Meandering Political Essay #2

[Cain]

Nowhere is the failure of structure over results more noticeable in current affairs than that of warfare.

The organizational revolution of the 16th and 17th century would, of course, eventually be transferred to the domain of killing.  Europe's wars were among the bloodiest in the world, driven as they were by religious fanaticism and unaccountable rulers (that is, unaccountable to anyone except other rulers). 

The hope was that in applying new methods, such as professionalizing the officer corps, would lead to fast and efficient wars, with a minimum of casualties and disruption.  It was also hoped that such a class would create a cooler, more reflective attitude towards war in general, removed from ambition, lust for power and all the myriad irrational causes of conflict. 

Well, that worked out well, didn't it?

It should never be forgotten, Loyola himself was a soldier, trained in a professional military school before he took up the cause of Jesus and the Pope, and so in a very real sense, warfare has driven this social change I am describing.

On a global level, 64,000 people die per year, every year, directly due to conflict.  That is as many Canadian troops were killed in the Great War, dead every year.  In typical political science terms, any conflict that has over 1000 deaths is considered a war.  Yet we like to think of ourselves as a planet mostly as peace.  No doubt, this has something to do with most of the world's wars not directly involving white people.

Ironically, most of these deaths are not due to terrorism.  Terrorism is mostly a media event, one that strikes at you through a television or iPhone.  Most people in the general vicinity of a terrorist attack can continue on quite happily in their daily routine, completely unaware of what has happened.  The dense quarters of city living can prevent the sound of explosions being heard more than a few streets away, and traffic is always terrible in major metropolitan areas.

Historically, war was not like the wars of today.  Most ancient wars were a cross between piratical opportunism and aristocratic wars.  Mercenaries had little interest in dying for a cause, as Machiavelli so prominently pointed out, and aristocratic wars involved few but those directly tied to the noble houses that were part of the struggle.  The population was not involved, and was mostly apathetic to such violence.

Modern warfare is a direct descendant of the French Revolution.  The coming of the national-state and the modern citizen led to the creation of citizen armies, and a new age of warfare that involved vast masses flung against each other.  This culminated, ultimately, in the disaster that was the Cold War, where entire populations were held hostage with nuclear weapons.  Mass warfare taken to its logical conclusion, via the convulsions of the Franco-Prussian War, WWI and WWII.

According to Sun Tzu, an eminently more civilized man than most modern military thinkers or commanders, "those skilled in warfare subdue the enemy's army without battle.  They capture his cities without assaulting them, and overthrow his state without protracted operations.  Your aim must be to take the opponent's country intact.  This is the art of offensive strategy."  Clearly, the Pentagon, Ministry of Defence et al did not get the memo.

When one considers the 20th century with an objective eye, the miserable nature of our military situation becomes clear.  World War One and Two were closely fought affairs, involving mass civilian death and were decided more by the insanity of certain leaders than the wisdom of its commanders.  The United States has won exactly two wars since the end of WWII, Korea and Gulf War One, and even those are questionable.  Britain has won in Malaysia and Northern Ireland(!) and the French have won a few minor conflicts in Africa.

Every other conflict is a litany of failure or, at best, uncertain outcomes.  The largest and best funded militaries in the world are incapable of defeating some of the worlds most impoverished.  Clearly, we have gone wrong somewhere along the line.

Part of this is our incomplete understanding of what actually constitutes warfare and conflict.  The Boer War is one of the starkest examples of this, "England's Vietnam" as some modern historians have come to call it.  In South Africa, the heavily armed and conventional British military were humiliated by the Boers, often armed with little more than hunting rifles.  While British training was severely lacking in certain key areas, most notably in map-reading and logistics, that the Boers were a flexible force who used common sense and guerrilla warfare apparently escaped their notice.  Focusing on training instead of their strategic deficiencies, they only won through scorched earthy policies and the introduction of concentration camps.

Belief in structure, the chain of command and the absolute power of the commander over his troops are the hallmarks of modern military thinking.  For an especially obtuse example, shortly before the German attack at Verdun in WWI, troops stationed there reported to the Minister of War that defences were defective, and that General Joffre was not taking the situation there seriously.  Joffre ignored the Minister of War and fired those troops who had reported to him, for disregarding the correct hierarchy and procedure.  When the attack came, the French defences crumbled.

Some of the generals even sought conflict without a clear strategic rationale for conflict.  According to the diaries of General Fayolle, he said that General Foch was seeking on the Somme a battle that had "no point.  Not even to break through."  Foch, incidentally, was one of the better commanders in World War One.

World War Two was little better.  The German Staff Generals opposed their most imaginative commander, Guderian, because his strategies involved formulations without due attention paid to the form and structure of the German Army.  Guderian did not hold with plans, charts, and organisation of forces according to rational method.  Instead, he gave them objectives, and let them figure out the best way to achieve it.  It was only due to Hitler that the General Staff were convinced to follow Guderian's battle plans, rather than their own cumbersome, Schlieffen Plan based preparations for the invasion of France.

Things were no better on the British side.  The "Cult of the Offensive" was very strong among the RAF, who believed it was worthless to prepare for anything except massive bombardment of Germany.  However, due to some support among money-conscious ministers, who knew it was cheaper to make fighters than bombers, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding insisted that the Luftwaffe was best fought through defensive measures – fighters and the new radar system, and that attrition would wear the German Air Force down (it costs far more in resources to bomb than it does to defend – bullets are cheaper than bombs, fighter pilots are more likely to survive to fly again etc etc).  For his efforts, Dowding got...nothing.  Despite the greatest air campaign in history being won due to his foresight, he was never promoted to Marshal, and the UK decided to mirror German bombing raids later on in the war, raids which had roughly the same effect as they did on the UK, which is to say none.

And on and on it goes.  Military "experts", trained in abstract, "rational" methods of waging war, backed by the world's most powerful economies and most advanced weapons are currently being defeated by illiterate Afghani peasants armed with Kalashnikovs, and religious zealots who believe the end of the world is coming.

Sometimes, the sophistication of modern weaponry is actually a fatal flaw in its design.  The more complex a system is, the harder it is to predict the individual interactions of all the parts, and what possible effect that could have (this is why social sciences are not very scientific).  The more advanced a weapon, the more associated problems there are with it.  For example, the US Stark, a war frigate, was sunk by a Mirage fighter armed with two Exocet missiles.  The Stark had a top of the range anti-missile system, which could've dealt with the Exocets and the Mirage too.  But this system...well, it had a distressing tendency to target any available nearby aircraft.  And a lot of civilian craft fly in the Persian Gulf.  Even when turned on, the anti-missile system relied on the ship facing the right direction.  Should a frigate be attacked from two opposite directions, it would be sunk.

Even guns are getting too sophisticated to rely on.  The British SA-80, its main rifle, had a distressing tendency to jam up in the desert or when exposed to excessive heat. 

A Kalashnikov, by contrast, can be comfortably stored in mud for a decade, washed out, reassembled and fire just as it was designed.  Is it a good gun?  Not especially.  Is it durable and reliable?  Absolutely.  The Iraqi insurgents did more damage with RPGs, Kalashnikovs and IEDs than the Serbian military was capable of doing with its relatively modern infrastructure and military equipment.

The "expertise" of the officer corps of all modern militaries is a sham.  The military structure, like that of any bureaucracy, rewards following the chain of command and punishes independent, original thinking.  Structure, the plans and methods laid down by earlier officers, must be adhered to, even when they obviously do not work.  We believe we are at peace when we are at war, we prepare for great power, static conflicts while we are assaulted by lightly armed and mobile guerrillas, and we trust technocrats with a history of humiliating defeats or hard-fought draws.

[The Rev]

Interesting. I had laid a lot of the change in the fact that a soldier doesn't really have to look his opponent in the eye as he kills him now.

[deadfong]

Going to have to go back and reread the first one, but this bit:

In typical political science terms, any conflict that has over 1000 deaths is considered a war.

reminded me of something I saw recently, that 250 people are killed every week in Mexico as a result of the conflict between the government and the cartels, and it only seems to be getting worse.  Is the Mexican military in the same bind as the U.S. military in terms of inappropriate strategy for the current conflict?

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

The same kind of thinking is rewarded in any large group of primates, but it's especially tragic in cases like the military when it causes so many lives to be needlessly lost.

For example, the US Stark, a war frigate, was sunk by a Mirage fighter armed with two Exocet missiles.  The Stark had a top of the range anti-missile system, which could've dealt with the Exocets and the Mirage too.  But this system...well, it had a distressing tendency to target any available nearby aircraft.  And a lot of civilian craft fly in the Persian Gulf.  Even when turned on, the anti-missile system relied on the ship facing the right direction.  Should a frigate be attacked from two opposite directions, it would be sunk.

I remember hearing about some anti-missile system that did fine during all the tests, so the pentagon bought it.  Then as soon as it was deployed in the field, it immediately went into red alert and started targeting something.  The people knew there were no incoming missiles, so they switched it off and back on, and it did the same thing.  It turns out the thing thought the moon was a hostile incoming missile.  None of the tests had ever been conducted when the moon was in the sky.

I don't remember where I heard that story, and Google hasn't been able to help me with a link, so that may be an urban legend rather than a true story.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I think the thing that swung it for me was when the US devised their plan for invading Iraq, namely "Shock and Awe"

So basically you have billions of dollars of hi tech equipment at your disposal and the best you can come up with is to jump out from behind a tree and yell "BOO!" really fucking loudly, mostly at civilian non-combatants?

I remember thinking at the time that all you would really need to defeat an enemy this retarded would be one guy, a reasonably sharp knife or stick and some duct tape (just in case the americans really brought their a-game that day) 

[LMNO]

Cain, that reminds me of some of Orson Card's post/parallel-Ender's Game books about Bean and the rest of Ender's army.*  It stressed small, independent cells with no top-down heirarchy other than a general to give objectives and to coordinate attacks based upon the plans each cell came up with.








*This was, of course, before Card went completely bonkers.

[Telarus]

Took me a while to get to this one. Excellent read.