Remote war is bad war
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Can wars even be "won", in this sense, any more? Modern war is asymmetric. If the enemy is a radicalized percentage of the civilian population, hiding in plain sight, when do you "win"? Who surrenders? Who signs a treaty?
That sounds like modern warfare.
The fanaticism of Japanese soldiers may have nuances when compared to the guerrilla and insurgent wars of today, but the potential for fighting to drag on for decades seems to have been demonstrated.
The first gulf war, Operation Desert Storm, was deliberately limited in scope -- liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control. Its predecessor, Desert Shield, as similarly scoped, to prevent an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. Both were successful by the metrics set out for it. Bush Sr. got a lot of flak from the burgeoning neocon movement for not driving through to Baghdad, a decision which in retrospect was incredibly correct.
Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, and the various "police actions" undertaken since then, have objectives that are unclear or are metric-based and do not easily translate to a simple objective that can be reasoned to be a stable endpoint. In this, it seems that the military is following suit with general industry trends towards vaguely defined metrics and objectives that allow for technical "success". This approach was pioneered, really, during the Kennedy administration with our approach to Vietnam and the "domino theory".
Saddam was willing to leave.
> Both were successful by the metrics set out for it.
Because they were beat downs.
> Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, and the various "police actions" undertaken since then, have objectives that are unclear or are metric-based and do not easily translate to a simple objective that can be reasoned to be a stable endpoint.
i.e. not beat downs. America is good at beat downs, any idiot with a gun is good at a beat down because as the Beastie Boys said it takes a second to wreck. It takes time to build.
Remote wars then are bad because they facilitate beat downs. Because America has big guns, lots of money, and little actual intelligence of how to fix or change anything.
It's funny all these people saying oh well the CIA doesn't do anything it's those stupid people who are fighting with each other because of their ideology. And then look at how Russia with a bit of money screwed up American politics and how badly they reacted to this little bit of interference.
In this current age of instant communications, global logistics, and rapid deployment people are again failing to accept how strategy must change in response to these technologies.
Ever since Vietnam the world has entered the age of long war. War can be won, but not when people lack the necessary patience, persistence, and drive to win. For the home team to win all they have to do is remain vigilant. They don't have to win a single battle. They just have to remain militant longer than the opposing force has patience. Game over.
For an invading force to win they must be able to have a quick and decisive invasion that results in a clear military victory and then must hold the ground, in cooperation with supporting elements, as long as it takes for the defending forces to cease military action. COIN (counter-insurgency) is rarely taken seriously, but is so incredibly essential. All of this could take decades.
That is a hard win since most people in a first-world country understand warfare about as well as they understand poverty or astrophysics. Everyone seems to think they are an expert in these matters despite all evidence to the contrary and their clearly never working with or in proximity to the field of study.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech
You would think people would be educated enough to see through that bullshit on its face regardless of what politicians say. I don’t have any sympathy for people lacking this ultra basic level of education.
No, the recent wars we’ve fought have been asymmetric. There is no reason to think that won’t change.
My sense is that with more technology, you get more focus on metrics, not less, with an even greater likelihood of choosing the wrong strategy.
So I read this is less of a "good vs evil" debate. It's just that when you are up close to the evil, you are really left questioning, "is the end really going to justify the means". If you are far away, you just see "hey, we're winning".
Thus, this "bad war" is less of a statement of "evil war" but _ineffective_ war.
IMO, Vietnam was a vanity war against an idea ("Communism"), and remote warfare is bad because it lowers the cost of vanity conflicts dramatically.
If I need metrics in a historical narrative to keep score, nobody is winning. That's the problem.
Every military contract/mission officer wants one thing: to claim success for their project at the end of the year. They quickly learn the best way to do this is to reshape the metrics for success so that, whatever the outcome was for that year, you can claim that was the real objective all along. In the space of R&D contracting, it turns out that "blind the generals with flashy demos" does that rather well.
Of course, that also requires that the original mission objective be phrased in ambiguous terms so "goalpost" and "kick" remain freely fungible concepts. To that end, in 1964, "Defeating Communism" fit the bill nicely. Today it's "Defeating Terrorism".
Since "victory" is often very hard and messy to define, I just expect the more tech we offer, the more we're going to "win", because of this effect.
Yes--the US literally bombed villages of innocent people because maybe someone had written a Viet Cong slogan on the wall. It then counted these huts as "enemy structures" and "munitions factories." All civilian casualties were indiscriminately counted as enemy combatants.
That's literally what the US government did, while supporting an oppressive feudal government trying to crush a populist uprising (which was considered as obviously illegitimate because they were not Christian and capitalist).
KPIs, everyone.
It's also part of why black communities in the ghetto are harassed by police officers. If you have to hit growth numbers, you start going after people who aren't doing anything wrong and arresting people on bogus charges.
Quick google search suggests this is false, but an urban legend told marines during Vietnam to conserve ammo.
In fact, longest confirmed hit AFAIK was done quite recently by .50, I think by canadian sniper.
Plus you have these machine guns on vehicles that are .50, I can't imagine they are not used 'because rules'. Maybe not against civilians, but that's another topic.
The equivalent Warsaw pact round woud be the 14.5x114 (.57 cal) and is the third round with confirmed hits from a rifle at over 2km.
Note that both the 12.7x99 and the 14.5x114 are heavy machine gun rounds while the .338 lapua is specifically designed for rifles (at least I'm not aware of an HMG that fires them). It turns out that for long range you want a heavy bullet moving really fast with low-drag. an HMG cartridge fitted with a low-drag bullet does that pretty well.
None of this really matters in my opinion. Once the stuff is flying in both directions most restrictions (short of nuclear weapons) kind of get relaxed.
As a long-distance paper-punch, the .50BMG has some nice ballistic properties, if your shoulder can take the punishment. Thus its modern use. But the natural enemy of the .50BMG is the engine block. It was optimized for the objectives of the tail-gun crew in a WWII-era bomber.
The root of the idea is to get soldiers to think about the "rules of war", so if nothing else its been very successful in that area. I wonder if any one has done a study on to the effectiveness of these various training(s), to see if it has a measurable impact on behavior
Drake served in armored cavalry in Vietnam -- many of his science-fiction books imagine a universe of higher technology that is no less human.
A great accomplishment with no waste of resources.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu is quite a read. Did you read it? Well.. your enemies are reading it.
This has to be an over-simplification, and we should think this narrowly about armed human conflict. It's definitely possible to win a war by simply not fighting it, to win a war via stalemate (cold war), by finding a political alternative, or by just not showing up.
What is a justifiable war? Or necessary war?
While war is not good, what about our participation in WWII?
If Germany and Japan had started the war with their first strikes in the same way, but had not committed war crimes on a colossal scale, it might be remembered rather differently. Few people talk up WW1, it gets remembered as a pointless slaughter. Or all the various post-WW2 conflicts the West chose to get involved in.
I still believe it was worth fighting, but I agree that we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing that we didn’t have other motivations.
It was only the bombing of Pearl Harbor that gave Roosevelt the political power to openly support intervention in the European theater, which before he could only passively push for. If he had announced his intention to get boots on the ground before the 1940 election, we would have had a different president in 1941.
Diplomatic relations between the US and Japan were already essentially ended before the attack on Pearl Harbor. With the financial freeze already in place, particularly the refusal to sell Japan oil, Japan could not continue their wars in Southeast Asia. The Hull Note signalled a final refusal to terms which Japan could accept, and with that, war between the US and Japan was inevitable[1].
Japan's aggression in Southeast Asia could be seen as aggression against US allies, but it has to be seen within the context of colonialism. Japanese aggression in Southeast Asia was primary directed at colonies which were themselves the result of Dutch and French aggression. It's harder to see the US as being the "good guys" when you realize that until Pearl Harbor, US involvement in WW2 was that of an imperialist power meddling in the colonialist activities of another imperialist power[2].
Even after Pearl Harbor, the atrocities committed by the Germans and Japanese were not a big part of the public justification for war. If you look at American propaganda from during the war, all of it appeals to fear of the Germans and Japanese rolling through Europe and Asia and then finally invading America. It was only after the war, when the true extent of Axis atrocities started to become apparent, that these atrocities were used as an ex-post-facto justification of the war.
Hindsight makes it fairly obvious (to me, at least) that WW2 was a justifiable war. But I don't think, given the knowledge the average American had during the war, that we could have said the same thing then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note
[2] The war which was then called the Second Sino-Japanese was was an exception, in that Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Chinese government wasn't a colony, but Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek were allies of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" variety--it is unlikely that Japanese aggression against the nationalist Chinese would have motivated the financial sanctions the US placed on Japan in the absence of Japanese aggression against European colonies. There's little evidence that American attitude toward Chiang Kai-shek's government became any less imperialist, even after the war: Roosevelt offered Chiang Kai-shek's government control of French Indochina, but this was still a colonialist move, in addition to being a token gesture given none of the allies had the resources to reclaim the colony (and indeed, neither did the nationist Chinese: Chiang Kai-shek declined Roosevelt's offer).
I guess I'm glad US did participate, because I wouldn't be sitting here otherwise. :) Hard to argue against something that resulted in me existing.
Anyway, whether something is justifiable is subjective. Millions of people who died from US actions during WWII and millions who were killed by US after the WWII may have had a different opinion. To the dead, who the executioner was doesn't really matter after all.
It's also probably good to compare what happened, instead of what might have happened, because that is unknowable.
Nazis killed millions and had a disgusting ideology. US killed millions too, and one has to wonder what their ideology was or how important it was if they decided to kill hunderds of thousands of civilians just to show their new found military power, without even thinking about the victims (at least some National Geographic documentary I've seen recently mentioned that there were no indications in archives/diaries that anyone involved in decision making mentioned civilian lives that would be destroyed, while dropping the atomic bombs). How about millions of destroyed lives in the fight to "stop the reds"?
That's different than "good". The only reason that WW1 is seen as pointless and throwaway is that the scope is such that we can sort of internalize the horror and pointlessness. End of the day, WW1 and WW2 was the same conflict, and the scale of it was too horrific and too big for a human to appreciate.
It's amazing that people continuously by into the bullshit propaganda they keep making up.
The wars are about the same thing they have been for thousands of years. Why is there really conflict in places like Syria and between the US and Iran? It's the same thing as the Roman-Persian wars. Or the Crusades. It's about control of resources and territory.
Then why is violence worldwide decreasing?
And, are you counting something like what China is doing to the Uighurs in what you count as violence?
There are local maxima, of course, but over any significant time scale and area, violence is down a lot.
> Then why is violence worldwide decreasing?
Actual violence mostly occurs when one side is willing to use violence and the other side has enough belief in their ability to resist (including in that belief that the first side will back down before resorting to force) to compel the first side to actually resort to violence to achieve their actual aims, to which violence is usually merely a means. States becoming more willing to use violence and gain greater capacity to accurately (at least, avoiding false negatives) target that violence might plausibly result in populations becoming more compliant without actual resort to violence (or, at least, more quick to capitulate on an issue once the state first responds violently on it), reducing total active violence but increasing repression through the omnipresent threat of violence.
(Also, violence done “in [society's] name”—mostly state violence—and violence in total aren't the same thing; it's also plausible that total violence might decrease while, perhaps even because, state violence increased in a way which eliminated more non-state violence.)
"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it". --Robert E. Lee
Wars are about control and resources.
The real issue with remote wars is that people sit in their air conditioned offices in Washington DC and move other people's sons into the deserts. They pay no personal cost for the failed operations and accidental drone strikes.
Because those kids are more than willing to, say, accept extremely lucrative directorships at foreign oil companies, despite lacking any discernible expertise in the industry.
Selective Service is probably the last remaining bastion of sexism in the US. Take the opportunity to fix that at the same time!
> When domestic economic prospects are grim, the military has no problem recruiting soldiers. When those prospects improve, recruitment falls. How do we know? We can see a micro-version of this process happening right now.
> This year, for the first time in thirteen years, the Army reported it was short thousands of recruits. This year’s unemployment rate is also the lowest we’ve seen in that same time period. These facts are related, and the military agrees.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/military-recruits-full-employ...
> Enlisted recruits in 2006 and 2007 came primarily from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Low-income neighborhoods were underrepresented among enlisted troops, while middle-class and high-income neighborhoods were overrepresented.
Officers, of course, and civilian leadership tend to come even more from the upper part of the income spectrum. The idea that wars are fought by the poor for the rich is a myth--the lowest 20% of households in terms of income account for just 10% of enlisted ranks.
As to "profit"--war isn't particularly profitable. Raytheon, the third largest defense contractor, is about as profitable as Starbucks (both in terms of absolute profit and profit margin). The defense industry doesn't mint billionaires or enjoy 30%+ profit margins like say tech. Raytheon has a valuation similar to WeWork. With the exception of a few highly-compensated CEOs, defense contractors are dominated by upper-middle class scientists and engineers.
The U.S. has a middle class military that serves middle class interests. Anti-war people fail to understand that because they fail to understand that Americans aren't anti-war. We're an ideological people and we're not afraid to use the military to achieve a wide variety of ends.
For example, what are we doing in Syria? I don't know, but a slight majority of Americans oppose Trump's decision to withdraw: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/18/americans-d.... 43% of Americans still think the iraq war was the right decision: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/19/iraq-war-co.... Only 30% of Americans think that reducing our overseas military commitments should be a "top priority." https://www.people-press.org/2018/11/29/conflicting-partisan.... Many policies that would involve the opposite, like fighting terrorism, limiting the influence of China, etc., enjoy more support.
45% of Americans self-identify as "hawks." https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public.... And more than 50% of Americans believe the following would justify military intervention: stopping genocide (70%), humanitarian crisis (70%), stopping Iran nukes (69%), ensurign oil supply (55%), peacekeeping in the middle east (50%).
Over 70% of both Democrats and Republicans support: U.S. airstrikes against terrorist training camps, drone strikes to assassinate terrorist leaders, and assassination of terrorist leaders generally.