The Inheritance:

America's Military After Two Decades Of War

Reviewed by Michael Bonura

Article published on: April 1, 2024 in the Army History Spring 2024 issue

Read Time: < 6 mins

The Inheritance: America's Military After Two Decades Of War

Mara E. Karlin’s The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War seeks to uncover the legacies of the post– 11 September 2001 wars on the U.S. military and then to make some recommendations on how to address the negative aspects of those legacies. Karlin conducted nearly one hundred interviews with generals and admirals and a few civilian senior leaders in the Department of Defense to inform her analysis of those legacies. She also heavily leveraged her career as a civilian senior leader serving five secretaries of defense and is currently serving as an assistant secretary of defense. This is not a traditional historical analysis but an assessment of the war on terror on the national security establishment, including the military. It is focused on understanding how that establishment prosecuted the war and what its legacy on that establishment is to the present. This analysis of the legacies of the longest war in American military history would be important in its own right, but the fact that neither the Department of Defense, the Joint Staff, or any of the services have conducted or are conducting the same kind of review makes this inquiry even more critical.

Although Karlin sets an important and lofty goal for her analysis of the legacies of the Global War on Terrorism, The Inheritance has a much narrower focus. Because of her professional perspective and the senior rank and positions of the subjects of her interviews, The Inheritance provides legacies from the perspective of the senior military and civilian leaders who directed those wars. This includes an analysis of the effectiveness of the military’s senior leaders and their inability to achieve strategic victory. It also discusses the challenges of civil-military relations from the Global War on Terrorism to the present. This senior-level perspective—which includes both the more recognizable commanders and advisors from the period, as well as a sizable portion of the subordinate generals and admirals who made and executed military plans and policies that have not made front-page news or treatment in studies of the wars to date—is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature.

Through interviews, the works of scholars of the military, poll results, social media bloggers, and Hollywood presentations, Karlin identifies three main crises that form the negative legacies from the post– 11 September 2001 wars: a crisis of confidence in the military, a crisis of not caring for the military by the American people, and a crisis of meaningful civilian control between senior military officers and the civilian managers of violence in the Department of Defense, the White House, and Congress. With chapters explaining these crises, Karlin presents several issues that influenced them, including how the U.S. military goes to war, how the military fights, who serves in the military, who leads the military, and which theories of war are adopted and which ones are rejected. The book ends with general recommendations on areas that need to be addressed and overcome, more than any particular recommendation for how the military should come to terms with these legacies as it prepares for an era of competition between great powers.

For Karlin, the crisis of confidence represents the confusion of many service members about what the military does, how they do it, and why they should do it with respect to the lack of clear victory in the Global War on Terrorism. This is not a crisis of the rank-and-file military but of the military’s senior leadership, and their answers to why they did not achieve victory are telling. The general and flag officers Karlin interviewed expressed three reasons why they did not achieve victory: the military did achieve the victory of avoiding catastrophe at home by fighting abroad; the missions given to the military were impossible to win; and that victory was possible, but service members were failed by poor military and civilian leadership and given the wrong resources to achieve victory. The answers to the question of victory from senior military leaders would be a valuable contribution to a wider assessment of leadership over the past twenty years.

The crisis of caring focuses on the separation of the military from American society. Karlin identifies the concerns of generals and admirals about how isolated the military has become, as well as the problem of the military becoming a family business. The vast majority of Americans volunteering for service today come from families with a military background, thus further isolating service members from American society. Karlin identifies this as the biggest challenge the all-volunteer force has faced since its inception in the 1970s. However, neither she nor the generals or admirals she interviewed questioned the utility of the all-volunteer force based on this crisis. The logical result of decreasing the separation between society and the military would be an increase in concern about how and where the military is deployed. What would that do to the ability of civilian decision-makers to use the military for overseas missions to advance foreign policy goals?

The crisis of meaningful civilian control is the most straightforward and refers to the increasingly difficult relationship the military has had with the civilians in the national security enterprise. Again, this crisis of senior military leaders reflects the civil-military challenges of the recent conflicts.

Like many of the reports, studies, and after action reviews from the recent wars, Karlin’s work raises many critical issues but does not treat any of them comprehensively. From how different secretaries of defense affected the promotion of generals to the integration of women into combat roles, each one requires a separate study or volume, or at least a broader treatment in the book. If there is any criticism to be made, it is that Karlin raises many important issues but does not explicitly state for the reader what the short- and long-term implications of those issues are. Based on her interviews and professional experience, her perspectives on the implications of those issues also would have been an important contribution to the analysis of the post–11 September 2001 wars and their legacies.

Author

Dr. Michael Bonura has been an assistant professor in the Department of Joint, Multi-National, and Interagency Operations at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School since 2022. A retired Army colonel with over twentyfive years of service, he earned his PhD in history from Florida State University in 2008. He taught military history at the United States Military Academy at West Point from 2006 to 2009.