Blogfriends on the Make
Galrahn of Information Dissemination was interviewed by James Joyner and Dave Schuler at OTB Radio. The interview is approximately an hour. 
OTB Radio – Tonight at 7 Eastern
As usual, Dave Schuler will co-host. We’ll be joined tonight by Raymond Pritchett, who blogs under the pseudonym Galrahn at Information Dissemination and the United States Naval Institute Blog. We’ll talk about the Somali pirates, the state of the U.S. Navy, and the Tea Party Protests.
Tom Barnett has a muscular op-ed piece up in Esquire Magazine that is making some waves:
Inside the War Against Robert Gates
….When it came to selling that paradigm shift, Gates didn’t need to convince the military itself – the ascendant Army
and Marine corps have suffered enough casualties to have learned it the hard way. And quite honestly, Gates needn’t worry about the defense industry’s willingness to follow the money, because Lockheed Martin and L-3 have been snatching up enough blue-chip companies to prove they can spot the Pentagon’s future funding spigots.
Turns out you can find Gates’s biggest antagonists in the halls of Congress, where the battle cry of “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” echoes the military’s growing embrace of funding for the manpower that’ll keep this counter-insurgency movement as successful as it’s become. So even amidst all this fighting and dying – neither of which is likely to slow down any time soon – the American military’s newest struggle seems to come down to one question: whose economic stabilization package matters more?
Read the rest here.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:22 am
Tom’s piece is solid.
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I am already seeing my righty friends lining up against Gates as a shill for Obama who wants to "gut" our military, etc.
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They are being herded like cattle by the propaganda arm of the Military Industrial Complex.
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That makes me sound like a radical Marxist. Ha.
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It would be funny if it were not pathetic.
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Worst of all, it may work.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Hi Lex,
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It may. It’s based on habitual, default, political positioning carrying special pleading to the goal line. Enlisting Iraq/Afghan vets in a public campaign about guys dying and being maimed because Pentagon bureaucrats not wanting to release Future Combat System (designed to perform no mission well) procurement money to buy armored up, IED resistant Humvees might be an effective counter.
April 16th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
From Barnett:
America hasn’t fought a war against another great power since 1945, coincidentally the year we obtained and first used nuclear weapons. Since then, no two great powers armed with nukes have ever gone to war — one of the longest droughts since nation-states were invented.
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The nature of war is changing. The argument that we need more nukes because that kind of war is what we will fight is part of what Barnett is arguing against in the Esquire article.
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Implicit in the quote I’ve pulled out is that it’s the nukes that have kept the wars from happening. I think that’s arguable. I’m working on a post on deterrence. (Whatever does it mean in today’s world? Really?) But it’s going slowly and other things are intruding.
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Wouldn’t Barnett himself argue that a world interconnected through trade and IT is less likely to go to war? Hm?
April 16th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Cheryl –
In the long run, I think you’re right. But as Keynes famously pointed out, in the "long run", we’re all dead anyway. Sure, the US and the UK are not going to go to war with each other, and obviously the fact that we are both nuclear powers is not the reason for that. I don’t think that warfare breaking out in Europe of the WWI and WWII varieties (i.e., France vs. Germany, etc.) is a risk either. However, if there were no nukes, is it inconceivable that the US could be at war with China or Russia over some stupid thing like Taiwan or Georgia? In a non-nuclear world, don’t you think that Cheney & Co. would have sent troops into Georgia last summer – I have little doubt of it, even though it would have been ridiculous in terms of the economic interests involved. I think the reason for this is that there is usually a lag between economic evolution and political evolution. Traditional Marxists always assumed that political power is simply a reflection of economic class interests. I don’t think it works that way. Political power often falls into the hands of groups that are driven by non-economic interests, such as nationalism. The Junkers who ran Imperial Germany – basically a pre-capitalist aristocracy – are a good example of this (I would say that the neo-cons who, at least for the first 6 years, ran the last Bush Administration are another example of a group that ruled based on ideological preconceptions and not on the basis of economic interest). And as Lexington pointed out in a post on Barnett’s blog, WWI is the perfect example of a devastating war breaking out among nations that were nevertheless extraordinarily interconnected economically. I disagree with Lexington that the danger of such warfare is inescapable, and as I said, I think that in the long run, the elimination of nuclear weapons in an interconnected global economy is quite feasible, and probably inevitable. For the foreseeable future, however, until political ideologies catch up with economic realities, nukes make good peace-keepers.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
"Implicit in the quote I’ve pulled out is that it’s the nukes that have kept the wars from happening. I think that’s arguable. "
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Barnett has been very EXplicit about that elsewhere.
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I agree with him totally on this point.
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Nukes = peace. Nothing else does, can or will. There is zero reason to think that political leaders of organized communities will not resort to violence whenever they think they can get away with it. They always have. As we learned from studying Clausewitz, seeing violence as a simply way out of your problems is usually wrong. But they have always done it anyway, because they cold get away with it. Nukes are the only thing that make even insane leaders like Stalin and Mao realize that they cannot get away with it.
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"Wouldn’t Barnett himself argue that a world interconnected through trade and IT is less likely to go to war? Hm?"
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He has said precisely that. So did Norman Angell in 1913. Angell was right. A war would be devastating and pointless. Europe was more interconnected in 1914 than it is now, in many ways. The Somme, Verdun, all happened anyway. As Barnett has put it "I am Norman Angell with nukes".
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Richard Cobden and John Bright argued in the 19th century that free trade would bring peace. Why kill your customers? But that liberal dream died in 1914. It is dead, but it keeps standing up, because it is such an appealing illusion. People do not go to war for strictly economic reasons, or often for economically rational reasons at all. The Kaiser went to war to seize Germany’s place in the sun. Stupidity. The went to war singing, with girls beaming and hugging them and handing them flowers. Men like to fight and women like men who like to fight. Politicians will always find ways to exploit that, unless they are terrified of personally dying and having their families and others they care about slaughtered in the process. Make that threat credible, and peace has a chance of breaking out.
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Nukes work. The best thing the USA did in the 20th Century was slaughter hundreds of thousands of Japanese (civilian and military) with two atomic bombs. No other political or military act has ever bestowed such huge benefits on mankind. Coming on top of the brutality of the firebombings, which killed even more people, America’s willingness to kill on that scale very prudently made the rest of the world afraid of the consequences of a third round of great power war. Those lives have been repaid many times over by wars that were not fought. Lots of people have died in vain over the centuries. The people who were burned alive at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not among them.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Hi Cheryl,
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Nukes alter the calculus for great power war by making it effectively unwinnable and driving the costs up to the suicidal. This is the impetus for intiating and tolerating proxy wars and irregular conflict like terrorism during the Cold War. It was more tolerable by virtue of offering a greater margin of safety than Dulles-style brinksmanship. Today, the existential need to tolerate terrorism is actually far less than it was back in the day.
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Remove the nukes and you will change this calculus. Period.
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France and West Germany had a half-century of East-West standoff to move away from historical enmity toward real partnership. Let’s give Russia, China, India, the U.S. etc. some time to come to grips with managing the world cooperatively before we take nukes off the table and make war a feasible option for achieving great power national interests.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:51 am
Remove the nukes and you will change this calculus. Period.
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Precisely. But you don’t remove them – prestochangeo – from this world. You negotiate them out of use. That requires a wide range of changes in the world order.
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Nobody is saying that this will happen instantly.
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France and Germany didn’t decide against war with each other because of nukes. They decided because the costs, even of conventional war, were too high.
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Let’s give Russia, China, and all the others the chance to participate in figuring out ways to remove those weapons. That will help them come to grips with managing the world cooperatively.
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I see contradictions in Barnett’s piece and in the comments here. Peace is because of nukes. Peace is because of interconnection. We shouldn’t worry about giving up nukes because that’s too far in the future. If we can’t totally scope out that future, we can’t give up nukes.
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WWI happened in a world that was interconnected by networks of treaties that urged war as the answer, along with other aspects of globalization. That was as big a lesson as that of Hiroshima. You’ll note that, beyond NATO, such pacts no longer exist. The League of Nations didn’t work, but the UN has done better. People, and nations, have learned these things, so you can’t argue that nothing is learned, that the same foolishnesses will be repeated.
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So nuclear weapons may have served a purpose. But it’s time to move along.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
"Peace is because of nukes. Peace is because of interconnection. "
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No. Proof? 1914. More interconnection than now, war anyway.
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Peace is because of fear.
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"People, and nations, have learned these things."
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They have learned to be afraid of nuclear weapons. They have also learned to massacre their neighbors with rakes, hoes, and hatchets up to a six figure score, as in Rwanda, where nukes were not in the equation.
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People don’t change. They respond to incentives. Take away the incentives, the behavior will go right back to where it was.
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Humans will never "move on". That is the tragedy of being human.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
"France and Germany didn’t decide against war with each other because of nukes. They decided because the costs, even of conventional war, were too high."
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There was a large Soviet army, and shortly thereafter, Soviet nukes, pointed at Bonn and Paris. That helped clarify common interests.
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The French and West Germans did not have some kind of Kumbayah moment. The young Germans were so thoroughly indoctrinated in 1945 as to be addicts of militarism, quite ready, as many German POWs cheerfully told our intel people, to continue fighting the Russians as allies of the United States. Later so many blond haired, blue-eyed, ex-Wehrmacht and ex-Waffen SS ended up in the French Foreign Legion in Indochina and Algeria that German was the legion’s lingua franca into the 50’s and 60’s.
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Germany was shattered and the the French were hell-bent on reconstituting themselves as an imperial great power. Both feared Moscow and were worried about Europe being able to avoid being dominated by Washington. It took only a nudge from the U.S. and appropriate behind the scenes support, to get the Schumann Plan rolling.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
"…ex-Wehrmacht and ex-Waffen SS ended up in the French Foreign Legion…"
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There is a notorious photo I could probably find on the Internet of a group of Legionnaires on leave in Hanoi early in the First Indochina War, marching down the street. And … they are goose stepping! And … they have painted a swastika on their tricolor flag!
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Oops! Bad photo op for the French government, and great one for the Soviets and their revolutionary brethren worldwide.
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Rumor had it that alcohol was involved!
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Now I need to rent that classic Lost Command, with Anthony Quinn, from Netflix, if they have it. And how come all the Small Wars guys all say to read Jean Larteguy’s novels, but they have not been reprinted and cost a fortune used? Seems like the copyright holder could make a lot of money on those … .