Wars and Rumors of Wars

An Assessment and Advice for the Managers of GAE

Substack writers cited in this piece:

Neoliberal Feudalism

and

Simplicius The Thinker

The logic is inescapable; war is coming.  The managerial regime that currently governs the US survives through global rent seeking and manufacturing demand for dollars which would become unfeasible in a multi-polar world.  Ukraine is a melting glacier of a country that will soon release devastating floodwaters across Eurasia and the battle has now shifted to preparing the public for a reality it has been shielded from since WWII- the empire demands a sacrifice.  The rub of course is how to make it happen.

Most of you reading have by now at least heard of The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters paper “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force.”  Written by Katie “nothing says ‘serious’ like authoring a paper under a diminutive” Crombe and John A. Nagl, the paper spells out what the US Army has learned since the SMO began.  The central lesson is that the US Army, not to mention the military as a whole, could not, as presently constituted, win a war against a peer enemy like Russia or China.  For the past twenty years, the US has fought insurgent wars against foes that could not match its material infrastructure, thus allowing America to dominate the skies and communications.  Neither would be true in a war against either China or Russia, or, as seems to be the master genius plan of GAE High Command, both at the same time. 

What, no attack on Venus while we’re at it?

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More prosaically, the model of service that came into being after the Vietnam, the all-volunteer military, is breaking down under the weight of current commitments, not to mention what a peer war would entail.  The authors estimate (under Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions) that in such a conflict the US would lose in casualties the equivalent of a brigade every day; at a 10-1 wounded-KIA ratio that would mean a number of dead equal to the entire Global War on Terror in two weeks.  The US Army currently maintains a combat strength of 31 active duty brigade combat teams and 27 in the reserves, for a total of around 232, 000 men.  Assuming they are all even deployable, that would mean that the US can fight with its volunteers for just over two months before every one of them is killed or wounded. 

One of these gone per day.

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This leads to the inescapable but quite hedged and nuanced (huanced?) conclusion that the US will have to institute a draft.  The authors are clearly launching a trial ballon (flying a trial drone?) here.  As Simplicius points out in his far more thorough take, this paper was issued in conjunction with a number of similar pieces for the purpose of beginning to condition the public to this reality.  One expects that leading figures in the mass media will take the cue to begin lauding the virtues of sacrifice for freedom and the American way of life against the twin menaces of Putler and something-something-China-TBD (going with ‘smash communism’ is politically unacceptable).  Also politically unacceptable, apparently, is the idea that since the American people have no interest in fighting a bunch of wars, perhaps those wars could be avoided. The regime is quite past all that.

There are a number of problems with a draft, something others have pointed out as well.  In the first place, America is not what it was the last time a draft was meaningfully employed, during the Vietnam War.  From having been a largely homogenous country with a strong common culture and a great deal of social trust, the US is now a polyglot empire with contending ethnic factions grouped into two viciously hostile political camps, each regarding the leadership of the other side as an illegitimate, existential threat.  For all of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, for all of the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era, the young white men of the working class who were disproportionately sent off to fight and die were overwhelmingly reflexively patriotic and willing to sacrifice for a country they regarded as their inheritance.  Theirs was a country where Richard Nixon could win 49 states on the strength of his positive invocation of traditional values and assertive foreign policy.  Theirs was a country where people who waved communist flags would be savagely beaten in the streets of New York, to Nixon’s full approval.

My favorite is the guy in the back in the cardigan.

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Of course, those draft-deferred erstwhile American Viet Cong recovered from their black eyes and bruises, cut their hair, put on ties, and went to work busily selling off the industrial base that employed their one-time tormentors to China.  Don’t get the idea that it was revenge, of course; Nixon’s supporters in the business world happily joined the party as well.  As Christopher Caldwell so thoroughly documents in his The Age of Entitlement, the Reagan revolution institutionalized the firesale of America’s manufacturing capacity and its replacement by a financialized, deficit economy that allowed elites to use labor arbitrage to rake in unheard-of profits while buying off dissent with deficit-funded welfare programs, and otherwise manufacturing consent for their program by importing a new people to vote for it.  The dollar domination made possible by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tech boom of the 1990s further enabled the regime to paper over the real national decay.  That is now becoming increasingly impossible, and to judge by the recent assessments of military readiness seeping out into the public, a matter of no small concern to those in the managerial elite. 

The problem is, having streamlined the economy for maximum extraction, they have left little behind from which to draw a levee en masse.  In the first place, few young Americans could serve even if they wanted to, a problem which is only getting worse.  Some are too fat, others on drugs, others mentally ill; the largest plurality is ‘all of the above.’ Cheap processed foods, a consumer society that prioritizes sedentary consumption, the commodification of every form of addiction, and the mental illnesses that result from loneliness and social breakdown are all the produce of- or the slag thrown off from- the machine of neoliberalism. 

Compounding that problem is another, one created by the ideological rather than the economic imperatives of neoliberalism.  The pursuit of DIE, which aims to create a deracinated, gray, rootless mass to serve as a consumer base for the empire, conflicts fundamentally with the need to cultivate an intelligent and well-trained elite to manage it all.  They have yet to be able to square the circle of proclaiming the value of both meritocracy and equality, probably due to the fact that unlike their predecessors, this generation of managerial elites actually believes in both due to an education system that prizes conformity and box-checking above reason and honesty.  As the military draws its leadership from the same hive process, their thinking mirrors the regime’s.  Thus, they have rejected pursuing those who would be generally culturally predisposed to serve, working-class whites from the South, in favor of the Emmas of the world, on the grounds that the latter is just as willing and able to fight as the former, would the former only get out of her way.  Not only has this not panned out as envisioned, to say the least, but the widespread and correct perception that high command means to purposely curtail the career prospects of white male officers and NCOs has been disastrous for recruiting and morale.  Families that have sent their sons into the military for generations are now telling them to stay away. 

Putin’s waking nightmare, in cartoon form

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So what is the regime to do?  They lack even the raw material for soldiers.  They have cultivated a populace that hates them, of dubious loyalty and poor quality.  Even were they to round up every healthy man and send him to fight Eurasia and Eastasia, what would happen on the home front with the detritus left behind?  The streets of American cities are unsafe even with two-million people in prison; how could the homefront survive the absence of every qualified man in every community all at once?  Who would produce the goods needed and where would they produce them?  Who would buy them to offset those who steal them? And what would happen should the unconcealable truth of disasters abroad filter back home?  What would January 6^th 2025 look like?

Is there anything that could make a draft palatable to the public?  Is there any way the regime could get Americans to accept a high-casualty foreign war with carnage not seen in nearly a century?  Here I differ from most on the right- I believe there is.  While I doubt it is a course the regime will pursue, I think there is something that might actually work.  The regime should tell the truth.

Those aren’t lies, you cynic- the man is merely senile.

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The truth is that there is another even more fundamental reason for the contemporary widespread rejection of military life.  To put it bluntly, we are creatures of ease who live in unspoken but omnipresent fear of suffering and death.  I write of “the regime” and GAE, but the hard fact is that our lives are less the result of what they have done to us than what we have done to ourselves.  They have only ever offered, really.  We could say no to the Twinkies and joints and World of Warcraft marathons.  We could exercise and read and go to Church.  We reject those things because what Globohomo offers is easier.  We like their program better than the alternative, which is difficult, unpredictable, and has an unwelcome tendency to sort us out into categories of worthy and unworthy. The GAE gives us what we want, Mencken’s democracy, good and hard.  But in the end, we made that choice.  In a way, it’s a bit ungrateful really.  The managers have created an America of such abundance that the population is too fat to fight, and when called upon to do so, that population refuses to slim down enough to sit at a drone-operator desk for a six-month tour and blow up the regime’s rivals to keep the (literal) gravy train coming.  No wonder they hate us.

If I were advising the president, I would tell him to go on TV and make the following appeal:

My fellow Americans and 30 million assorted illegal aliens- yes I know, I’m being honest because who cares at this point.  War is upon us.  Russia and China are poised to break the grip of American domination of world political and economic power.  If they do so, the American economy as we know it will cease to exist.  Deficit spending will be impossible as it currently stands; the government will probably enter a state of sovereign default, credit financing will collapse, and with it the stock market and all related financial institutions.  There will be no more Social Security or anything like that.  Our world will be like it was before the Cold War; hard money and higher prices. We will have to onshore manufacturing and erect tariffs to block foreign competition.  Those of you in service jobs will mostly lose them; industry will return and with it the ethos of physical labor, masculine culture, and probably the patriarchy.  You will no longer be able to rely on the state for the means of daily life, for healthcare, or for education. Universities will largely vanish save for those who can afford them.  Communities will have to see to their own; life will become more local, differentiated, dare I say, segregated. Let me be clear- all of the progress of the last sixty or so years- at least- will be wiped out.

I call upon all of you to rise up as one people inhabiting this country and fight to prevent that.  Your forefathers and foremothers fought to give you a life of easy access to the things that truly make people happy, games and toys and fun substances.  I ask that you put those things aside but for a little while.  It is true, yes, that some of you will not return from this war.  But think on the fact that so many of you end your own lives in hopelessness in any case. How much more worthwhile would it be to die so that others might live on to enjoy the products and services of the future? Does that sound trite, like something not worth dying for?  My friends, it’s all you live for.  To paraphrase a passage from my faith tradition, “Man liveth by bread alone.”  We, the managers of the liberal world order, have fulfilled our promise to provide you that bread for generations.  Now I ask that you do your part, to sacrifice that others might continue to enjoy that life.  Think of others, as we who administer the rules-based international system think of you.  Good evening, and may we all continue to prosper.