Isegoria

On July 15, 1915, the New York Times ran an interview with legendary economist Irving Fisher — parts of which are still music to Bryan Caplan’s ears:

After this war is over, of course, Europe will find herself prostrated economically, by the destruction of property and workers, and not only that – the survivors will lack the strength and vital power which the aggregate had before the war. So far as the strongest still survive, they will be crippled largely in body, mind, and estate. Europe will be a vast hospital full of invalids, a vast almshouse full of paupers, a vast cemetery full of graves.

This will leave the United States the one great nation, physically and otherwise fit to carry onward the torch of civilization. We, alone, of the world’s great peoples, will remain endowed with both the economic and vital power necessary for the prosecution of that mission. Therefore, it seems to me that it must be clear to every thinking man that Europe should serve to us as a warning and not as an example.

The tragedy there should stir us on to reduce, not to increase our militaristic ideas. While Europe is spending life we should set ourselves determinedly at the task of saving life.

Fisher was a crusading vegetarian, teetotaler, and eugenecist:

It is the quality rather than the quantity of human life that should be held precious…

If war would weed out only the criminal, the vicious, the feeble-minded, the insane, the habitual paupers, and others of the defective classes, it might lay claim, with some show of justice, to the beneficent virtues sometimes ascribed to it.

But the truth is that its effects are diametrically opposite. It eliminates the young men, who should be the fathers of the next generation — men medically selected as the largest, strongest, most alert, and best endowed in every way…

Their less endowed fellows, medically rejected from military service, because of defects in stature, eyesight, hearing, mentality, &c, are left at home to reproduce the race.

Caplan didn’t much like that part:

According to Fisher, war isn’t bad because it’s mass murder; it’s bad because it’s dysgenic mass murder!

Really, I don’t think that’s a fair paraphrase. Fisher would say that mass-murder is bad, but dysgenic mass murder is worse.

Near the end of the Cold War, talk turned to cost-imposing strategies — strategies that pushed the Russians to spend more than they could afford in order to keep up — but, Tom Ricks recently discovered, this isn’t a new idea:

Paul Kennedy, in his terrific study of The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, quotes the Duke of Newcastle as stating in 1742 that, “France will outdo us at sea when they have nothing to fear on land. I have always maintained that our marine should protect our alliances on the Continent, and so, by diverting the expense of France, enable us to maintain our superiority at sea.”

Kennedy says this was the key to British policy for centuries: Keep Europe in a balance of power so that no one nation dominated the continent, and all nations there would have to focus on land power at the expense of sea power. Hence Britain’s “perfidious” reputation — it didn’t care much about the nature of its alliances as long as it could balance European powers while it expanded its empire outside Europe. He writes that, “of the seven Anglo-French wars which took place between 1689 and 1815, the only one which Britain lost was that in which no fighting took place in Europe.” This pattern gave rise to the expression that France lost Canada in Germany.

This approach worked until 1914.

The British occupation of Gibraltar grew out of this strategy. By having a base at the mouth of the Mediterranean, the British could deter the French from moving their Mediterranean fleet out to join their Atlantic fleet.

Kennedy’s book reminds me a lot of Piers Mackesy’s The War for America in that it teaches not just history but strategy. I am surprised that no one told me to read it years ago.

Zenpundit discusses strategy, power and diffusion:

A recent estimate for the cost of the war in Afghanistan by the Congressional Research Office is $443 billion dollars to occupy and fight a Pakistani-supported insurgency in a primitive country whose annual GDP is a mere $27 billion. A figure that itself inflated by $3-4 billion in remittances, $4 billion in NGO aid and $14 billion in direct US aid (2010 figure); when you then subtract opium smuggling ($4 billion), Afghanistan’s legitimate economic activity may only be a miniscule GDP of $2–3 billion.

This does not, of course, include the cost of ten years of lavish bribes for Pakistan, a portion of which was used by the ISI to support the Taliban killing American and ISAF soldiers and Afghan civilians.

This is not a cost-effective or strategic way to run a war. In fact, even for a nation as wealthy as the United States there is nothing in Afghanistan worth such an expenditure of blood and treasure, especially when the bulk of our enemies appear to be based in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

[...]

William Lind and the 4GW school used to like to make the point, regarding your moral and political legitimacy, that “If you fight the weak, you become weak”. The corollary to that is economic: “If you fight the poor, you become poor”.

Grinding poverty itself is a tax upon the invading force. There are no resources for your army to commandeer or buy, no skilled manpower to requisition or hire, no infrastructure for them to use. All of that must be imported and built at great expense by the invader whose troops are accustomed to far less spartan environs. The local population is usually malnourished, illiterate, ignorant, suspicious of outsiders and rife with disease; their living habits and water sources unsanitary and endanger the troops. Caring for the locals, even minimal administration of humanitarian aid, becomes a bureaucratic and logistical burden consuming time and diverting resources away from urgent military needs.

The United States under George Bush the Elder, entered into Somalia, a land beset by violent anarchy and it’s people in the grip of a terrible famine and was driven out shortly thereafter under Bill Clinton. The last scenes there being the emaciated Somali followers of a two-bit warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, gleefully swarming over and looting our military’s former… garbage dump.

When the enemy has a land so poor that he treasures and makes use of the crap you throw away, the economic spillover of your logistical supply lines will fund his war against you. Used to surviving on bare subsistence, the invader’s presence becomes an economic bonanza for resistance and collaborator alike. Sort of a highly kinetic form of military Keynesianism. The war itself and the occupation become an irreplaceable cornerstone of their economy. They hate you being there, but can’t afford to defeat you and drive you out either — making a “quagmire” irregular conflict their ideal economic equilibrium to maintain.