Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country Audiobook (Free)

A blistering critique of the gulf between America’s troops and the society that sends them off to war, from your bestselling author of The Limits of Power and Washington Rules

The United States continues to be ‘at war’ in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a 10 years. Yet as war is becoming normalized, a yawning gap has opened between America’s soldiers and veterans and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary people, as previous secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed about Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Nation conflict is becoming an ‘abstraction’ and military service ‘something for other people to do.’

In Breach of Trust, bestselling author Andrew J. Bacevich takes stock from the separation between People in america and their military, tracing its roots to the Vietnam period and discovering its pernicious implications: a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing up army demonstrably struggling to achieve success. Among the guarantee casualties are values once regarded central to democratic practice, including the rule that responsibility for defending the united states should rest with its citizens.

Citing figures as diverse as the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the marine-turned-anti-warrior Smedley Butler, Breach of Trust summons Americans to restore that principle. Instead of something for ‘other people’ to do, national protection should become the business of ‘we individuals.’ Should People in america refuse to make this responsibility, Bacevich warns, the chance of endless battle, waged by a ‘international legion’ of experts and contractor-mercenaries, beckons. Therefore too will bankruptcy-moral aswell as fiscal.