308 e lusive v ictories
human and the other monetary. Th e Bush administration shunned
both, however, by rejecting either a major expansion of the armed
forces or higher taxes to pay for the war. Eventually the president, by
not calling for popular sacrifice, saw political support for the war
evaporate.
Much as 9/11 created conditions that gave the Bush administration a
free hand to pursue military intervention abroad, the global dominance
enjoyed by the United States encouraged the president and his key
advisors to believe they could do so without disrupting life back home.
Theirs was a risky calculation. The president envisioned a struggle
against terrorism that might last a generation or longer—what he and
those around him called “the long war,” even if the individual campaigns
within it, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, were expected to be brief. Only
a nation that enjoyed remarkable military, technological, and economic
advantages over its adversaries could aff ord to embark on a struggle of
indeterminate length and scope without asking its citizenry to bear real
obligations. In the early 2000s the United States appeared to be in just
such a position. Th e president urged Americans just weeks after 9/11 to
continue to live as they had before, to “get down to Disney World.”
Administration policy would refl ect the confi dence that wars like the
one in Iraq need not inconvenience the American people.
At no point did civilian leaders weigh, or military commanders
request, measures to increase dramatically the size of the American
military. Unlike Vietnam, when the JCS pressed Johnson again and
again to mobilize for large-scale war, the Chiefs under Bush and
Rumsfeld never contemplated a return to the draft. Th ey remembered
the unpopularity of conscription during the Vietnam era. Th e pres-
ident agreed at the start of the war to limit deployments to one year, a
constraint that seemed unimportant at the time because the Pentagon
expected a short war and quick exit. Of course, things turned out
diff erently, forcing not just repeated tours in Iraq but extensive use of
Reserves and National Guard units. Military personnel and their fam-
ilies endured with remarkable stoicism. To Rumsfeld, a larger ground
army was anathema, the very antithesis of his intended revolution in
war-fighting and an invitation to inappropriate use of American
troops (e.g., for nation building). Pressure from multiple deployments
fi nally compelled the administration to undertake modest steps to