Andrew Bacevich says military magnetism was engendered as an antidote to the humiliation and social upheaval of the US retreat from Southeast Asia.

It is a societal trend refined by successive US leaders and popular culture's glorification of US armed forces, he argues in his book, "The New American Militarism."

"Today as never before in their history, Americans are enthralled with military power," Bacevich writes, warning that global supremacy imposed at the barrels of sophisticated guns has become a defining national characteristic.

"The nation's arsenal of hi-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for."

Bacevich argues the new militarism has perverted US foreign policy, and paved the way for the Bush administration to wage an open-ended global war.

Now a professor at Boston University, Bacevich quotes James Madison, fourth US president, to question the 'war on terror' launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001 : "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare."

While there is no shortage of critics of George W. Bush as a warrior president and his foray into Iraq, Bacevich is no Michael Moore, and makes an unlikely dissident.

A graduate of West Point, veteran of the Vietnam War, and a self-confessed conservative, Bacevich advocates a return to days when warfare was a "last resort" and not a primary tool of an action-first foreign policy.

Bush warned Americans they were at war hours after the September 11 attacks, and still considers himself a warrior president.

"We are winning the war on terror," Bush told graduates of the US Naval Academy on Friday. "The best way to protect our citizens is to stay on the offensive."

"Across the world, our military is standing directly between the American people and the worst dangers in the world, and Americans are grateful to have such brave defenders."

The lionising of American troops has seen the common soldier elevated to a "national icon," Bacevich argues, pointing to "recruiting poster" movies like Tom Cruise's "Top Gun" and Richard Gere's "An Officer and a Gentlemen."

Winding up a book tour, ahead of Memorial Day Monday when Americans remember war dead, Bacevich confessed he had sometimes felt like a heretic but paid fulsome tribute to American grunts dodging bullets in Afghanistan and Iraq.

People assumed his book dripped with anti-American sentiment and was hostile to soldiers, he said.

"The assumption must be that the author is if not a card-carrying communist, at least a fellow traveller," Bacevich told a book forum at Washington's Cato Institute Friday.

While critical of Bush's response to September 11 -- Bacevich advocates more of a policing and containment operation against the "ideological" threat of radical Islam -- the book traces growing militarism back at least two decades.

Through former president Ronald Reagan's flag-waving rhetoric and myth-making to "chest beating" after the redemptive victory in the 1991 Gulf War, Americans have been persuaded their military is omnipotent, Bacevich warns.

As US troops slog through insurgency in Iraq, Bacevich seems a voice in the wilderness, competing against former generals who fan out across cable television, or eye-witness accounts of "embedded" reporters.

His warnings run counter to claims by administration forces that the Iraq war will be seen by history as a just conflict to remove a dictator, and that Bush's bid to transform the Middle East is bearing fruit.

His premise can also be challenged by the fact that there is little evidence in the United States that the country is at war, and the price of conflict abroad is only being borne by a tiny sector of society.

But he closes with a warning that unless the "disease" of militarism is recognised, "America will surely share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and power to fulfill their destiny.

"We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize."