Since the Vietnam War, Americas more successful interventions have been brief. That war engendered a legitimacy crisis in the United States military. Domestically, large numbers of young men resisted the draft or took advantage of deferments, but conscription still kept the armed forces supplied with men. In Vietnam, the military was riven by drug use, racial strife, and fraggingthe assassination of unpopular officers by their troops. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 may be a model for a successful large-scale intervention post-Vietnam: the coalition allied with the United States dropped some bombs and sent an overwhelming ground force; Saddam capitulated while Lee Greenwood provided the soundtrack. If one ignores pesky issues such as the fate of Iraqi Kurds who were encouraged to rebel and the blowback from stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War was a big success.
The United States fares worse when our goals are more ambitious and the enemy doesnt quickly fold. When a volunteer army becomes bogged down in an unpopular war, protesters dont fill the streets the way they did in 1969, and soldiers dont frag their officerspeople simply stop joining the military. The quest to fill that enlistment gap is where the investigative work of English journalist Matt Kennard comes in. In Irregular Army, Kennard documents a series of disturbing trends in the military: lowered standards, inadequately treated mental-health and substance-abuse problems, and the enlistment and retention of white supremacists, Nazis, and gang members.
Irregular Army begins with an investigation of undesirable elements who in years past would have had difficulty entering and staying in the military, such as racists and Nazi skinheads. Such extremists have made it into the military beforeI briefly served in the Marine Corps in 1986 with someone who described himself as a racist skinheadbut Kennard provides background on how today the military often looks the other way to keep the ranks filled. He interviewed one neo-Nazi who had tattoos (a Celtic Cross and a Nordic warrior) that recruiters are supposed to flag. Forrest Fogartys story somewhat undercuts Kennards thesis, however, since he actually joined the Army prior to the War on Terror. He is something of a celebrity as the leader of the skinhead band Attack; he took leave in 2004 to play two concerts in Dresden, Germany. A bitter former girlfriend alerted the military to his leanings by sending pictures of him at neo-Nazi events, but that didnt derail his military career. After his discharge the Southern Poverty Law Center intervened to keep him out of a job with a private military contractor.
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