It has become far too easy for our presidents to send our soldiers to fight in foreign wars.

That is the opinion of Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent C.J. Chivers. I happen to share it, but Chivers has done far more to earn the credibility to make the point.

I had the honor of hearing Chivers speak last Tuesday at Connecticut College to the Southeast Connecticut World Affairs Council, of which I am a member. It was a sobering experience.

American military personnel have been fighting in Afghanistan for 18 years. Personnel remain in Iraq. And though President Trump announced on Dec. 19 the planned withdrawal of American forces from Syria, an estimated 2,000 remain there with no clear timetable for removal. In the unending war on terror, Special Operations Forces are active in other far flung places we don’t hear about.

But don’t expect any fierce debates about the wisdom of these missions, no street protests.

“The wars are largely unwatched, uncriticized, unassessed and unexperienced outside of a small warrior caste,” Chivers, 55, told his audience. They are wars, he said, “That are not on your television and not much in your newspapers and not, by design, really in your consciousness.”

A disservice was done to the warriors who returned from Vietnam. Some of those protesting that war blamed those who were sent to fight it, victims themselves of a strategic approach by the generals and the politicians that was doomed to failure.

But Chivers would argue, and again I would agree, that a different disservice is being done to today’s all-volunteer force and the soldiers being sent on repeat assignments to war zones. You can challenge the justification for these wars, or at least raise questions about them, and still honor the soldiers. In fact, Chivers argued, you are not carrying out your duty as a citizen, and duty to those who serve, without giving serious thought to the stated policies underpinning these wars and expressing misgivings and objections when you have them.

“If we say, ‘Thank you for your service,’ and use yellow ribbons and sort of deify the idea of military service, then we think that we’ve done our duty and it stops there. Rather than, as citizens in a free country, interrogating our political leaders about our policies and their effects,” Chivers said.

Chivers traces our national detachment to the elimination of the draft in the 1970s.

“Since the end of conscription, American households have not had to worry about their children being summoned by a lottery to the battlefield. And when you don’t have to worry about something there is a pretty good chance you don’t think about it,” Chivers said. “The triumph of the all-volunteer force … is the end of a conversation in this country, of a national discourse about war, and with it the near end of the anti-war movement.”

In the time of conscription, our military forces were weaved into the national fabric, a combination of the enlisted and those who did their duty when summoned.

“Our citizens who fight now are a separate class,” he said. “They’re apart from us geographically and socially.”

Chivers is the opposite of disengaged from our military men and women and the wars they are sent to fight. After graduating from Cornell University in 1988, Chivers joined the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer and served in the first Gulf War from 1990-1991, not your typical career path. After completing his military service as a captain in 1994, Chivers obtained a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Chivers, who joined the New York Times in 1999, became a war reporter. His assignments sound like they were put together by a terrorism tour guide. “Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Palestinian territories, Libya, Syria, Uganda, one after another — back to Iraq, back to Afghanistan,” he told his audience.

“I covered it from the bottom,” Chivers said. “The men and women who actually fight and suffer in America’s wars.”

His published book, "The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq," describes in unflinching detail, horror and heroism the perspectives of six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, infantryman, infantry officer and a Special Forces sergeant.

Through no fault of their own, the nations these soldiers were sent to did not become safer or less likely to breed terrorists, instead they became more dangerous, he contended.

Congress has surrendered to the president its constitutional duty to authorize war. And the public has done a poor job of holding Congress accountable.

The result, said Chivers, has been epic failure.

“We have created hundreds of thousands of pop-up soldiers, police officers. The bulk of them disappeared, often with their weapons, certainly with our credibility,” he said somberly. “The weapons are in the enemy’s hands or black markets. And we have created in doing this the human and logistical clay for unending war in these countries. That’s on us.”

Paul Choiniere is the editorial page editor.