Posted on 05/25/2009 9:17:48 AM PDT by SeafoodGumbo
The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.Much has been made over the past two decades of the emergence of “asymmetric warfare,” in which the ill-equipped confront the superbly armed by changing the rules of the battlefield. Yet, such irregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win.
There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles. We like the frisson of feeling a little guilt, but resent all calls to action that require sacrifice.
Second, collective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. As someone born only seven years after the ovens of Auschwitz stopped smoking, I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today.
Third, ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.
Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decisionmakers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.
Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do. Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.
Last, but not least, history is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.
By 1965, we had already forgotten what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the degeneration of our historical sense has continued to accelerate since then. More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944, as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, prize-hunting reporters insist that our losses in Iraq have been catastrophic, while those in Afghanistan are unreasonably high.
Read the rest here .
Thanks for the article. It is spot on.
bump for later
—good post—
In the new Terminator movie, the hero breaks chain of command to plead with the resistance to disobey their commanders and not launch a supposedly war-winning attack on the genocidal enemy.
The reason? The enemy has thousands of hostages at the attack site.
If we launch an attack that kills hostages, we are not really human.
Under this bizarre theory of warfare, no attack can ever be launched if the enemy has a few hostages or civilians around.
What was most interesting is that after all the hollering, the heroes apparently rescued perhaps a half dozen of the hostages, then blow the rest up with nuclear energy.
Bump.
I don’t agree with some of this. The idea that the WOT can be fought on a more symmetrical battlefield with an army conscripted from a population that will be invested in the outcome is just regurgitated Rangel (Charlie, D-NY) and WWII nostalgia of the sort you’d get from Brokenjaw. And I have no idea what he is talking about when he trashes the defense industry. I doubt he does, either.
On the other hand, I agree with him that our unwillingness as a culture to confront the realities of religion, Islam and our own, contributes to our problem at war. And I completely agree with his well-noted indictment of the media: that it only trusts the nobility of savages while finding all civilization evil. That’s the predominant agitprop of this period, no doubt.
The conductor, a decent guy, turned around and said something about honoring veterans (first mistake. Memorial Day is to honor the war dead) serving "in 'our' behalf."
Being a veteran, I resent it greatly when someone thanks me for serving "in their behalf."
Veterans serve out of a sense of duty, and the GP choose to shirk their duty and justify it with platitudes about the veteran doing something for them.
An excellent essay by Ralph Peters.
long article, worth the read
It is unrealistic, and more like a fairy tale. However today's youths and thirty something are in agreement with what a good idea it is.
we are in huge trouble as a result of our entertaining ourselves with self indulgences of all kinds and maximum distractions around us every waking moment. The ADD TV,creating our children to have attention spans of about 3 seconds. Not all not all ... ;but we are in big trouble. We are captured from within our selves, our thinking, our desires, our instant gratification syndrome.
God help us all.. Amen.
One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you. Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence (often quite violent in its reality) only worked because his opponent was willing to play along. Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (or today’s) China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Effective non-violence is contractual. Where the contract does not exist, Gandhi dies.” ...
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and so on ...
This is an excellent article. Food for serious thought.
Many of us as individuals have lost our survival instincts, and this translates into a lack of will in our national defense approach.
Very wise words!! Will the powers that be heed them?
Thanks for the post.
Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza.
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.
In closing, we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities—also necessary for victory—turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps.
We may wish reality to be otherwise, but we must deal with it as we find it. And the reality of warfare is that it is the organized endeavor at which human beings excel. Only our ability to develop and maintain cities approaches warfare in its complexity. There is simply nothing that human collectives do better (or with more enthusiasm) than fight each other. Whether we seek explanations for human bloodlust in Darwin, in our religious texts (do start with the Book of Joshua), or among the sociologists who have done irreparable damage to the poor, we finally must accept empirical reality: at least a small minority of humanity longs to harm others. The violent, like the poor, will always be with us, and we must be willing to kill those who would kill others. At present, the American view of warfare has degenerated from science to a superstition in which we try to propitiate the gods with chants and dances. We need to regain a sense of the world’s reality.
Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking.”
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Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a strategist, an author, a journalist who has reported from various war zones, and a lifelong traveler. He is the author of 24 books, including Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World and the forthcoming The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.
Thank you, Ralph Peters ... for your understanding of current status in America. Wise words.
Ping to an excellent essay.
Freerepublic is a communtiy with all kinds posting, linking and commenting. I remain a freeper partly because this site provides some excellent links such as this one and some intelligent commentary.
Great Post!..........Now if I had a little Seafood Gumbo to go along with this beer, all would be right with world.
But, DIL is cookin’ some up right now and we’ll be goin’ over there shortly. But, it’s too late for this beer. And the next one! :( ......LOL!
Great Post!..........Now if I had a little Seafood Gumbo to go along with this beer, all would be right with world.
But, DIL is cookin’ some up right now and we’ll be goin’ over there shortly. But, it’s too late for this beer. And the next one! :( LOL!
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