“The [U.S.] Constitution calls for a well-regulated militia, …” Harm Forces on PeaceWorld.
“The [U.S.] Constitution calls for a well-regulated militia, …” Harm Forces on PeaceWorld.
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- WORLD MILITIA (I) -
Military honor is the only thing that prevents weapon technicians from wrecking everything — which fact peace mythology must emphasize. Learners should appeal first and foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every good warrior, that scrubs him of his filth. Those whose passion is military honor will recognize it at once in PeaceWorld and defend it against anyone crazy enough to deny it, lethal as he may be. They will champion PeaceWorld and guard it fiercely thereafter. Duty, honor and Learning must fuse into one.
It may surprise you to stumble on a blueprint of a World Militia in Learner, a PeaceWorld manifesto. Actually, it shouldn’t surprise you. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution bars government from infringing on the right of its citizens to bear arms, a well-regulated militia “being necessary to the security of a free State.”
The weapon justification was to arm local militias against slave revolts in the South and attacks by Native Americans wherever they had not yet been exterminated or confined to concentration camps. The peace justification will be to arm everyone against any armed threat from any direction, from global tyranny down to an active shooter in the neighborhood.
No solution can be found in current “norms” of private handguns in too many households, (fire harms + children = tragic loss guaranteed); bodyguards for the rich and weapon shakedowns for the poor; a ruinous, mercenary army anathema to the spirit and letter of the Constitution; suicide bomb massacres; fire fights that mow down innocent victims on the street, in restaurants, even in the hallowed hallways of school.
Learners, what a disgrace! The whole world may have come to terms with this infamy, but we should have done better than that.
Some people confound a world without war with one without violence. In the end, they may be right. Then again, they may have mistaken a method like non-violence – a very powerful one, therefore very challenging – for the goal at hand: PeaceWorld.
Can you tell the difference between simple pacifism and much more complex Satyagraha, between a world without any violence whatsoever and PeaceWorld?
The practice of deliberate non-violence (Satyagraha) has just been rediscovered by humanity after thousands of years of brutal suppression at every attempt.
The most recent attempts have been in Palestine. They have been painful failures for the time being because this exercise cannot succeed until the following lessons are Learned.
Palestinian Satyagrahi overlooked two key elements:
1. The presence of a dangerous military alternative, the evil twin of the Satyagrahi but under their control as long as the peace party succeeds: “Negotiate with us in good faith or take on those other guys as best you can.”
2. Realtime, world-spanning media coverage of any suppression of the Satyagrahi.
Palestinian Satyagrahi may have been able to call on the former necessity. I doubt it: their armed forces were never strong enough or under their complete control. But they were fatally denied the latter. The systematic brutality of reactionaries won out once again, this time under the Israeli boot while the world media looked the other way.
In 2018, unarmed Palestinians were shot down in droves along the Gaza fence line, carefully filmed by the world media. The Israeli government is not troubled by its criminal behavior because its American patron has become equally fascistic and bloody-minded, while both their civilian populations are so downtrodden that no-one has the spine to protest. Weapon mentality has reached its vicious climax of Yang, just before its nova explosion into a justice-prone Yin ‒ just as race apartheid hardened so much it collapsed into its economic equivalent in South Africa.
It may take centuries to perfect nonviolence in our institutions and even longer to convince every free-willed individual. On the other hand, humankind has debated pacifism for thousands of years (“No matter what happens, I don’t much care for war”).
Learners can criminalize warfare and establish PeaceWorld. We have merely to work it out assertively and all together. It could take mere months or years to institutionalize that across the planet.
The criminalization of war does not mean its total elimination; it means making it illegal, much more difficult and expensive ; thus less rewarding, savage, frequent and lingering. Theft has been criminalized everywhere. That does not mean there is no theft, merely not as much, in proportion to the effectiveness of institutions that criminalize it and, even more importantly, the public’s enhanced wellbeing and wisdom that make it redundant and obviously self-destructive.
As peace institutions improve, war will drop off perhaps to extinction, as with cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery, even though their debris continue to disgrace us today. Once war has been dealt with, those others may finally vanish.
What would the world look like if we had done nothing about theft until absolutely everyone always obeyed the commandment not to steal?
This text is quite wary about ending the violence that seems rooted in human nature. Will it prove useful in the long run, more or less tractable, more or less subject to institutional remedy? After all, any project to eradicate it could provoke its ultimate adherents to do their worst.
If the criminalization of warfare must wait until brutality has been purged from every human psyche, then we are due for a long, long wait. And if PeaceWorld must wait until everyone is solely motivated by non-violence in any given conflict situation, then multiply that wait-time by hundreds. Since war has achieved hair-trigger devastation of staggering proportions, this delay will allow warfare to swallow us whole in the meantime.
What should we do now? Hold off until everyone has achieved personal perfection? Or transform our institutions into peaceful ones today and then revisit the project of universal perfection? You choose. Let’s be realistic about our priorities.
Learner concludes that warfare must be criminalized now, while we retain the means, motive and opportunity to do so. Thereafter, unconditional human non-violence can begin to grow for as long as that takes.
Those two are separate projects. The former might take the next few decades to perfect; the latter, the rest of human existence.
Just keep this in mind: the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good, the enemy of the worst. Would you cling to the worst until perfection had been achieved, or would you try to make the worst a little less bad, pending perfection in the long run?
Let me be perfectly clear. These two projects have never been mutually exclusive. On the contrary, each one would reinforce the other. We should work hard for the good now and for perfection in the future.
This said, in the here and now, we can reduce the worst effects of weapon mentality, multiply the benefits of peace and replace penal punishment with shrewder, more focused methods of improved conduct. What’s more, we can criminalize warfare, which provides the greatest scope for those inclined to do harm.
Learner forecasts no end to human violence … it wouldn’t begin to tackle that evil. I doubt if it could be strained from human awareness without harming that awareness. However, a global majority of sane Learners (the psychosane and the sociosane) will defy weapon mythology’s intent, demote weapons elites to cultural insignificance and relegate weapon technology – their masterpiece – to vestigial status. Once enough of us agree to share this task, we may carry it out almost overnight.
Learners will disband the world’s Harm Forces, decommission most of its weapons of mass destruction and rebuild their remnants into four nested organizations:
· World Militia,
· World Court Foreign Legion,
· Continental Constabulary, and
· Local Police.
This chapter contains the least effective of Learner’s prescriptions. Those outlined in this chapter are merely cosmetic tweakage until Learner majorities adopt some semblance of the following features first:
· Laocracy (direct, proportional democracy through a World Agora),
· Learning Networks, and
· The entire constellation of political metaphors these features imply.
Indeed, without these crucial supports, militia paramilitaries morph into nightmare murder clubs. Examples abound: Colombian death squads, the Afghan Taliban – “Taliban”: an ironic twist on the term “Learner” in Arabic – and an assortment of gangster organizations across the world. Eliminate them where they breed or expect them and theirs to take over your hometown. In this case, a penny of local development spent now is a better bargain than expensive tons of stray rounds fired into the same area later on.
A well-regulated militia will rely on a universal draft and incorporate the best features of the armies of Switzerland and Israel.
Mandatory high school training will emphasize the tough know-how and fieldcraft of elite light infantry. Militia units will not claim organic vehicles, artillery, armor or aircraft; but they will be well equipped with dug-in, crew-served, automatic, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. Prepared positions will dot the approaches of every community. In times of crisis, entire communities will mobilize quickly. Indeed, this Militia scheme will require Civil Defense facilities comparable to those in Switzerland. Local Militia garrisons will offer a few high value targets to a mechanized aggressor; on the other hand, a multitude of equally dangerous, low value, low signature targets; relative logistical immunity and tremendous defensive depth against assault, bombardment and military occupation.
During Operation Desert Storm, air power dominated ground combat because of the relative prominence and vulnerability of mechanized forces in desert terrain, as well as their fragile command, control and logistics networks. None of these liabilities would trouble an omnipresent, static, pre-positioned and virtually self-sufficient World Militia whose units would defend fanatically their homes and families and thus deter aggression.
Despite the pros and cons of Yugoslavia’s dysfunctional politics, Tito organized his Harm Forces to stalemate road-bound invasion from any direction. For decades, his setup stymied foreign aggressors regardless of their strength and provenance. This arrangement backfired in Yugoslavia. The Serbian ethnic minority got hold of most of the weapons and disarmed the others.
No minority of this kind among Learners will remain disarmed. The World Court will see that every minority can defend itself and that no unarmed group “of innocent civilians” gets handed over to heavily armed chaosists … as happens all the time these days. We can forbid this around the world, prevent flare-ups and buy our way out of them relatively cheaply, compared to current weapon outlays.
Ideally, this defensive posture will deter local Aggressor forces until their preparations attract World Court investigators to arrest local ringleaders before they can initiate organized combat.
Every so often, the World Court might fail to pre-empt criminal aggression during its conspiracy stage. In that case, World Militia doctrine will permit the pass-through of gangster main forces and temporary occupation by them if unavoidable, in order to reduce local casualties. Thereafter, guerrilla raids will fall on their logistics, command/control and combat support elements. Military occupation will become too costly for some future petty Hitler with his homespun armed gang.
In Vietnam, thousands of mechanized infantrymen parked their armored vehicles around the village Chu Chi and rooted out underground fortifications in a frenzy of mayhem and destruction. Then they left, only to have to repeat the raid soon thereafter. The battles of Grozny I, II, III, etc., taught the same painful lesson to the Russians; and once again for the Americans at Faluja in Iraq.
Military leaders require years of repetition of the same painful lesson before it sinks in and calls for revised doctrine. In the meantime, the old ways trigger corresponding casualties, defeat and dishonor.
Short of total extermination, labor-intensive fortifications, extensive woodlands, deserts, mountains and dense urban hardscapes ‒ if manned and reinforced by determined combatants ‒ can frustrate almost any amount of costly firepower. Big cities are like enormous armored vehicle parking lots that shield the combatants within, even if the buildings are immobile. Shell them to rubble and triple their defensive value.
As a mechanized aggressor, there's not much one can do. One can surround the city with one’s own troops that outnumber the rebels at least three to one, or occupy it against an organized guerilla force (urban or, worse yet, rural) at odds of ten to one or higher. One can extinguish them by hunger, thirst, exposure and lack of reinforcements; or crush the city under a hurricane of firepower, block by city block. One can kill an unforgivable number of innocent civilians, recruit their outraged survivors into the next wave of enemies, get many of one’s own people killed, and then lose the case in the court of world opinion (as the American drone program does today).
M.L. Cavanaugh posted Military Victory is Dead at http://www.mwi.usma.edu/defeat-military-victory/ on September 11, 2016. He concluded that the standard definition of military victory: disarming an opponent to such an extent that he can’t resist militarily, cannot be considered a practical objective any longer. Weapons have become so cheap, widespread and lethal that any group can offer significant military resistance so long as one of its members remains alive. He calls into the question the purpose and goal of national military might.
Those lessons pay as much attribute to the heroism of the Vietnamese, the Chechen, the Iraqi and countless other peoples as to their tactics. The Serbs used similar ones to baffle NATO air power during the 1999 Kosovo Campaign. They ejected local inhabitants from their home and replaced them with their own heavy weapons. Short of blowing up every empty house, the allies could find nothing to shoot at. Saddam Hussein’s shadistic partisans and opponents adopted similar tactics in Iraq, from 2003 on, and baffled American occupation forces for years.
It doesn’t matter how “decadent” we become in the future. Military heroism will remain constant among human beings in large numbers, regardless of their provenance, riches, religion and ideology. Warrior valor is innate to humans. For every coward who runs away, a half dozen heroes step forward, each leading twenty average guys into danger. Defeats in Afghanistan and Chechnya taught this lesson to Russian chauvinists; those in Vietnam and Somalia, to their American peers. Genghis Khan’s Mongols and Alexander’s hoplites, otherwise undefeated, were taught the same lesson, often by the same opponents.
There is a critical contradiction between conventional, set-piece warfare and partisan, guerilla or so-called low intensity warfare.
In the first category, generals on both sides collect mounds of materiel and droves of human resources. Only weapon mentors could coin such a loathsome expression without blame. Since when have the lives of sacred, gorgeous human beings become a resource like so much guano? Only in the mind of weapon psychopaths who dictate our ethics.
They assemble those elements at one place and time in order to dispute their claim to victory (success by murder). It is a laborious and time-consuming task to gather so much military logistics and train so many people to operate effectively under one chain of command. A lot of time must pass while both sides gather their strength in relative isolation from one another, interrupted by shorter stretches of time during which they exercise their military marionettes in close combat.
According to Clausewitz, this duration of conflict must be of maximum intensity in order to conclude quickly and decisively. Modern war has contradicted this rule for years. In military parlance, this is called “making and maintaining contact with the enemy”: sort of like placing your hand on the coals of a fire to put it out. During combat, unit A of your military and its successors are going to be worn down while they wear down Ae of the enemy and its successors. Military units are mobile machines for giving, taking and replacing casualties.
In the second category, factionalists gather under local leadership – usually the traditional one; if not, selected democratically – in violent opposition against their neighbors backed by distant authority (whether some tyranny headquartered in the regional capital, a foreign invader or quite often both). Military contact and its destructive friction rarely let up between these groups.
The sum of casualties and devastation during guerilla warfare may be lower than that during pitched battles as described above. However, since guerilla attrition is ongoing and cumulative, final casualty counts and damage assessments in partisan war may be higher than those of climax battles. Entire districts are sterilized by guerilla warfare, which could recover more quickly from a momentary tsunami of regular warfare. The proportion of civilian losses is usually higher during guerilla warfare than during organized battles. Many civilians flee set-piece battles that rage locally and then shift elsewhere, or linger and spare many other places. Whereas guerilla warfare is so widespread and continuous that most locals cannot escape from it. Furthermore, in a typical situation of regular combat, neither side wishes to burden the discipline, limited supplies and morale of its troops with civilians and their panic, muddle and clutter. It is easier to expel them from the field temporarily.
Both sides of a guerilla war come to view the locals as cheap hostages and candidates for extortion (mistakenly, as it turns out; see below). The intensity of guerilla warfare can only be considered “low” during brief snapshots of time. It may be much more intense in the long run. The “low intensity” aspect of warfare is thus another falsehood made up by weapon propaganda to make it more palatable.
Contact is maintained between conventional adversaries by cavalry, light infantry, aerial reconnaissance and irregular forces, as well as civilian spies favoring one side or the other. Nonstop skirmishing between those elite actors is rarely described in standard military histories more interested in the better-documented maneuvers of large armed units. Notwithstanding other factors such as raw numbers or relative superiority in equipment and training, the success or failure of this skirmishing usually leads to corresponding success or failure by regular armies.
After all, it is only by maintaining contact that vital information is garnered: awareness of the enemy’s strength and weakness, of his layout, plans and intentions. The likelihood is, if you lose this low-level war of information, you will sooner or later lose the conventional one.
World War I (sic), a few wars before and most since differed from those prior in that regular forces on both sides were responsible for both conventional battle and lower-intensity warfare. For example, in major offensives during World War I (sic), tens of thousands of casualties and kilotons of munitions were expended in a few days. Meanwhile, “low intensity” warfare persisted as each small unit (a battalion of about 500 men) lost a handful of men or more almost every week on the frontline.
During most civil wars, entire regular armies are built-up on both sides. Each acquires its own central government, tax base, geographical focus and regular army units (intended for combat instead of garrison: the difference is significant in terms of leadership and material) so as to come to blows in conventional warfare. So-called low-level warfare is just the initial development stage of the final test of conventional strength.
Low-intensity war is not necessarily an existential challenge for the occupying power. In other words, whether it wins or not, its survival is not in the balance — at least in the short term. Usually it will fight with one hand tied behind its back, by definition. This weakness may be crucial. The home team has nowhere to run and must fight for its life, all out.
The rebel organization has another home advantage against a distant authority, its regular army and local adherents. Many inhabitants identify with the rebels and provide them with logistical support, reinforcements and information about the enemy. A foreign power or regional government is at an obvious disadvantage with its long history of abusing the locals. However, once those advantages and disadvantages are assigned to both sides, their combatants face the paradox described below. They will succeed or fail depending on how well they handle it.
Given this imbalance, “low intensity” warfare has one major distinction from the conventional sort. Those who ignore that distinction lose the “low intensity” fight and quite often the conventional one this skirmish heralds.
In conventional warfare, achieving a higher body count of the enemy and occupying his terrain dictate military success regardless of local wishes, (for example, the military occupation of his capital, his resource extraction and industrial centers). Losses among civilians can be ignored or worsened. According to Clausewitz’s doctrine, they will fall in line in any case, once their army has been crushed while trying to block the path of invasion.
During “low intensity” warfare, the side will lose that antagonizes the local population. This, regardless of body count and terrain successfully occupied. The higher the local body count, the greater the advantage to the side that minimizes it.
In guerilla warfare, a conventional general needs to be harder, in a way, on his own troops than on the enemy. He must discipline them so severely that they allow their own casualties to increase in order to minimize civilian ones. As much as possible, economic transactions between his warriors and the civilian population must be voluntary and fully compensated. His combatants must be punished for crime committed against local civilians, and more of his resources must be devoted to civil affairs and reconstruction through civilian agencies than to devastation by military means. The sooner during the fight he enforces these requirements, the less likely he will fail at this task, almost guaranteed to fail otherwise.
The U.S. Army ignored this requirement during its wars in Iraq. Setting aside the efforts of General Petraeus, it tried much harder to defeat the Iraqi Army and its paramilitary supports than to rebuild its society and infrastructure. In Afghanistan, the proliferation of civilian casualties from long-range drone bombardment may prove to be our undoing, as well as our habit of hiring local warlords who “maintain the peace” by denouncing their everyday competitors as our common enemy. We are paying off a conveyor belt of additional conflict as a result of those mistakes.
Law and order must be restored, even though almost everyone can thwart them. Property rights must be protected even though local civilians are helpless. It is easier for hungry soldiers to rip off local civilians than to fight dangerous, resource-poor guerillas. Otherwise do both and still lose.
This rule applies just as much to hungry troopers “liberating” the chicken of a peasant family, as to a field commander scanning his battle map for fewer and fewer good targets of his overwhelming firepower, indeed, more so to the latter.
To hell with the false promise of lethal drones! This program should be called “Dragon’s Teeth” since it creates many more enemies than it gets rid of. Like any other poison with therapeutic applications, it should be used very sparingly and cautiously.
The military discipline required for a guerilla war is much more ferocious and difficult to enforce than that required for a conventional one. The massive ideological education and propaganda campaigns that guerilla armies such as Mao’s Red Army had to teach themselves, were not needed to fight the enemy. Red Army soldiers were willing to fight without them. This schooling was needed to prevent the Red Army men from destroying their civilian support base at gunpoint.
An army of occupation confronts an even greater challenge in preventing its troops and local supporters from augmenting their security and sustenance at the expense of native civilians. This problem may be insurmountable in the long run. A foreign power can only guarantee its short-term military success by certifying that it will withdraw as soon as possible and allow honest people to reestablish local autonomy. That would be an admission of defeat during a conventional war. But it can be the key to victory during a guerilla one.
Conventional generals have only recently grasped this idea and its ramifications. http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf. They would rather satisfy conventional war’s demand that our casualties be minimized and those of the enemy maximized, whatever the cost. This standard formula guarantees failure and defeat in guerilla war. Its semi-reversal – though paradoxical and extremely difficult – forecasts success. Whichever side, guerilla or conventional, kills, rapes, rips off and terrorizes more of the civilian population, that side will be more likely to lose in the long run. The other side will win by default, no matter how weak and ineffective it may have been at first.
There is also a double jeopardy based on the home-ground advantage. Even though native rebels may murder more civilians; if they can shift the responsibility for those murders onto the foreign occupier and his inability or unwillingness to control their crimes, he will lose the fight.
Policing those murders must become the occupying power’s first priority, whatever the cost. It must honestly integrate all the peaceful forces in-country into its administration and grant them sovereignty and full support; otherwise, accept eventual defeat.
A successful occupation administration should fine-tune itself as much to the needs of local inhabitants as to those of the occupying power – somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia – and be fully responsible for local administration. The sooner this is done and the less interference from doctrinaire intruders ignorant of local traditions and language, the less difficult it would be. No tactical compromise, ideological intervention or strategic delay would be allowed.
“… He [Napoleon] made Marshall Marmont the governor of these Illyrian provinces, and it was an excellent appointment. Though Marmont was a self-satisfied prig, he was an extremely competent and honourable (sic) man, and he loved Dalmatia. His passion for it was so great that in his memoirs, his style, which was by nature dropsically pompous, romps along like a boy when he writes of his Illyria. He fell in love with the Slavs, he defended them against their Western critics. They were not lazy, he said indignantly, they were hungry. He fed them, and set them to build magnificent roads along the Adriatic, and crowed like a cock over the accomplishment. They were not savages either, he claimed: they had had no schools and he built them plenty. When he saw they were fervent in piety, he fostered their religious institutions, though he himself considered faith buckram to stiffen the Army regulations.” Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yougoslavia, Penguin Books, New York, London, 1994, p. 120.
Finally, a local guerilla force’s survival and eventual victory are much more likely with the military support of an adjacent country immune to follow-up invasion for whatever reason. If your country plans to wage a counter-insurgency campaign in some nation, it should plan to invade and occupy its friendly neighbors and their friendly neighbors and so on.
Conventional generals and their civilian leaders must teach themselves these Learner concepts from scratch.
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