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Notes -
End Orwellian Langauge: It's the Department of WAR Not Defense
Niall Ferguson writing in WSJ this Weekend posits "Ferguson's Law" (conveniently named for another Ferguson) which states that:
Or more concretely, as to debt level:
Ferguson is concerned that the USA has recently crossed this threshhold:
He goes on to offer historical parallels: Habsburg Spain, Great Britain in the twentieth century, Bourbon France. All countries that, according to Ferguson, failed to keep their defense spending high enough
Leaving aside the wishy-washy verb "risks" (isn't any Great Power at risk of ceasing to be a great power 100% of the time always? Give me a quantifiable degree of increase in the risk!), what really stuck in my craw, as I read the essay, was the term "defense."
As used by Ferguson, it seems to refer to military spending, broadly defined to include things like intelligence and infrastructure. The problem is that referring to Charles V and Phillip II's series of misadventures in Habsburg Spain as "defense spending" is insane, or so deeply credits the viewpoints of the early modern Habsburgs that it amounts to insanity.
Charles V's wars were fought against France, against Muslims and Turks, against various Dutch, German, Protestant, and Spanish/Catalan rebels, and of course in his name wars of conquest were fought from what is now Latin America to the Pacific. His heir Phillip II would continue to fight all those foes, and add England to the list in a series of disastrous attempts to reconquista the newly Protestant island of his one-time erstwhile Tudor betrothed. Ditto the wars of les rois Louis XIV-XVI, the scheme of Richelieu and the wars of empire against England across the globe, that produced the debts that brought down the Bourbons. These were wars fought over trade, over succession crises on foreign thrones, over complex webs of alliances, over religious affiliations.
To be fair, I do hold the theory that virtually all wars we perceive as naked acquisitive wars of conquest in human history were, in first person view of the conquerors, justified in some way by religious or moral precepts. Rome "conquered the world in self defense;" Age of Exploration Europeans perceived themselves as spreading Christianity; Alexander justified attacking Persia by pointing to Persian invasions of Greece. Even Genghis seems to have justified his conquests with references to insults given to Mongol caravans and embassies or to ideas of sacred horses and sky gods granting universal sovereignty to the great Khan. The line between "self-defense" and "acquisitive conquest" is thin and faint and difficult to locate in the moment.
But we as historians, as economists, as political theorists, as assholes arguing on an internet chatroom, are not constrained by the first person interpretation of events through propaganda. We can interpret things as they are, and not as we imagine them to be. We need to distinguish between the act of self defense and wars of choice. Which turns into the game of determining each nation's proper aspirations, a trap of impossible proportion. But surely in theory we can agree there is some line between defense and aggression.
Which brings us to Ferguson's present case: the United States of America in the 21st century. The problem of confusing wars of choice with defense spending makes Ferguson's Law a rule that can be invoked in favor of anything a policy maker wants. My question for Ferguson: did the Iraq and Afghan wars bring the USA closer to or further away from compliance with Ferguson's Law? On the one hand they represent increased military spending, on the other they increased debt load. But looking closer, they had nothing to do with defense, and decades later we can see that they advanced no policy goals of the United States. So would Ferguson say that we should do more military adventuring abroad to increase defense spending, or less to reduce debt load? Is aid to Ukraine salutary, in that it is a relatively cheap way to achieve global military goals? Would a new Pacific navy be positive or negative?
The core problem here is the conflation of Defense with War, a problem created in 1947 when Congress changed the sensibly named Department of War and Department of the Navy into the Department of Defense. The Founders, in their wisdom, created those departments, intuiting that the Army would fight on the continent and the Navy would handle overseas foreign policy, primarily the protection of trade ("the shores of Tripoli"). The Department of War is logically named: it deals with war. The Department of Defense is obfuscatory: it assumes that wars are defensive, not offensive. It frames the question wrong, and obscures the reality of what the Army is for and what it is doing.
It reminds me, rhetorically, of the joking debates in my BJJ gym. The professor frequently talks about the "self defense" implications of different jiu jitsu moves, and in general we all kind of giggle about it, because the culture of the gym just isn't guys who get into a lot of fights. One of the other guys at the gym, when told to avoid shooting for a single leg on concrete, noted that his favorite "self defense" move was to either run away or to draw a gun. Robert Drysdale in a recent podcast appearance discussed how there were in his view four types of BJJ ability: Gi, NoGi, MMA, and Self Defense, in a discussion of who were the best competitors of all time. The host joked that it was difficult for anyone to be "the best" at self defense, as "the best" self defense would obviously be to avoid fights altogether. So they settle on "street fighting" or something like that as a better definition, but Drysdale points out that there's something artificial about a lot of the classic Brazilian fight videos that the Gracies built their reputation on: everyone sort of formed a circle, and the fight was one-on-one with no one interfering. Both combatants were constrained by customary agreements, by threats from law enforcement, by the goodwill of the spectators. So it's less "no rules" and more its own customary set of rule for fistfights, which might or might not hold in any given time and place you get into a fight. To say nothing of how a guy who is an expert in "self defense" may use it as license to behave aggressively, knowing they can't be held to account.
All of which is to say, we need to RETVRN to tradition and make it the Department of War again. We need to think clearly about what it means to defend this country, and whether the pursuit of imperial hegemony aids that defense or undermines it, both fiscally and materially.
I am reminded of the George Carlin bit where he talks about how the rather ugly term “shell shock” got softened into “battle fatigue” and later the sterile acronym “PTSD”.
Really? I find PTSD to be stronger than either of the other two, because it talks about how it could be a lifelong condition rather than a temporary thing strong men will eventually "get over"
It was also an effort to recognize causes that weren't from direct combat. For instance, your wingman getting in an accident that kills him can be as traumatic of an event as seeing him get blown up by enemy fire, and both can be traumatic even if you didn't get blood and guts or debris all over you as you'd expect from a name like shell shock. Shell shock was named when they thought it was a literal physical reaction to the concussive force of artillery barrages, battle fatigue came about as the realization that it was psychological set in, and PTSD was a more generalized descriptor not exclusive to battle.
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