Category: military
Your Pre-Super-Bowl Reading
From around the web:
- Via Brad DeLong, James Fallows follows the money in U.S./China trade, so you can, too.
- Greg Mankiw lets New Hampshire Senate candidate Jay Buckey into the Pigou Club for proposing a gas tax of roughly 7 cents per gallon at current prices. Read about the National Security Levy here. It's as good a place as any for an aspiring politician to start.
- Closer to home, Dartmouth's president, Jim Wright, will receive the Semper Fidelis Award from the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation for his work on behalf of wounded veterans. Read more here.
The Counterinsurgency 411
Former Marine Captain Nathaniel Fick gives us an ominous welcome in Sunday's Washington Post Outlook:
Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.
The objective in fighting insurgents isn't to kill every enemy fighter -- you simply can't -- but to persuade the population to abandon the insurgents' cause. The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: Money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing.
Read the whole thing. Follow it up with some Q&A.
Memorial Day at Dartmouth
Last week, ABC News made the Wright choice for its Person of the Week. To read more about the inspiring work that Dartmouth President Jim Wright has been doing on behalf of severely injured veterans, see this story from The New York Times:
When he first met James Wright, the president of Dartmouth College, two years ago, Samuel Crist was in a hospital bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., recuperating from gunshot wounds from a firefight in Falluja, Iraq.
“I was pretty heavily medicated, so my memory is a little bit foggy, but he was visiting people and asking about their experiences in the war, and pushing people to get an education,” said Mr. Crist, 22, who grew up in Lafayette, La. “He said he’d been a marine, too, and he’d gone to college after he got out as a lance corporal, the same rank I separated at.”
That hospital visit changed things for both Mr. Crist and Mr. Wright: On Mr. Wright’s advice, Mr. Crist enrolled in college courses in Texas, and next fall, will transfer to Dartmouth.
Mr. Wright, 67, meanwhile, has made eight more visits to wounded veterans at Bethesda and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and, with the American Council on Education, started a program to provide individualized college counseling to seriously injured veterans.
We'll look forward to welcoming Mr. Crist and others to campus in the fall and, as ever, be grateful that we can honor them on Veterans' Day rather than Memorial Day.
Drafting with Charlie Rangel
There has been considerable discussion in the blogosphere about the latest installment of Representative Rangel's legislative proposals to reinstate the draft. Some of the discussion has been abetted by Milton Friedman's well publicized opposition to a draft and his recent passing. This is obviously a non-starter in Congress, based on the reactions of the current and incoming leadership. But it's a worthwhile discussion to have.
Of the several varieties of this legislation that Rangel has proposed in the last four years, I am most sympathetic to a version that includes both sexes and a wide age range (like 18 to 42, as in this latest proposal), with essentially no exceptions. If something like this were to be done, it should be done in a manner such that everyone has an equal chance of serving.
However, I don't necessarily subscribe to Rangel's reasoning:
"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel said.
One could just as readily make the argument that if we had millions of people available for military service at little additional cost, we would find ways to use them.
To my mind, the largest problem with the draft is that it puts a lot of untrained people not just in a position to get themselves killed but in areas where they might compromise the safety and mission of the well trained armed forces who would still do most of the work. A commenter (k harris) at Angry Bear put it well:
As a matter of rightness, we need to settle on who should serve, on whether service should be compulsory, and on how service should be compensated.
Some of those questions also spill over into preparedness, but preparedness goes beyond just those questions. We have been sending accountants and school teachers into a quasi-policing, quasi-combat situation. It's stupid. We have a highly mechanized, highly computerized method of war-making. Grabbing people off the streets, either through conscription or through reserve obligation, and tossing them into the military, is not going to get the job done. It was never a good idea to shove a rifle, or a pike, into a conscript's hands and put him on the battlefield. These days, it is not a good idea to put a conscript or a reservist into the logistics chain or a behind the lines hospital orderly uniform, much less on the battlefield. If we are going to keep fighting battlefield wars, and it looks like we are, then we need to do a better job of matching skills to jobs. That means interrupting people's lives during peacetime, giving them the specialized skills they need, and then turning them loose again. Keep bringing them back to keep skills fresh, in case we need them. That's a shared burden. It also helps keep battlefield soldiers supported in a way that may save lives.
The fundamental issue is not a draft but a mass mobilization of the population. In the wake of 9/11, much of the population was willing to be mobilized. Manpower applied to homeland security and the "War on Terror" could have been increased substantially without conscription. We would be five years ahead of where we are now in terms of training the citizenry to resist or respond to attack and to match them to the areas where they could help the most.
During these five years, there as been a frustrating absence of Presidential rhetoric about how citizens can participate meaningfully. If militant Islam is now such a threat to our existence as a society, then why are we not encouraged to change our way of life as a society to meet it? Is our patriotic duty as a citizenry really just to keep the economy humming along, so that tax revenues are generated to pay for the military budget? There's little outlet for patriotism in going to the office or the mall. To channel the patriotic fervor into something constructive, we need people to engage in something new, not something routine.
Happy Veterans Day
Last evening, the Rockefeller Center commemorated Veterans' Day with a presentation by Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer of their book, AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service--and How It Hurts Our Country
I thought it was a fascinating presentation, and I'm persuaded that the military will not be used as responsibly as it should be as an instrument of diplomacy if it does not include more participation by the upper classes, whom I would define as those with many choices about whether and where to work beyond military service.
I thought they summarized quite well why this situation won't change of its own accord. It is the convenient bargain struck by three institutions--the government, the military establishment, and the upper classes themselves. For the first two institutions, they realize when it's the children and spouses of those in the upper classes risking everything on the battlefield, they are likely to be more vocal in their displeasure with the military and civilian leadership when things go wrong. Who wants that kind of oversight if you can get by without it? And for the upper classes, the narrow benefits are obvious--why risk your neck if someone else will do it for you?
You can read more about the authors project here. It's the beginning of a very important national conversation.
UPDATE: Here's the story in Monday's issue of The Dartmouth.
Defying Logic
There is apparently quite a bit of fallout from the following remark made by Senator Kerry on Monday:
He said: "You know, education -- if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.
"If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Part of the fallout involved this clarification:
A Kerry aide said that the prepared statement, which had been designed to criticize Bush, "was mangled in delivery."
Kerry was supposed to say, "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."
Most of the fallout has been criticism of the Senator for saying that members of the armed forces services in Iraq are not smart, despite the clarification.
This fallout is misguided, even focusing on what he said initially. His critics are insisting that the members of the armed forces serving in Iraq are smart. I agree with their assessment, but their examples are not relevant here. These examples falsify the statement:
"If you are serving in Iraq, then you are not smart."
He didn't say this. He said:
"If you are not smart, then you get stuck in Iraq."
To falsify this statement, you need to find people who are not smart who are not stuck in Iraq. It's very easy to do that as well. You could start with people who don't understand the structure of if-then statements who are stuck in the Senate, if you wanted to.
ROTC on Campus
Greg Mankiw makes a number of thoughtful points about the relationship between ROTC programs and elite colleges, referencing this post at Open University. I believe that there should be more support for ROTC at Ivy League colleges, and I made a point this year of attending the Army commissioning ceremony.
At the Rockefeller Center, we have also made a point of commemorating Veterans' Day. Last year, we invited Nate Fick '99, a veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq, who delivered a remarkable lecture. This year, we will host Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, authors of AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service--and How It Hurts Our Country
Greg ends his post with a poke at some of his colleagues' protests against ROTC:
Some faculty see the Harvard ROTC ban as a protest against the federal government's treatment of gay military personnel. But to me the form of the protest seems particularly sanctimonious, as the faculty are asking for a sacrifice from others (in particular, from potential ROTC students and from other students who would benefit from a more diverse student body), while giving up relatively little themselves. I propose that any professor who wants to protest federal policy can do so personally by refusing to apply for or accept any grants from the federal government.
Well put. I support neither the treatment of homosexuals by the military nor the obstacles to ROTC on campuses. I'll also suggest another dimension along which burdens could be more equitably shared. If conscription should be required in order to protect the United States, then the entire population below the age of service in the Vietnam era should be mobilized, excepting only those who have already been discharged from the military. This does not mean combat for everyone--it means service. There is no reason why the burden of fighting the war against Islamic radicals should fall so disproportionately on young adults.
Hiroshima Day
I had mixed feelings about receiving this in my Inbox yesterday:
"I never really understood the craziness until I saw this video"
In honor of the victims of Hiroshima, send this E-card to your friends
Dear Andrew,
Sunday is Hiroshima Day, the 61st anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack in history.
We've come up with a 90-second video that shows the truth in a simple way you'll never forget.(click below to watch it).
http://www.truemajorityaction.org/postcardHiroshima Day is a time to remember the dead, but let's also work toward a saner, safer future. Please send the E-card to asmany people as you can. You will be commemorating the day at the same time you spread the crucial information needed stop the craziness.
No more Hiroshimas,
Matt Holland
TrueMajority Online Director
As TrueMajority videos go, this one isn't so bad, but what's with the crass reference to Hiroshima?
First, "No More Hiroshimas" suggests that there was an inadequate moral rationale for having dropped Little Boy on it. There is an important historical debate with valid points on both sides as to whether Japan would have surrendered without the two atomic bombs. The firebombings of Tokyo and other cities (over 100,000 civilians killed) in the winter and spring of 1945 didn't do it. The brutal battle for Okinawa (an estimated 150,000 civilians killed) in May and June of 1945 didn't do it. So what was going to do it in the absence of the atomic bombs? More firebombings? A naval blockade leading to widespread starvation? A full American invasion of Kyushu and beyond? It's hard to imagine we would have killed fewer than 200,000 Japanese with any of those options.
Second, we are told that "Hiroshima Day is a time to remember the dead." I'd like to suggest that if one were to observe Hiroshima Day, it should be a time to remember the living as well. In many communities across the country, there are men in their eighties, veterans of World War II, who would have perished in an invasion and occupation of Japan that might otherwise have been necessary to end the war. Commemorate Hiroshima Day by telling them how glad you are that they got to live for another six decades, to be fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, rather than paying the ultimate price.
Defense versus State
Via Powerline, this is an absolutely fascinating post over at Big Lizards. The thesis is that Presidential administrations can be characterized by whether the Department of State or the Department of Defense is ascendant. Without subscribing to all the editorial comments in the post, it does seem to characterize recent administrations--and the way they are personified in the media--quite well.
Taking the framework a little bit furhter, I think that most elite college campuses are State campuses. Very few, outside of the service academies, would be Defense campuses. And that may explain some of the disconnect between the military and the academy.