# Breach of Trust Subtitle: *How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country*. [[Andrew Bacevich]]'s 2013 book, published by Metropolitan Books in its American Empire Project series alongside *[[Washington Rules]]*. It supplies the **mechanism** underneath the rest of his work: not why America keeps going to war, but why nothing stops it. ## The breach The title's accusation runs the opposite direction from the one readers expect. The trust broken is not the government's toward its soldiers — that is the familiar complaint, and Bacevich thinks it is a distraction. **It is the country's, toward itself.** Americans, he argues, have quietly traded the obligation of citizenship for the ritual of applause, and the transaction suits everyone: the public is relieved of risk, the state is relieved of consent, and the soldiers are relieved of nothing at all. His term for the ceremonial substitute — the flyovers, the seventh-inning salutes, the airport ovations — is **"a masterpiece of contrived spontaneity."** The instruction the citizen receives, in his reading, is: *stand and cheer, and otherwise butt out*. ## The argument **1. 1973 is the hinge.** Conscription lapsed at the end of the [[Vietnam War]], on the recommendation of the 1970 Gates Commission — [[Milton Friedman]] among its members, characterizing the draft as a tax-in-kind levied on the young — and under [[Richard Nixon]], for whom ending it was also a way to drain the antiwar movement. The [[All-Volunteer Force]] was sold as fairness and efficiency. Bacevich reads it as the moment war stopped being **the people's business**. **2. The friction was the feature.** Draft notices, campus protest, arguments at family dinner tables: conscription generated domestic political costs that accumulated until wars had to be concluded. Removing the draft removed the accumulation. A war that costs the electorate nothing personal can run indefinitely — which is the argument that makes this book the load-bearing text under [[Forever Wars]]. **3. Everyone is implicated, and the essayists most of all.** Bacevich distributes responsibility across an incurious public, the Pentagon, the contractors, the political class, and the pro-war commentariat — singling out pundits (David Brooks among them) whose forecasting failures are forgiven **as long as those failures favored the use of force**. That asymmetry in professional accountability is one of the book's most portable observations, and it generalizes well past foreign policy. **4. The remedy: bring back conscription.** Bacevich does not stop at diagnosis. He argues for restoring the draft explicitly, on the grounds that it would make foreign policy a life-and-death matter for the whole population rather than for one percent of it. ## The counter-argument The remedy is where most readers get off, and the objection is a strong one: **the [[Vietnam War]] was fought with a draft and still ran for years.** Conscription demonstrably does not prevent military adventurism; at most it changes the timetable on which the political costs come due. Critics also note that a restored draft would face the same political impossibility as any new war authorization, which makes the proposal a thought experiment about civic obligation rather than a policy. A sharper charge came from within the military-affairs world: *War on the Rocks* ran a rebuttal in October 2013 under the title "Stabbed in the Back — Once Again?", arguing that Bacevich's framing edges toward a civil-military stab-in-the-back narrative in which an unworthy public rather than bad strategy explains failure. [[Rachel Maddow]] reviewed the book favorably in *The New York Times*. ## KB significance **1. It is the mechanism page.** *[[The New American Militarism]]* explains the appetite and *[[Washington Rules]]* explains the doctrine; *Breach of Trust* explains why neither is ever checked. For anything in the vault about permanent war, this is the causal layer. **2. It reframes "support the troops" as a political technology.** The formula is unfalsifiable, costless, and — crucially — **substitutes for accountability**, which makes it structurally similar to other ritual-affirmation devices the vault tracks. Read alongside [[Militarism]]. **3. It is a conservative argument about civic obligation.** The complaint is not that the wars are unjust but that the republic has stopped asking anything of its citizens. That places the book closer to the classical-republican tradition than to the peace movement, and it is the clearest single illustration of why [[Andrew Bacevich]] cannot be filed as a left critic. ## See Also - [[Andrew Bacevich]] — the author - [[All-Volunteer Force]] — the institution under examination - [[Forever Wars]] — what the mechanism enables - [[Washington Rules]] · [[The New American Militarism]] — the companion arguments - [[Civil-Military Relations]] — the theoretical field - [[Militarism]] · [[Military-Industrial Complex]] [[Works Hub]]