{"id":4119,"date":"2007-12-16T11:35:15","date_gmt":"2007-12-16T18:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/16\/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-military\/"},"modified":"2007-12-18T18:14:01","modified_gmt":"2007-12-19T01:14:01","slug":"what-is-the-purpose-of-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/16\/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-military\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is the Purpose of the Military?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I have written about over and over and over again, the purpose of the military should be to defend the country. That&#8217;s it. One would think that the Secretary of Defense would know that. Yet, in a recent speech before the Association of the United States Army, Robert Gates articulated the following\u00c2\u00a0role for the U.S. military:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure and promoting good governance. All these so-called nontraditional capabilities have moved into the mainstream of military thinking, planning, and strategy\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhere they must stay.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That is, anything but do what the military should do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I have written about over and over and over again, the purpose of the military should be to defend the country. That&#8217;s it. One would think that the Secretary of Defense would know that. Yet, in a recent speech before the Association of the United States Army, Robert Gates articulated the following\u00c2\u00a0role for the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}