ForeignPolicy.com, August 2, 2012
The real problem with the civilian-military gap.
By Rosa Brooks
One of the biggest misunderstandings about the civilian-military gap is that it is cultural — the national security version of the red state-blue state divide.
But the distance between those in and out of uniform isn't fundamentally a matter of Texas vs. Massachusetts or NASCAR vs. Wimbledon. At the most basic level, it encompasses deeply different understandings of how we think — how we plan, how we evaluate risk, even how we define problems in the first place. Ironically, the one place where the gap should be the most avoidable is the place where its effects are the most pernicious: Washington.
