My War (1982)
harpers.org
harpers.org
The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft.
Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.
(Leaving NBC for a different comment:) Stalingrad had more Allied deaths alone (in ~half year) than Union and Confederate deaths combined of the US Civil War (in ~4 years).
To be fair, that was (part of) a big war without medevac, but given (a) the determination of modern actors to ignore Geneva Conventions, and (b) the tech level of the RU/UA war, I'm not sure medevac is still a thing.
Not the way it was for US troops from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Getting injured people out of the combat zone is much tougher. The combat zone is deeper. The first kilometer is now about as tough as it was before helicopters. Doing something major for a patient in the "golden hour" after injury is often not possible.[1]
[1] https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2023/08000/putt...
Maybe I don't understand how the mentality works but for me, once you are at the point you are killing people - and killing them in the thousands - you are already either crazily desperate and/or have a complete loss of empathy for your opposition.
Once you are in this alien mindset, why would you pay attention to any "rules" that might limit your murderous psychopathy?!?
And this worries me. Seeing the world increasingly brace itself for war I fear there will be someone who thinks COVID was a great trial run for a bioweapon.
And that is my simple unimaginative first grab at horror. I am sure smarter minds than me can think up worse.
The theory is, that as war is just a continuation of peace "by other means", one should not start wars without having an idea of the various ways in which one might end them, and (as the NSDP discovered in 1945) it's a whole lot easier to end them if you haven't been doing war crimes (or "war crimes"; if you intend to end a war short of genocide*, de jure or de facto doesn't really matter) during them.
(yes, I think we both agree that it'd be better to have a period instead of "without" after "one should not start wars", but if one allows for the existence of hawks, is it not better that they have some limits?)
Which part do you consider sheer ego? The distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or the inclusion of medical personnel among the non-combatants?
* compare Goebbels' Freudian slip in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech
Or that once a war is started the "idea of the various ways in which one might end them" actually holds up in reality after the enemy get their vote.
I honestly tell you that if someone invaded my country in the manner of Russia with indiscriminate killing and bombardment of cities literally threatening the survival of those I care about then I will not give a toss what any convention says - what good does obeying a rule someone made up if I/my-loved-ones am/are dead?
And at that point, bio/nuke/any-weapons become an option - the rules be damned. I very much know that I shouldn't be trusted with such calls.
Essentially the sunk cost fallacy.
Making victims drag other down with them is like 101 Keeping The War Machine Going. Furthermore 'war mongerers without borders' cooperate for atrocities to get out of control.
At some point however the victims will blame their elite instead of the elite their elite blame.
Also, you usually don't lose everyone you care for in one blow. Losing half of your children might decrease the wish to lose the other half for some people.
Except where is the fallacy to the individual? As a society/nation you can argue these things but same as corporations, the decision makers are individuals.
And if the individual sees surrender as death (or equivalent, life in miserable prison)- Hamas for example - why would they stop fighting? And if you are outmatched then survival demands using every resource you have - rules be damned.
Hamas hiding in the civilian population is not surprising at all. Israel continuing to bombard them with civilians then harmed is also not surprising. This is war, not a game with rules.
It is terribly sad for the civilians. It is horrifying. And yet predictable.
Hamas might be a bad example since Netanyahu supports them. They are manufactured miserables where the point is that they are used as an excuse for ethnic cleansing.
Hamas could be compared to the right wing militias in Ukraine. Like, when they are in the position to pull you down with them, they will, becouse 'traitors'. And I guess both Israel and Russia are easy to "tease" which makes their job easy. And with their absolutist world view there is hard stopping them by talking. The hardline "total victory" types.
I see war as absolute/total/complete/existential in a sense. Anything less is an exercise in power, military/political/propaganda or otherwise. Not to demean those exercises as being terrible frightful happenings in their own right. Nor to demean their use in deterring what I see as war in the existential sense.
But I think that means I communicate with a crossed purpose.
For example, I see the US in Iraq as a military exercise. Nothing existential about it for the US. Again, to be clear, I'm not trying to demean the efforts or lives involved. There are great heroics and terrible outcomes in any such event. And such an exercise had significant political/social outcomes due to the military statement. For all I know it may have altered outcomes in a manner to avoid a war in the existential sense for the US. What if, per se.
But somewhere I feel that there is a different level, a different meaning, for fighting in the existential sense. World War 2 conveys that level of existentialism to me - many nations and peoples were fighting for continued existence. And it resulted in the age of the atom.
And I think it is this sense of "total war" that I mean when I am deriding the "rules of war". Because to me, the word War is loaded with the idea of there being no rules to begin with because sheer existence is on the line.
And so at this point I cede any debate. And thank you for helping me come to realise a significant point regarding my own views.
War is not a polite game of chess played by a nation. It is emotions, fears, consequences for individuals at every level.
When the war goes well you may compromise, you may not. But when survival is on the line everything comes into play - no compromises. What do you have to lose?
If that were true, all wars would end in genocide rather than treaty.
That they do not* is evidence that often, people —even individually— eventually decide what they have to lose is that which they have not yet lost.
(War, like chess, is a negative-sum game. The same calculus applies to the "victors"; I worry that people in the Old Country often forget this aspect.)
EDIT: also, the point of being either a noncombatant or a recognised combatant (who only followed lawful orders) is that you are then protected at the end of hostilities, so already your "nothing left to lose" has assumed (perhaps correctly!) a world in which the Geneva Conventions no longer have any meaning.
* consider: the US was losing in the Chiến tranh Việt Nam yet left without dropping The Bomb; Great Britain was losing in the US Revolution yet failed to do whatever the XVIII equivalent of glassing the colonies might have been (yes, they were busy globally with France, so they were a tad distracted, but still...)
There was some solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades, merkel et al completely ignored warnings from baltic members or Poland that russia can't be trusted yet. Current german leadership still doesn't treat this as their top urgency, they naively hope russians will get bored or scared from human losses and do just tiny glacial moves. This won't ever happen, just look at WWII, they still have the same mentality. They have to literally run out of equipment to stop at this point, they won't run out of men, not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
I think there were some naïveté on the US side of thing, just like both were naive on how mainland China would turn to democracy as it opened to outside trade and industry
That it would be a strongman who wants to go back to the era of the tsars was unexpected.
"Realization" implies truth. I bet you couldn't even try to prove your theory.
> ...not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
Pot, meet kettle.
The "unsubstantive" part is another matter. Stop and look at the actual quality of my counterparts' comments Dang. Is it (solely) me who is deserving of a scolding?
These are not minor or inconsequential topics being discussed here. If no community takes a stand and takes thinking more seriously especially when it matters, humans will continue to be tricked into forever war, indefinitely.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
- Carl Jung
Fundamentally it's ok to arbitrage with your opponent if it means more prosperity for you -- it gets complicated when you're doing it on the back of large deficits, and do it for long enough that you forget it was a gambit to begin with and now it's a dependency. Oops.
This is a self-inflicted wound and I cannot feel sorry for Germany. Their choice has been fueling the Russian war machine until recently. Fuck 'em.
It was a war of maneuver from start to finish, which is why it was so much more destructive than WWI.
>Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone
Do not believe Ukrainian numbers any more than you believe Russian numbers.
One thing we have learned from this war is that a core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat. With the current recruitment crisis in the West I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a push from the agencies to make future generations more right wing.
Not WWI-style, but I think there were a number of trenches. For example, Fortress Europe (Germany's efforts to secure Europe), consisted of a number of Maginot Line-style entrenchments and tunnel complexes.
I think that the Eastern Front also had a lot of that stuff.
I believe that the Ukraine War is now featuring trenches, and I know that the Ethiopia/Eritrea War featured classic WWI-style trench warfare.
WWII was real bad, and was one of the first modern wars to claim more civilian lives, than military. I think that's sort of become a standard feature of most wars, these days; even the small ones.
I'm currently trying to figure out how my father[0] got a Silver Star, in Belgium, in WWII. He never told us, and the St. Louis fire destroyed his main records.
It affected him badly. I think he fought in a similar fashion to this story. He was in mechanized artillery, but saw plenty of bad stuff, and was wounded twice.
thank you for sharing. i enjoyed reading a little bit about your dad's exploits. /salute to Mike Marshall.
My grandfather became a Navy navigator, B25s I think, right as the war ended. Chased hurricanes in the Pacific. I was the only person in the family to ever get much out of him about it in the last years before he passed.
Even in peacetime operations, he watched many colleagues die in storms, fog, and from accidents. I think everyone who served then saw how arbitrary death could be, and how the entire service was designed to operate around the necessary assumption that lives would vanish for nothing - and that everything else had to keep humming along.
Provides a very different perspective than the modern era.
The Central and Voronezh Fronts each constructed three main defensive belts in their sectors, with each subdivided into several zones of fortification.[148][149][150] The Soviets employed the labour of over 300,000 civilians.[p] Fortifying each belt was an interconnected web of minefields, barbed-wire fences, anti-tank ditches, deep entrenchments for infantry, anti-tank obstacles, dug-in armoured vehicles, and machine-gun bunkers.[151] Behind the three main defensive belts were three more belts prepared as fallback positions; the first was not fully occupied or heavily fortified, and the last two, though sufficiently fortified, were unoccupied with the exception of a small area in the immediate environs of Kursk.[150][152] The combined depth of the three main defensive zones was about 40 kilometres (25 mi). The six defensive belts on either side of Kursk were 130–150 kilometres (81–93 mi) deep.[152] If the Germans managed to break through these defences they would still be confronted by additional defensive belts to the east, manned by the Steppe Front. These brought the total depth of the defences to nearly 300 kilometres (190 mi).
The opposite lesson from WW2, where having genocidal right wing nationalists tended to start the wars which you would then lose. The RWNs in Ukraine are even cited in the Russian causus belli (yes, obviously that's BS and it's an unjust invasion).
RWNs in Europe also tend to be pro-Russia. Possibly because Russia is paying them, possibly sheer contrarianism. Either way it's going to be difficult to divert them from divisive, fictional "enemy within" anti-immigrant discourse to the real threat from Russia.
>Look ma, we made grandpa's genocide into a game for 5 year olds.
Both, but mainly it's because of a common enemy - the liberal-democratic west. Russia has very little in common with conservatives in the west when it comes to lifestyle (divorces, suicides, drugs, hiv, alcoholism, abortion are at record levels there - much higher than in most western countries) - but it promises "conservative values", hates liberals and delivers anti-LGBT legislation and that's enough for far right.
It's not unlike the nazi alliance with communism before WW2. Both wanted "liberal global order" gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...
And it started in 20s already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Rapallo_(1922)
Soviet russia helped Germany work around the military restrictions that were placed on them after WW1.
Certainly there was much more maneuver in WWII - blitzkreig - but it lasted a long time and armies were not in constant motion all that time.
Ye see Alternative for Germany. Providing weapons for Azov et al. removed alot of social dogma around supporting those kind of movements that NATO would bomb "becouse nazis" if they were not picking on the right ethnicity.
Dunno why 'people' pretend this is not a thing. There are more or less fascist paramilitaries roaming around and collecting men for the trenches. Men who btw also are barred from fleeing the country.
That's inaccurate - Poland at least declared that it will cooperate with Ukrainian authorities in this matter should they decide to recall their men.
So far the only thing that happened in this direction is that the Ukrainian consulate in Poland stopped providing services for adult Ukrainian men.
Just for anyone interested: Sweden actually stopped conscription in 2010, switching to a fully volunteer-based professional force. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, opinions began to change and conscription was reintroduced in 2017. The number of conscripts per year is much lower than it used to be (~5K last year compared to ~27K in 1997), but is planned to increase to ~10K/year by the early 2030's.
GDP of Russia was about 2 trillion USD in 2023. GDP of EU was about 18 trillion USD.
1.5% of EU GDP is still double the russian military budget.
People who are in their 90s: “Guess I’ll just die then.”
Thank God For the Atom Bomb (also by Paul Fussell): https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...
Losing the War by Lee Sandlin: https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memor...
Which actually surprised me, because I first learned about him through his book on class (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-clas...).
It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it.
Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing.
I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory.
I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.
the opposition of these values to liberté égalité fraternité doesn't seem to have changed much in the intervening eight decades
Having reflected, the general problem with "homeland" vs "patriotism" is that the narrower focus might lead to silliness such as the overseas francophonie getting textbooks speaking about "our ancestors, the celts".
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls_nVMZK3rM (Euh les filles, are-you sure that the problem of inégalité as posed is, in fact, soluble by radicals?)
(at least Vichy France left things at « Famille » and didn't go so far as the teutonic triple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_Küche,_Kirche#Third_Re... )
The Real War 1939-1945 (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33184040 - Oct 2022 (161 comments)
Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32188044 - July 2022 (1 comment)
Book Review: Fussell on Class - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913 - March 2021 (75 comments)
The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027749 - May 2012 (78 comments)
Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019325 - May 2012 (3 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
"This story is based on the non-fiction book The Anatomy of Courage by Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran (1882-1977), who was also known as Lord Moran. He served as the personal physician to Sir Winston Churchill. As a doctor in World War I, Lord Moran had no knowledge of concepts such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but he was a keen observer of human nature and captured the heartache of that tragic war. I’ve drawn from the examples he cataloged from the trenches of World War I and expanded on them in this novel, wanting to keep his insights alive."
And, of course, he talks about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" too …
That said... this guy joined the ROTC because it got him out of gym class in high school. That put him on the path to being a lieutenant in WWII, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place, but I also don't consider him likely to be a clear-eyed observer of it all.
I mean, the horror he experienced is real, and he describes it eloquently. The larger picture... that's where I don't trust him so much.
> it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place
You go to war with the people you have available, few of whom are ideally suited to it.
> shrewder friends were enrolling in Navy V-1 or signing up for the pacific exercises of the Naval Japanese Language Program or the Air Corps Meteorological Program