Let's start with what Vlahos said here: bq. "How will an American world empire change military identities? The deepest shift has already happened: going from citizen-soldier to professional military. Back when it happened it seemed like a natural and normal response to the debacle of Vietnam and the Draft. But calling today's military a "Volunteer Force," and the Guard and Reserve a legacy of our original militia ethos, cannot hide the bigger change. Although its ranks are volunteers in the narrowest sense, and most are citizens, it has slowly assumed the character of all great professional militaries. bq. This profession means a way of life increasingly separate from the society it defends, whose agenda flows from its Commander-in-Chief, and whose needs must be defended and fulfilled within the politics of the "imperial court." Administrations have become imperial courts with quadrennial tenure - whose politics is the internal jostling between executive agencies, party apparatus, rank and file members of Congress, and loyal media organs that all compete for the attention of the Commander-in-Chief." While Vlahos make many interesting observation and asks some of the right questions, the passage above is fundimentally wrong. Exactly what is different between the volunteer military of 15 years ago and today? Besides it being 15 years further from the Draft? We are not seeing new patterns evolve here. We are seeing old American military cultural memes and patterns re-emerge. The American military, save for the major wars and from 1952 through the aftermath of the Cold War, has been a small, long service, volunteer force with a culture seperate and apart from that of the American civilian world. The U.S. Army, for example, typically has had a purality of its officer corps coming from the South, has had disadvantaged minorities as its NCO corps (Irish in the past and African-Americans recently) and recent immigrants in the ranks. This pattern snapped back like memory plastic when the Draft ended and simply became much more visible with the draw down after the Cold War ended. The pattern has parallels in other nations. The reemergence of the Cossack fighting clans in the post-Soviet Russian Army is directly comparable in terms of old cultural patterns reasserting themselves in the modern age. The real observation in the Vlahos column is here: bq. "Jointness was a 1980s idea to improve military efficiency by breaking down barriers between the armed services so they could work better together. It's done that. But by breaking down the lock each service had on its own people, Jointness also has opened a bridge to cultural migration within the Military. Thus Jointness has become a path for sub-cultures inside of traditional military institutions to leave old identities behind and invent new identities better suited to new military conditions. bq. The most visible example of this migration is SOCOM (Special Operations' Command). Its elements once inhabited little niches in Army (Rangers, "Green Berets"), Navy (SEALs), and Air Force (Spectre Gunships) culture. They are now free to come together and create a new military society. They keep individual origins as legacy - meaning that a SEAL, say, may still graduate from Annapolis and bear the badge of Navy rank - but their true identity is simply SOCOM, and a whole new military institution is emerging around it." and... bq. "The imperatives of American world security management could lead to new hybrid or even mutant organizations, task groups, and permanent institutions whose ties to "parent" cultures, like SOCOM today, are at best nostalgia. Eventually the new institutions will become their own cultures with their own unique societies." In SOCOM we seem to have a new military service being born. The real question with the reordering of American military priorities to the problems of foreign population control, what else will happen to existing military services. We are going to have a Navy. It will have surface combatants, subs and it will have aircraft carriers, but will those be manned planes or something else flying from them? Directed energy weapons and electromagnetic railguns are arriving and ships will be among the first platforms for them. We will have an Army, but what kind? How many will be constabulary troops, how many will be light infantry and how many will be the hard corps, heavy equipment armed, killers like the 3rd Infantry in Iraq? Will we contract out the population control mission to private military corporations or to other client militaries like Jerry Pournelle suggests? What will the Marine Corps become, because it has to be something different from the Army to survive the budget wars. If the V-22 Osprey goes down, the USMC may be in serious trouble. Of the services, the Air Force seems to be the most vulnerable to change. The manned fighting aircraft paradigm of the F/A22 is passing in favor of an AWACS-like manned forward area UCAV controller directing swarms of UCAVs. Meanwhile the most important manned planes in the force structure in the "War on Terrorism" are becoming the C-17 airlifters and 'KC-767' tankers needed for power projection. I have commented on the problems of the USAF on multiple occasions here, here, and here. Steven Den Beste recently took his shot here. The Fighter Pilot Mafia in charge of the USAF may cause the service's roles to be reabsorbed into the Army. The strength of the Vlahos column is this, he is starting to get people to ask some of the right questions about adapting the structure of the American military to the age of small wars we have entered.