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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest. Sometimes that means accepting limitations—when you actually get something in return. That’s civilization for you.

I don't have reason to believe that these strikes were actually illegal. But if they somehow were, Hegseth would be undermining an equilibrium that really does benefit the U.S.. And for what? A little extra assurance that those narcos wouldn’t get rescued? There’s no reward.

The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest.

Our current Secretary of War has written a whole book (The War on Warriors) about how treating the US military as an instrument of policy and social change, rather than an instrument of violence, is the root cause of much dysfunction from the Vietnam-era to the present day.

And Clausewitz wrote a book saying that "War is the continuation of policy by other means". I think Clausewitz is right and Hegseth is wrong.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

When we signed the CWC, we were binding our hands with respect to chemical weapons. We’d decided that was a fair price for binding all the other signatories. Cooperate-cooperate.

We don’t bomb lifeboats so that other states don’t bomb ours. Even though narcos will never be in that position, bombing their lifeboats would set a bad precedent for our relations with other states. They might reasonably assume that we will, in fact, ignore the rules we’ve supposedly endorsed.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

Secretary Hegseth would disagree. As @gog and @YE_GUILTY observe above, there has been a societal shift towards the idea that discipline should be done away with. Hegseth argues that this attitude is fundamentally incompatible with the "warrior ethos" and by extension winning wars, and I feel like he makes a reasonable case for this position.

Which of those things applies to bombing lifeboats, though?

Who's bombing lifeboats?

This is no longer a moral argument but a political argument. At that point, it’s more parsimonious to admit this is just another anti-Trump hoax. That is, none of this press coverage exists as an organic natural concern about what’s best for America’s interests in the world. Those are just arguments made up to get the sexy “war crimes” headline into the news right as Mark Kelly is calling for soldiers to be prosecuted.

That would be selective outrage at worst. Hoax would mean that they made up the details of the story.

If the latest NYT reporting on this is to be believed: they did.

And how do they assert the national interest? Essays? Vibes?

No, with the threat of deadly force, and the application of that deadly force.

Diplomats are also there to assert the national interest, but diplomats aren't for killing people. Armies are.

A method isn’t a purpose.

Violence is the most important skill for armies, but it’s not the only one, and there’s no reason they can’t agree to hold back in some way.

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