An army that severs its own link to the people it asks to fight has stopped being what it claimed to be. In a Fox News op-ed, Why the Army should restore its grassroots link to America’s communities, Van Hipp, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army, argues that the Civilian Aides to the Secretary of the Army program was dissolved in June 2025 after more than a century and should be restored. The CASA corps was a state-by-state network of volunteer civic leaders who carried the Army’s story into rural schools, recruiter offices, VFW halls, local businesses, and the difficult transition out of uniform. Hipp is right about the wound. He is wrong about who inflicted it.
The Civilian Aide program was not a discretionary ornament. Since the early twentieth century, the Secretary of the Army appointed at least one prominent civic or business leader in each state to serve voluntarily as the service’s ambassador to the citizenry it recruited from. These aides did the slow work no Pentagon directorate can do: standing in a school gym in a county the recruiters cannot reach, sitting across a kitchen table from a mother weighing whether her son should enlist, helping a captain’s wife find work when a post closed, connecting a transitioning sergeant with the plant manager two towns over. There is no algorithm for this. There is no software subscription. There is a neighbor, appointed by name, keeping the rope taut.
The Army itself called the program “The Army’s Link to the People.” That is what was dissolved.
The stated reason was focus. The future is technology: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, spectrum, the silicon that decides whether a drone finds its target. One can grant this without hesitation. A serious army cannot pretend otherwise. Hipp is honest about that, and he is right to insist that technological strength matters.
But the CASA aides were never in competition with the engineers. They were the reason the engineers had a country to defend.
I have watched a futures screen long enough to know what it looks like when an institution mistakes its instruments for its purpose. The mistake is not that the instrument matters. The mistake is believing that because the instrument is new, the purpose has become obsolete.
The harder question is how an institution a century old, anchored in the very communities the right never stops invoking, came to be judged expendable. The program cost the taxpayer nothing. It had been sustained for a hundred years by local reputation, personal trust, and the work of citizens who served the places where they lived. It generated no contract, no consulting fee, no data exhaust. It could not be optimized, scaled, or acquired. On the balance sheet of modern institutional life, it registered as zero.
A technology partnership with a major defense contractor registers differently. It arrives as a line item, a press release, a ribbon cutting. That is the market for these severances: institutions that cannot be monetized are treated as though they do not exist.
The choice was presented as a choice about warfare. It was also a choice about which institutions the country is willing to notice, and which it will let go quiet.
The “Forgotten Americans” were not invented yesterday. Pat Buchanan coined the phrase for Richard Nixon; Donald Trump placed it at the center of his 2016 acceptance speech. In the familiar telling, these are the rural and small-town Americans who love their families, go to church, pay their taxes, volunteer, and answer the call when the country is threatened. Van Hipp draws the portrait in this very piece.
These are precisely the Americans the CASA corps was built to reach.
There was no institution more thoroughly aligned with that constituency than a state-by-state corps of volunteer civilian ambassadors, appointed by name, visiting local schools and VFW halls, standing beside recruiters, and helping soldiers return to civilian life in the towns they came from. Yet the corps was retired in the middle of the term of a Secretary of War who had personally intervened to meet a recruiting goal, on the judgment that “technology” was a sufficient substitute.
This is what the fusionist betrayal looks like when it leaves the conference room and reaches a real town. The rhetoric of community survives. The institution does not.
The people are told they are seen. They are recruited from, then dissolved out of, the institutional architecture that once made them neighbors of the uniform rather than its labor pool. A citizen becomes a target demographic. A town becomes a recruiting market. A soldier becomes a body to be processed.
An army that loses its neighborhood loses its reason.
The conservative principle here is not nostalgia. It is subsidiarity: work should be done at the lowest level competent to do it, by people close enough to possess the practical knowledge that no centralized office can manufacture. Pius XI called it “a grave evil” to assign to a higher organization what lesser organizations can do. The CASA aide was subsidiarity in the literal sense—local knowledge, local trust, local responsibility, carried by a person whose name meant something after the recruiter’s car had left.
The answer is not a new federal program, a new Pentagon office, or a czar of community engagement. It is not the concentrated state replacing the concentrated corporation. The answer is the institution that was dissolved.
Restore the CASA appointment: one civilian aide per state, voluntary, civic, named by the Secretary of the Army, answerable to the towns from which the aides come. Let the aide make the rural-school visit a standing obligation rather than a recruiter’s side errand. Let the Soldier-for-Life transition be bridged by the person who already knows the local employer, the local parish, the local veterans’ hall, and the volunteer who can drive a returning sergeant to the VA.
No platform replaces this. No app replicates it.
The dissolution is not yet two years old. The institution is not yet lost. The rope, cut, can be spliced. But only by people who understand that an army is not a technology program with a flag attached. It is a public institution held in trust by the people whose sons and daughters it sends away—and to whom it must remain answerable when they come home.