FORTRESS AMERICA: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace.

#### FORTRESS AMERICA: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace.

By William Greider. Public Affairs Press. 208 pp. $22

Greider, national editor of Rolling Stone, has seized on an important yet largely unexamined fact: despite the absence of any significant overt threat, the United States has chosen to remain the world’s dominant military power. A decade after winning the Cold War, in a departure from all previous American history, the nation has yet to demobilize. "What exactly is the purpose of Fortress America," Greider asks, "now that our only serious adversary has evaporated into history?"

Seeking an answer, he calls on those who build and defend the ramparts of the American fortress. He visits the crew of a spanking-new

U.S. Navy destroyer undergoing sea trials in the Atlantic. At Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, he watches fighter squadrons go through their paces in a highly competitive "Red Flag" exercise. At Fort Hood, Texas, he assesses the army’s efforts to adapt mechanized forces to the information age. Near Fort Worth, he walks the floor of Air Force Plant 4, birthplace of thousands of warplanes since World War II, now barely alive as it produces a dwindling number of F-16s.

Viewed from the inside, Fortress America has shrunk significantly over the past decade. The services have absorbed painful cuts. Through successive waves of consolidation, the defense industry has laid off 40 percent of its workers. Yet the author argues that this streamlining falls woefully short, leaving the nation with a defense establishment that "is too large to sustain, too backward-looking in design, too ambitious in its preparations for the future war," not to mention overburdened with duties in far-off places such as Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.

All sides of the "Iron Triangle"—the military officers, corporate executives, and politicians whose Cold War collaboration created Fortress America—are acutely aware of these contradictions. They know that present levels of defense spending will not suffice to train the existing force, support essential deployments, procure new equipment, and develop new weapons for the future. Greider takes it as a given that increasing the defense budget is out of the question. As he notes, though, money is not the only issue: "The larger and more troubling political questions are about purpose."

When Greider describes what he sees and hears—especially when he allows commanders, crew members, engineers, and corporate executives to do the talking—the results are impressive. But when he ventures into the realm of lofty analysis and policy prescription, he is awful. In "the post-Cold War vacuum," he reports with dismay, the United States has gradually assumed "the obligations of empire" through its role as "high-minded, vigilant enforcer of world order and global commerce." He calls on Americans to "say ‘no’ to empire," and instead ask themselves "what are we to do now that a general peace is upon us?" (Some readers may wonder how an era of ethnic cleansing, episodic genocide, nuclear proliferation, and terror qualifies as a "general peace.") Surrendering to the ethers of utopianism, Greider declares that "the end of the Cold War is a great opportunity to re-imagine the world." The United States has the chance once and for all to put an end to injustice, inequality, and war, to "move to a higher ground and dreams of a common humanity."

Loath to confront the reality of empire and its military implications, Greider opts instead for a Great Crusade. Americans will recognize the summons as a familiar one. It was, after all, previous crusades that created our empire and our fortress in the first place.

—Andrew J. Bacevich