The Return of a Real American Hero
by Clay Risen

The 1980s were good years to be a boy. Like most kids throughout time, the boys of the '80s liked to play war. And the 1980s were maybe the greatest playing-war decade in our history.

Think about it — G.I. Joe, one of the most extensive toy lines ever, was at its apex. The world around the boys seemed to validate their sandbox games — Contras, terrorists, Stingers, arms dealers, MX Missiles, START. Not only that, but as the United States wasn't really involved in a war per se, our boys could pretend to shoot and kill their friends without any of that pesky "war is hell" reality butting in. Finally, top it all off with the Gulf War, popularized by trading cards, picture books and huggable General Schwarzkopf dolls.

The Clinton years, in contrast, were not good ones for the boy-as-soldier routine, Duke Nukem aside. Often the best a young man could hope for was a high target-kill ratio for the president's most recent volley of Tomahawks. Not very exciting, at least from a spectator's point of view.

Thanks to our new president, though, it looks like those good old days are here again. It's not even Inauguration Day, and we're already seeing headlines about new, top-of-the-line weapons systems — the New York Times from January 8 ran as its lead story an analysis of the DD-21 class destroyer, a stealth ship designed to evade shore-based radar and drop several thousand tons of explosives on an unsuspecting city. That alone will inspire hundreds of boy-hours worth of war playing.

It's important, of course, to draw a distinction between news about the military and news about weapons. The military is a broad concept, a whole, messy facet of life, while weapons are just instruments — technical, but otherwise just big toys. The military is always in the news, but during the Clinton administration it was usually discussed in the abstract — we talked about gays in the military, or military budget cuts, but not about what those cuts ever meant.

And Clinton never really had faith in the military, anyway. The last eight years were great for a kid, if said kid wanted someday to be a diplomat, or maybe a trade representative. But those boys who demanded intellectual stimulus for their war-hungry imaginations were sadly disappointed.

However, the next four years promise to be chock-full of boy-inspiring military news. It's looking more and more like we may get dragged into Colombia's quagmire of a civil war, and if not there we can always turn to the Middle East for armed conflict.

And even if we don't go to war, America's boys can look forward to a happy, details-oriented approach to military spending under Bush. The President-Elect has made sure that specific weapons programs will remain front and center on his agenda, already going to bat for the C-17, the V-22 Osprey and the B-2 stealth bomber. He has already committed himself to an expanded effort to build a ballistic missile defense (I mean, come on, it's called Star Wars — what kid wouldn't love that?). He has even indicated support for increased military aid to Colombia, which will mean more and possibly even cooler helicopters and light infantry weapons.

Of course, this all costs money, and even the pro-military Bush has underestimated the cost of such new procurement (Bush has proposed a yearly military budget increase of $4.5 billion, while some in the Pentagon estimate the added cost of new weapons systems at $70 billion).

This sets up an either-or scenario: Either Bush sticks with his spending figures and Congress has to start debating the specific merits of individual weapons systems to decide which will be cut, or Bush goes along with higher spending, in which case we'll see whole new kinds of weapons coming out of our nation's military-industrial complex.

Either way, America's boys win out. America, unfortunately, does not.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.