Do We Know War

Do We Know War ?

America's global military supremacy was proposed by the triumphs of the Second World War and ratified by a 40-years' deterrence and subsequent defeat of the Soviet Empire. Along the way there have been a number of campaigns of relatively compact dimensions in which American will was thwarted without calling her technical supremacy into question.

The proposition that these, the ambiguous outcomes, have been the issue of a fickle electorate rather than a reflection of military impotence is hardly controversial, yet the national leadership is habitually bewildered as to the practical matter: how the national will to prevail in war is to be excited and directed.

The key to perseverance in the sort of warfare we've seen since Nagasaki , then, lies in the ubiquity and degree of citizen participation in the national security enterprise. Arousing this participation is one of the duties of leadership, and insofar as we democrats get the leaders we deserve, it is the electorate which must be held to account for the disappointments in Korea and Vietnam and our timidity in the war with Islamist jihad. We lose when we vote to lose, and we vote to lose when we are unimpressed by the costs of defeat. When we can't be bothered to carry on.

Whence our indolence ?

One damaging ( although not wholly unanticipated ) result of ending the military draft has been a withering of martial lore in the culture. It's unfashionable. Until about 1950, when Americans numbered 150 millions (half of the present population) and for another 25 years or so, it would have been well nigh impossible to locate an adult male American citizen who was not a past, present or prospective serviceman , or who did not count servicemen among his intimates. A sense of things military, and of the nature and conduct of war was more or less universal in American society.

No longer. Moreover , in the vanguard of popular culture the academy is discovered to have declared a Utopian Age , prematurely as it turns out, and so we study war no more.

An American born in or after 1953 has by default an entirely civilian biography, writing a military chapter only upon taking the initiative and passing through the volunteer forces’ selection filters. First-hand experience of soldiering , and of war, is now the property of a relatively small and increasingly distinct martial class. The general public’s exposure to these things comes from a mass media staffed largely by people whose understanding of the matter is ideologically driven, anecdotal, or entirely wanting.

This convivial alienation of the general public from the professional military is most apparent at points of direct contact. In venues such as television news programs and in press conferences, the experts’ informed discourse is almost certain to be misapprehended, insofar as it presumes a grasp of fundamentals their interlocutors and viewers generally do not have. It’s difficult to address complex matters of any sort without a common set of basic understandings and a shared, specialized lexicon. Military presentation is mapped through ignorance and caprice to the civilian experience, and saleable journalism is necessarily so reduced and incomplete as to be essentially false. The questions asked at Pentagon press conferences by highly intelligent, well-intentioned (and well-paid) journalists are an excellent illustration of this problem. The stupidity of some of these questions is astounding. As the physicist Pauli said of a rival theory, their relation to reality is such that it’s not even wrong.

This, when none would contest the observation that war is one of the elementary forces which shape the human order. Yet the subject is absent from the curricula of our secondary schools and universities, excepting a handful of arch-traditionalist privates and the military academies. Wars in their particulars are taught and studied, to be sure. Date started, date ended, causes-of, principle battles : that handful of bullet points which will be on the final exam. But war itself - the art, science, functions, purposes, morality and human nature of war, of which particular wars are instantiations - is not in the syllabus.

This revision is an artifact of that progressive social transformation which, coupled with the effective segregation of our military classes, has bred an electorate which is increasingly ill-informed and subject to misleading itself in these matters of life and death. Its own.

It is, on the one hand, granted that a soldier’s experience imprints upon him, or her, a deep understanding of war. No less confidence is apparent in the belief that a soldier learns little of the grand scheme of things, so that all consideration of war is best left to annointed intellectuals. The position du jour is determined by expediency.

In fact, the only certain yield of a soldier’s experience, no matter how intense or how horrific, is a greater or lesser knowledge of soldiering. War is a related, but distinct intellectual domain.

Our vernacular now takes ‘war’ and ‘combat’ as synonyms. A state of war is thought to exist when and only when two or more adversaries are actively engaged in combat operations. The Cold War was in this view a metaphorical war, and the one between jihad and dar al-harb began when President George W. Bush sent a U.S.-led military coalition into Afghanistan. The slightly more discerning mainstream view goes back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, or perhaps to the 1991 Gulf War to mark the beginning of the present hostilities between the United States and an uncircumscribed but certainly Islamic enemy.

In politics, as in all of the natural world, no niche is left unfilled. Our vacuity is an empty course upon which politicians build out their electoral prospects. Senator Kerry's remarkable transformation from short-time Swift Boat commander to Clauswitzian sage is a fine example. It is entirely likely that Kerry himself believes in it. A great many voters did. Instances of catastrophic security policy shaped by academic Sun-Tzus are innumerable. Former officers with political ambitions assure us that there is no war on at all. Retired General Wesley Clark did so in a television interview only hours after the July 7, 2005 London terror bombings in which over 50 civilians were killed. It is, he declared, time for hard police work. A criminal matter, is all. We sense that we are ill-equipped to construct our own views on matters of war and peace, and so we shop for them at retail. This is a marketer's dream come true, and the end of any marketplace role for substance and reason. Anything that is well-packaged and promoted can be sold.

It is not so much our awareness of the horrors of combat that dilutes our national will to preserve ourselves, though glimpses of the horror are now visible, on television, to everyone. Pop artists and "anti-war" propagandists have made a fine job of getting the point across, however abstractly, that horror follows from combat. This seeming immediacy lies, however, on the periphery of our core structural weakness. We are frightened and appalled by Hollywood’s simulations of battle and its aftermath, and correctly infer that the real thing is even more dreadful. We understand that part.

The deeper threat to our society’s willingness to persevere and finally prevail in this Thirteen Centuries War stems, rather, from a deficit of fundamental knowledge and the reflection which follows from it. The problem begins with our schooled denial of the complexity inherent even in the elementary concepts of "war" and of "peace". Well-meaning people across the cultural and political spectrum take it for granted that peace (defined , it is thought, by the absence of combat) is always preferable to all other things. In practice all but a handful of axiomatic pacifists are easily induced to concede that this is not so. The concession, a fruit of our common gift of reason, only rarely comes as an epiphany or yields a lasting change of heart, for it is contrary to the common faith. Everybody knows that peace is the way - whatever that means.

This is particularly salient to the outcome of the current phase of the Thirteen Centuries War of jihad, which has followed a relatively lengthy period in which combat between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds was the exception rather than the rule. This is a war in which our enemies' definition of ‘peace’ is radically different from our own. Very nearly half of the American electorate has recently favored such a peace. Europe has manifestly sued for it, the result being the accelerating progression of Eurabian dhimmitude so chillingly documented by historian Bat Ye’or.

Yes, postmodern conflicts between the West and her enemies are waged in the hearts and minds of the democratic electorates. The military asymmetry in the war of jihad, overwhelmingly favoring the West, calls our attention to this truism. Impotent on the battlefield, our enemies have relied upon terror, deception, patience and relentlessness. Their longitudinal view of war ought to signal us that our educational system is a decisive theater in this existential struggle. What we teach today will mature with the careers of the student cohort as it succeeds to positions of influence in politics, media, the sciences and humanities. They will have to know war better than we do if they are to survive and prosper.

The survival of the West, then, hinges to no small degree upon bringing the study of war to the rising generations, on a par with the other fundamentals such as mathematics, chemistry and business administration. As unattractive as the notion will be to the biens pensants, the study of war is properly one of the Humanities. The fact that at present its proper instruction would require a multi-disciplinary faculty speaks volumes about the musty attic we’ve hidden it away in, as though it were a leperous relative. It does not even have a name, though it is arguably the Mother of All Disciplines. Without it, there were no others.

Perhaps the faint will be soothed by a reminder that learning war and learning peace are one and the same, and will develop a wholesome interest in features of the peace now offered: the terms under which the Islamist will stop making war on us. The traditional Achilles heel of liberal societies has been that selfsame Athenian tendency which enables our gentle civil order and animates intellectual dynamism. Our queasy disdain for Sparta disposes our better natures to the view that all peaces are created equal, and are preferable, in any case, to the alternatives. This failure of discrimination is our vulnerability. In asymmetric warfare, the militarily weaker of the adversaries studiously avoids combat while vigorously prosecuting his war aims. His plan is based upon a clear, fundamental distinction between war and combat, and so exploits the openings our insensibility affords him. Sun Tzu would approve, for this is an attack upon our strategy itself.

If we do not study war, we will be prone to elevating Chamberlains, rather than Churchills, to the seats of power. The mechanics of this tendency are similar to those described by Hayek for collectivist polities and the varieties of apparatchiks who flourish therein. An uneducated electorate easily drifts toward pacifism as an article of faith and so tends to favor precisely those politicians least likely to assure its survival.

The thirteen centuries of war against Islamist jihad have, of course, seen some periods of intense combat, one of which has begun only recently. The now-global dimensions of the war and the enemy’s innovations (many derived from our own Western technologists and totalitarians) are daunting. The magnitude of the challenge to our existence and the widespread lassitude across Western ideological factions are powerful arguments for general mobilization.

The nature of postmodern warfare is such that this no longer seems to imply mass conscription, victory gardens, ration cards, Riveters Rosy and other varieties of pre-Hiroshima emergency measures. General mobilization in this evolved paradigm is nonetheless a necessary component of the assembled means by which a contentious, liberal Western democracy can persuade itself to persevere and to apply its overwhelming military might to assuring victory in the struggle against jihad.

The enemy has a long view of the conflict. He has waged his war for thirteen centuries and is of a mind to go on until he has either met the core requirement of his ideology, fulfillment of jihad, or has met total and final defeat. The West has only lately renewed its tentative defense, reluctantly mustered by American leadership and darkly suspicious of Israeli solidarity. We are famously impatient and short-term in our strategic thinking. This is what has enabled the jihad to regroup and continue after successive and unsurprising battlefield catastrophes. If our desire is to be free, finally, of the existential threat posed by Islamist jihad, we must accept the trans-generational schedule our millennial failures have bequeathed us, effect a general mobilization of our national will, and prepare for a long and arduous trial.

Our high school and university curricula will have to be enriched by the proper study of war, so that our sacrifice and that of those who came before us is not cast away by the ballot, and along with it the ballot box itself.