Clip-Clop

Another Hobby Horse

… out for a trot.  This whinnying nag is an ugly old devil, mean-tempered and surly.  He’s also the truest and most reliable quadruped in the stable.  His barn name is Buster, but he runs under The Ugly Truth.

Thomas Sowell writes today about the potentially “fatal trajectory” our nation is on; and there is a lot of material for discussion in the issues he brings up.  But one is of particular interest, because even the flawlessly logical and precise Dr. Sowell gets the wording wrong – as almost everyone does. He writes:

Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the strongest nation on earth militarily, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not.

He repeats the idea a few sentences later:

It doesn’t matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians – at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.

Ultimately it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

Democratic nations invariably put the proposition in Sowell’s terms:  whether we are willing to die or not.  But the Ugly Truth (neigh-h-h) is that the successful use of force for national security objectives depends not on being willing to die, but on being willing to kill.

Ouch.  “Killing,” here, does not imply that force is only successful if people die.  They may have to, but “killing” covers not so much the demise of enemy citizens, as the whole package of destruction, denial of means, and elimination of organized will that must be imposed on the enemy, to make him relinquish his purpose.

Dying before his eyes cannot accomplish this.  It never has.  No enemy has ever been induced to surrender, or relinquish his purpose, by seeing his opponent’s soldiers and people dying.  If you show up thinking of yourself as willing to die, and he relinquishes his purpose, it is because he thought you were willing to kill – not because he was impressed with your willingness to die.

America has experience with showing up – deploying military force – willing to die, but not to kill:  in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia.  It is counterintuitive to our sensibilities, but when we show up willing only to die, our posture produces death – for ourselves and often others – without achieving a decisive political purpose.  We left all three of those conflicts with the same local actors in place, interacting on the same dynamics that prevailed when we entered:  not because there was no way to achieve a different outcome, but because we were only willing to die for our cause, not to kill.

We cut our losses in Lebanon and Somalia, but Vietnam, particularly in the period before 1969, is one of history’s supreme examples of the consequences of showing up willing only to die.  Because we were not willing to visit on North Vietnam the destruction that we were well capable of, but instead confined ourselves primarily to fighting on the schedule of the NVA and Viet Cong in the South, we died in the thousands, as did the South Vietnamese, and the war dragged on for years without resolution.

The Vietnam example highlights the broader meaning of “kill” in our context here, because of course American soldiers killed many Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in battle.  But our basic approach was a “come and try to kill me” one.  Until the Nixon years, we operated in reactive mode, ceding all the tactical initiative to North Vietnam and the VC.  We were there to absorb and turn back assaults and raids, and withstand sieges – not to destroy the means and will of Hanoi.  We were willing to fight, and willing to die; we were not willing to kill and win.  If we had been, we would have destroyed Hanoi’s army, materiel, defenses, supply lines, and national infrastructure in 1965, instead of waiting to conduct serious attacks of this kind until six year later.

Our national leaders considered their reasons for not pursuing this more offensive course good ones, but that is not the issue.  It doesn’t matter what your reasons are; the best of reasons cannot make dying in front the enemy, and fighting at his sufferance, a means of defeating him.  At best these tactics keep the fight going, for as long as you are prepared to continue them.  They will not achieve a decisive political purpose, or the ending of the conflict.

Western democracies have a hard time with this concept, in a political sense.  Our moral ideas require us to think of ourselves as fighting and dying in defense of our ideals and our way of life – or at least of being willing to.  (Naturally, we would prefer to defend our ideals and way of life without actually dying in the process, if we can avoid it.)  It sounds cold and cynical to us to think in terms of being willing to kill to preserve our liberties and way of life.

But the Ugly Truth is that dying – even fighting, if it does not defeat the enemy’s will – doesn’t get the job done in this regard.  Dying is heroic – but only killing is effective.  Even in Thomas Sowell’s formulation today, we can see this.  If we wait for Iran, or North Korea, or some other politically dangerous power that may realize nuclear ambitions, to detonate a nuclear device in an American city, we will have proven that we are willing to die.  We will also have proven that we are not willing to prevent this form of attack.

I note that historical thinkers like Victor Davis Hanson and Russell Weigley, in discussing the “Western” and “American” ways of war, have implied the “killing versus dying” principle in elaborating on their theories of our traditional way(s) of war, as brutal and decisive.  The characteristics of Western war – organization and discipline, unified operation, linear relentlessness, emphasis on technology, and intent to achieve rapid decision – are not features geared to an idea of war as something to die in.  They are, rather, essential for using war to achieve political ends quickly and decisively, so that combat and its disruptions are not prolonged any more than necessary – and so that there will be a political benefit from having fought.  (In shorthand, what B.H. Liddell-Hart called fighting war to achieve “a better peace.”)

The day has come when a modern military like America’s can, in many situations, achieve decisive effects without the slaughter of nearly as many people as the same effects required 50 or 100 years ago.  When we speak of being willing to kill, in the context of our Ugly Truth here, we do not speak of a need to take lives, on the scale of the major wars of the last century.  We speak of killing the will of the enemy to pursue his objective.  Denying him his means and options – destroying his army, his navy, his air force, his missile force, his infrastructure and resources – these are the military goals, not killing his people.  But these are the goals we may not demonstrate we are willing to pursue.

The decision to kill is a very serious one:  not to be taken lightly, or alluded to superficially, as the willingness to die too often is.  Perhaps if we think of it in these clear-sighted, unromantic terms, we will sort our priorities out better in our own minds.  There is a very real price to be paid for letting our thinking be sloppy here – as Vietnam demonstrated clearly.  We should not be willing to die.  Deploying our troops to be bullet sponges is not noble but stupid.  Leaving our people exposed to nuclear incineration is not prudent but irresponsible.  If other options fail – and other options, like negotiation and intimidating maneuver, should always be tried – then we should be willing to fight to kill:  kill the enemy’s will:  and accept death if it is necessary in that effort.

Axiom derived from today’s Hobby Horse:  Dying is heroic.  Killing is effective.

The Ugly Truth is ready for his stall and blanket.