Thursday 9 August 2012
war
Friday 13 July 2012
The biggest misconception about the war is that the soldiers care about politics. The right thinks the soldiers want support. They want to feel good. They want everybody to fly their flag and have a bumper sticker and go, ‘Rah! Rah! Rah! I support the troops. Yay, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ The left thinks the soldiers all want to run off and get out of there, that they’re dying in a living hell. I think that most of the soldiers are young people that are having a decent adventure. Sergeant Perry Jeffries (via The American Bear) ☀
Thursday 12 July 2012
The Iraq war was misleadingly sold to Congress and the public as a relatively low-cost, short-term affair (among other things), so conscription wouldn’t have made much of a difference in preventing it. If we want our political leaders to “think twice” about the wisdom of needlessly invading a country whose government posed no major threat to the United States, perhaps we should start by holding accountable the politicians that failed to do so. Perhaps the military would benefit from some of the reforms Ricks proposes, but it is extremely doubtful that it would make the government less prone to wage an unnecessary war when there is a bipartisan policy consensus in favor of it. If we want to avoid unnecessary wars in the future, we need political leaders less inclined to favoring aggressive policies and less eager to take military action as anything other than the last resort. Reviving conscription doesn’t make any of that more likely. Conscription Doesn’t Make Unnecessary Wars Less Likely ☀
Let’s Draft Our Kids ☀
A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.
Those who don’t want to serve in the army could perform civilian national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar benefits like tuition aid.
And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.
Sunday 17 June 2012
This Week in War ☀
A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.
(via thepoliticalnotebook)
Thursday 14 June 2012
It is one thing for the ruling class to target the general domestic population on economic matters, as it has by systematically squeezing every last bit of wealth and opportunity out of “ordinary” Americans and shoveling all of it into the drooling maw of the rulers (and for many Americans, these methods of brutalization are already catastrophic in the extreme). It is very different when the ruling class announces to the world that it considers every human being on Earth not favored by power and privilege to be fair game in a neverending campaign of slaughter. Yet there are no crowds in the street. Forget howls of fury; you can listen with the greatest concentration of which you are capable, and you will detect barely a whimper. Life goes on precisely as before, as if nothing of great moment has happened. With very rare exceptions … even the harshest critics of the murder campaign so thoughtfully detailed in the NYT will not say: These people are monsters. This is profoundly evil. All these people, all those who collaborate and assist in such a program, have placed themselves far beyond any limit of what can be designated as civilization. Unspeakable Things: The Liberals’ Clumsy Dance Across Obama’s Killing Floor ☀
Friday 1 June 2012
You have Martin Luther King’s statue in your office, but you are sending these unmanned drones out, and bombs are dropping on innocent people. That’s not a small thing. That’s not a small thing. We know from historic examples that if you engage in a certain kind of foreign policy it eats at your soul on the domestic front. Cornel West ☀
Thursday 31 May 2012
It is absolutely true that the “hero” rhetoric that is attached to all things related to the U.S. military is used to shut down real debate about the merits of what exactly it is that all those heroes are doing out there. If all soldiers are heroes, then all soldiers are righteous. If all soldiers are righteous, then the soldiers’ cause is righteous. The soldiers’ cause is war. Therefore the war is righteous. This is one of the oldest tropes in the “Manipulating the Free Press During Wartime” handbook. You need only look back at the profusion of American flag graphics and distinct lack of pointed skepticism that defined the U.S. media in the run up to the Iraq War to know how well this tactic works. It is easy for a TV network and its pundits to be patriotic. Theirs is a cheap patriotism. It is a patriotism of platitudes and comfortable symbols and cartoonish enemy villains to be opposed. Dissenters are just easy weenies to be picked on in the media schoolyard. Pundits, Platitudes, and Patriotism: War Heroes and Their Enemies ☀
Wednesday 30 May 2012
Calling “hero” everyone killed in war, no matter the circumstances of their death, not only helps sustain the ethos of martial glory that keeps young men and women signing up to kill and die for the state, no matter the justice of the cause, but also saps the word of meaning, dishonouring the men and women of exceptional courage and valour actually worthy of the title. Political correctness: Hero inflation ☀
Our public discourse is such that anyone can find him or herself viciously denounced by complete strangers based on a single sound-byte from which everyone extrapolates wildly. In Defense of Chris Hayes ☀
The Golden Age of Special Operations ☀
Since 9/11, USSOCOM’s budget has quadrupled. The special operations order of battle has expanded accordingly. At present, there are an estimated 66,000 uniformed and civilian personnel on the rolls, a doubling in size since 2001 with further growth projected. Yet this expansion had already begun under Obama’s predecessor. His essential contribution has been to broaden the special ops mandate. As one observer put it, the Obama White House let Special Operations Command “off the leash.”
As a consequence, USSOCOM assets today go more places and undertake more missions while enjoying greater freedom of action than ever before. After a decade in which Iraq and Afghanistan absorbed the lion’s share of the attention, hitherto neglected swaths of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are receiving greater scrutiny. Already operating in dozens of countries around the world – as many as 120 by the end of this year — special operators engage in activities that range from reconnaissance and counterterrorism to humanitarian assistance and “direct action.” The traditional motto of the Army special forces is “De Oppresso Liber” (“To Free the Oppressed”). A more apt slogan for special operations forces as a whole might be “Coming soon to a Third World country near you!”
The displacement of conventional forces by special operations forces as the preferred U.S. military instrument — the “force of choice” according to the head of USSOCOM, Admiral William McRaven — marks the completion of a decades-long cultural repositioning of the American soldier. The G.I., once represented by the likes of cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s iconic Willie and Joe, is no more, his place taken by today’s elite warrior professional. Mauldin’s creations were heroes, but not superheroes. The nameless, lionized SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden are flesh-and blood Avengers. Willie and Joe were “us.” SEALs are anything but “us.” They occupy a pedestal well above mere mortals. Couch potato America stands in awe of their skill and bravery.
This cultural transformation has important political implications. It represents the ultimate manifestation of the abyss now separating the military and society. Nominally bemoaned by some, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, this civilian-military gap has only grown over the course of decades and is now widely accepted as the norm. As one consequence, the American people have forfeited owner’s rights over their army, having less control over the employment of U.S. forces than New Yorkers have over the management of the Knicks or Yankees.
Tuesday 29 May 2012
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. General George S. Patton ☀
Tuesday 1 May 2012
Saturday 31 March 2012
Waging war for my Bible class ☀
Throughout history religions have used the Bible to regulate behavior — as in don’t kill anyone and don’t take their land or property, while nations have used the Bible to justify behavior — as in kill people and take their land and property.
In the” Warmonger’s Bible” class we would go full circle, from President Bush’s modern day “crusade” remarks to the actual Crusades, in which warriors from the Middle Ages were urged on by Biblical verses like Jeremiah 48:10 “Curse is he who does the work of the Lord with slackness; and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed.”
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