utopian thinking goes to war

by el gato malo | Oct 10, 2023

so, i’m just going to come out and say it:

the obvious takeaway from this is the need for a system of government that does not require leaders to provide liberty, freedom, or any other of the seeds of human agency and thriving.

the cornerstone of the republic is that power should reside with we the people, enshrined in our rights and set irrevocably and inalienably above the preferences and prerogatives of leviathan and its agents.

and this goes double for war.

if your nation cannot support a volunteer military willing to defend it, then what does that say about both your country and the fights it picks?

and that starts to make THIS look worrying.

the essay cited can be found HERE.

one always wants to be a bit careful in assessing these military position papers and “whether and to what extent this is spitballing or core philosophy” is always an important question to ask, but several salients are raised that on the one hand seem straightforward to the point of being near inarguable if we grant their assumptions, but that on the other, appear to be rooted in basic premises we should be deeply suspect of ever accepting in the first place. through this framing, a sort of sleight of hand around presumption of value, inevitability, and need is taking place.

the key presumption in this “call to action” is that low intensity, long duration conflicts like afghanistan and most of iraq are likely not great models for future, high intensity conflict and we need to be ready for far greater death tolls where we get 50,000 causalities in 2 weeks, not 20 years.

these are serious numbers and the folks at war college are heading right at them as “inevitable” as the “counterinsurgency” focus of the last 20 years gives way to gearing up for theater combat like ukraine. this is a new orientation back to large scale war and large scale casualties.

and it’s being led by the same flailing failures of military leadership that have been miring us in pointless conflict for decades while beribboning themselves like the persian pashas of darius.

the demoralization of those who rushed to volunteer post 9/11 only to discover that many of the pretexts for war (like saddam’s WMD’s) were false and from having troops left stranded with no clear mission nor clear path to success for decades on end before finally just leaving en masse to hand over control and weapons to the taliban was bad enough. no one wants to fight for leaders who lead you to ruin and defeat.

but the move to woke is just a bridge too far.

this is just not packing in the new recruits. the people it appeals to are not fighters and are too busy picking out their next pair of ironic skinny jeans to consider a career in soldiery.

and so recruiting plummets. and they know it. but rather than change course and pivot back to a system that could work, crombe and nagl speak of going with coercion instead.

if people will not sign up for this morass of woke indoctrination in service of ill conceived foreign adventurism to waste lives and treasure in pursuit of pigheaded goals in pointless places, well then we’ll jolly well conscript them and force them to do it.

fun fact:

grabbing people by force under threat of death or imprisonment and taking them halfway around the world to undertake backbreaking and deadly dangerous work against their will used to have a name. it was not “voluntarism.”

these military honchos seem obsessed with this new “multidomain operations” (MDO) capacity around long range precision attacks and cyber and electronic warfare and intelligence to counter “hybrid threats” and of being able to command access to the walls of meat that they presume will be fed into the vast grinders of such large scale theater wars.

the last time they had this power, we got viet nam.

is anyone seriously hankering for a repeat?

frankly, i see no reason that any of us should be having any of this. the whole idea smacks of deception and disaster.

the whole premise upon which it rests should be denied out of hand as baloney.

just what theater is this supposed to represent?

it’s not china. where are we going to wind up in a land war there? such a war would be mostly naval and it’s frankly difficult to even conceive of how that would go in the age of long range missiles (including fleet busting nukes) and satellite imagery. taiwan is not the new guadalcanal.

the US is a continent scale fortress and unless the mounties get rascally drunk one night, it’s hard to see how one of the neighbors sends troops across our borders.

so just where are we supposed to be fighting? europe? against russia? over what? the ukraine, a 20 year old country full of ethnic russians run by a hopelessly corrupt government quite possibly installed by US coup/backing? (and vikky nuland’s fingerprints were all over this then, just as they are now)

the US has these weird memories of how abandoning a longstanding and effective policy of isolationism and trade to wade into european spats is somehow the crowning glory of american exceptionalism and an inarguable demonstration of how the world needs “america, world cop” but that seems an awfully selective reading of history to me.

why did the second world war happen? why did the nazis rise in germany and kick off a war of conquest? the answer is probably “america” if you really want to be honest. we essentially made that inevitable when we jumped into world war one and helped our allies achieve such a comprehensive victory that they were able to impose severe and humiliating terms upon the vanquished including the reparations that drove weimar hyperinflation and ground german pride into the mud until they were willing to back a demagogue.

people speak of “going back in time to kill hitler” but that would probably have accomplished little. as a result of the social forces ongoing at the time, germany might well have picked a more competent military leader and then who knows what might have happened. but if instead you had gone back further and grabbed wilson and packed him off to some american elba to keep the US out of WW1, perhaps some durable peace actually reflective of local power balance vs the balance only achievable when the US weighs in could have been reached and the whole fascist period and WW2 could have been avoided altogether. (or perhaps not, but it would be worth a try)

a balance of power resting upon outside intervention requires outside intervention to sustain it. and that’s a deeply stupid business to be in unless your goal is “MOAR WAR!”

why did the war in the ukraine happen? might it be because land formerly belonging to one nation was taken and made into a new country whose borders and demographics don’t make a ton of sense and then, on top of that provocation the US backed a coup/far right governmental switcheroo to replace the government with some truly corrupt nasties that included quite the passel of actual (not even metaphoric or allegorical) nazis? because that’s not small beer as poking the bear goes.

pile on some sabre rattling about crossing a clear “bright line” by offering NATO membership to this “country” that stabs into russia in a manner that would make it a bit like the soviet union seeking to add texas to the warsaw pact during the cold war and it’s not exactly puzzling how the tensions got high.

it’s not like putin is a swell guy or innocent of lying and playing nasty games of his own or stands as some sort of good actor here, but given the US response to cuba back in the day, imagine what we’d do if russia helped overthrow the mexican government and inducted them into a soviet defense compact. anyone think that would have been mild or peaceful? we’d have had troops across the rio grande faster than you could say “51st state.”

and so again, we face the question: would this ukrainian conflict have happened at all if the US had not ridden in roughshod to dramatically alter a balance of power in the first place by playing “musical governments” or might a peaceful solution more in keeping with the facts on the ground and sustainable by the parties thereto have prevailed?

because the history here is not what’s being bandied about in the dangerously jingo-prone US media.

this was a situation the EU and russia and ukraine could have likely hammered out to lasting acceptance. but by once more wading in to help impose a one sided peace in favor of one too weak to keep it, it looks to me like it was once more US adventurism and intervention that set the inevitable stage for the next war.

and when fights have no good guys, backing anyone makes you the bad guy.

and “getting out” often goes badly and has nasty future consequences.

and all these propounded ideas and ideals that keep this perpetual war machine spinning are failing in the important test:

americans, of their own free will, are increasingly refusing to be a part of it.

this is not a bug, it’s a feature.

this is the ultimate check on the foreign policy of these united states. what if we threw a war and nobody wanted to come?

that is not a lack of patriotism, that IS patriotism.

it’s the decision that america’s sons (and increasingly its daughters) are not fodder for foreign cannons to be fed wholesale into the hungry maw of warpig policy at the behest of senile and self-serving oldsters safe at home.

these wars are not making the world better nor safer nor more stable: they are creating the very instability that inevitably induces the next conflagration.

and a draft does NOT fix this.

that’s like trying to eliminate ants by spreading jam on the sofa.

it’s the removal of the check against awful, unending militarism that we the people do not want. no one need be convinced anymore, simply coerced at gunpoint.

that’s not a recipe for good policy.

it’s also effectively a war on the liberty of americans by their own state.

there is nothing less american than a draft into combat. it abrogates the very self-determination that the rights of a republic should defend above all else.

it is the literal taking of your life and induction into a deadly form of chattel slavery because “otherwise how can we make up the casualties?”

this is anathema to agency and to our founding principles.

the ideas of crombe and nagl are grotesque and theirs is not a philosophy that can be tolerated much less countenanced.

if you cannot rally soldiers to your cause of their own free will, then your cause is almost certainly unjust and/or not in keeping with the will of the people.

if a nation’s sons will not defend it, then what are we to say about that nation’s value?

there is no obligation to die in foreign wars for the folly of fools in power.

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