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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
I'd say it's right there in your first sentence: a warrior class.
Americans are allergic to the concept. Or at least to talking about it openly. When something implies the existence of a class divide, we tend to get real uncomfortable real fast, and start casting about for alternate explanations. You can have military families just like you can have legacy admissions, so long as they're framed as pure personal preference.
"Warrior class" isn't the right word, anyway. We're not talking about kshatriyas or samurai or knights. Those classes are no longer economically viable. Back in the days of subsistence farming, feudal dues were one of the more effective ways to support specialization of labor. Peasants farmed, lords taxed, and when it came time for violence, the necessary logistics and command structures were already in place. As food production improved, and state capacity generally expanded, this relationship was no longer the only game in town. The standing armies of Renaissance Europe were already decoupled from retinue-of-retinues feudal structures.
Simultaneously, the proliferation of firearms and fire artillery was closing the technological gap between the aristocracy and the plebes. By the modern era, the warrior aristocracy was no longer load-bearing. Officers got down in the mud and choked on mustard gas just like their lowborn brethren. The most successful militaries coming out of the World Wars adapted to this reality by treating military expertise like any other economic niche. Career soldiers are no longer a class. They're a commodity.
So there is a class of Americans which makes up the tip of the spear. But they're not a warrior class. They're just another one of the socioeconomic strata which form our vast, Byzantine economy. As with doctors, lawyers, police officers and chronic welfare recipients, membership in this class is to some extent inherited. Members hail from certain regions and tend to hold particular political beliefs. Their parents were likely in the class, and their children may find themselves making suspiciously similar choices.
On the flip side, we don't allocate greater rights to our doctors and lawyers and other extreme specialists. At least not explicitly. The privileges of rank, and of choosing to commit oneself to a particular niche, are supposed to be folded into pure economics. If, on noticing your material wealth and stable retirement prospects, others choose to treat you better...well, that's their prerogative, isn't it? Once again, any implication of class barriers is swept under the rug.
I cannot stress how important this is to our national mythos! As such, I can't endorse giving the military class some sort of immunity or credibility. Just look at how much damage the perception of such immunity has done to American politics. The cult of personal responsibility may be one of our greatest pretensions, but it's also one of our most effective. I think we should be trying to repair it rather than work around it.
Perception of immunity only happens when there's actual immunity. If there was a true system of personal responsibility, that would be great, near-ideal. But since there isn't, immunity and special privileges should be distributed outside the elite.
Even if we don't call it a class, class is still there. In the US, there are the Harvard and Stanford people, people with connections.
And isn't there this whole cult of veteranhood in the US, how soldiers get discounts on certain goods? Don't they get cheaper education and preferences in employment, in some places? Isn't there Veteran's Day, (like we have ANZAC day)? It seems like they're a class with positive privileges. I simply propose the negative privilege of not having the predominant, load-bearing echelon be harassed or insulted by their leaders.
Napoleon is right IMO. Soldiers aren't just an economic product, they need some kind of ideal to fight for. If there's one lesson from the Middle East, it's that money is secondary to will. The hatred, fanaticism and self-confidence of the Taliban overcame our firepower and funding.
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