Re-Thinking Strategy

U.S. Elections 2024: The Rise of the “9/11 Generation”

11/07/2024
By Murielle Delaporte

Donald Trump just won the Presidential elections by a wide margin over Kamala Harris and there are many reasons for that.

One of them is that beyond the “fight of the Titans,” the selection of their respective teammates has been decisive.

While a few days only after Harris’s defeat, voices within the Democratic Party are starting to blame Tim Waltz for the defeat.

Conversely, the selection of JD Vance on the GOP side has been for many a key determinant for moderates from both parties to rally to Trump’s camp.

Even though Kamala Harris presented herself as the “next generation candidate” that message did not get through and JD Vance is the only one who actually qualified as such during this campaign given his age and background.

From a defense point of view, Vance’s stance has indeed resonated in a particular way as representative of the rising new generation of veterans.

While most of the media have been tending to focus on the polarization of the two American political parties in the race for the White House, there is indeed one phenomenon that emerged in the background of this period rich in electoral twists and turns: the emergence of a new generation of political figures born of “9/11”.

This “ 9/11 Generation”corresponds in particular within the U.S. armed forces to the veterans of the “Afghan Generation.”

While the Democratic Party has now to envision a genuine succession battle to succeed the Biden-Harris /Harris-Waltz tickets, Donald Trump will not succeed himself. Not only is that not allowed by the Constitution, he has made it clear as well that he might even leave before the end of his term.

The choice of JD Vance as Vice President, have opened up the field of possibilities for a genuine generational transition within the Republican Party enabling the armed forces and their veterans to make their voices heard to a greater extent.

The End of the Great War Politicians

If Joe Biden and Donald Trump and even Kamala Harris and her vice-president Tim Waltz, both some twenty years younger but having grown up largely in the atmosphere of the Cold War still fit in generational terms with the legacy of the presidential teams of the Great War – i.e. World War II – and, to a lesser degree, the Vietnam War (with the late John McCain), the same cannot be said of Ohio Senator and soon to be Vice President, JD Vance.

He was just finishing high school when the 9/11 attacks struck, sparking patriotic fervor across the country and prompting him to enlist in the Marines, where he served from 2003 to 2007, including as PAO (Public Affairs Officer) with 2nd MAW (2nd Marine Aircraft Wing).

It was in this capacity that he was deployed to Iraq for six months, a conflict he would later criticize when he became a Senator, believing that the American intervention had been built on a lie and had led to many Iraqi and American casualties for nothing.1

JD Vance thus expressed a sense of betrayal from political authorities while calling into question the wisdom of their military decisions. He also illustrates a widely shared aversion to the “Long Wars” as the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are referred to in the United States.

The fall of Kabul on August 15th, 2021 and the precipitous departure of American troops from Afghanistan only reinforced this sense of waste among Vance and many of the soldiers belonging to this generation of warfighters as well as among a large part of public opinion for whom the fall of Saigon is still an open wound.

The Afghan War: The Vietnam of the Twenty-First Century

While the events of January 6th, 2021 have been a leitmotif in the Democrats’ campaign against Donald Trump, the abandonment of Afghanistan is regularly cited by Republicans as the Biden administration’s biggest foreign policy mistake, leading to the deaths of thirteen American servicemen in the precipitous withdrawal phase.

Reports following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan show that the American authorities should have organized “non-combatant evacuation operations ”(NEO) much further in advance of the officially announced departure date for all American military personnel.2

Despite exfiltration operations organized in haste by the Pentagon, and on a voluntary basis by a number of veterans (such as Operation Pineapple Express3), many Afghan nationals who had worked alongside the United States and its NATO allies in the fight against terrorism for twenty years were left in the hands of the Talibans.

While the Republicans do not question the withdrawal itself — a process was initiated by Donald Trump with the Doha agreements signed in 2020 with the Talibans– they do criticize the Democratic administration for the way in which it was carried out, leaving in its wake not only families condemned to a certain death, but also intelligence documents and billions of dollars of military equipment. They point out to a return to square one with the reconstitution in Afghanistan of a training sanctuary for terrorists whose motivation for a global caliphate is now tenfold.4

The trauma and bitterness felt by this generation of American servicemen and women is echoed in the speeches of JD Vance and other politicians who have joined Trump’s team, such as Tulsi Gabbard, former Congresswoman from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and former presidential Democratic candidate in the 2020 elections. Gabbard is a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Army and was also deployed to Iraq.

This open wound is not unlike that of the “Vietnam veterans” or, in France, that of the “Indochina and Algeria veterans” but also of the “orphan wars” spoken of by Hélie de Saint Marc in “ Sentinelles du soir ” as follows:

“After Indochina and Algeria, with less intensity of course, but perhaps with just as much gravity, I see the return of the time of orphan wars, those for which no one assumes paternity, where the stakes disappear beneath the polemics and media manipulation (…).

Military strategy is now subordinated to diplomatic and media imperatives, which impose themselves on military realities. Troops find themselves at the end of the decision-making chain, in terrible situations, unarmed or against the tide.“5

The difference today is that this “September 11th Generation” is now represented for the first time on a presidential electoral list and can make its voice heard so it no longer remains precisely “at the end of the decision-making chain ” (another interesting phenomenon of this campaign to note is in fact the migration of the neo-conservatives to the Democratic Party which illustrates this divergence of approach as far as interventionism is concerned).

The traditional question of medical care upon their return to civilian life and in particular the need to take into account post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which has generated an extremely high suicide rate in this community is one of the themes the GOP campaign addressed in public debates.

This underlying trend has been been heard through the voices of Vance or Gabbard, namely the rejection of “useless ‘ military engagements for which American troops “serve as cannon fodder.”6

The task of the next heads of the Pentagon and the VA ( Department of Veterans Affairs ) will be to win back this lost trust among a section of the American population, a loss of confidence that is at the root of the recruitment and retention difficulties from which the American armed forces have been suffering in recent years.

Footnotes:

1 “I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict (…) I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke”, parliamentary statement by JD Vance as quoted in https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/07/16/jd-vances-marine-corps-service-would-set-him-apart-most-vice-presidents.html

2 See for example the following parliamentary reports

3 This operation has been described in a book published in November 2023: Operation Pineapple Express, lt. Col. Scott Mann (Ret.), Simon and Schuster, New York, 2023.

4 See, for example, Al-Qaeda 2.0: The Upcoming Attack On the United States and Europe Unveiled, William Harcher, The Transatlantic Intelligence Consortium, 2024.

5 Hélie de Saint Marc, Les sentinelles du soir, Les Arènes, Paris, 1999 page 113.

6 Statement by Tulsi Gabbard during a campaign rally for veterans, Pensylvania, October 30, 2024

Credit Photo: PBS