Citizens and Legions;Farewell Printed Britannica; the measure of the universe

View 717 Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Continuing the previous theme:

From Kandahar embedded writer Neil Shea, just up in The American Scholar

http://theamericanscholar.org/a-gathering-menace/?utm_source=email

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics

Harvard University

Shea of course finds what he is looking for and writes about what he intends to write about, but I expect he was able to find the instances he describes. Some of it is the kind of show that insiders put on for reporters. Some is quite real. It is hardly astonishing. Spend some time hanging around police bars among long term patrolmen who have long been assigned to certain precincts in any big city in America and you might be surprised at what you hear.

The American Way of War has been to maintain a small professional army, a very professional and mostly long term service Navy, and otherwise play things by ear; when there is a war we call up citizen soldiers and put out a maximum effort, win the war, and go back to the business of the United States, which is mostly business and in any event was dictated by liberty not by government directive.

Just as this policy failed in Greece and Rome when the citizens were continually called up to defend the country and eventually became professional soldiers because they never had a chance to become citizens, it was thought to be failing after Viet Nam when the war seemed to drag on and on, and the conscript army used its political influence. The need for a long war of attrition – the Cold War – changed things a lot. Even so, it was possible to continue with citizen soldiers. Even the long term regulars were not subjected to continuous deployment in constant danger. SAC and the deterrent force were subjected to the continued stress of the Cold War, but as SAC proudly proclaimed, ”Peace is our profession.” Those on combat readiness duty were subject to the threat of ultimate violence, and sometimes to operational violence through accident, but there was little actual combat. The navigator of the KC-135 that was scrambled to rendezvous at the North Pole with the B-52’s understood that if this was the real thing, his ship would pump all its fuel into the Buff and be left dead stick over the ice, but he flew the mission, and went home at night to be a citizen again. The artillery brigades that kept watch over the Fulda Gap understood that if the joint USSR/People’s Germany maneuvers were a mask for a real invasion, all hell would break loose and Armageddon would be at hand; but as years went on and the maneuvers remained maneuvers, or the Warsaw powers invaded each other but not the West, it became easier to live with. No one was planting IED’s along the road from the base to the supermarket, and the markets were stocked with the goods you wanted. It was Cold War, but as time went on it was colder rather than more like war.

Viet Nam changed much of that, but tours of duty in country were short, and for most of that tour you weren’t really in danger. And the conscripts had their political influence. This produced the Hollow Army. The Volunteer Army was to change that.

We went to an army of citizen soldiers, but when you have been deployed four times in eleven years you have had precious little time to be a citizen, and the deployment is to a place more like hell than of any Republic you want to be part of. And the budgets were cut, the services were cut, veteran benefits were cut, and it seems that we thought we could treat the citizen professionals as if they were Foreign Legion. “You have entered the Legion in order to die, and the Legion will send you where you can die.” But the Foreign Legion was never intended to be a citizen army, and its members were not considered to be citizens.

The United States has to make up its mind. If we want a citizen army we have to start treating the Army like citizens. They have to be given time to be citizens. You cannot keep them continually on deployment while their children grow up without them, and they become soldiers as the concept of normal life and citizenship fades. If we want an army of Gypsy Joe’s – see Fehrenback’s This Kind of War if that makes no sense – it is possible, but you have to understand what you have when you do that. If we want an army of Joe and Willy, then they have to know that at some point their duty is done; and we have to treat them like citizens when they come home. You can’t run an empire on the cheap. You can’t meddle in other people’s affairs and save money – not unless your goal is simply to go in and loot, and extract tribute from the conquered. We don’t do that.

Note ‘there was a platoon sergeant named "Gypsy" Martin. Martin carried a full canteen and bandoleer, but he also wore a bandanna and earring, and he had tiny bells on his boots. Gypsy Martin hated Chinese; he hated gooks, and he didn’t care who knew it.
In anything but war, Martin was the kind of man who is useless.
In combat, as the 24th Division drove north, men could hear Gypsy yell his hatred, as they heard his M-1 bark death. When Gypsy yelled, his men went forward; he was worth a dozen rational, decent men in those bloody valleys. His men followed him, to the death.
When Gypsy Martin finally bought it, they found him lying among a dozen "gooks," his rifle empty, its stock broken. Other than in battle, Sergeant Martin was no good. To Jim Mount’s knowledge, he got no medals, for medals depend more on who writes for them than what was done.’

Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

Fehrenbach’s essay was written after Korea, but before we learned lessons from Viet Nam. We ignore his words at our peril. http://space4commerce.blogspot.com/2006/05/proud-legions-by-tr-fehrenbach.html

The military have the preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn’t want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.
But the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.
No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.
The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.
In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

Republics want citizen soldiers. Republics that play at conquest and nation building need legionnaires. We know how to create that kind of legion (in part by creating auxiliary units which are actually deployed while the citizen army remains behind). There are costs for doing that. What we cannot do is expect citizen soldiers to become legionaries and spend their lives acting like mercenary soldiers under weird rules of engagement and remain citizens, but act like citizens when Neil Shea comes around.

Those contemplating these matters may find this interesting:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new-old-lie-7300

Objects and things and the universe

On an entirely different subject: If you have not seen this, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html be prepared to lose some time when you first look at it. I cannot think anyone reads this place who will not love this.

A sign of the times:

No more printed Britannica

After nearly 250 years, the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica print set will be discontinued.

http://store.britannica.com/products/ecm001en0

Considering the cost of $1,395.00, it’s hardly surprising that sales are down.

I truly regret this switch to digital. One of the joys of using a printed encyclopedia was all the things you discovered in your search for what you were supposed to be looking up. It wasn’t as efficient as the digital format but so much more pleasurable.

(I spent one summer as a child reading the 1957 Grolier Encyclopedia of Science. It was dated then but wonderful!)

Pieter

When I was a child out in Capleville, cut off from the rest of the world, I had two Britannicas, the Eleventh Edition and whatever the current edition was in 1941. I read both. Obviously I didn’t read them starting with From A to Anno and going through to whatever the last volume was named; I would think of something I would like to know more about, start to find it, be tempted by something else I had run across, and eventually find the entry I was looking for. Often enough the next item might also tempt me. I spent a lot of time with the Britannica, and I learned many things that I have found valuable over my lifetime that I probably would never have heard of without the books. Then, as an undergraduate or perhaps a first year graduate student I spent a few weeks in door to door sales of the Britannica. I think I sold one set in all that time. The training in sales, though, was invaluable. My father told me that I didn’t have enough larceny in my heart to be a successful door to door salesman.

I wrote for the Britannica a few editions ago. I did an essay on Science Fiction, in which I said we were “Bards of the Sciences”, much like the old Homeric bards who wandered from camp to camp and said “Give me a cut from that roast, and fill my cup with wine, and I will tell you a story about a land where men can fly, and another of a virgin and a bull…” I got a free Britannica for this and ten years of the Yearbook, and my boys grew up with it, using it about as I had.

We will miss the old Britannica, and I do not know what will replace it. Certainly not Wikipedia. You could rely on the old Britannica. We now have access to more information than ever, but we also learn to be skeptical. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps.