The changing face of the military

January 22, 1992
Issue 

Left Face: Soldier Unions and Resistance Movements in Modern Armies
By David Cortright and Max Watts
Greenwood Press. 1991. 282 pp. $58.50 (hb).
Reviewed by Allen Myers

This book is the product of decades of research and, more importantly, involvement. Both authors have been helping to build resistance to the military since the time of the Vietnam War. Max Watts was a mainstay of RITA (Resistance Inside the Army), a group that aided US deserters in Europe. David Cortright was probably the first GI (thanks to a court suit, he was definitely the last) to be punitively transferred for "failure to control his wife". (Carrying antiwar banners, she and other supporters of antiwar soldiers followed a parade by the army band in which Cortright played.)

The authors believe that the resistance to the Vietnam War within the US military was only the most visible example of a new culture of opposition within modern armies — more precisely, within the military forces of the more economically developed countries. "Resistance has developed only in the most highly industrialized nations, and only after a certain time ... in the late 1960s and early 1970s."

Cortright and Watts thus explicitly consider the new antimilitarist movements as distinctive from events like the "Bring us home" wave that swept through US forces at the end of the second world war. "Today's movements", they write, "are not the same as the spasmodic, short-lived revolts that occurred during and after earlier wars. Soldier resistance today is a more permanent, peacetime development that is transforming the very nature of military service."

The causes of this transformation, they suggest, are a number of changes in industrialised societies. These include urbanisation, which has reduced the percentage of recruits from the rural population, whose "lack of opportunity made military service seem attractive"; the lengthening of adolescence and hence of education and the development of a wider range of "individual needs"; and a relative affluence: "... today's young soldiers have rarely known the kind of material scarcity and hardship that was the common lot of their predecessors ... and that is still the majority experience for soldiers in such nations as Mexico and Egypt".

Summing up, they write, "The material conditions of life for the vast majority of the population have progressed to a point where the restrictions of military life become less acceptable. Young people today have experienced a greater degree of personal independence and affluence and are more educated than earlier generations. They have new expectations and needs that the military cannot meet. The quality of life is better on the outside than on the inside."

In the course of investigating the evidence for and against their thesis, Cortright and Watts conduct a wide-ranging survey of resistance in the US and Europe. This is particularly valuable, providing a wealth of information on movements that are seldom or never mentioned in the commercial media. A major focus is the attempts, of widely varying success, to unionise the military — in itself an indication of a changed perception of military service: it is now seen as a job rather than a patriotic duty or a "career".

Also covered are the efforts of the authorities to cope with the new resistance. Repression predictably plays a major part, but there have also been interesting attempts to undercut soldier militancy through minor concessions and the creation of company unions.

Informed and informative, Left Face deserves a wide circulation.

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