A POIGNANT feature of American bases in Iraq were their walls of Thank You cards sent by American schoolchildren. Often displayed outside the chow-hall, where the troops gathered to eat, they typically thanked them for “being over there to keep us safe”. Hardly any of the soldiers Lexington spoke to, during several trips to Iraq, believed that to be the case. Their Iraqi enemies were fighting a defensive war, not trying to launch one against America. Yet the soldiers accepted the sentiment unblushingly. No soldier expects the beloved chumps back home to understand what he gets up to. He just needs to feel appreciated.

This paradoxical tendency among soldiers, to hunger for the approval of civilians whose views they otherwise set little store by, came to mind during chief of staff John Kelly’s recent presentation in the White House briefing room. The retired marine general’s boss, President Donald Trump, had got himself into hot water after it emerged that he had not written to the grieving relatives of four soldiers killed in Niger, an oversight he made worse, characteristically, by falsely suggesting his predecessors hadn’t contacted Gold Star families much either. Worse still, in a call to the grieving widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, which was overheard and described by a family friend, Frederica Wilson, who is a Democratic congresswoman, the president crudely suggested her dead husband “knew what he signed up for”.

Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

In response, Mr Kelly sought to delegitimise the president’s critics, by implying that, as they had little direct experience of military affairs, including the “selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield”, they should not pass comment on them. Indeed, Mr Kelly went further, suggesting, to a group of awestruck journalists, that they were not merely incompetent to pass judgment on military affairs, but unworthy of doing so. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said as he left the podium. “We’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kind of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than they love this country.”

Setting aside, for the moment, that this was a spurious defence of the president’s slander of his predecessors and his carelessness towards Mrs Johnson, Mr Kelly pointed to an important truth. The gulf between America’s armed forces and its civilians has never been greater. In 1990, 40% of young Americans had a military veteran for a parent; in 2014 only 16% did. But this dissonance has not, as the general implied, caused Americans to underappreciate the forces. To the contrary, it has encouraged, as his remarks also indicated, a highly romanticised view of military service, which is inaccurate and counter-productive at best.

Members of the armed forces are often patriotic. But many see their service primarily as a way to make a living, as the soaring cost of recruiting and retaining them indicates. Personnel costs have risen by over 50% in real terms since 2001. Acknowledging this truth takes nothing from their professionalism and valour, which your columnist has witnessed at close quarters. Nor is it disrespectful to fallen heroes such as Mr Johnson to dig a little deeper into their motivations. When the bullets fly, it is true, most soldiers really are motivated more by a great, self-denying sense of love than by money. Yet that momentous and inspiring emotion is primarily aimed at the comrades fighting either side of them, not the flag.

Meanwhile there are costs to America’s uncritical soldier worship. Most obviously, it gives the Department of Defence an outsize advantage in the battle for resources with civilian agencies. Today’s cuts to the State Department, whose officers are not noticeably less patriotic or public-spirited than America’s soldiers, are a dismal case in point.

The phenomenon also provides an easy opening for political opportunists, such as Mr Trump. His eagerness to hire former top brass—including James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and Mark Inch, a retired army general who was recently appointed to run the Bureau of Prisons, as well as Mr Kelly—was on one level a cynical bid to appropriate their hallowed reputation. And it is working. Where earlier soldier-politicians, including George Marshall and Colin Powell, were viewed as political figures, Mr Trump’s generals are widely considered to be above the political fray, including by the president’s critics, who look to them to moderate an errant commander-in-chief. Perhaps they do. But it is unwise to subject such powerful men to so little criticism, as Mr Kelly’s ill-judged intervention illustrates. On the one hand, the former marine implied that he, too, through the awfulness of his experience, as a commander who had sent men to their deaths, and as the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, was unimpeachable by journalists. On the other, his remarks, including a harsh, erroneous attack on Mrs Wilson, were highly partisan and contestable.

Those lovely men in uniform

A less-noted problem is that America’s unthinking reverence for its fighters is forestalling a badly needed reappraisal of how it organises its forces, and to what end. The fact is, America’s foreign-policy doctrines envisage a degree of global dominance, based on military might, which its volunteer force is now too small to enforce. And to increase the force sufficiently, on current trends, appears unaffordable or impossible. “This force cannot carry out that foreign policy,” concludes Andrew Bacevich, a historian and former army officer, who happens also to be a Gold Star father.

This constitutes a looming crisis, which could logically end in one of two ways. Either America will have to reintroduce conscription. Or it must curtail its military ambitions. Neither outcome is palatable to American policymakers, however, so the problem is seldom discussed. Maintaining the happy delusion that America’s forces are ideal and irreproachable makes that easier. But reality cannot be deferred indefinitely.