WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- WORLD MILITIA (II) -
In the future, Militia training will be universal. Small harms (arms) will be locked up at home in healthy communities and guarded in neighboring armories if recent hostilities have flared.
Able-bodied teenagers will receive some military training, if only field medicine and man-pack logistics for conscientious objectors. These apprentice warriors can be called Ephebes (ehfehbs, from the Greek for youngsters approaching maturity). Equivalent local terms will be acceptable, such as “learner warrior” or some local equivalent. This training will take two or three months during yearly high school summer camps, a week or so every few months for the following two or three years, and as long and often thereafter as local elections and voluntary membership permit.
The right to vote should not be tied to a military obligation, contrary to the Swiss model where there is no vote without military service. Learners should discuss this idea. Voluntary social work like Vista or the Peace Corps should remain disconnected from any military obligation. PeaceWorld will demand much more volunteer civil service.
It is not so much a question of separating Church and State, or School and State for that matter. We must not delude ourselves: religion is and has always been a vital part of government and the educational system. Weapon functions and institutions should become vestigial while peace functions resume the fore. We should separate killing from life-support functions and the functions of Government from those of Administration. Under this separation of powers, local Administrations will control every peace preservation function including the local Militia.
This Militia will require small cadres of full-time military instructors, combat specialists and tactical leaders: Militia Condottieri (mercenaries).
Unlike the Swiss Militia whose officer corps militarized the Swiss upper class, and unlike Israeli officer candidates a majority of whom come from certain schools and kibbutzim (nowadays, from cults of Zionist extremists), this professional soldiery should have no clustered source of recruitment, no significant political affiliation and no other job ties.
The very idea of private military contractors (hired killers and body guards) will be criminalized on PeaceWorld and eventually considered obscene. Individuals under threat because of their popular politics will be protected by the World Court and by local administrations, or if due to their malice and preference for special interests, by no-one.
Condottieri force levels should remain dangerously low. Retention will be merit-based on a competitive basis. Condottieri will fulfill their duties under intense political scrutiny. They will be reassigned worldwide at random intervals and for no apparent reason. Military honor will bind their loyalty to judicial decisions of the World Court, any deviation from which they will deem high treason and punish accordingly.
What remains of coastal, customs and border guard units will be recruited from local Militias. Defense and law enforcement will only devolve to World Court troops if local Militias and Police become too corrupt or biased to enforce global regulations of peace. For example, crooked law enforcement, factional infighting and over-quota commercial harvesting.
If local Militias become too polarized to do their duty, World Court military police units will relieve them, backed by as many World Court commando and mechanized units as necessary. Once peace is re-established, the native Militia will be retrained to enforce peace and justice until they gradually replace the World Court’s forces. Where possible, local militants will be recruited into the World Militia.
This will work as long as two rules remain in force:
· Local Militia and its recruits must never polarize along ethnic, religious and other Prism lines without immediate intervention; and
· The 1-800-MY-RIGHTS telephone number to the World Court mustn’t ring ceaselessly from that region without immediate intervention.
World Court units will only intervene in local affairs with great circumspection. Those interventions will cost local Administrations heavy tax levies after the fact, proceeds of which will finance future World Court interventions. These levies will be deferred if they threaten to induce “Weimar Germany” outcomes; if they intensify popular resentment and don’t reduce it. Instead, a Marshall Plan will be drawn up to satisfy local needs — the way environmental protection plans work these days.
Rigidly warlike regions will be isolated and “frozen out” of global exchanges until local leadership changes its mind. New approaches will deal with loose cannon elites without doing harm to the masses they hold hostage. Neighboring Militias will see to on-the-ground defense; World Court strike forces, to strategic deterrence along the periphery.
Prism organizations should shrink over time. The United States prospers because its State borders are kept permeable, because its career military are compartmentalized away from politics and government regulations are kept to a minimum under strong courts. At least that’s the theory.
During the first decades of Learner apprenticeship, elite mobile killer forces will be required for strategic deployment worldwide. These World Court troops will make up a peace-making Foreign Legion. It will incorporate a mixed air assault/mechanized corps with organic air support per continent; a naval task force for each of the seven seas plus command, transportation and logistics assets as required.
These tough Regulars will train full-time to apply selective violence and endure brutal casualties required to separate both sides of a civil war. Since they are made up of a random mix of international expatriates, little political influence will exist to remove them from trouble or withdraw them once their losses escalate, unlike national troops whose families and supporters would vote for them to leave due to excessive troop casualties. No aggressor could rely on Legionary casualties to assure their withdrawal by world opinion. On the contrary, the more casualties, the more tenacious the Legion’s grip and the stronger its reinforcement ‒ by tradition ‒ a little like Gypsies and the Masai. No-one would dare harm a few of them because, if so, hundreds more would come to retrieve their dead, investigate the particulars and dial in hurricanes of firepower on the murderers.
Shielded by this Legion from bullying neighbors, local minorities will set their own political agenda and establish their own Militia units to enforce political moderation. Militia recruitment will reach across every prismatic barrier. Whenever possible, local leaders will join the Militia, both to uphold Learner ideals and to defend egalitarian politics.
After a cease-fire brings local combat to an end, its fiercest combatants will be granted provisional amnesty. This, providing they join the Foreign Legion for long postings to the other side of the planet. They may not come home until they’ve turned into grizzled retirees. Once they make their way back home, they may live off their pension and tell war stories so horrific as to stand local ephebes’ hair on end. This system will become as self-perpetuating across the globe, as it became in the Gurkha villages of Nepal.
· Velites : local militia
· Hastati : Legion
· Triari : on pension or condottieri
Brief home leaves will be allowed earlier on to see the family – no longer than a few days and carefully watched – then extended in length and liberty for longer-service legionaries. Perhaps as the reward for valor and merit at new postings? Perhaps. We shall see.
World Government will limit other interventions to disaster relief through dedicated, non-governmental agencies. The management of disaster relief and reconstruction will be independent of the military chain of command, better funded than it and superior to it. The military will serve as bodyguards and security advisors, no longer as governors. Otherwise, local Administrations and its citizens will handle local matters. Any World Court military intervention will entail huge tax levies once the affected region has recovered, to defray similar interventions elsewhere.
The World Court Foreign Legion will rely on voluntary international recruitment. Under normal circumstances, Legionaries will not serve as occupation troops. When not deployed or on maneuvers, they will occupy isolated, company barracks. Foreign Legion garrisons will only augment local militias. Without reinforcement, they will be too weak to contradict the Law upheld by them.
Government and Administrative objectives will be negotiated in depth before each new military operation. From time to time, local light infantry Militias and mechanized Foreign Legion “stiffeners” may coordinate combined-arms maneuvers as none-too-subtle warnings of impending intervention in earnest.
No Foreign Legion unit will include too many recruits from the same region. Paul Lackman mentioned that Russia mixes its troops of diverse origins so that no unit can cohere along ethnic lines, with the exception of Russian Slavs who remain dominant. The U.S. Regular Army does the same thing. It jumbles troops together without regard to their hometown. On the other hand, the American National Guard and foreign armies recruit entire units from geographic hubs. Local recruitment promotes unit integrity and morale since recruits must answer to their home community for their behavior in combat.
Only Foreign Legion troops will suffer from such restrictions. Militia units will recruit, train and deploy locally. Without World Court support, they will lack enough supplies and equipment to deploy far afield and enough heavy weapons to prevail against light infantry of equal quality.
Civilians would be amazed by how many elite commandos can be killed or pinned down by a few well-placed machine guns, even those manned by relative amateurs, in the absence of pinpoint artillery fire in support of the attack. Such unsupported assaults rarely work out as well as they’re shown in Hollywood action movies. At best, artillery and air bombardment level everything, and follow-up infantry with armor support takes heavy casualties to overrun a few dazed survivors, their automatic and antitank weapons.
Heavy militia losses will be hard to hide since they will be reported without censure to grieving home communities. Families will soon find out how many of their sons and husbands had fallen in combat. Too bad. Learners will never hide the horror of military casualties.
No nation-state will maintain strategic armed units beyond a few squads of mobile and municipal SWAT police, local human rights investigators, the control agency of transport networks and a ceremonial guard unit: the Continental Constabulary.
Beyond the adolescent swagger of young warriors, there will be no more international or inter-service rivalry between members of this Foreign Legion. The World Court will administer the Legion as its uniformed enforcement branch; its World Court Inspectorate will administer the World Militia globally. Recruitment into the Foreign Legion will be based on basic training by Militia units and selection from among them. Militia Condottieri will be drawn from the pick of Foreign Legionnaires.
The World Court will regulate weapons manufacture and distribution. No one continent will retain a balanced weapons industry or a complete inventory. Weapon components will be manufactured separately and then assembled on delivery to units. Weapon factories will be established in the poorest regions of the Earth.
All remaining nuclear weapons, Air and Naval Fleets, and surplus battle equipment will be mothballed and scrapped under World Court supervision. They would serve no useful purpose under a reasonable planetary regime — just as radioactive arsenals have served nothing but mythical purposes.
We must stop contaminating the anthrosphere with warfare toxins, as the so-called Security Council and its demonic patrons do today, stop turning poor regions into killing grounds for profit and stop lobotomizing scientific research by restricting it to military and paramilitary applications. Instead, we will take advantage of humanity’s enhanced creativity, once those poisons and limitations are weakened if not eliminated completely. It’s merely a question of getting smarter, sidelining psychopaths and making better use of the time we have left.
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