| Saturday,
August 19, 2000
The next is long. If you want to skip it, click
here. But I think most of my readers will want to read it.
General Anthony Zinni, USMC, is retiring as the head
of Central Command. The attached file text file is his retirement speech,
given last month. I think he has some interesting and important things to
say.
-- Cheers! - Lindy Lindy@arcanamavens.com
"When values are sufficient, Laws are
unnecessary. When values are insufficient, Laws are unenforceable." -
Barry Asmus
By General Anthony C. Zinni, U.S. Marine
Corps
I joined the Marines in 1961, so it's been 39
years. My retirement date is 1 September, but I plan to step down and go
on terminal leave in July.
I'd like to talk about who we were--the
military generations who went through the past four decades, from the
1960s up to the new millennium. If you looked at a snapshot taken when I
first came into the service, all the generals looked the same--older white
males with Anglo-Saxon names and Southern drawls--despite the fact that
the troops they led came from lots of different places. Let's just say
that the generals didn't speak Philadelphia the way I speak Philadelphia.
But things were changing in the 1960s. Marine
Corps officers were still coming in from the service academies and
military institutes, but more and more were coming in from Catholic
colleges in the Northeast (like I did), from state colleges and
universities around the nation, and from other schools with strong NROTC
units or other strong military traditions. At the same time, we were
seeing people coming up through the enlisted ranks to become officers--not
just the old mustangs or limited-duty officers with mid-grade terminal
ranks, but quality people we would send to school as an investment in the
future of the Corps.
Back then, whatever our various backgrounds,
we all came into the Service with a code--something imprinted on each of
us by family, school, or church. In my case, nuns and Augustinian priests
had drilled one into my head. Those who had come from military schools
received the imprint from their officers. One way or another, all of us
were programmed to believe that what we were doing was not a job; not even
a profession; but a calling.
For me, joining the Marines was the closest
thing to becoming a priest. Certainly, I took a vow of poverty when I
joined the Corps, although I stopped short of taking a vow of celibacy.
Lately, though, it seems as though we have been driven more and more
toward a "warrior monk" ethic, and I just wish that we'd start
spending as much time on the warrior part as we seem to be spending on the
monk part.
Perhaps part of the move toward monkishness
is prompted by the realization that the young people today don't seem to
be coming into the service with that code imprinted. It's not necessarily
their fault, but the code is not there. Until recently, our recruit
depots, officer candidate schools, and other institutions responsible for
socializing recruits and new officers have operated on the assumption that
the code was there, imprinted beforehand. So now we have to regroup.
A lot of things affected my generation over
the years. In addition to having good genes and DNA, those who did well
also seemed to have come from families that functioned normally, as
opposed to the dysfunctional ones seen so often today. We also grew up in
school systems that actually taught us something and imprinted us with
that code, which helped move us along the path toward being useful
citizens. And for most of us, our religious upbringing gave us an
acceptance of a Higher Being in one form or another, at the core of our
beliefs.
We also were shaped by events. Some were our
legacy; some were events we actually lived through. One of the biggest was
World War II, which has proved to be both a blessing and a curse to my
generation. The blessing was that it preserved our freedoms and our way of
life and lifted us out of a severe depression on a wave of prosperity and
moved us into a role of world leadership. The curse is that it was the
last Good War--with moral clarity, an easily identified and demonized
enemy, unprecedented national unity in mobilization and rationing, pride
in those who served in uniform shown by blue-star flags hung by the
families of those who fought and gold-star flags by the families of those
who died, and welcome-home victory parades for those lucky enough to
return home from overseas. Every war should be fought like that.
Our family military tradition in America
started with my father, who was drafted to fight in World War I--the War
to End all Wars--shortly after he arrived here as an immigrant from Italy.
He got here and he was drafted. When I looked into it, I found that 12% of
America's infantrymen in World War I were Italian immigrants. And they
were rewarded for their wartime service to their new homeland. My father
loved the Army for the relatively short time he served in it--and along
with his discharge papers he received his citizenship papers. He came out
of the War as a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Just imagine
what that meant to him!
During and after World War II, I learned
about war at the knees of my Uncles and cousins, who fought at the Battle
of the Bulge in Europe and all over the Pacific-on the ground and in the
air. A few years later, my older brother was drafted and fought in Korea.
Their war stories were remarkable: sometimes gory and horrible, but always
positive in the end. It was like winning the Big Game against your arch
rival--always clean and always good.
So this was my generation's legacy: World War
II was the way you fight a war. And all throughout our four decades of
service, this notion kept getting reinforced. Former Secretary of Defense
Cap Weinberger's famous statement of doctrine is a recipe for re-fighting
World War II--not for fighting the operations other than war (OOTW) that
we face today. In fact, if you read the Weinberger Doctrine and adhere to
every one of its tenets, you will be able to fight no war other than World
War II.
I've been attending all the World War II 50th
anniversary and follow-up celebrations in Florida, where I live and work,
and sometimes it is unnerving to face the old veterans who look at me and
seem to be saying, "How in hell did you screw it up? We had it right
and we did it right and we fought and we understood and we did all this. .
. ." It's hard to escape the feeling: God--I've let them down,
because the second major event that affected us was the Vietnam War--our
nation's longest and least satisfactory. It was my second-lieutenant
experience, and I wondered at the time just what in hell our generals--my
heroes who fought in World War II--thought they were doing. Those of us
who were platoon commanders and company commanders fought hard, but never
could understand what our most senior leaders were doing. The tactics
didn't make sense and the personnel policies--one-year individual
rotations instead of unit rotations in and out of country--were hard to
comprehend. In time, we lost faith in our senior leadership.
Today, of course, we are seeing a stream of
apologetic books by the policy makers of that era--as though saying mea
culpa enough will absolve them of the terrible responsibility they still
bear. Beyond all his other shortcomings, I'll remember--as an
infantryman--former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara for one
indelible thing: He decided that all services should have a common combat
boot. Further, he decreed that to economize there would be no half sizes.
So I had to wear size 10 boots instead of 9 1/2, my regular size. My feet
are still screwed up to this day, thanks to Robert Strange McNamara. And
that just about symbolizes the leadership we had back then.
The third thing that affected my generation
was the Cold War--which Actually was a 40-year attempt to re-fight World
War II, if ever the need arose. Once again, we were energized to engage in
global conflict against the evil Red Menace. Problem was that we never
could figure just how this particular war would actually start. After
playing a bazillion war games at the Naval War College and other places, I
still could not come up with a logical or convincing way such a war would
kick off. It was just too hard to show why the Soviets would want to
conquer a burning, devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit
the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over the way the
miserable war got started, jump into the middle of things, and play on.
Deep down inside, I don't think many of us really believed it ever was
going to happen.
To be sure, there probably were some armor or
armored cavalry folks with not much to do in Vietnam who sought to patrol
the Czech border, in the belief that World War III would erupt there. But
that's not where my life was focused at the time. The Cold War was
ever-present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems, and force
structure--but no one seriously believed that it would actually happen.
Still, it drove things. It drove the way we thought; it drove the way we
organized and equipped; and it drove the way we developed our concepts of
fighting.
Then suddenly, at the end of the 1980s, the
Berlin Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, and we found ourselves
in the post-Cold War period. It would require a major adjustment. I was
serving in the European Command when the Wall came down so quickly and
unexpectedly--and in turn we drew down too quickly, in the worst possible
way. On the way down, we broke a lot of china, in the form of contracts
with U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines--and in particular the
soldiers. We drew down our Army too far, almost ripping it apart in the
process--ten divisions is just too low a force level--I'm here to tell
you.
In addition, we have let manning levels sink
way too low, not understanding that the post-Cold War would bring more
chaos instead of a smooth transition to world peace. Not fully
understanding the Cold War force structure we were drawing down--and the
kind of structure we would need for the post-Cold War period, we have been
drawing down to a mini-version of the Cold War force. Today's high-demand,
low-density units are paying the price for those decisions. Let's admit
it--we've screwed up again.
The next influential event was Desert Storm,
which, as far as I am concerned, was an aberration. It seemed to work out
okay for us, but ultimately it may be an aberration, because it may have
left the impression that the terrible mess that awaits us abroad--to be
dealt with by peacekeeping or humanitarian operations--or coercive
diplomacy, for some--can somehow be overcome by good, clean soldiering,
just like in World War II.
In reality, though, the only reason Desert
Storm worked was because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the
planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically--with
less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.
In the high-and top-level war colleges we still fight this type of
adversary, so we always can win. I rebelled at this notion, thinking there
would be nowhere out there so stupid to fight us that way. But then along
came Saddam Hussein, and "good soldiering" was vindicated once
again. Worse yet, the end of any conflict often brings into professional
circles the heartfelt belief that "Now that the war is over, we can
get back to real soldiering." So we merrily backtrack in that
direction. Scary, isn't it?
Still trying to fight our kind of war--be it
World War II or Desert Storm-we ignore the real warfighting requirements
of today. We want to fight the Navy-Marine Corps Operational Maneuver from
the Sea; we want to fight the Army-Air Force AirLand Battle. We want to
find a real adversarial demon-a composite of Hitler, Tojo, and
Mussolini--so we can drive on to his capital city and crush him there.
Unconditional surrender. Then we'll put in place a Marshall Plan, embrace
the long-suffering vanquished, and help them regain entry into the
community of nations. Everybody wants to do that. As a retiring CinC, I
would love to do that somewhere before I step down-just find somebody for
me!
But it ain't gonna happen.
Today, I am stuck with the likes of a wiser
Saddam Hussein and a still-elusive Osama Bin Laden--just a couple of those
charmers out there who will no longer take us on in a symmetric force
match-up.
And we're going to be doing things like
humanitarian operations, Consequence management, peacekeeping, and peace
enforcement. Somewhere along the line, we'll have to respond to some kind
of environmental disaster.
And somewhere else along the line we may get
stuck with putting a U.S. battalion in place on the Golan Heights,
embedded in a weird, screwed-up chain of command.
And do you know what? We're going to bitch
and moan about it. We're going to dust off the Weinberger Doctrine and the
Powell Doctrine and throw them in the face of our civilian leadership. But
at the same time, there's the President, thinking out loud in a recent
meeting and saying, "Why can't we ever drive a stake through the
hearts of any of these guys? I look at Kim Jung II; I look at Milosovic; I
look at Saddamn Hussein. Ever since the end of World War II, why haven't
we been able to find a way to do this?"
The answer, of course, is that you must have
the political will--and that means the will of the administration, the
Congress, and the American people. All must be united in a desire for
action. Instead, however, we try to get results on the cheap. There are
congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some
silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll
equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97 million worth of AK-47s
and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most
likely. That's what can happen when we do things on the cheap.
But why can't we muster the necessary
political will to do things right? It goes back to cost-benefit analysis,
especially in terms of potential casualties. Nobody in his right mind can
justify the possible human cost and the uncertain aftermath of strong
military action. The bombings at Beirut and the Khobar Towers in Saudi
Arabia and the debacle in Mogadishu have affected us in bad ways--making
us gun-shy to an extreme degree. But every time I testify at congressional
hearings, I try to make the point that there is no way to guarantee 100%
force protection while accomplishing the variety of missions we undertake
out there. Somewhere, sometime, we are going to lose people again--to
terrorist or other actions that take advantage of our own
less-than-perfect protective measures.
For example, I have more than 600
security-assistance people working throughout the Central Command's area
of responsibility. Some of the detachments are quite small--in twos and
threes. They live in hotels and try to keep low profiles. Their mission is
to work with host-country military organizations and try to improve them.
They travel a lot. They get targeted; they get stalked; they can get hit.
If anyone really wants to take them out, they can and they will.
And, you know, we are going to see it happen
some day. The only way to stop it from happening is to shut down all our
activities overseas, if we want 100% security for all our deployed people.
But 100% definitely seems to be what more and more people want these days,
as we send our people into operations other than war. These OOTW are our
future, as far as I am concerned. But in a sense, it's going to be back to
the future, because today's international landscape has some strong
similarities to the Caribbean region of the 1920s and 1930s--unstable
countries being driven by uncaring dictators to the point of collapse and
total failure. We are going to see more crippled states and failed states
that look like Somalia and Afghanistan--and are just as dangerous.
And more and more U.S. military men and women
are gong to be involved in vague, confusing military actions--heavily
overlaid with political, humanitarian, and economic considerations. And
representing the United States--the Big Guy with the most formidable
presence in the area--they will have to deal with each messy situation and
pull everything together. We're going to see more and more of that.
My generation has not been well prepared for
this future, because we resisted the idea. We even had an earlier Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said, "Real men don't do OOTW."
That just about says it all. Any Army commander worth his salt wanted to
take his unit to the National Training Center and any Marine commander
would want to go to the Marine Air-Ground Training Center for live-fire
maneuver and combined-arms work, rather than stay on their bases and
confront a bunch of troops in civilian clothes, throwing water balloons
and playing the role of angry overseas mobs. It just goes against the
grain to have to train our people that way.
Going beyond these events, what other things
have affected my military generation? There have been trends in law a
policy making that have had a profound effect. The National Security Act
of 1947, for example, set up the most dysfunctional, worst organizational
approach to military affairs I could possibly imagine. In a near-perfect
example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, it created a situation in
which the biggest rival of any U.S. armed service is not a foreign
adversary but another one of its sister U.S. services.
We teach our ensigns and second lieutenants
to recognize that sister Service as the enemy. It wants our money; it
wants our force structure; it wants our recruits. So we rope ourselves
into a system where we fight each other for money, programs, and weapon
systems. We try to out-doctrine each other, by putting pedantic little
anal apertures to work in doctrine centers, trying to find ways to ace out
the other services and become the dominant service in some way. These
people come to me and the other CinCs and ask, "What's more important
to you--air power or ground power?"
Incredible! Just think about it. My Uncle
Guido is a plumber. If I went to him and asked, "What's more
important to you--a wrench or a screwdriver?" he'd think I'd lost my
marbles.
The real way this stuff gets worked out is
not in the doctrine centers but out in the field. The joint commands and
the component commanders can figure things out because we're the
warfighters. We have to work things out, so we actually do. We could not
produce a joint fire-support doctrine out of Washington or the doctrine
centers to save our ass. But we can produce one in the Central Command, or
in the Pacific Command or European Command or any joint task force we
create. They can produce one in a heartbeat-and they have. We can make a
JFACC work. We can make a land-component command arrangement work. There
will be no more occasions in the Central Command's area of operations
where the Marines fight one ground war and the Army fights a different
ground war. There will be one ground war and a single land component
commander.
But we've been brutalized in the process.
We've had to be pushed into cooperating with each other by legislation.
And those of us who have seen the light and actually put on joint
"purple" uniforms--we've never been welcomed back to our parent
services. We have become the Bad Guys. The only thing we are trusted to do
is to take your sons and daughters to war and figure out ways to bring
them back safely.
Virulent inter-service rivalry still
exists--and it's going to kill us if we don't find a better way to do
business.
Goldwater-Nichols is not the panacea
everybody thinks it is. I'm here to tell you that it did not increase the
powers of the CinCs--not one bit. A CinC still owns nothing. I own no
resources and no assigned forces. All I get is geography and
responsibility. And the CinCs have to go up the chain of command through
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For more than a quarter-century, we have been
operating with an All-Volunteer Force--and the American people tend to
forget that until the volunteers stop showing up and reenlisting. And
that's what is wrong right now. But the troops are not getting out because
they're deployed too long and too often. I will bet anyone that the
forward-deployed units--the carrier battle groups, the Marine
expeditionary units, the air expeditionary forces and wings-have the
highest retention rates.
So what does that say about the high
operations tempo and personnel deployment rates? The people who deploy are
not the ones getting out. The guy getting out is the guy who's left back
home and has to pick up the slack with a workload that's been increased by
a factor of eight or ten. We were building an All-Volunteer Force with
professionals, not mercenaries. The troops certainly don't mind a better
paycheck, but they find it insulting that we seem to think that's all they
want. Deep inside, there have been negative reactions to the recent pay
raise. They see their benefits continuing to erode. Their families are
telling them, "Look at what happens to your medical care when you
retire. You can't even pick up a telephone and get through to someone who
might see you." And despite all the smoke and mirrors around TriCare
and MediCare and other programs--even if they do work--the perceptions are
bad. To top things off, the quality of life back at the home base is
terrible. We still have too much infrastructure eating up funds that
should go toward improving quality of life. But don't count on DoD and the
politicians going through another base-closure drill or anything like it.
So this all-volunteer, highly professional
force we built--to give quality performance with quality support--has been
allowed to erode. That came with the "peace dividend." The
All-Volunteer Force has become something else--something less attractive
than opportunities on the outside, in many ways. The troops want to be
caught up in a calling--but they're not. They are involved in a job.
Over the past 40 years, we also have seen
strange things happen with regard to the media. To be sure, there are no
more Ernie Pyles out there, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the
media, which has the same percentages of good guys and bad guys as other
fields. But technology has changed things. The media are on the
battlefield; the media are in your headquarters; the media are everywhere.
And the media report everything--good things,
warts, and all. And Everyone knows that the warts tend to make better
stories. As a CinC, I've probably been chewed out by seniors about five
times--and four of the five were about something I'd said to the media. At
this stage of my life, it doesn't really bother me--because where in hell
do I go from here? But if you are a lieutenant or a captain and you see
another officer get fried, you react differently. The message is clear:
"Avoid the media." And the message hardens into a Code:
"They are the enemy. Don't be straight with them." And that is
bad.
That is bad because we live in the
Information Age. Battlefield reports are going to come back in real time,
and they are going to be interpreted-with all sorts of subtle shadings and
nuances--by the reporters and their news editors. And the relationship
between the military and the media, which should be at its strongest right
now, has bottomed out. It has begun to heal a little, but a lot more must
be done. We need to rebuild a sense of mutual trust.
My uncles in World War II generally
experienced a friendly press--with Willie and Joe cartoons and Ernie Pyle
stories--that was part of the war effort. G.I. Joe was lionized and bad
news was suppressed--if not by the military then by the media. The
relationship generally remained positive through the Korean War, despite
its ambiguities. But the relationship soured during and after Vietnam, for
a number of reasons--not the least of which was a mounting distrust of
government by the media and the American people.
My generation and those who have followed
over the past 40 years are still dealing with social issues that swept
across the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. The racial and drug problems
that peaked during the Vietnam years and persisted well beyond them are
largely behind us now--but they came close to destroying the military from
within--something no enemy has ever accomplished on the field of battle.
We still wrestle with problems associated with the massive infusion of
women into the ranks of the military, seeking a final adjustment that
meets the twin requirements of fairness and common sense. A final
adjustment on the issue of gays in the military-largely sidestepped up to
now--still lies ahead.
Today, we are suffering through the agony of
watching and waiting for our political masters and the American people to
decide what me U.S. military should look like in the future. It is
especially agonizing because the political leaders--and the population in
general--have very little association with the armed forces. Consequently,
they have very little awareness of how we function.
For example, they don't understand the
Uniform Code of Military Justice-the UCMJ. If you work for IBM and don't
show up for work, you might get fired. If you are in the Marines and don't
show up, you might get locked up. Further, the military doesn't hire the
handicapped in the same percentages as IBM or other corporations--probably
for good reason. The military is different, but not enough Americans are
aware of that.
Over this 40-year period, we have made some
significant internal changes. We made a magnificent recovery from the
Vietnam War, and my hat goes off to the Army, because I think they led the
way in making the needed transformations. In general, we have
professionalized our noncommissioned officer corps, but still not enough
NCOs are doing the jobs that officers had taken away from them when I
first came in. The rank structure is holding them back, despite the fact
that their educational attainments--bachelors, masters, and even doctoral
degrees--have far outstripped the structure. This needs to be fixed.
The one thing that makes us a standout among
the world's military Services is the quality of our NCOs. Don't ever
believe it's the officers; it's the noncommissioned officers.
All of the events that have shaped us over
the past 40 years have not been negative. Somewhere in the mid-1980s we
began to experience a renaissance in the operational art. We actually
started to take war fighting more seriously. Once again, I want to credit
the Army for leading the charge, and the other services for following
suit, in one way or another. Today, we see highly qualified,
professionally competent, operationally sound officers and noncommissioned
officers as a result.
There's also been a technological
revolution--the Revolution in Military Affairs, which already has gone
beyond the point most may think. Whenever I go to my command center in the
basement of my Tampa headquarters, I can pull up a common operating
picture--every ship and aircraft (commercial, bad guy, good guy) in real
time. With a six-hour delay--which I could crunch to two hours if I wanted
to--I can get a complete ground picture. That's the good news. The bad
news is that the White House and the Pentagon will probably be interested
in the same picture, and might be tempted to make decisions on their own,
without input from the folks actually on the scene. That could be
disastrous, as history amply demonstrates.
As we close out this 40 years of service,
those of us who served must ask: "What is our legacy?" My son is
a newly commissioned second lieutenant of Marines. What have we left for
him to look forward to?
We all know that burgeoning technology will
widen his horizons beyond anything we can imagine. It also will present
new questions of ethics and morality that we barely have begun to fathom.
But he also must live with an organization
that I have had to live with for 40 years. Napoleon could reappear today
and recognize my Central Command staff organization: J-1, administration
stovepipe; J-2, intelligence stovepipe--you get the idea. This antiquated
organization is oblivious to what everyone else in the world is doing:
flattening organization structure, with decentralized operations and more
direct communications. This must be fixed.
My son will have to deal with the inevitable
military-civilian rift and drift--which will become more severe in the
future. He also will have to deal with the remaining social issues. And
they will get tougher, within a national debate over why we still need a
strong military.
In addition to dealing with these social
issues--which will worsen--to shape their potential heritage, my son's
generation must ultimately face the question of how much the military
should be a reflection of U.S. society. The people of America will get the
military they want, in due course, but it is up to the military to advise
them about the risks and consequences of their decisions.
My son will face non-traditional missions in
messy places that will make Somalia look like a picnic. He will see a
changed battlefield, with an accelerated tempo and greatly expanded
knowledge base. He will witness a great drop in the sense of calling.
People entering the military will not be imprinted with his code. They
will not be candidates for priesthood; at best, they will be part-time lay
ministers. On his watch, my son is likely to see a weapon of mass
destruction (WMD) event. Another Pearl Harbor will occur in some city,
somewhere in the world where Americans are gathered, when that nasty bug
or gas or nuke is released it will forever change him and his
institutions. At that point, all the lip service paid to dealing with such
an eventuality will be revealed for what it is--lip service. And he will
have to deal with it for real. In its wake, I hope he gets to deal with
yet another Goldwater-Nichols arrangement.
What will we expect of him as a battlefield
commander? Brains, guts, and determination--nothing new here. But we would
ask for more than battlefield skill from our future commanders. We want
character, sense of moral responsibility, and an ethical standard that
rises above those of all other professions. We want him to be a model who
accepts the profession of arms as a calling. We want him to take care of
our sons and daughters and treat their lives as something
precious--putting them in harm's way only if it means something that truly
counts. We'll expect him to stand up to civilian leadership before
thinking of his own career.
And I hope that we would think enough of him
and his compatriots to show some respect for them along the way.
Published July 2000
I should let that sink in before I do much
commenting, but I guess I won't.
First I have to say that the General doesn't
quite seem to understand the Cold War: the reason the USSR never took the
rest of Europe was precisely because there were those trip-wire forces
along the borders, and those young men and women in the silos, and the men
in the submarines; war is deterred when the aggressor thinks he can't win
it, that he will be worse off after it is over than before. I covered this
extensively in my study of Stability for the Air Council back in the 50's
when the General was a lieutenant. Those of us who had been in Korea had
no doubt that if you gave the Communists any sort of break the Russians
would be on the Rhine not long after. I don't have any such doubts now.
One real problem here is "unification".
That hasn't worked and doesn't work. Erecting the Air Force into a
separate Service, and then making the Marines very nearly another
independent Service was a foolish thing to do. It hasn't worked and it
won't work. The roles, missions, and doctrines of an Army and a Navy are
quite different. The Army was properly labeled the Department of War: it
was for War, and for a republic War is War, sleeves rolled up, higher
taxes, maximum effort, crush the infamous bastards who forced this
peace-loving people to go to war. If they want War we'll give them WARRE,
war to the knife, war to victory.
The Navy doesn't and shouldn't see it that way.
The Navy's job is all those activities short of declared war.
Traditionally the President has owned the Navy and Marines, and the
Congress owns the Army.
So where does that leave the Air Force?
Well, as part of Navy or War Department of course. The real mission of an
Air Force should be as a part of the field army or the fleet.
What is revealed in this analysis is that there
is one obvious lump that doesn't fit: the Strategic Offensive Force, and
that includes the nuclear missile submarines: the Armageddon Corps. These
really aren't part of the traditional mechanisms of war. They aren't part
of the Navy with its routine operations, showing the flag, rescuing ships,
bombardment of coasts, landing parties, evacuating US and allied citizens
from trouble spots, rapid operations like Lebanon in Eisenhower's time,
and all the rest. That's what Navies are for in a Republic. Navies and
Marines do the fighting when there's no declared War and if we need more
force than that the Congress damned well ought to declare a War and tell
us what victory means.
That's all assuming a Republic, of course.
The problem here, and the General probably sees
it but didn't want to say so, is that the force structure we have is
already more appropriate to an Empire than a Republic, and will be more so
if we continue as we have. And certainly, if we continue the trend toward
Empire, toward being the World Policeman, toward minding everyone's
business because there is no business that isn't our business, we will
need an entirely different kind of military.
We will need Legions. We will need small forces
that can stiffen up the forces of client states. We will need mercenaries
along the model of the Gurkhas. We will need 'professional soldiers' who
will kill on orders, and who will be more soldier than citizen; indeed it
might be well to deprive them of citizenship while they are in service.
Rome did that in effect even before the formal conversion of Republic to
Empire, since the elections were held in Rome and most of the Legions were
elsewhere.
One doesn't want professional soldiers to worry a
lot about civic affairs unless ordered to as part of their duties. One
wants them to think about being Legions.
The Code that the General entered the Corps with,
and which he saw in recruits of that long ago era, isn't there for most of
those who become "professional soldiers." Why should it be? It's
a Code of a Republic, and most troops no longer join the services for
reasons having anything to do with the values of a self-governing people.
Most of the officers do, but that's not quite the same thing. Now a
Warrior Code can be instilled in young men -- perhaps in young women as
well, although I wonder if they're not too smart, and have their emotional
wiring set up different -- but the Warrior Code has nothing to do with a
republic. The young Warrior fights for his comrades, for his outfit, for
his officers, and for the nation, in that order. A Warrior will lay down
his life for a flag, but it's not the flag of the nation, it's the Eagles
of his outfit.
We know how to instill that Code, at least in
young men. But it won't have much to do with a Republic.
The real decision, which the General didn't
state, is this: what is the business of America? If the business of
America is business, we need one kind of military. If the policy of the
United States is "we are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the
guardians only of our own," that dictates the military requirements
of a Republic. If the business and policy of the United States is to
make a better world but direct intervention everywhere: if it is the
business of the United States to keep Serbs from slaughtering Albanians
and Albanians from retaliating, to intervene in Russia vs. Chechnya, the Kashmir
wars, the African tribal slaughters, the Rhodesian expropriations -- if
that is our business, then we need an Imperial force.
Rome was an Empire long before Augustus made it
formal.
And people like General Zinni are caught in the
middle of it. Which way do we want to go?
And on that score:
On the general subject of Republic vs. Empire -
I note that the Emperor has decreed (see http://assaultweb.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001038.html
and http://www.aimsurplus.com/
) that foreign-made military-style rifle receivers and barrels are now
prohibited from importation. Too many were using loopholes around the
previous set of infringements on the Natural Right recognized by the 2nd
Amendment to build military-style rifles, and so it was decreed that
importation of parts must stop. An international agreement to stop small
arms proliferation among the proles was the "reason" given. I
used to think people discussing UN conspiracy theories were crazy. Now I'm
not so sure.
I sometimes wish they'd just do away with the
"death by a thousand cuts" approach and try a complete ban.
It's a slippery slope we're sliding down, and I'm
really losing hope we'll make it back up.
Thanks,
Jim Riticher jritiche@bellsouth.net
Probably nothing differentiates Republic from
Empire more than in trusting citizens with arms. The Imperialists are
afraid of the citizens: even as they promote diversity in cultures and
ancestry, they seek to impose a uniformity in core values throughout the
land. Naturally they are afraid of armed resistance, as they should be.
The Framers intended that the citizens be as well
armed as the Army: that would include cannon, musket and bayonet, pikes
and rifles, bullet pouches, and purely military equipment not useful for
hunting. Hunters used rifles and fowling pieces. Muskets were not useful
for hunting; nor were bayonets; but they were certainly part of the arms
that citizens might and should bear. Indeed, had it not been for Quaker
sensibilities, the Convention might well have mandated that every citizen
be armed. Patrick Henry certainly thought they all should be.
In modern terms that translates to at least
"assault rifles" and the silliness of prohibiting bayonet lugs
on rifles is self-evident.
But that is a Republic.
Now to say that people of diverse languages and
cultures cannot be armed and live together in a Republic is to admit
ignorance of elementary geography. The Swiss manage nicely. Their last
civil war was not long after ours, when a Canton was divided into
Protestant and a Catholic hafl cantons, each with what amounts to half a
vote in the federal structure.
A racially and linguistically uniform people can
have a unitary republic. Culturally divided people will require a
federation, with real power in the states. I don't think it is my business
to criminalize what orifice people use for sexual gratification, but I
have to say that it is the business of the state -- not federal --
government. Laws derive their just power from the consent of the governed.
That is why state churches were not only permitted in the Constitution of
1789 but the Congress was in the very first sentence of the Bill of Rights
prohibited from disestablishing them. Now I doubt any state, even Utah,
would establish a church today; but they certainly ought to have the power
to do so. Why not? It is not as if persecutions were coming back. Most
"religious right" want merely to be left alone by the
government, to have a few religious symbols in public places, and to say a
few prayers, some hypocritical, at public events. Why should they not?
I could go on; but the point is that a Federal
Republic will not disarm its citizens, nor will it force them to endure
laws and absences of laws not needful for Federal Union; it will leave
them their states, well or badly governed, and not try to force a
uniformity that is difficult even in a uniform people and impossible in a
culturally and religiously diverse people. Or so think I.
And see below
Just read your article on
burning cds in win 2000. Are you using the latest version of cd creator? I
think it's 4.0 I have it installed on my work computer (an hp pavillion
pII 400) and it works perfectly in win 2000. I don't have the adventurous
spirit to try obscure software on my computers, and besides hp sells the
updated adaptec software for $25 to existing system owners.
Bob Graham
As you probably know, for years I was an Adaptec
enthusiast. Perhaps I will be again, but I tell you the fiasco with their
stuff burned me a bit, and Nero BURNING ROM works so well I am not tempted
to go back to Adaptec. DirectCD, when it worked, worked well, but their
Creator did manage to make coasters more often than I liked; with NERO I
have YET to make a coaster, even at 12X on 8X blanks, and that says a lot
for me.
Dear Jerry,
I used to be a loyal reader of the BYTE when it was
published in a paper format. I used to enjoy reading your articles and
found them to be very enjoyable and fulfilling. I still sometimes visit
www.byte.com and catch up on what's going on in IT world.
I need your advice and expertise...
I am about to buy a new motherboard and Pentium III.
I have decided to buy a new ASUS CUSL-2 i815E. As you already know,
nowadays Pentium come in two types: Slot and Socket. I do not know which
of the two is the better one? Which one would you recommend? There don't
seem to be any price difference between them.
Why did Intel decide to move back into the Socket
framework?
Thank you for your time.
Maxim Goltyakov UK
I sent this along to Thompson who says:
Slot 1 is on the way out, although the Slot 2
Xeons will survive. The original Pentium II/IIIs and Celerons used
discrete L2 cache chips, necessitating a cartridge. The newer Pentium IIIs
and Celerons have on-die L2 cache, which means the cartridge (and Slot 1)
is a needless expense. Although in the past there was little or no price
difference between the Slot 1 and Socket 370 variants, that is changing.
Slot 1 product now typically sells at a noticeable premium. Tell your guy
to go with Socket 370.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com
You will note his web page address, where much of
interest is posted. I sent this to Mr. Thompson because I rely on his
opinions in most matters.
Jerry,
I suspect I've had my home network invaded by
something that replaced my Notepad with a larger file 118KB.
All systems are running W98, either R2 or original
with updates. Three of four systems that were running had their
Notepad.exe files replaced just after midnight on 12 Jun 2000. I searched
and checked the usual virus sites. Any collective knowledge?
Jeff Timm
I do not believe there is such a thing as a
Notepad virus, but replacing your notepad sounds odd indeed.
I sure would look into that!
Erwin on Prions:
http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/yeast.prions.html
http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/yeast_cell.html
These results begin to suggest some ways that
maternal effects can play a role in development. I had known earlier that
the brain was too complex to be encoded in the genome, but this result
begins to clarify why the genome need not be that complex. We probably
inherit via other mechanisms, too, and the uniform conditions in the
mammalian womb limit the environmental complexity that has to be dealt
with during early development. Start messing around with either, and baby
is likely to be hurt, because the homeostatic mechanisms that ensure
successful development in egg-laying embryos have probably been lost in
mammals.
Remember, identical twins have shared a
developmental environment during the period they were probably most
vulnerable to insult.
Cheers,
-- --- Harry Erwin, PhD, Computational
Neuroscientist (modeling bat behavior), Senior SW Analyst and Security
Engineer, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, GMU. CV and papers
available at: <http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin/CV.htm>
Joat Simeon Says:
I'd say the correct historical analogy for the US
today is Great Britain in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, rather than
Rome.
In both cases -- Britain in 1815, the US in 1990 --
we have a heavily populated, very wealthy, very technologically
progressive "island" off the coast of Eurasia.
In each case, it has just emerged triumphant after
long series of wars against a land-based continental rival; France in the
case of Great Britain, Germany and then the Soviets in the case of the US.
In both cases, the hegemonic power was head of a large alliance, and
emerged economically and technologically stronger from the forcing-house
of war, while its opponent lay impoverished and prostrate.
France lost as many men in the
Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars as in WWI, and from a smaller population; it
took generations for her to recover. Germany has remained a
political-military eunuch after 1945, and Russia is a wreck with a
declining population and a sputtering gangster-ridden economy making a
very slow transition to successful capitalism.
The analagous period for the US would be between
1917 and 1989-91. Like Britain vs. France, she shrewdly avoided the sort
of sustained high-casualty fighting that wrecks nations.
As the US has done since 1990, Great Britain cut
back heavily on the size of its armed forces after 1815, but remained a
dominant naval power with the capacity to intervene where it pleased, or
of course not to intervene -- that freedom being the strategic benefit of
ruling the World Ocean.
Britain after 1815 also relied on a powerful navy,
and a small army of long-service professionals intended for service
abroad. It had no territorial ambitions in Europe (where people could
fight back effectively) but intervened in the "3rd World" fairly
often, putting down pirates, forcing Chinese mandarins to open their
ports, making Arab sultans give up the slave trade, policing the rougher
parts of the globe, etc., in the classic era of gunboat diplomacy.
Whenever someone was in trouble, they called for the Royal Navy; and the
British Empire grew, not from any great ambition to accumulate territory,
but from the need to impose local order and free trade in areas without
effective government of their own. Eventually it covered a quarter of the
globe and a quarter of its population, the largest realm ever under a
single sovereignty in human history.
This seems to me to be very much the situation the
US is in today; a hopeful analogy, given the long period of growth and
prosperity and cultural blossoming, and freedom from _major_ wars, that
the UK enjoyed from 1815-1914. Nor was the UK much troubled at home, since
this was the era when successive Parliamentary reforms went through
without any of the revolutions or civil wars that plagued the Continent,
and when the rising industrialists (and then the populace as a whole) were
accomodated without ever violently displacing the traditional landed
classes.
The world seems to function better when there's such
a "power of last resort" around, too. The post-Napoleonic system
worked fine, until the rise of Germany made British hegemony increasingly
expensive, and the rise of the US made it unrealistic.
Joat Simeon
Well, the world goes better perhaps: but the
United States seems not to have the temperament to build that kind of
force, a strong Navy and a small professional army not deployed at home.
Perhaps we will learn. But a Republic is always at risk when it staggers
toward empire. When the government begins to be imperial abroad, depend on
it, it will be imperial at home as well. It can't help it.
Historical note to the interesting discussion: in
traditional European society (before the mid-18th century) reproduction
was inversely proportional to social standing, not directly proportional,
as it was for most of the period after that.
That is, the richer and higher status you were, the
earlier you married and the more children you had, and the more likely
your children were to survive and reproduce themselves. (The above applies
to the area north and west of a line roughly from St. Petersburg to
Venice, the zone of what the specialists call the "West European
Family Pattern). Since there was always considerable social mobility in
Western society (albeit less than there is now) this meant that those who
muscled, schemed and worked their way up the social scale would
consistently have more children, and more surviving children. This would
definitely tend to drive up the IQ, over time; although the rule of
clerical celibacy until the Reformation would be a countervailing factor.
(I'm using Peter Lasletts' "The World We Have
Lost", as confirmed by later historical demographers.)
The way the west-European system worked was this:
you couldn't get married until you had your own "hearth", until
you were economically independent -- and working for someone else for
regular wages didn't count as independence.
There was, except for some very wealthy aristocrats,
what amounted to a complete taboo on two married generations living in the
same household. Most permanent employees -- "servants in
husbandry" or apprentices or whatever -- lived as part of their
employers' households; they weren't considered autonomous adults and
generally speaking they couldn't marry. At least 10% and sometimes as many
as 20% of the population never did marry, and the evidence seems to
indicate that they didn't have children irregularly, either; these were
the poorest of the poor.
Illegitimacy rates were quite low, in most places
and times, and the survival rate for illegitimate children were even
lower.
For ordinary people, the independence necessary for
marriage meant accumulating a fair amount of capital assets; enough to
rent and work a farm, or set up at least as a journeyman or preferrably a
master in some craft, or to be a merchant or whatever. Both men and women
had to bring assets to the marriage, even if it was only a chest of linens
on the part of the female.
This generally took at least ten years after
puberty, often spent working as a "servant" or apprentice,
accumulating both equipment and skills.
Hence the average age of marriage was about 28 for
men and about 2 years earlier for women, in, say, 17th-century England. A
man's eldest son usually married about the time he died; few men, and not
many women, lived to see their younger children married.
Age at marriage varied with the couple's
expectations -- the more you stood to inherit, the earlier you could
marry. And it also varied with the state of the economy; the better the
times, the earlier people married. In bad times, they had to put it off.
Only royalty and the top layer of the landowning class could afford to
have girls marry in their teens.
One very big exception was the American colonies,
and some other settlements of Europeans abroad, where an open land
frontier, high wages and cheap land allowed people to marry much earlier.
Hence the extremely rapid population growth in the colonies free of
tropical diseases; population there doubled every 25 years or so,
increasing six or seven _times_ as fast as in the source populations in
Europe. (Which is why there are probably something like 300 million
descendants of the 5 million or so British of 1600.)
Back home, the European family pattern acted as an
automatic "flywheel" to keep the population from bumping too
hard against the margins of subsistence; since women had children at
roughly 2-year intervals from marriage to the end of their fertile period,
the age at marriage was _the_ factor in determining how many they would
have, closely followed by the percentage who never married.
Which reached a full fifth in late-17th century
England; after the hard times of the early to mid-17th century, for
example, the population of England actually declined from about 1670
through the 1730's. The age at marriage increased, and the percentage of
never-married women reached an all-time high.
NB: this seems to be why black slaves replaced
indentured servants in Virginia and Maryland. It wasn't that tobacco was
killing labor, like the Carribean sugar plantations -- the black slaves
had a high reproductive rate in the Chesapeake, unlike the sugar islands
which needed continuous fresh drafts from Africa. What happened was that
the supply of surplus young people in England was reduced because the
population there stopped growing, driving the price of indentured whites
so high that expensive African slaves became an attractive alternative.
It's also extremely likely that this pattern of
marriage and reproduction made it easier for the European societies in
question to accumulate economic surpluses -- and hence to eventually
achieve worldwide hegemony and the industrial revolution. (Not a complete
explanation, of course, but an important one.)
Virtually everywhere else in the pre-modern world,
most people -- women particularly -- married very soon after puberty, and
it was unusual for there to be many who never married. Multigenerational
households were common, rather than being very rare as in Western Europe.
Hence China, despite its great technological
inventiveness, tended to "breed up" to consume all the available
product. Until the 1500's and possibly later it was as advanced as Europe
in sheer technical skills, but the standard of living -- per capita output
-- was considerably lower.
Joat Simeon
Reader with a problem:
I have an HP Pavilion 8650C 128MB SDRAM 550 Mhz
Celeron pro. I have not been able to use a third party video card. I just
bought a Cougar Video Edition 32MB PCI card. You install the drivers for
the card and restart the computer. That works great. As soon as it boots
up into Windows 98, the computer says it"found a Cougar Video Capture
Driver" and asks for the driver disk. You put the disk in and the
computer hangs. The Intel 810 chipset cannot be disabled. I have been to
the Guillemot website and found an area for "Problems with
Motherboard for the AGP card". It says that the PCI version is not
out yet. It has patches for the problem motherboards and chipsets for AGP
but nothing for PCI. I just want to know if anyone out there has had this
problem and fixed it. I need some help PLEASE!
THANKS.
ALEN SIMUNIC please leave reply here or at nj@bboy.com
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