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Saturday,
October 6, 2007 Subject: A demographic
theory of war
Jerry,
There is an interesting discussion here of
demographics as it relates to war:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/
Public/Articles/000/000/014/185jeplm.asp
Some will see it as another reason to call for action
- boost the birth rate now to prepare for future war. Only I doubt that such
a call could be effective:
1. The appeal couldn't be direct, it would have to be
disguised as something else (religious revival, return to traditional
values, etc.). In the Western world, the notion of having more offspring to
be cannon fodder for the aspiring empire would be a very tough sell.
2. It might be difficult to achieve high growth rates
economically. Lester Thurow explains it this way:
"If one looks at wealthy countries, one sees that they
have all had a century or more where population growth rates did not average
much more than 1 percent per year. The reasons are simple. Before per capita
incomes can go up, the new individuals added to any society have to be
provided with those items necessary to generate the society's already
existing per capita GDP. Newborn citizens must be fed, housed, and given
medical attention until they enter the labor market and can support
themselves. Entering the labor force on average at age 20, they need $8,000
per year in living expenses for 20 years if they are to have the average
American childhood. To get an average job they must be given the average
amount of education. American elementary and secondary education costs
$7,200 per year, and higher education $14,700 per year. A little
multiplication will tell you what must be invested in education if everyone
is to have twelve years of education, and 34% of the population is to have
some college education. To create an American average job requires $122,700
in capital equipment. About two-thirds of the adult population works. Social
infrastructure, such as roads and airports, requires another $21,000 per
person. Adding it all up, total investments of a little less than $400,000
per person are needed to make each new American into an average adult
American.
Human populations can at their maximum grow at about 4
percent per year. Not country has ever had a 4 percent population growth but
some, like Mexico, have come close for a while. Suppose American's
population were growing at 4 percent per year. This would mean 11.3 million
new Americans every year and require an investment of $4.4 trillion. But the
American GDP is only $11 trillion. Forty percent of the American GDP would
have to be devoted to making new Americans into average Americans. This
would require a big reduction in the standard of living of existing
Americans. They simply would not accept it. The necessary investments would
not be made, and the average per capita American GDP would start to fall.
In poor countries, the investment numbers in each
category are different, but when one divides by the local GDP the
percentages come out about the same---somewhere near 40 percent. As a
result, with population growth rates much above 1 percent, it is essentially
impossible to catch up. This is one of the main reasons to be optimistic
about China's economic prospects and pessimistic about India's economic
prospects. One country has its population under control and the other does
not." [Fortune Favors the Bold, Lester Thurow, 2003]
So if Thurow is right, you can either be a rich
country with population growth at or below 1%, or you can be a poor country
that is well stocked with cannon fodder. Doesn't seem like all that much of
a choice to me.
But what of those teeming hordes of foreign young men
ready to do battle with our precious youth? Well, it is a problem if we
expect to embark on daring foreign adventures, imposing our will and way of
life on unreceptive native populations by military force. Then we will have
wars of attrition that we can't win. But it does not follow that those
teaming hordes would necessarily pose a real and severe threat to our
national sovereignty. Modern war is as much about logistics as it is
manpower and technology. It is hard to imagine any of these relative poor,
rapidly growing countries creating and maintaining the supply lines needed
to sustain a direct attack on the US. And we already have more than enough
nukes to deter any nuclear armed enemy. Terrorism is, of course, something
to be concerned about. But I think there are better ways of dealing with
those threats than sending an army to execute a regime change with every one
of our potential enemies.
All this considered, I'll vote for a wealthy,
population stable, energy independent republic!
CP, Connecticut
Lester Thurow is always interesting. I
didn't say always right; but it's worth thinking about his theories. He's
also a fascinating lecturer in person.
It was shown in 1900 that war between
industrial nations was impossible because it would be so economically
devastating and expensive. Conclusively proved. No question about it. No
more big wars after 1900.
=========
Profound
Jerry,
Profound... from an unusual source
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/
2007/10/05/sputniks_impact_on_american_technology
<snip>
The astronauts brought back that image in the famous
photo, "Earthrise" -- and, with it, that feeling of longing. That iconic
image did not just help spur the environmental movement. With surpassing
irony, it created at the very dawn of the space age a longing not for space,
but for home.
This is perhaps to be expected for a 200,000-year-old
race of beings leaving its crib for the first time. We will, however,
outgrow that fear. It was 115 years from Columbus to the Jamestown colony.
It will take about that same span of time for a new generation -- ours is
too bound to Earth -- to go out and not look back.
-- Charles Krauthammer
========
This is going to be fun!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071005/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/blackwater_rice
"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered federal
agents on Friday to ride with Blackwater USA escorts of U.S. diplomatic
convoys in Baghdad to tighten oversight after a shooting in which private
guards are accused of killing 13 Iraqi civilians.
"The steps will require the State Department to deploy
dozens of additional in-house Diplomatic Security agents to accompany
Blackwater guards and are the first in a series of moves Rice is expected to
take to boost control of contractors the agency relies on to protect
diplomats in Iraq."
John
That should fix all problems...
=========
Promotion to Captain is automatic
Dear Jerry:
In the US Army, promotion to Captain is virtually
automatic, especially when there is a war on. During the four years I was in
I only saw one officer fail to make the grade, a VMI graduate who was an
avowed racist, used the "N" word frequently and looked like a recruiting
poster. It was his misfortune that the Army had finally decided to embrace
President Truman's policy on racial integration. (This took 20 years because
a whole bunch of officers had to retire first.) It takes real effort to get
yourself dismissed from the service in the middle of a shooting war, but he
managed it, as did a fair number of racist senior NCOs with 17 years in, who
were denied reenlistment, and hence, their pensions. It was interesting to
watch a major policy change in action. Normally, back then, the rank of
Captain came when you had been in three years or so. Enlisted men who were
promoted from the ranks started at First Lieutenant or Captain or even Major
if they had enough time in enlisted service. Interestingly enough, there was
no real advantage to getting your commission as a 2nd Lieutenant one place
or another. West Point, R.O.T.C. or 90 day wonder was all the same, and the
O.E.R. was the document that drove the decision to promote.
The most devastating O.E.R. I ever saw (and , yes,
these were passed around by the clerks) said, in part "This officer can be
relied upon to find the circumstances under which any given plan will not
work." Making Captain was no guarantee. One company commander of my
acquaintance was reduced in rank to E-5 and transferred to a post equivalent
to the Island of Yap after mismanaging his company for two years. In fact,
that was as we were pulling out of Vietnam and there was a big reduction in
force that swept away many of those time servers previously mentioned. Many
of them had attained the rank of Major. (There is no one more fearful than a
field grade officer looking for his next promotion. The process is called
"up or out" and is very Darwinian.)
Any large organization will go through these episodes.
No system is perfect, and neither are all of the people. The wonder, on a
daily basis, is that things are not even more screwed up. I've heard it said
that there are four kinds of Army officers; brilliant and industrious,
brilliant and lazy, stupid and industrious and stupid and lazy. The best are
brilliant and lazy, the worst stupid and industrious.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
==
Officers as college graduates, Chaos Manor, View,
Tuesday, October 2, 2007; Mail, Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Sir:;
The basic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon military, every
since Oliver Cromwell and the Major-Generals, has been that, in order to
preserve the supremacy of the civil society over the military, no one shall
be an officer who does not possess the requisites of status in the civil
society, however these are defined at that time and place. Furthermore,
inasmuch as an officer should be a person of more than usually steady and (Kirkean)
conservative frame of mind, officer recruitment should stress the
traditional bases of status, rather than new and emergent ones. In
eighteenth century England, the main basis of status was property,
especially landed property, and the logical result was the system of
purchase of commissions. A mill owner who wanted his son or grandson to be
an officer, and generally accepted as such, had to buy land and set up as a
country gentleman, and then, buy a commission. Under the more democratic
conditions of America, the militia officer was likely to be the same man who
was also chosen as selectman or church vestryman.
In late nineteenth century England, the bases of
status had shifted somewhat, and the basis for a commission was to have
attended a certain sort of expensive secondary school, the English Public
School, and to have a private income besides. The requirements were more
elastic in the local auxiliary forces, such as the British Indian Army, but
they operated most stringently in the Brigade of Guards, the one unit
ideally located to march into the House of Parliament, and take the M.P.'s
hostage, the way that Spanish colonel did back in 1981. In the United States
Army, at the time, a West Point nomination was still a valuable piece of
political patronage. Senators and Representatives dispensed appointments to
local elites. George C. Marshall went to Virginia Military Institute because
his father was of the wrong political party, and the local congressman did
not owe his father a favor. The case of Joseph Stillwell is still more
illustrative. After a spectacular high-school prank, Stillwell pere decided
Joseph was too rambunctious for Yale, and called in a favor to get him a
West Point nomination. There are certain interesting parallels to Winston S.
Churchill. Dwight Eisenhower, coming from notoriously egalitarian Kansas,
got his nomination through an open academic competition sponsored by his
senator, in modern fashion, in which the emphasis would have been on
mathematics and languages. However, Eisenhower was something of an
exception. Of course, the army of Marshall, Stillwell, and Eisenhower was
small. The officers were of course highly selected, and so, in the opposite
direction, were the enlisted men, who were more likely to be Foreign
Legion-style strays.
We now have a larger army. Both the officer corps and
the enlisted ranks are less divergent from the general population. Very
well, at present, the college diploma is the passport to a wide range of
good jobs for people who are not extraordinarily talented: schoolteacher,
state or federal bureaucrat, etc. College students do not study very much, I
grant you (say, 15 hrs/wk, total, in term, or 450 hrs/yr), but they practice
conspicuous leisure. The types of colleges, what one might call "collegiate
colleges," which produce a lot of ROTC officers tend to be the kinds of
colleges which have a lot of fraternities, and take football very seriously.
They are located in college towns, where there is relatively little scope
for students to work their way through college, and students cannot save
money by living at home. The archetypal workingman's colleges like CUNY and,
perhaps, Minnesota, geared to night school, are under-represented. In short,
ROTC recruits the kind of college graduate whose parents are also college
graduates. A newly commissioned ROTC second lieutenant has an economic stake
in the civil society, unlike, say, a South American officer, someone like
Hugo Chavez, who seems to have been born in a mud hut. Really talented
warriors, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, sooner or later get the clever idea of
making themselves king. The whole Anglo-Saxon military tradition is designed
to insure that someone like Bonaparte or Chavez does not come within
reaching distance of power.
Of course, this has a price in military efficiency. A
civil society, to preserve itself, has to take steps to minimize its
long-term conflict with other countries. Thomas More, in Utopia, posited
that his fictional hero king had created an island of Utopia by digging
something very like the English Channel. More realistically, England did, at
key points, chose to become an island by writing off bits of territory on
the continent. It focused its energies on consolidating the "Celtic Fringe"
instead. England recruited suitable people, and moved them to places which
were ultimately defensible, including, eventually, North America. That is
the ultimate background of Washington's Farewell Address.
Andrew D. Todd
==
On officers and college degrees
Dr. Pournelle:
I've read Tom Wolfe's and your commentaries on
requiring officers to have degrees, and was struck by a couple of things:
"According to Tom Wolfe's novel, today's college male
students are attached to beer kegs at one end and a coed at the other. Is
THAT what makes for a good leader?" I don't know what college Mr. Wolfe has
been visiting/attending, but I suspect that his view has been distorted just
a bit. I attended Virginia Commonwealth University from 1998 to 2003- I was
35 when I started, I might add- and while there were parties and sex going
on, what I saw there was about on a par with what I saw when I went to
college in 1981. And, from what I've been able to piece together from
various sources, that was not much different from what people of my parents'
(and your) generation experienced back in the '40s and '50s. My father tells
of him and his fellow medical students having parties with the lab's
ethanol, which back then was not denatured. I think Mr. Wolfe is the victim
of wishful thinking, either on his own part or that of others. Today's
universities are no more the epicenter of sexual debauchery than they were
when you attended. But much more importantly: you ask what the future
military leaders might learn from such overwhelmingly liberal institutions.
Apparently you feel that they will become thoroughly liberal from being
immersed in such an environment. And that is where I really take issue. A
person going to college may be young, but their opinions have already been
pretty firmly set on basic matters by their upbringing. While at VCU I saw a
good many mindlessly knee-jerk liberal kids, as the stereotype runs, but I
also saw that the majority of kids there were not following this trend-
there were very conservative right-wing types there, as well as more
moderately conservative people who looked on the flaming liberals with
amusement. The sort of person who would choose a military career is, by
nature and upbringing, likely to be conservative- and the neo-hippies are
unlikely to sway them. Kids in their late teens and early twenties are not
all easily led automatons, waiting to have their brains molded by their
peers and professors- most of them have minds of their own. So what will
they learn at college? They will learn how to think critically, how to
communicate clearly, and how to tolerate people with opinions different from
their own. They will learn how to work within an organization, and how to
work with people with whom they don't necessarily agree. In short, yes, they
will learn many skills valuable to a leader- whether their degree is in
engineering, as mine is, or in history or literature or one of the softer
fields. No matter what, they will only graduate if they learn to do as
they're asked and cooperate with others. And that is well worth learning.
Paul Martin
==
Military Education
Dr. Pournelle,
I've a little to add to Ed's comments on Air Force
senior enlisted educational requirements. Now you HAVE to have an
Associate's Degree from the Community College of the Air Force (CCAF) to
advance beyond Master Sergeant in the USAF. You do not get a senior rater
endorsement on your enlisted performance report (EPR) if you do not have
this otherwise worthless piece of paper. Even if you have a bachelor's
degree from another school, you'll be down rated. Not getting a senior rater
endorsement on your EPR puts your promotion board score in the toilet,
knocking off around 60 points. You can ace the test portion of your overall
promotion score, but lack of the CCAF degree will keep you from advancing
beyond Master Sergeant. I've not gotten my CCAF degree, because over the
years I've either been deployed or had to work two jobs to support my wife
and six kids. Last year they made the degree a requirement, and I knew then
I'd never advance further. That's one reason I'm retiring next year. The
other is that I'm tired of going to the desert and not seeing my kids for
four months at a time. I'm writing this from the desert right now, and it's
my last time over here :-). You have no idea how good that feels!
Still, I've seen people who are less capable promoted
beyond folks who are hell on wheels at their jobs due to this. It makes me
wonder, sometimes, what happened to the days when you were rewarded for
performance of you assigned duties? It's an annoyance to many in the
enlisted corps. Perhaps it would be different if the degree meant something,
but 90% of the credit to get the degree is training you get in the military
to do you job, then you have to take five basic courses (math, science,
humanities, speech, and some form of literature). I've seen plenty of folks
with college degrees who can't write decently (even without spelling and
grammar check in today's word processing programs) and cannot complete even
simple mathematic problems without the help of a calculator. That annoys me
more than anything, I guess…
Respectfully,
Name Withheld
==
Dr. Pournelle,
In my experience, there are at least three things an
officer learns in college, regardless of where they go to school.
1. The ability to express themselves in writing and in
their speech. The additional vocabulary alone is invaluable, and I have
witnessed firsthand the dramatic differences in sentence structure, grammar,
and spelling between college grads and non-grads. Not that all college grads
can spell or put together a sentence, but I find that this generality holds
true most of the time. I think this is one concrete reason to require that
senior enlisted troops get a college degree. 2. The breadth of experience
and knowledge, which provides context to everyday lives and decisions.
Whether it is a book read during English lit or knowing who the 300 were and
how their story relates to modern military tradition before watching the
comic-book version that was so popular recently, the sometimes random
exposure to additional culture and information in a structured format can
make the difference between someone who makes decisions based only on what
they are presented with in front of their nose, and someone who makes
decisions based on the big picture in addition to the immediate situation.
3. The ability to “learn how to learn” is often gained during college. Again
in my experience, this general ability makes it possible for college
graduates to more quickly absorb information and put it to use even when
there are time constraints or when presented with limited or incomplete
information. Extrapolation and synthesis tends to be a big difference
between college courses that require both memorization of facts and creative
approach to problem solving, and high school courses which often are focused
on fact memorization.
As an Academy graduate, I would further argue that the
leadership experiences every Academy grad receives, plus the additional
courses on military history, give an Academy grad a big advantage when
starting a career as a military leader. Enlisted troops must learn USAF and
generic military history from books as part of their professional
development studies (test scores are a big factor in enlisted promotions)
but their education is not guided by history professors so again this
sometimes lends itself to rote memorization of facts rather than practice on
how to creatively apply these facts to current and future situations.
Over time most senior NCOs in the USAF get this sort
of education as they advance through their military careers, but because of
the degree requirement, officers start out on day 1 with (hopefully)
additional critical thinking skills that are often demanded of very junior
officers.
S
=============
McCaffery Story
Remember the story I once sent you about standing in a
line all morning in sub-zero temperatures at the Smithsonian waiting for a
Van Gogh exhibition to open on its last day? Then being told that the White
House staff had been on a visit and had overstayed, so we wouldn't be able
to see the exhibition. Same crew.
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security, University of Sunderland.
Astonishing!
==========
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