How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything
Written in 2024 for History of Modern Militarism 2901 at the University of Winnipeg.
When I got my copy of Rosa Brooks’ How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, I was excited to step into the insight of a legitimate agent of the Pentagon. What I wasn’t prepared for was the frustration that would come from reading it. What I took from Brooks’ book is a higher resolution understanding of what we see in real time; the United States extending their troops across the world.
What stood out the most was the frequency soldiers are doing what was once civilian work. The militarization of once civilian operations of rebuilding communities has created further complications in already complex situations. This is not to suggest military members are incapable of helping communities but anyone working outside their trained expertise will perform much worse than those focused primarily in that field. Brooks suggests civilian organizations will not take these jobs back, but they should become integrated in order to create greater success and oversight with these projects. It does not seem anyone in the military would allow or accept this, but it would certainly make sense to have individuals who specialize in these operations deeply involved.
A major factor I took from Brooks is that despite the odds and despite how things may seem, we must not stop trying to think our way out of our present situation. It is easy to throw in the towel but we need to buckle down and consider the difficult and the complicated problems before us.
The way Brooks finished her book seems to attempt to shine light through the gloomy clouds she spent more than 300 pages articulating. The solutions she suggests seem helpful but they also seem to disregard a major factor impeding implementation: reality. While it is great to say we don’t have to accept boundary-less wars, it is tough to imagine how to change this. Pandora’s Box has been opened and it was our Southern Security Blanket which broke the lock. America is, at this point, too invested in the strategies which have defined their military in the 20th century to simply change course.
Brooks made creative and practical suggestions for avoiding worst case scenario, but we may be too close to the fire to avoid getting burnt. Change does not come easily, especially when we are hoping to change gargantuan institutions on the global scale. Tremendous change to perennial global norms is easy to imagine but often requires a major upsetting factor; before the statue of norms can be reconstructed it must first be destroyed. What might cause such a tremendous restructuring remains to be seen. Perhaps it is a modern equivalent of a world war, or a collapsing state in America. Or maybe we will see the day when climate change is evident enough across the world that we are forced to unite us as a human collective.
Brooks left me imagining alternatives, whether they will ever come to be or not. Her book really introduced me a line of thinking which allows for blatant realism but a sense that giving up really is not a viable option. Any fool can look at where we are collectively and quit, but that really won’t do. Brooks helped me feel optimistic enough to try thinking our way out of the mess we’re in.