Toward a militarist America: the framers of our republic warned of the dangers posed by overgrown military establishments. Could our nation someday succumb to a military dictatorship?

The year is 2012. Prisoner 222305759, a 1992 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, has been convicted of sedition and condemned to die. Armed with smuggled research notes and a small sheaf of writing paper, the Prisoner composes a lengthy letter to a classmate describing in detail how the United States, once a constitutional republic with a military establishment under civilian control, had succumbed to military dictatorship under the reign of General Thomas E.T. Brutus, self-designated "Commander in Chief of the Unified Armed Forces."

"It wasn't any single cause that led us to this point," writes the Prisoner. "It was instead a combination of several different developments, the beginnings of which were evident in 1992." Chief among them was an increasing tendency of America's political class to task the military "with a variety of new, nontraditional 'missions,' and vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties." These included not only foreign "peacekeeping" and "operations other than war," but also a variety of domestic missions, from law enforcement to environmental clean-up to educational initiatives. Military personnel became "an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country"; social and economic problems--from deteriorating public infrastructure to bankrupt commercial, airlines--"were transformed into 'national security' issues," and eventually brought within the military's sphere of influence.

With the rapid and apparently painless victory over Iraq in 1991, it seemed as if the military--unlike practically every other branch of the federal government--was a bottomless well of competence. "I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military," wrote Atlantic Monthly commentator James Fallows in 1992, capturing the prevailing mood.

Infusing the military into the warp and weave of everyday life, the Prisoner ruefully reflects, meant that "people became acclimated to seeing uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood.... Even the youngest citizens were co-opted.... [We have] an entire generation of young people who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel patrolling their streets and teaching in their classrooms."

Even as it became nearly ubiquitous in American society, the military became increasingly alienated from the civilian political class and mainstream society. It subtly "evolved into a force susceptible to manipulation by an authoritarian leader from its own select ranks."

"What made this all more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War," continues the Prisoner's account. "Consumed with ancillary and nontraditional missions, the military neglected its fundamental [reason for being].... When Iranian armies started pouring into the lower Gulf States in 2010, the U.S. Armed Forces were ready to do anything but fight."

With military morale collapsing and the political class thoroughly discredited, General Brutus exploits the death of the president in February 2012 by persuading the vice president not to take the oath of office. Invoking the "power vacuum" that he created, Brutus moves into the White House, "postpones" elections indefinitely, and engineers a referendum to ratify his new status as military ruler of the United States.

Future Shock

This scenario--alternately fanciful and plausible, but entirely horrifying--was laid out in "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." That essay, a "darkly imagined excursion into the future," was published by military analyst Charles J. Dunlap in the Winter 1992-1993 issue of Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College.

"It goes without saying (I hope) that the coup scenario ... is purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is emphatically not a prediction," writes the author. However, the developments he described--such as the dangerous fusion of military and law enforcement functions, and the promiscuous use of the military for "peacekeeping" and humanitarian missions abroad--are authentic, and were extensively documented in his essay. He may prove to be prescient in describing the disastrous outcome of the Second Gulf War as the pivotal event in America's descent into authoritarian rule.

In some ways, Dunlap's sober parable is reminiscent of an earlier premonitory work: Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Set sometime in the indeterminate future, Heinlein's tale describes a war between a militaristic global government called the Terran Federation and a race of intelligent, warlike "Bugs" inhabiting distant desert worlds. The Terran Federation had come into being when military veterans seized power following a devastating war against the "Chinese Hegemony."

The veterans "had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the [peace] Treaty ... especially the P.O.W. foul-up," Heinlein wrote. With civil order breaking down, "Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people ... and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee.... What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice--in a generation or two." Eventually the ad hoc military junta morphed into a global government --the Terran Federation--in which there were two classes of people: "civilians" and "soldiers." The difference between the two is that "a soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life; the civilian does not." Only those who enlist in the Federal Service are entitled to enjoy the benefits of citizenship.

Servitude as "Citizenship"

With military recruitment bottoming out, the manpower demands of the Iraq War have prompted several proposals to inaugurate a "Starship Troopers"-style national service program. The March 2005 issue of Washington Monthly outlines a plan, devised by Capt. Philip Carter, U.S. Army (Ret.) and Paul Glastris, that would require all 18-year-olds--of both sexes--to serve 1-2 years of mandatory service in either the military, homeland security, or a federal program like Ameri-Corps, as a prerequisite for attending college. No deferments or exemptions would be permitted, although draftees would be allowed--at first--to select their preferred form of involuntary servitude. Furthermore, all conscripts would be required to serve several years of reserve duty, which would offer what the authors call "surge capacity" to deal with sudden military manpower demands overseas.

In a March 9, 2005 address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who has sponsored legislation to reinstate the draft, endorsed an approach very similar to that described by Carter and Glastris.

Those liable to conscription "would be about 36 million people between 18 and 26," explained Rangel. "We couldn't possibly need more than a million, probably far less than that, for military activity.... So it would seem to me that ... you bring everybody in, and then you determine what can you do with them, what contribution can they make?"

The view expressed here is cognate with the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which proclaims the "universal liability of all to serve" as the state dictates. It also resonates with the slogan of Heinlein's fictional totalitarian Terran Federation: "Service Brings Citizenship."

Neither Heinlein nor Dunlap intended for their fictional scenarios to be taken as prophecy. Unfortunately, there are countless ways that republican liberty can be extinguished through perpetual warfare--as we are likely to learn, to our sorrow, if we do not get out of Iraq and abandon our compulsively interventionist foreign policy.