serious means to a serious ends, and it has costs. Bacevich's book seeks to develop a direct conversation with the American people, political leadership, and military regarding what the United States has become and how we need to put our house back in order.

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