Memorial Day

The holiday we know today as Memorial Day started as a commemoration to Northern troops who were killed or died of disease during the War Between the States.  There were many to mourn.  The fatalities both North and South were massive, the largest ever experienced in relation to total population size by we Americans.

The awesome butcher's bill was the consequence not only of the size of the armies involved or the new technologies of killing developed and fielded during the war.  The greatest single cause of the body count, a body count so large as to permanently change the American way of warfighting arose from the nature of the war.  The American Civil War was a total war of national survival for each side.  The struggle was existential with a capital "E."

Since the guns fell silent over the battlefields of that war nearly one hundred fifty years ago, the US has engaged in only one war which might be described accurately as an existential affair, a total war of national survival.  That war was, of course, World War II.

Even if the Imperial Japanese government had not made entering the war easy as well as obligatory, there would have been no realistic way in which the US could have sat on its hands much longer.  It was apparent to many thoughtful people that desirable as the peace of isolation might seem, it was an impossible dream.  A world dominated by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan would have constituted a world entirely too hostile to both the defining core values of our country as well as its national interests to be long endured.

World War II may not have been as it has been termed "the good war" as no war can be said to be "good," but it was a most necessary war, a justifiable war, or, to be brutal, a least-worst option sort of war.  By the time the Japanese representatives signed the instrument of surrender in September 1945, the US had fought two existential conflicts, two wars of national survival in eighty years.

A lot of men were killed in each of these existential wars.  Only the fact that each war was existential and total provides justification for the great loss of life.  The lives of these men made and preserved the nation-state.  Without their violent deaths, the US would not have become and remained what it has been.   The modern United States, indeed, much of the modern world, has been erected on the corpses of these men.

(A point of personal privilege here.  The Geek cannot stomach terms such as "sacrifice" or "gave their lives" or "fallen," or any of the other commonly used terms in a vain attempt to cover up the brutal reality that these men were killed.  None sought out death.  Death, violent death, was inflicted upon them.  These men had done to them what they would have done to their enemy had the toss of fortune's coin only gone differently.  There ain't no way around it: War is a matter of killing or getting killed, of getting or getting got.  It cannot and should not be prettified.)

All  of the other wars we Americans have fought over the past century and a half, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the myriad of skirmishes, interventions, raids, humanitarian relief missions gone awry, were not matters of national existence nor even material national interest but rather national policy.  All were limited wars in support of policy.  Arguably, most were neither necessary nor justifiable in any realistic way.

Being wars men were killed in all.  A lot of men.  Even the lowest cost of these many nasty little policy exercises saw scores of American men killed.

After the Civil War, the American view of war and how to fight it became one not of avoiding war but rather of finding ways to both fight and win which resulted in the fewest number of Americans being killed.  More than any other state, the US sought and employed technologies of killing which were most effective at the lowest risk to American lives.  The hectatombs of the War Between the States taught Americans that there is nothing heroic in getting killed.  As General George S. Patton Jr. put it, "You do not win by dying for your country.  You win by making the other sonofabitch die for his."

Even though the US has been very successful at limiting friendly deaths, the reality remains that American troops are killed in the course of limited wars in support of policy.  More importantly, these men are killed without the ultimate justification that their deaths preserved the nation from existential obliteration.

It is for this basic reason that We the People question and finally turn against the continuation of limited wars in support of policy should such not be successfully completed at a low body count in short order.  Our repugnance for "small" wars being waged for obscure reasons of state has had several equally negative ramifications for the way in which the US approaches the difficult subjects of national security interest and coercive diplomacy.

One of these is the predilection of administrations (of both parties) to oversell the war or to overstate what is at stake in the conflict or to expand the mission so as to make it more politically acceptable.  The prototype for all three courses of action was President Woodrow Wilson's framing of our entrance into World War I.  But the Wilson approach was eagerly, if even unconsciously, followed by later administrations.

The War in Vietnam was oversold and overstated.  So too was the invasion of Iraq.  The operation in Afghanistan was reprogrammed from one of a purely punitive nature to the impossible goal of "nation-building" in order to put a proper gloss on the underlying reality.  Even the most easily justified war in support of policy, the Korean "police action," fell prey to mission-creep following the invasion of Inchon when the goal changed from restoring the status quo ante to that of eliminating North Korea as a functioning state.

Another effect of addressing the American distaste for wars in support of policy is that of prevarication.  While the "Jive at Five" press briefings of the Vietnam period stand as the towering monument to this particular attempt to stave off the effects of public disenchantment, the same dynamic has been at work in every American war following World War II.  Successes have been magnified.  Difficulties have been downplayed.  Mood music intended to sooth the potentially savage beast of political disaffection has been played often and loudly.

Worst of all, the various administrations have seen it necessary to build coalitions in order to give the appearance that the US was not fighting a limited war in support of American policy and national interests but rather was acting in concert with other states in a common, preferably universally supported, cause.  By avoiding the public appearance of fighting a war by and for ourselves, the administrations have undercut the clarity of purpose, certainty of goals, and unity of effort necessary to bring the war to a quick and successful conclusion.

By yoking ourselves to coalitions which may be far more an artifact of diplomacy than an organic expression of coinciding national interests, the US both complicates the problem of pursuing critical national interests and renders the achievement of these interests less rather than more likely.  The chimera of multilateral action is sought in order to lower the political risks to an administration which seeks to wage a limited war in support of a policy which it perceives as critical to national or strategic interests of the US.

The history of limited war shows that such wars are the least likely to be successful.  That is, they are the least likely to lead to a better state of peace at the end of fighting.  In the past, these wars have been quite unlikely to provide a firm base for permanent peace in the contested area.  In largest measure this has been the consequence of failing to understand properly the linkage between diplomacy of the negotiation sort and diplomacy of the fighting variety.

More than a contest between organized bodies of armed men, a war is a contest of political wills.  Each party to a war is wagering that it has the greater political will.  Each party is putting the lives of its men at risk as a demonstration of its determination to win.  Battles are a way of upping the ante, corpses are chips pushed to the center of the table.

One of our limited wars in support of policy--the one in Korea--put this linkage in stark relief.  The most bitter as well as most pointless combats were waged over obscure terrain features of no intrinsic value while the armistice talks were in progress.  It took the Americans a while to tumble to the fact that these battles, exemplified by the one at Pork Chop Hill, were being used by the Chinese as a demonstration of their political will--and a test of ours.  The side which was willing and able to quite literally "waste" the greater number of lives was the side possessing the greater political will.

This key lesson taught by the killing of Americans on bleak hillsides in Korea during 1952 and 53 had been forgotten fifteen years later as the North Vietnamese used the same process during the Paris Peace Talks.  Nor has the US remembered these lessons today when they would be applicable to combining talking and killing in the context of Afghanistan.

To put the matter simply and in no way oversimplified, the only way in which the limited war in support of policy can achieve a better state of peace and thus begin to justify the leaving of American bones to (metaphorically) bleach in some far away place with an unpronounceable name is the proper combination of the diplomacy of talking and that of killing.  Simply declaring victory and heading home or (as in Vietnam) establishing a "date certain" and then cutting off all funding for the war neither redeems failure nor makes right the killing of American personnel.

In the total war, the existential struggle between peers, there is no substitute for victory as General MacArthur properly noted.  However, the reality in the limited war in support of policy is different.  In this kind of war, the "small" war of limited lethality, limited means, limited scope, and limited goals, there is a substitute for victory.  The substitute is the achievement of a better state of peace by demonstrating superior political will.  The means of doing this is the proper linkage between the killing kind of diplomacy and the palaver variety.

Talking does not mean--nor should it--that the shooting must stop.  Nor does the continuation of the shooting render talking either impossible or unproductive.  Now and in the future when wars will continue to be of the limited policy directed sort, the realization of the crucial nature of political will is needed along with a commitment to the capacity to talk and shoot at the same time.

Sure, it is a multitasking approach, but we Americans invented the concept so we ought to be good at it.  Why not give it a try in Afghanistan?  If we can  pull it off there we will be in very good shape for the many small wars yet to come.