Why Veterans' Lives Count

The best memorial is memory: Remember their impact on the world

The airmen in our unit served in Korea, ready for war but never engaged, while our fellow veterans fought half the world away in Iraq. This week, as our nation celebrated Memorial Day, a veteran friend of mine (now a civilian) was in Ukraine, doing all he could to help defeat the invading Russians. Meanwhile, thousands of our active duty troops are stationed overseas. The count is 173,866 to be exact, according to the Pentagon. A few are fighting, though most are quietly ready for war, deployed to allied nations in order to deter the atrocity of war by doing just that. Quietly waiting.

As we honor the fallen, we honor many who were killed in battle, many who lived for decades after their service, and many who succumbed to mental anguish and suicide. I want to honor all of them, but especially to reach those who wonder this year whether their hard duty in Afghanistan counted. It must be a very difficult burden to bear, that question, having fought in Mazar-i-Sharif, or conducted counterinsurgency ops in Helmand province, flew sorties over the Hindu Kush, or simply processed papers in the Green Zone. The politicians chose to evacuate, abruptly and needlessly, to abandon all that had been invested and built. Institutions. Alliances. People. So after twenty years and millions of individual missions, the question must haunt: “Did any of it count for anything?”

The Veterans Affairs Department reports that suicide rates remain 52.3% higher among veterans (in 2019) than for non-veterans, adjusting for demographics. There are 17 Veteran suicides every day, on average, which is down from 22 a few years back. Progress, and yet, still tragic and unacceptable to us. For those haunted by uncertainty over the value of serving in a warzone that was ultimately lost, we have to let them know that the answer to the question is: YES, your service counted. All of it. You were a force for good in the world.

Flesh and Blood Alliances

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has introduced a new generation to the existential horror of war, pulled their attention from smart phone screens and fading mask mandates. The deadly resistance of everyday Ukrainians has been a wonder. Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainian refugees have fled to Poland and other lands to the East.

Now, the diplomats are debating whether to expand NATO, an alliance whose members’ spines have stiffened in the wake of Russian aggression. The nature of war among nations in the “civilized” world is easily forgotten during interludes of peace. It is so overwhelmingly cruel and brutal that there is a sudden hunger to stop it at all costs, but also a naivete. Pacifism is revealed as an empty philosophy in a world where there are aggressors. So now, more than ever, we should take stock of what the past century has taught about the prevention of conflict.

Whether the expansion of the NATO alliance is right thing to do is, or should be, overshadowed by the question of whether it is the right question to ask. Do paper alliances stop invading armies? My sense is that the thing that should be remembered is the effect of flesh and blood alliances, and damn the paper.

Korea isn’t a member of NATO, nor Japan, nor the Philippines. But the United States deployed flesh and blood in those countries for years, de facto alliances kept the aggressors at bay far more effectively than treaty agreements elsewhere. Right?

The question I’ve been asking myself these past few months, pondering what good American troops might do, concerns their strong ability to deter conflict. I wonder, has it been absolute? This is a sincere question, and I want to know. Has any nation with a flesh and blood alliance with the United States - i.e. a nation hosting American troops on its soil - been invaded by a foreign power?

I don’t think so. I don’t think a single invasion against a flesh and blood ally has happened in eighty years.

Deployments

Ever since the invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent editorials needling for an “Exit Strategy” and quoting General David Petraeus’s famous riddle, “How does this end?”, I began assembling a spreadsheet on U.S. troop deployments. The most recent working paper is: The Decline of American Engagement: Patterns in U.S. Troop Deployments (see the main figure below, from a 2020 data update). Contra those who declare America and empire, there is this slow, steady disengagement that is forecast to hit zero in 2050 if not sooner.

A simple count of countries that host a significant number of U.S. troops, whether the significance threshold is 100 (or 1000) troops per year, offers a surprise in that the count risen compared to the 1980s.

By my count, there are 29 countries as of 2020 that could be fairly counted as a “Flesh and Blood ally.” Qualifying nations host 100 or more American soldiers for three consecutive years. These include South Korea, Japan and Germany, most notably, but also nations in more dangerous neighborhoods such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Norway. The allies, ranked in order of Americans hosted, says a lot about priorities:

Japan
Germany
South Korea
Italy
United Kingdom
Afghanistan
Iraq
Bahrain
Spain
Kuwait
Turkey
Belgium
Australia
Norway
Qatar
Netherlands
Saudi Arabia
Greece
Honduras
Egypt
Portugal
Singapore
United Arab Emirates
Philippines
Poland
Greenland
Canada
Romania
Thailand

Should Afghanistan and Iraq be included in this list? I think so, and so would many locals. Their governments certainly wanted U.S. troops there. The more interesting F&B ally, in my mind, is Norway. Does anyone really think Putin would be less likely to attack Norway if it joined NATO but had none of the 700+ U.S. troops in place now? I think that’s laughable, and I think the deterrence effect of Flesh and blood alliances has been empirically ironclad for eighty years. No?

Poland, which borders Ukraine, has been eager for such an alliance for many years. A few American troops have been stationed in Poland since the Cold War, but that’s only because of the embassy contingent of two dozen Marines. It wasn’t until 2017 (which was during the Trump presidency, to be fair) that a genuine deployment began. With over 10,000 combat-ready Americans on its soil today, the Polish government emphasizes my point:

On August 15, 2020, Mariusz Błaszczak, the Minister of National Defense and Michael Pompeo, the US Secretary of State signed an agreement to strengthen the presence of US troops in Poland. [It] is the crowning achievement of Polish-American negotiations on increasing the number of US troops in Poland.

The Effect of Boots on the Ground

Research shows that the presence of American forces on host countries is strongly positive for economic growth, health, investment, and other developmental indicators. Also, paradoxically for the pacifists, American troops bring peace. I’ve documented this extensively in formal research (by myself, Garett Jones, and many other scholars), summarized in a Commentary Magazine cover story a few years ago.

In Afghanistan, for example, literacy rates rose dramatically after the U.S. invasion in 2001. Education for girls went from literally zero to more than half of that population. Contrary to expectations of a “war-torn country”, the reality after 20 years of US-occupied Afghanistan was one of higher life expectancy, child mortality cut in half, and dramatically expanded personal freedom. So when the White House evacuated the relatively small contingent abruptly in the summer of 2021, it begged the question: Were the two decades of service and sacrifice all in vain? That’s the question, isn’t it, the Lincolnian challenge. Did we count for anything, in the end?

Life teaches us that things never really end, though, do they? No, and there are other ways to understand how our actions - our very lives - count, despite the illusion of ends. First, actions matter in the moment. Every day that a village can live in peace and freedom is a triumph, even if those days are numbered. Second, actions have long-term consequences, and the service of U.S. troops abroad have acted as long-term investments. People get a taste for freedom, even after the water of freedom is taken away. Taliban rule over Afghanistan will itself be temporary because there has been an awakening in the minds of Afghan girls and women, and indeed men as well, that will not be darkened.