Two Decades of War Have Eroded the Morale of America’s Troops
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
—James Madison
Pretty much exactly what happened. Pretty smart these guys.
But it's not hard to say: "if you commercialize war and create an entrenched institution around it, then there are a lot of people (weapons manufacturers, government contractors, military leadership) with considerable money and power who are highly incentivized to perpetuate the state of war, irrespective of its necessity."
One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label. I always found it staggeringly obtuse for conservatives (people; not the corrupt politicians and media manipulating them) to simultaneously complain about the debt and endorse pointless wars that end up costing many trillions of their own taxpaying dollars.
And then I realized that rationalizing the right wing platform is a total package deal: maybe you came for your gun rights, red meat manliness, shallow (or deep) streak of white supremacy, and/or your Christian values, but you end up staying for the costly warmongering, poor-to-rich wealth transfer, and excessive broad spectrum deregulation.
Please. You're ignoring biology if you think the association between manliness and war is an engineered phenomenon.
If you compare military ads for example, you’ll see that in the US we glorify and Hollywoodize war (because they know the Call of Duty aesthetic will lure kids into joining) whereas in a place like Ukraine it’s positioned as a grim and unpalatable necessity.
I’m not saying we don’t need a military btw. I am saying it’s potentially an order of magnitude more bloated than it needs to be. Biological aggression alone hardly serves to explain that. Cultural and political manipulation are the dominant explanatory variables.
And this should bother us, because while we’re busy fighting the wanton perversion of our democratic system in this and various other ways, other countries committed to a state-sanctioned technocratic agenda are running laps around us. It’s stupidly tragic.
That is a very idealistic view. The truth is that the majority of the world still lives a stone's throw from death, and even lower class American neighborhoods are filled with violence that is inseparable from traits that are amplified by male biology - pride, aggression, anger - compounded by physical differences between the sexes which affect psychology - i.e. a lifetime spent weaker or stronger than average.
Don't get me wrong. These drives and emotions have their place, and I would argue that they are also responsible for much of the good in the modern world.
But these biological and social properties continue to force an association between manliness and war, although to some degree propaganda and Hollywood do have an amplifying affect, as you suggest.
It is, I have found, very difficult for people to accurately assess what it would be like to not know something they already know. Steven Pinker calls this the Curse of Knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...
People with opposite views have opposite images of the "HN crowd". Since these images are determined by your/their own views, they don't contain any information about HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
Ferishizing the past while simultaneously ignoring everything they have to say is a cynical way to anchor modern policy position with the distant past.
"In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war."
Counterpoint: in the modern era debts and taxes derive from the social system, not war. The US spends 2 trillion per year on taking care of its retirees and “only” 600 billion on the military. The entire world spends less than 2 trillion on war, so less than the US social security and medicaid budget. The thing governments largely spend their money on is taking care of their people, and taxes largely get redistributed through social systems. The image of the typical government as some malignant force dominating its populace is false (although such governments do exist).
Lots of 'War against Drug' money is used to support the wars. Lots of 'devlopment' aid is used to support war.
Massive amount of money are given to Israel and Egypt that is essentially military spending. The list goes on.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n2/v66n2p1.html
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/business/...
Edit: The Soviets and resistance groups had women fight, but most countries had women in the armed forces and filling roles previously male only. Outside the military there was a pressing manpower shortage and women filled roles that were previously male only. Post war not everyone wanted to give up the positions they had filled and done excelled at.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-15-02-042...
This reads as profoundly anti-statist. Can somebody clarify the context please?
In the words of National Security Advisor John Bolton, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2005/04/28/boltons-conservati...
John Bolton was extremely supportive of the war in Vietnam. He simply utilized his privilege to avoid being drafted so he didn't have to go to war.
The morale of occupying force starts to decline under constant resistance. This has been true in the Latin America, Africa, Caucasus, Asia etc. Eventually you end up with high crime, corruption and death squads.
What the West should have done is designated another force for that. Something like (but not exactly) keeping the Army as it was and transforming the Marines into a desert-fighting force. Or taking elements of the Army and Marines and making an entirely new force. Or something like the French Foreign Legion.
If they had 700,000 men deployed in SOCOM they would still lose. The Roman Empire showed how you defeat an insurgency militarily - by exterminating/recruiting the population of the target nation. You do this by establishing and expanding colonies along with large military garrisons to protect them. This takes generations, though, and requires either finding enough volunteers to colonize, or forcibly shipping people to these colonies, which tends to not have the desired effect. The Romans accomplished this mostly by giving land in conquered territories to ex-soldiers, along with members of the conquered population as slaves. These strategems are largely taboo now, so the "mowing the grass" strategy of continual armed sweeps is what's left and just like with your lawn, it will never end.
To both have a real country in Afganistan where a group of minorites, that don't get often get along, that make up 60% of the population supress the largest minority of 40% is totally insane in a country like Afganistan.
The Pashtun tribes have dominated the their region and beyond for a long time, and they are essentially a warrior culutre that will never give up. At least not with the level of violance the west is willing to employ.
The problem is that the local allies that the US uses in Afganistan also don't know the area they are fighting in and they don't know the language of the people they are fighting. This makes the 'local' support far less useful then theory says it should be.
Not even with the level of violence the Soviets were willing to employ
The Romans generally preferred to co-opt local elites and win hearts-and-minds. When the Catavelauni were “conquered” they had already been trading with Rome for 50 years and loved Roman merchandise and culture. Caesar showed up with his legions one day and instead of fighting they said what took you so long?? Can we be Romans now please?
The US could have done this in the 1980s in most of their former enemies I reckon. Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Michael Jackson and Madonna. But somehow they ballsed it up...
I thought the US Army, for most of a century, was designed for low-intensity warfare against the militarily weaker indigenous population of the land claimed by the US.
And that the Army used the tactics learned in the Indian Wars during the US control of the Philippines.
Only to find in WWI that we were far behind the tactics of mitteleuropa.
This sounds like it would be in violation of a parent statute of some kind. Or maybe the Authorization was deliberately left open ended. Which should also be illegal.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Just when I think I cannot support our stupid wars and troops less, something like this comes along and does the job. I'd rather break my own leg or spend years in the hell that is American prison than take up arms for what America has seen fit to go to war to in every conflict since WWII. Maybe if we didn't have this seemingly never-ending record of fighting wars for idiotic reasons, losing almost every single one, our soldiers' and public's morale wouldn't be so low. What else can one possibly expect when fighting wars that aren't meant to end, against enemies that have never harmed us, for no fucking reason anyone can possibly explain or comprehend? To be fair, the American people have not even had a choice of a candidate that didn't support such wars from either party at least since 9/11 and for the most part even before then. The troops finally realizing how idiotic and purposeless conflicts like the one in Iraq are could be a great thing for America. If enough of them speak out or even refuse to serve, maybe we won't be involved in such crimes against humanity. But let's face it, the politicians who don't have to go to war or send their children to war seemingly will never get the message. Possibly the only thing that might change their minds is seeing their own children bleeding out in the middle of a highway and coming back in coffins. I guess this is what happens when we have a military like the US has and no actual enemies. In the meantime, actual enemies rising are generally ignored, and by the current administration even encouraged to become more powerful. At this point, I'm quite certain the idea of "winning" any of the conflicts we're currently in or will be in the near future is mere fantasy and quite delusional. So is the idea that a draft will ever be supported or come back successfully. The internet exists so at this point, I can't imagine anyone but the poorest, the dumbest, and the most violent can even twist their minds enough to not be disgusted enough by our past actions to support any war the US is or might be in. That's probably why we're enlisting klansmen and other similar lowlifes--no one else is insane or stupid enough to enroll of their own free will.
America making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch."
- Frankie Boyle
Vietnam was a vile deception, and a tragic example of focusing on unfounded methodologies (McNamara, running War as a business, body counts), rather than on the why, whether and how.
Attributing the collective actions of every single person from the US to a single entity called "America" and then pointing out that these actions are inconsistent is a silly reductionist argument.
Edit: I should also add that I strongly think the world would be better if the filmmakers were creating movies about the effects of war on the _other_ side, not just their country's side.
They are also used by American pop culutre to understand the war and they absolutly do influnce how people view the conflict.
To get critical movies about US army we need to wait for full CGI. Although I bet Army will retailiate then through copyright law.
Unexploded ordinance dropped by the US on Cambodia and Laos has rendered large swaths of land unproductive, and still leads to hundreds of deaths and injuries every year to this very day. Cambodia has an entire cottage industry devoted to recycling and neutralising American bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
That communist and leftist had widly positive views of any regime that called itself 'communist' or 'socialist' is well known. Even if it is today often ignored.
The US didn't try to conquer North Vietnam. It didn't try to annex the nation. It got involved in an existing civil war - on the premise of fighting Communism's spread - and tried to keep North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam for exactly the same reason it acted to keep North Korea from conquering South Korea. The US left Vietnam, the North went on with its conquering anyway.
The US killed vast numbers of North Koreans in the Korean War as well, in the defense of the South. Why isn't that treated exactly the same way that the Vietnam War is? A curious inconsistentcy of popular sentiment: it's because to either wish the US had failed in Korea, or never got involved at all, is to be ok with the idea that South Korea would very likely look like North Korea today and that the South's people would have had the same horrific history the past six decades.
Let's see how things turned out.
South Korea: GDP per capita of Spain & Italy, ~$30,000.
Vietnam: GDP per capita of East Timor & the Solomon Islands, ~$2,300.
CHOMSKY: As far as the opinion makers are concerned, they have been doing exactly what it was obvious they would do. Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how — while it may have been a “mistake” or an “unwise effort” — the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That’s standard to say.
The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam. The real invasion of South Vietnam which was directed largely against the rural society began directly in 1962 after many years of working through mercenaries and client groups. And that fact simply does not exist in official American history. There is no such event in American history as the attack on South Vietnam. That’s gone. Of course, It is a part of real history. But it’s not a part of official history.
And most of us who were opposed to the war, especially in the early ’60’s — the war we were opposed to was the war on South Vietnam which destroyed South Vietnam’s rural society. The South was devastated. But now anyone who opposed this atrocity is regarded as having defended North Vietnam. And that’s part of the effort to present the war as if it were a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam with the United States helping the South. Of course it’s fabrication. But it’s “official truth” now.
QUESTION: This question of who the United States was fighting in Vietnam is pretty basic in terms of coming to any understanding of the war. But why would the U.S. attack South Vietnam, if the problem was not an attack from North Vietnam?
CHOMSKY: First of all, let’s make absolutely certain that was the fact: that the U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late ’50’s the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh — which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam. [The Geneva Accords of 1954 temporarily divided Northern and Southern Vietnam with the ultimate aim of reunification through elections. — editor’s note]
And so, not only were they not conducting any terrorism, but in fact, they were not even responding to the violence against them. It reached the point where by 1959 the Vietminh leadership — the communist party leadership — was being decimated. Cadres were being murdered extensively. Finally in May of 1959 there was an authorization to use violence in self-defense, after years of murder, with thousands of people killed in this campaign organized by the United States. As soon as they began to use violence in self-defense, the whole Saigon government apparatus fell apart at once because it was an apparatus based on nothing but a monopoly of violence. And once it lost that monopoly of violence it was finished. And that’s what led the United States to move in. There were no North Vietnamese around.
Then the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was formed. And its founding program called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And it’s very striking that the National Liberation Front was the only group that ever called for the independence of South Vietnam. The so-called South Vietnamese government (GVN) did not, but rather, claimed to be the government of all Vietnam. The National Liberation Front was the only South Vietnamese group that ever talked about South Vietnamese independence. They called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a kind of neutral block, working toward some type of integration of the South with North Vietnam ultimately.
Now that proposal in 1962 caused panic in American ruling circles. From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.
And in fact Kennedy and later Johnson tried to block every attempt at neutralization, every attempt at political settlement. This is all documented. There’s just no doubt about it. I mean, it’s wiped out of history, but the documentation is just unquestionable — in the internal government sources and everywhere else.
And so there’s just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South. There were no North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam then as far as anybody knew. And they anticipated of course when they began bombing the North from South Vietnamese bases that it would bring North Vietnamese troops into the South. And then it became possible to pretend it was aggression from the North. It was ludicrous, but that’s what they claimed.
First of, the US did not invade North Vietnam because they were afraid of war with USSR and China. Not for any other reason.
The US absolutly dominated the South, it was a client state. They basically made it possible for the South Vietnam government to exist. When the government there did perform as the US thought it should, the US installed a new government.
The US was the only thing preventing the South from failing. You are suffering from Propaganda if you believe the South Vietnam was much of state without US support. It did not have the support of the majority of people in Vietnam and probebly not even in the South.
The government that the US supported was handing out land to political cronies against the people on the land, who did you think they were fighint? Then the American went in and helped this corrupt regmie to enforce these policies.
The US Army absolutly slaughtered the people of Vietnam in unbelivable numbers. They spread 10% of the country with chemicals that lead to 100000s of deformed children. The numbers are stunnig and I could go on about all the other countires and people the US bombed and how that helped to great the worst genocide in human history (% based).
And all of this for what? The leader of North Vietnam wanted to firendly with the US in the beginning. Even basic geopolitics could tell you that he would much rather have the US as a supporter in order not to be dominated by China. This actually what has now happened, Vietnam is now US new best buddy. Also Vietnam turned capitalist pretty quickly once the US was gone. Most people realize that Communism is a idiotic idiology and most elites don't really like it at all.
Vietnam might not be rich yet, but they are doing much better. This process could have been started 20-30 years earlier but they had to fight a war for survival.
Your simplistic comparison with Korea is just that, stylised to fit your narrative. In reality the two situation were quite different.
The US also directly supported this and helped many people who otherwise would have stayed. It was part of a dilibrate strategy to weaken the North.
Many of the fears people had about what the Communist government was doing were false, and the Communist government actually implemted some sensable policies.
At that point it was not clear that the North would get more support, but over the coming years it became quite clear. The South just failed as a state way more so then the North.
A bunch of poor Vietnamese were able to defeat the biggest and most powerful military in the history of earth. That's a pretty hard thing to explain.
Also, lets remember that we should not take everything they say for granted.
A lot of resistance is also passive and that is effective as well.
That is not what US internal diplomatic notes said at the time, not in modern interviews if McNamara, Clark Clifford etc.
The Vichy French colonialists, then the non-Vichy French, then the Americans fought to retain the Vietnamese colony in the south. The fight was against the National Liberation Front in the south - Buddhist monks, Paris educated professionals, peasants etc. The north had little involvement until mid-1968. Also French Indochina was one country until 1954, and the ceasefire lines were supposed to be temporary barring national elections, which the US opposed. There never was a "South Vietnam".
> The South's people would have the same horrific history
US policy during the Korean War was to fire on civilians, as happened at No Gun Ri. South Korea was under a series of dictatorships with a more horrific history than anything happening up north until the late 1970s up until the Gwangju massacre in 1980 in South Korea. The northern economy eclipsed the southern one as well. Things began changing in both countries in the 1980s and 1990s for a variety of internal and external reasons.
That's neither the position of vietnam nor the US. Even during the separation the North left 10 000 vietcongs in the south to sow discord and guerrila activities. The different opposition organisations were soon under direct control from the north.
At least that is what the "People's Army of Vietnam" is saying which can be read here: https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Vietnam-Official-History-1954...
This is a cynical view but I see America as sticking to it fairly consistently over the last two centuries.
I suppose one bright spot in this otherwise dismal time is that both the left and the right mostly agree that we shouldn't be dropping bombs on people.
You mean in terms of voters, right? Because in terms of politicians, there seem to be an awful lot of hawks on both sides.
Our foreign policy is directed by people who do not care what the american people think.
The Europeans ignored many of the lessons of the civil war (the first modern war in many ways) because they figured that a bunch of amateur generals fighting with conscripts were not worth learning from.
Edit: fat thumbs typed 18 instead of 19.
I don't think the attitude was the same regarding a standing Navy. Standing Army, yes; the founders were clearly against that. But a major reason for having a standing Navy is to keep conflicts elsewhere from getting to the point where you need an Army--for example, protecting American merchant ships sailing abroad (since the British Navy would no longer protect them), which was what buying the original 6 frigates was for.
Can you give any specifics to support this? From my reading of the writings of the founders, I see them talking about the dangers of a standing army all over the place, but I never see them talking about similar dangers of a navy.
> Your rationalization was well after the fact
No, it was the reason given at the time. The reason it wasn't done first thing when the Constitution was adopted is that navies cost money and the early Federal government didn't have a lot of it, so they only agreed to finance a navy when the losses to American merchant shipping became large enough to make it a worthwhile expense.
1812: The Navy's War by George C. Daughan
and the history of the Naval Act of 1794
I think it's important to clarify, or read from context, whether people mean voters or politicians (which I often use to include political operatives and partisan organizations).
'Deep state' is being thrown around a lot these days. It's proper meaning is in relation to things like Italy's Propaganda Due lodge: a tightly-connected network of people who are in a strong sense anti-democratic, who are not publicly known but have something of a veto over the actions of an elected government.
Some of those features apply to the anti-Trump official world in the US, but only in a much weaker form. And this isn't to do with it, not least because Trump is the one pushing the button.
The idea that the actions of the state don't correlate with the desires of the people is more-or-less deliberate in a representative (rather than direct) democracy, incidentally. As a political scientist I find it rather offensive that the word 'democracy' has been repurposed to mean a kind of replaceable oligarchy rather than government-by-the-people, but that ship sailed decades ago.
They are distinct but not disjoint; the “deep state” concept is a specific form of unresponsive elite.
> The idea that the actions of the state don't correlate with the desires of the people is more-or-less deliberate in a representative (rather than direct) democracy
No, it's not, in general; the purpose of representative democracy is to allow the actions of the state to give effect to the desires of the people, on the premise that even most people with the requisite ability to effectively decide how to give effect to their desires aren't optimally employed spending all their time figuring out how the state should do that.
It's true that the US federal model of an unusually large number of barriers and unusually undemocratic selection and allocation of representation is designed to prevent government from representing the desire of the people, but the US system isn't the Platonic ideal of representative democracy.
That's one argument for representative democracy (and, I think, the best one for why participatory democracy is tricky) but it's not the intention behind existing representative institutions, at least in the US and the UK (and the countries who inherited different parts of our systems).
Edmund Burke's address to the electors of Bristol contains one of the most famous declarations of this principle: 'Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.'
The Federalist papers show that the US model was also not designed to operate as an efficient aggregator of citizens' opinions, but more as a means of the public endorsing competent and honest representatives to govern on their behalf.
The classic book-length exposition of this model (which is basically modern elite orthodoxy) is 'Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy', by Joseph Schumpeter. David Held's 'Models of Democracy' is a good comparative text, though there are lots of those to chose from.
While I understand this sentiment I've come to the conclusion that it's wrong and maybe even dangerous. Ultimately it got us Trump. I think this perspective on our current time is mainly cause by how the need cycle works. Someone on the a16z podcast claimed that shorter new cycles lead to more negative reporting. He suggested the thought experiment of a need paper only published every 100 year. It would contain awful stuff like WWI & II, but lots of positive we never think about like the number of diseases that have been eradicated. We have fewer military conflicts, unbelievably better build mortality, fewer famines, more individual freedom. It's not all great but it's so much better than we tell ourselves. According to Russ Roberts a study found that even economists who are pessimistic about our current situation will answer that they'd want to be alive right now when they are asked at what time in history they'd want to live. While I find myself more upset with the current state of things than ever before I must agree.
Edit: formatting
(Whoa! I really just meant to raise the questions, especially in the case of justification for recent US military conflicts. I'm not advocating for anything!)
Each of this items, alone, would justify many countries in the world to suddenly attack US.
Better not confuse the concepts of attack and defense.
Each of these notions are but rationales used to start a fight, not defend against one.
Once in a while you have a case where it makes sense, but very seldomly.
Most of the time you are much better at defending against uncertainty and economic hardship by putting some money assied rather then building a bunch of tanks.
Yeah, this was the time the US military did the bidding of the Supreme Islamic Councile and helped to ethnically cleanse Baghdad.
Givin support to people like the Badr Brigades who went around with powerdrills and killed all non-Shia residents.
The level of violence went down because the Sunni were defeated. They are just 20% and they have no chance against the other 60% that control the government and 100'000 marines.
The US also made deals with the Tribs in the country side. This worked as long as America was there and giving them protection and support. Once the US left it took a couple years and many of these tribes joined ISIS.
The narrative the this counterinsurgency thing 'worked' is utter nonsense. When Petraeus tried the same strategy in Afganistan where there was not a majority who was willing or able to utterly crush a small minority it failed completly.