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Notes -
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
A few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that troops who need an exemption from shaving their facial hair for longer than a year should get kicked out of the service.
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
I agree rules of engagement are for pussies. The United States should stop with this half ass shit. The US can destroy civilizations with the power of suns. If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies. Of course, the standard for such attention should be astronomically high.
Let's try a (maximally cynical) example out for size.
It is the year 2003, and you have been selected to lead Operation Get Iraqi Oil. Do you nuke the country into a glassy plain? I suspect that would make it harder to get Iraqi oil than staging an invasion and military occupation, but I'm curious what you think.
Engage maximum cynacism mode! No nukes are needed. In fact, nukes are overrated. Two squadrons of B-52s can drop the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb via conventional ordnance, except those can all be individually targeted down to an arbitrarily precise degree as smart bombs, and so are actually far more devastating. 80% of Iraq's oil is clustered in the southeast, you just blow any civilization near them off of the map, occupy the oil fields, and declare a 200km buffer zone between your occupation area on top of the oil fields and the rest of Iraq. Anything or anyone that enters the buffer zone will be destroyed without warning.
Literal robbery? Absolutely. But perhaps more humane in the long run that the almost quarter-century clusterfuck we have now.
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I would never lead that operation. But, if you are evil enough to think the US military should be used for such a thing I want you to shout from the rooftops "I am willing to kill every single Iraqi if that's what it takes to get the oil."
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I think @zoink's point is that you shouldn't be handling Iraqi oil in the first place. If you aren't prepared to kill and destroy everyone there, you have no business getting involved.
In practice, I don't think this works - if pirates are intercepting 30% of American shipping from their base in heavily-populated Lebanon, you need some kind of response between 'let them' and 'kill everyone for 10 miles'.
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The US has a lot of concerns where total annihilation would be wildly excessive and counterproductive. Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling. It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint. And it wouldn't even work, because the strategy immediately fails against any sort of decentralized opponent.
Doing nothing is comparatively reasonable, but still suboptimal, since having your shipping go unmolested is kind of a big deal.
Very few Somalis would share this sentiment if the shoe was on the other foot, which is the problem with modern ROE. They work when its Americans fighting Germans or the English. They fail wherever the enemy lacks sufficient honor.
Why? The shoe isn't on the other foot, will not be on the other foot in our lifetimes (if ever), and if somehow the shoe did switch feet it would involve a Somalia so transformed that any comparison to present Somalia would be useless. "What would the Somalians do in this situation?" is irrelevant to what we should do in the situation we are dealing with. Punishing people for the infractions of their hypothetical counterparts is counterproductive to your actual goals.
I'm not sure what this means. The US' last war against Germany was fought under very different circumstances, with different goals, and with different ROE than the GWOT.
Disagree. It is highly relevant when making moral calculations, which is part of what ROEs are supposed to do. If you are fighting someone who will knife you and your children when you're asleep it is very different than if you are fighting someone who would adopt your children and take good care of them if you die during your honorable duel.
Asserted not only without evidence, but in contravention of mountains of evidence from past historical conflicts.
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How would raining widespread destruction on Somalia even help prevent piracy? They're not the Barbary pirates - the reason why the pirates are in Somalia is that the government of Somalia basically doesn't exist, and certainly can't prevent pirates operating out of its territory - not that they are insufficiently motivated to. The situation with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda is similar - bin Laden moves to Afghanistan in 1996 before the Taliban has successfully consolidated power and sets up his first terrorist training camp in Jalalabad where Taliban control was shaky. The way the Taliban behaves after 9-11 certainly looks like a group that had become dependent on Al-Qaeda to maintain control of Afghanistan, and so couldn't kick them out even if they wanted to.
The reason why the US and allies took up nation-building in the noughties was that the problems we were facing at the time originated in failed states, not rogue states.
If there are no Somalis and/or no Somali boats, there can be no Somali pirates.
Yes, and the inherent flaw in this was looking at the "failed states" as states that failed their people, as opposed to states which gave their people what they wanted and/or deserved. Somalia isn't failing Somalis, the Somalis are just failing all over. The Afghan government that lost the country to the Taliban in like 14 hours didn't fail Afghans, it gave them the government they wanted.
The concept of a failed state had nothing to do with failing its people, even in the minds of the most high-minded Blairites - nobody saw North Korea as a failed state. A failed state was a state that was so dysfunctional that it couldn't prevent its territory being used to attack other states, like Somalia with pirates, OG Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda, or Syria with ISIS.
But Somalia's government isn't incapable of stopping pirates because theoretically. It doesn't care to because the people don't care to. And/or there aren't enough functional people in somalia to erect a state with that sort of state capacity.
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Not super invested in this argument, but --
This only makes sense if you extend care to all humans equally as part of an internationalist humanitarian ethos. Many people don't, so they don't really care if 1 or 100 or 100,000 Somalians get killed in reaction to bothering us. If you ask them directly they would probably mumble something about how terrible it is because it's socially expected, but if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.
Internationalist humanitarian true-believers are only (somewhat) common in U.S., Europe, and maybe Japan, countries so rich that luxury beliefs have become widespread. Most other nations' peoples still posses the tribal mindset I outlined above, and so to them the value of Somalian lives is approximately zero. Belgium and France might whine about it, but they increasingly irrelevant. Russia and China, who are relevant, would not care, though they would certainly cynically posture and feign outrage (just like the U.S. often does).
I don't really think maximum brutality is as beyond the pale as many (including myself) hope. There is a lot of room for American nastiness before Russia and China seem like more trustworthy and reliable allies, IMO.
Governments are so prone to lying, or at best motivated reasoning , about taxes that there's a certain base level of "if you tell us we need 5% taxes we won't believe you, no matter what it's for".
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No doubt Saudi Arabia would see this as ‘just what happens. FAFO’. But the Latin American elites do not differ in worldview(or complexion) from Anglosphere and Western European elites, and there’s a butload of unstable countries with serious crime problems that really don’t want to set that precedent.
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Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?
It seems to me that the United States needs to be able to exercise a wide range of levels of military force in order to compel its enemies, including both the extremely high (destroying civilisations with the power of suns) and the moderate to low. As in Starship Troopers:
Is any level of force short of complete annihilation 'half ass shit'? Do we need to either cut the baby's head off, or let the baby act out for as long as it likes?
Spanking is appropriate for a baby, community service is appropriate for a juvenile delinquent, and beheading is appropriate for a hardened, unrepentant public enemy.
Nobody thinks we should instantly behead babies or lunchtime rowdies, but many people think we should stop handing out spankings and community service to hardened, unrepentant public enemies.
Apparently zoink does.
As I indicated in my response to him, it's to illustrate a point in principle. Sure, the US military has often been used badly. The US military's record over the last thirty years is pretty darn embarrassing. The point I am making, citing Heinlein, is that past incompetence notwithstanding, it is both necessary and good for the US military to be able to deploy a wide range of levels of force, as appropriate for many different mission profiles.
I read @zoink's comment as calling for decisive action and full commitment. That does not require using maximum violence in all cases.
Well, he said, "The United States should stop with this half ass shit... If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies."
I asked a clarificatory question: "Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?"
His response to this question was: "Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct."
I took that to mean that, yes, his position is as I described it - that the US should either do nothing, or completely annihilate its enemies with nothing in between.
I believe that the point in the Starship Troopers passage, and the metaphor of punishing a baby by cutting its head off, is an effective argument against that position. Sometimes a military should enact a level of destruction that stops somewhere short of "everyone dies" (zoink's words) or "utter destruction" (mine), because the policy goals that a nation might wish to achieve with military action might be, well, something other than complete annihilation of its foes.
Now to his credit zoink seems to back off from his statement and say that he was using bombastic rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure what his actual position is - he rejects the child comparison but concedes he was using extreme rhetoric, but does he concede the actual point of controversy, that is, that some mission profiles call for less than maximum force, and that is desirable for the US military (or any military) to be able to exert controlled force for limited effect? But I stand by what I said as being a reasonable interpretation of what he had said at the time.
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This is a more correct reading, but I was being bombastic and did reference nukes and killing "everyone". I completely deny the comparisons to disciplining children. The military breaks things until whatever the state wants to happen happens. Deploying the military should involve wailing and gnashing of teeth as we beg God for forgiveness for what we may do.
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Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct. Time for the midwit poly-sci majors playing games "inadvertently" getting half a million people killed, with no moral accountability to be out of work. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
I'm talking about military action not disciplining babies.
The point of the metaphor is to be illustrative of a principle.
To wit, the purpose of military action is to impose your will on another party. It is to threaten, induce, or compel another party to accept your will.
Frequently it is desirable to do so using the least amount of force possible. This is partly because it is frequently preferable to injure the enemy the least amount necessary; for instance, if one conflicts with an enemy with whom one has a trade relationship, one may not want to shatter their economy entirely, or if one is conquering a piece of territory, one probably wants to preserve that territory in as good condition as possible. It is also partly just because of expense on one's own side; if your goal can be achieved with a special forces operation, that is much more affordable than a full-scale invasion. One can get maximum value, so to speak, from one's own military by using the smallest amounts of force necessary to achieve one's goals.
If your military has only two settings, zero and one hundred, you lose a tremendous amount of ability to meaningfully compel one's rivals. If I'm a rival of the United States and I know that the only military force the United States will ever deploy is total nuclear annihilation, then I am free to do anything I like without fear of retaliation as long as I stay below the nuclear death threshold. According to your own words, the nuclear death threshold should be extraordinarily high, so in practice I can do whatever I like. The US has effectively disarmed itself.
It does not seem in American interests, to me, to disarm itself.
Look, the idea that the US has used its military force badly over the last thirty years is extremely defensible and probably common sense at this point. But you are overcorrecting to the point of total absurdity. Has the US military not been used well recently? Certainly. But I don't think the correct response to that is to rule out the possibility of using the US military to do anything.
It really depends on the enemy you are facing. If you are facing an organized state with citizens comparable to your own in intelligence and conscientiousness, your framing makes a lot of sense. This is, to be a bit reductive, the "thermostat" view of violence. And I agree it can be done in those situations. Of course, sometimes it leads to losing, such as when the English lost their American colonies. But losing in those limited situations is acceptable, after all, it worked out quite well for England. America has been its best ally since approximately 1813.
But, if you are dealing with loosely banded together warlords governing over mobs of unintelligent, spontaneous, people, this method does not work. You have to deal with that kind of violence with the on/off switch model. The on/off model is the one, correctly, used by law enforcement (ideally) because there is no thermostat in dealing with a crack addict who might have a knife. Progressive attempts to impose the thermostat model continually fail in that context. Often officers suffer either on the job or in the courtroom because of such poor models of reality. And the same is actually true of Somali pirates. You can't really deter them properly by judiciously arresting a few of them once in a while after the fact. The thing that actually works is just blowing them out of the water. And that same thing would have worked with the Taliban, but no one was willing to do that thing.
Sure, the ideal amount of force or destruction is context-dependent. I think of Chinese history as one context, for instance: you can argue that the correct amount of force to use against steppe raiders is to wipe them all out to the last man, woman, and child, as with the Dzungars, but that this is a very inefficient way to handle a rival Chinese state (which is why e.g. Sun Tzu recommends leaving them lines of retreat). On the other hand, wiping out steppe peoples to the last is extremely expensive and only buys you a couple of generations before a new group of nomads moves into the void and then you have to do it again, so a preferable solution might to be strongly disincentivise raids with punitive strikes and alliances with some tribes as proxies (who can do your dirty work for you by punishing tribes who don't play by your rules); but of course those alliances can also end going quite badly and turn into the tribes just extorting tribute from you.
It's always a pretty delicate balance, I think. I don't claim that maximum force is never the merited response - just that it's a very expensive one that is not always to be desired.
Steppe people have little in common with modern dissident states. The mongols and huns, by way of example, were masters of modern (for the time) military technology such as husbandry, siege craft, etc. Pretending they are analogues to the Taliban or Somalian pirates, is acting like those people have fleets of aircraft carriers and a host of ICBMs.
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