Isegoria

When Russia recently (counter-)attacked Georgia, William S. Lind notes, this raised the issue of defending the Baltics:

The worst option, which Georgia took, is to create a toy army.  A handful of modern jet fighters, a battalion or two of tanks, a frigate for the navy, all add up to nothing.  Against a Great Power, a toy army goes down to defeat in days if not hours.  More, even a few modern jet fighters or tanks cost so much there is no money left for a real defense.  Unless the Baltic states want to fight each other, they should leave military toys to children.

Second, the Baltics could try to ally with other near-by Powers strong enough to balance Russia.  But this option exists only in theory.  Germany could fill the role but has lost all Great Power ambitions, while Sweden has been out the game for two centuries. There could be benefit for all concerned in a union of the Baltic states and Finland under the Swedish crown, all retaining complete domestic autonomy but united for defense and foreign policy, but it is probably only historians who can see the potential.

A third option is to ally with distant Great Powers in order to balance the threat from a local Great Power.  That is what the Baltic States have done through their membership in NATO.  Unfortunately, while central European states have attempted this over and over again for centuries, it never works.  It may involve Western Powers in war with Russia, or in the past with Germany, but it does nothing to protect the country in question.  Poland is a recent example: Britain and France went to war with Germany in 1939 over Poland, but Poland remained an occupied country for 50 years.

NATO membership also increases the pressure to build a toy army, or to specialize in “niche” capabilities like water purification that serve NATO but not home defense.  Both are roads to military irrelevance.

There is a model that would work for the Baltic states and other small countries:  the Iraqi model.  Instead of creating a toy army, they should plan an Iraq-style insurgency against any occupier.  This requires a universal militia like Switzerland’s, where every male citizen knows how to shoot and how to build and emplace IEDs and where weapons and explosives are cached all over the country.  In the Baltics, this would be a rural rather than an urban defense: Russia could take the cities but not the countryside.  The “Forest Brothers” kept up just such a resistance to the Soviet presence well into the 1950s.

An Iraqi-model defense would not make it impossible for Russia to conquer the Baltic states.  It could only make such a venture expensive for Russia, hopefully too expensive.

For long-term security, the Baltic states must approach the problem not just at the military but at the grand strategic level.  What that means is that, like all small countries bordering Great Powers, they must accommodate the Great Power’s interests.   The model here is Finland during the Cold War.  Finland maintained complete sovereignty in her domestic affairs, but she was careful to accommodate the Soviet Union in her foreign and defense policies.  She was a good neighbor to Russia, as the Baltic states should strive to be good neighbors to Russia now.  Their goal should be to create a situation where it is more in Russia’s interests for the Baltics to remain independent than to reincorporate them into the Russian empire.

Qadaffi’s dead, Jerry Pournelle notes, ignominiously shot down while pleading for his life:

So far as I know they didn’t take the body out and hang it upside down in a public square, but much of this is reminiscent of the death of Benito Mussolini — who was, oddly enough, the founder of the nation of Libya. Libya didn’t exist until the Italians formed it from the provinces of Tripolitania , Cyrenaica, and various interior Berber, Tuareg, and other tribal groups in the province of Fezzan. The Italian marshal charged with unification was given carte blanche, and the unification wars were brutal. Under Mussolini the trains ran on time — actually there weren’t trains, but a Coast Road was built from Tripoli to the Egyptian border, modern factories such as a Fiat plant were built, and there were numerous showpiece public works such as cathedrals and the Marble Arch commemorating unification. Jewish enterprises thrived.

After World War II a Tripolitanian emir was proclaimed king of Libya. Foreign developers were invited in. The US built an important base and some of infrastructure needed to operate it. The king was overthrown by Colonel Qadaffi, who ruled until the Arab Spring uprisings and consequent NATO-backed rebellion. The US lost a significant imperial asset, Wheelus AFB in Libya, which was not only a primary SAC base but a major staging area for any US regional forces. US-Libyan relations in the era of Qadaffi have been a roller coaster. We ended by supporting and partly financing the rebellion that killed him.

Was military reform ever possible?, William S. Lind asks:

When the world was young and hope dared live in Washington, a small group of people put together something called the Military Reform Movement. Its purpose was to measure defense policies and programs by the standard of what works in combat rather than who benefits financially. Launched in the 1970s, it peaked in the early 1980s and was gone by 1990. Why did it fail? Because in a contest between ideas and money, the money always wins.

Money wins not only on Capitol Hill but in the media as well:

As I said years ago to a Marine friend who was trying to get a job on Capitol Hill, working as Hill staff is the post-doctoral course in spiritual proctology. Wheeler’s chapters [in Military Reform: A Reference Handbook) dissect many an ass.

He does an equally good job on the press, which did what it always does: build something up (which creates news) and then tear it down again (which creates more news). What drew many members of Congress to the Reform Caucus was the opportunity it offered to get some good ink. When the wind started blowing the other way, those illustrious legislators blew with it. But the corruption of the press itself is a story told less often, and it needs telling. Why do defense companies buy full-page ads in major newspapers? Not because anyone buys a fighter plane based on a newspaper ad, but because the six-figure price for a full page buys the newspaper.

Razib Khan takes Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature as a jumping-off point to discuss relative angels and absolute demons:

Ironically Kolbert is repeating the Anglo-Protestant Black Legend about the Spaniards, rooted in the rivalries and sectarianism of the 16th and 18th centuries, but persisting down amongst English speaking secular intellectuals. The reality is that the Spaniards did not want to kill the indigenous peoples, they died of disease and the societal destabilization that disease entailed. Europeans who arrived from Iberia in the New World ideally wished to collect rents from peasants. The death of those peasants due to disease was a major inconvenience, which entailed the importation of black Africans who were resistant to the Old World diseases like malaria which were spreading across the American tropics. The violence done to native peoples was predominantly pathogenic, not physical.

This is not to deny that the Spaniards were brutal. They quite certainly were. But they need to be compared to their non-Spanish contemporaries. The Aztec Triple Alliance which Cortez overthrew famously went to war to obtain captives for human sacrifice, who were also later cannibalized. Cortez won his war with disease and native allies who were chafing under the brutal Aztec hegemony. Additionally, the Spanish authorities were ambivalent about the brutality and exploitation which was being meted out by the European settlers. Much of the material in the Black Legend derives from the polemics of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. He made the case for the humanity of the native people who were now due the protection of the Spanish crown. This sort of dialogue and argument amongst the Spanish is itself an advancement across the arc of history. Consider the genocide which is celebrated in much of the Hebrew Bible as a contrast.* Was there an an Aztec Bartolomé de las Casas? Judging by what we know from antique Old World societies I doubt it.

The same point can be made about British slavery. It is correct that the enterprise of European civilization in the early modern period focused to a great extent on the trade in humans. But this is not exceptional. Kolbert alludes to Pinker’s mention of the Arab slave trade, but Europeans themselves long traded in humans from the north and east of the continent from antiquity down to the medieval period. This only dissipated when the supply of pagans outside of the Christian fringe was removed by the conversion of the last enclaves of the old religions (note, for example, that Slavs were common as slaves on both shores of the Mediterranean around the year 1000; cities like Venice rose to some extent on the slave trade). What was new was that in the early modern period there were those who made the case against slavery on humanitarian grounds. Though not all pre-modern civilizations had slavery, slavery as an institution was generally accepted as legitimate, if not always optimal (in contrast to cannibalism and human sacrifice, which were marginalized or banned by the world religions rather early on).

Finally, the last bone I have to pick with Elizabeth Kolbert is a general paradigmatic one. The reason that I suspect Steven Pinker does not talk much about European colonialism is that it was not exceptionally brutal, nor was it a very long period in much of the world. To make these assessments you need a thick understanding of world history which most people don’t have. The greatest mass death that occurred during the age of white European supremacy was that of the Taiping Rebellion. Though China was already coming under European pressure, and the Taipings claimed a Christian inspiration, the reality is that if you know Chinese history they were entirely explicable as the sort of disturbance which occurs near the end of a dynasty. In India the British decapitated much of the local elite, but primarily focused on extracting rents (the systematic brutality in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny was exceptional). I doubt that the British Raj was a time of greater violence than the political chaos of the 18th century, as the Mughal ascendancy collapsed and other powers arose to fill the vacuum and triggered a series of conflicts. And the European colonial adventures in Africa and the Middle East were fleeting at best, rarely lasting more than a century, and often far less.

I suspect that Kolbert’s emphasis on the European colonial experience of much of the world is influenced by the ubiquity of the postcolonial paradigm. Those who take postcolonial thinking as normative sometimes forget that not everyone shares their framework. I do not, and I would be willing to bet that Steven Pinker would also dissent from the presuppositions of postcolonialism. That means that the facts, the truths, that many take for granted are actually not taken for granted by all, and are disputed. One of the issues with postcolonial models is that they seem to view Europeans and European culture, and their colonial enterprises, as sui generis. This makes generalization from the West, as Pinker does, problematic. But for those of us who don’t see the West as qualitatively different there is far less of an issue.

A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans. To my knowledge they do not touch upon the genocide suffered by the Dzungar Mongols at the hands of the Manchus in the 18th century. The Manchu Empire, which in China proper were the Ching, was clearly a classic colonial enterprise. Ironically it served as the template for the nationalism of Republican and Communist China. Similarly, postcolonial theorists may discuss the British influence India, but they do not give the same space to the impact of West Asian Muslim elites via native Indian converts to Islam, as well as how they shaped Hindu society more broadly (e.g., West Asian Muslim elite norms of female modesty spread to Hindu elites, and to some extent remain in place in much of the subcontinent). But anyone who knows the structure of the Mughal Empire in the 17th century at its peak will observe that India was viewed to a great extent as a fat cow to be bled dry by Persians and Turks who arrived in large numbers during that period to staff the civilian and military apparatus of the Timurids, and were given preference to native born Muslims and Hindus, who were tacitly understood to be racially inferior.

When it comes to reforming the military, William S. Lind says, so long as the money flow continues, nothing will change. If the money flow does dry up though, this is what Lind would propose:

First, adopt a defensive rather than an offensive grand strategy. America followed a defensive grand strategy through most of her history. We only went to war if someone attacked us. That defensive grand strategy kept defense costs down and allowed our economy to prosper. We do not have to be party to every quarrel in the world.

Second, scrap virtually all the big ticket weapons programs such as new fighter-bombers, more Aegis ships, and the Army’s Rube Goldbergian Future Combat System. They are irrelevant to where war is going.

We should not plan for conventional wars against hypothetical “peer competitors,” which can only be Russia or China. We should do our utmost to make Russia an ally, and we should make a fundamental, bi-partisan national strategic decision that we will not go to war with China. Regardless of who “won” such a war, it would destroy both countries, just as the two World Wars destroyed both Germany and Britain. The world needs China to serve as a source of order in what will be an increasingly disorderly 21st century. We should welcome the growth of Chinese power, just as Britain learned (reluctantly) to welcome the growth of American power in the 20th century. It is only a threat to us if we make it one.

Third, as we cut, preserve combat units. That means, above all, Army and Marine Corps infantry battalions. Cut the vast superstructure above those battalions, but keep the battalions. Infantry battalions are what we need most for Fourth Generation wars, which we should do our utmost to avoid but which we will sometimes be drawn into, even with a defensive grand strategy.

In the Navy, keep the submarines. Submarines are today’s and tomorrow’s capital ships, and geography dictates we must remain a maritime power. Keep the carriers, too, though there is little need to build more of them. Carriers are big, empty boxes, which can carry many things besides aircraft. Mothball most of the cruisers and destroyers. Build lots of small, cheap ships useful for controlling coastal and inland waters, and create strategically mobile and sustainable “packages” of such ships. Being able to control waters around and within stateless regions can be important in 4GW.

Fighter-bombers are largely useless in Fourth Generation wars, where their main role is to create collateral damage that benefits our enemies. Keep the air transport squadrons and the A-10s, and move them all to the Air National Guard, which flies and maintains aircraft as well as or better than the regular Air Force at a fraction of the cost. Reduce the regular Air Force to strategic nuclear forces and a training base.

In all the services, vastly reduce the baggage train: the higher headquarters, the development commands, the education bureaucracies and the armies of contractors. As Mark Twain said of the male teat, they are neither useful nor ornamental.

Finally, as we cut, undertake reforms that cost little but will make our remaining forces more effective. Reform the personnel systems to create unit cohesion, eliminate the surplus of officers above the company grades and reduce careerism by ending up-or-out. Reform tactics and doctrine by moving from the Second Generation to the Third, which is to say from French attrition warfare to German maneuver warfare. This requires a change in military culture, in education and in training. The adoption of Third Generation tactics, doctrine and culture must be real, not just words on paper as it has been in the Marine Corps.

A program of military reform along these lines could give us more effective forces for Fourth Generation wars and such minor conventional wars as we might face within a defensive grand strategy than the forces we now possess. It could do so for a defense budget half or less the size of the current budget. To the reigning Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, that potential is a threat, not a promise. When the MICC’s money runs out, it will suddenly become a necessity.