Independence

I'm sure my father would be ashamed of me if he were still alive. If not for my atheism, for my shabby opinion of the military. It's a funny thing, to be very proud of my family's long history of Naval aviation and also so disapproving of military force in general. In my opinion, it is currently a necessary evil. I hope someday it will be only evil, and I'd like to be a part of making that so. We made an important step in that process 234 years ago.

I think, in reality, I don't have a shabby opinion of the military. I think most people have an unnecessarily naïve and simplistic view of it. We're trained to have this knee-jerk, oorah response to anything camo. All holidays become military holidays in disguise. Every breath and every public word is about the troops. It even reaches into absurdity. There's a war on Christmas. Dingbats are warrior moms. Someone even decided that poverty activist authors need to be described that way. Everything is a fight; everything must be defeated; everything requires weapons and girding. We worship everything military. We value violent imagery above all, particularly when describing the most unmilitary things we can imagine. It's the ultimate way to make something edgy and meaningful.

But, 234 years ago, we put something above this drive to strap armor on. In fact, we put everything above it. Now, I know it's dangerous to misuse the text of the Declaration of Independence to infer US policy. The Declaration is not, and should not be confused with, an official document of the United States government. It was merely the offense of a gathering of uppity colonials who decided their king was a douche. But let's entertain this concept for a moment.

The twelfth item in our list of plaints against our former ruler stressed the supremacy of civil authority.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

Recent events have highlighted the truly revolutionary nature of this statement. I'm sure it's not just conservatives questioning the value of civilians having the final word on military affairs. But, this may in fact be the very thing that makes us American. This may be the very thing that has maintained our existence. To this day, the military starts and ends and functions at the pleasure of the civilian President and Congress. Certainly, there are occasions when this complicates the job of the armed forces, but I think only for the better. Regardless of the viability of current COIN strategy, there have always been (and hopefully will always be) much larger populations beyond armies, and, as it is our goal to ensure that more and more whole populations have a voice in their government (and certainly regardless of their agency, they provide fervor and succor to both State forces and extra-State militias), our goals in military action must be an extension of our diplomatic policies, not a replacement for them.

We are a nation with an army; we must never become an army with a nation.

And so, Sunday, like every Independence Day, I celebrated our political process, our social progress, and our philosophy on civil supremacy. And, I can only hope that next year, at least one new person will pause to consider that before being sucked into another day to congratulate the military for doing what they volunteered to do.