George Packer - Guns and Brains

Interesting take and worth the read - here is an excerpt:

I grew up during the Vietnam era and belong to a generation of educated liberals who came of age with a visceral dislike of the military. In the seventies and eighties, it was almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister. At the same time, on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor, a subscription to The New Yorker the mark of an oddball, and the words "liberal" and "academic" terms of abuse.

Here's a crude generalization: after the sixties, intellect and patriotism went separate ways, to the detriment of both. This mutual hostility made intellectuals less responsible and soldiers less thoughtful. We've come to think of this antagonism as natural and inevitable, as it is between cats and dogs, but in fact it was a product of recent political and cultural changes in American life. The estrangement was compounded by professionalization on both sides and the adoption of inward-looking and jargon-ridden specializations: the all-volunteer military and the social-theory crowd became equally isolated American subcultures.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to close the divide. I think the reasons are these: first, September 11th made military service more attractive to the kind of college students who used to find it unthinkable. It's no longer unusual to have a friend whose son recently went from studying photography at the Pratt Institute to searching for weapons caches south of Baghdad. Second, the nature of these wars demands a soldier who is more than an artilleryman with an engineering degree. After the military's failure in Vietnam, it tried to turn war into a matter of firepower and technology—which is why, when the Sunni insurgency began to take off in the summer of 2003, American forces had no idea how to react and made matters far worse. By 2004, battalion commanders in Salahuddin were begging the Pentagon for information about the nature of Iraqi society. This year, the Army is actually deploying teams of social scientists with units in Baghdad and Afghanistan. The soldiers whose reputations have been made and not destroyed in Iraq—General David Petraeus, Colonel H. R. McMaster, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—have doctorates in the humanities. The best soldiers I met in Iraq were eager to share critical views with professors and journalists. This past spring, when McMaster led a group of officials and private citizens to Iraq to assess progress there, he picked as one member an anti-war British political-science professor who happens to know a great deal about the country. Desperate times breed desperate measures.