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Wednesday, September
25, 2002
With luck I'll shake this cold shortly. It's still hanging on, but
there does seem to be improvement. Meanwhile the Angeles Forest fire burns
out of control, the the whole basis is filled with particulates, so it's
neither healthy nor wise to walk. We did anyway, taking advantage of about
an hour of on-shore winds before they failed and we began to smell smoke
and got back inside.
If there's a Santa Ana it's going to be bad.
My small comments on
the "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan raised a bit of a
storm, but I see nothing to withdraw.
First, regarding Canada's status as a client state: Republics neither
have nor need clients. They have allies, and sometimes have friends. The
notion of nations being "friends" is complicated, because the
most friendly of feelings can be overcome when the interests are
sufficiently divergent, but in general since the turn of the Century
(1900, not 2000) America and Canada could be described as friends with
mildly diverging interests. Those my age grew up with the notion that long
undefended borders were not usual in human history (true), and ours with
Canada was a matter of mutual pride. More, if you lived in Seattle in the
50's and 60's driving to Canada was no different from driving anywhere
else. There were border stations, but they were mostly for information: no
one inspected documents or searched cars, although the possibility was
there. My first novel, Red Heroin, reflected this to some extent.
Canada wasn't "the 51'st State" (actually in those days one
would have said "the 49th State") but a friendly neighboring
country. Moreover, Canadian soldiers had been in Korea with us, and some
of us remembered that.
Then came the ICBM and missile defenses and NORAD, and increasing US
cold war obligations, and things got a little strained as interests
diverged even more. That led to the SDI debates. Interests diverged.
Canadian governments understood that the US wasn't going to let anyone
take over any part of Canada and put bases there, so there wasn't much
need to spend lots of money on armed forces or a big navy, and the portion
of Canada's national budget that went to defense began spiraling downward.
I don't know what it is today, but one web site proudly states that when
the new program is completed Canada will have 30,000 Reserve troops (for
all 3 services). The Army consists of "40,000 including the
Reserves" and every year 8,000 are sent overseas to participate in
various international ventures.
This is rather interesting. Given the real threats to Canada's sovereignty
-- almost nil -- some 50,000 troops in all 3 services for a nation of 31
million is probably quite realistic. Indeed, except for the need to
participate in overseas activities it might even be thought high.
But that is in a world of republics interested in maintaining the
status quo.
Back in the 1960's Possony and I did a major study of Strategic
Stability for the USAF Air Council. In it we pointed out that status quo
powers have their defense needs largely driven by the correlation of
forces with what I called "disturber powers": those that want to
change the governments of other states. The USSR and the People's Republic
of China were of course the two I had in mind at the time. The US was a
status quo power. We concluded that at that time the US needed escalation
dominance over the USSR and the PRC. Given that, the world was stable.
Lose it and the world had problems.
A pause for definition: Escalation dominance: the status quo power can
win at any level of conflict, and preferably, the higher the level of
conflict (on a scale running between Marine operations in a foreign port
to Central Nuclear War) the more decisive the status quo power's
advantage. Thus the disturbers prudently won't escalate the conflict, and
the status quo powers will win at low levels, and the world will be
stable.
(Aside: One of these days I should find the briefing charts for that
study and publish them with some comments. There were classified elements
to the study but those were specific to the forces in existence and
technologies coming on line: the general study couldn't be classified
because it was an exercise in historical philosophy.)
The US goal in those times was to be the stabilizing power maintaining
the status quo. This was known as the Strategy of Containment, which
came largely from the book The Protracted Conflict by Strausz-Hupe,
Possony, and Kintner. It worked, but it was costly, and the
US, rightly or wrongly, thought that many allies were not doing their part
in contributing to the vast array of forces needed to maintain escalation
dominance at all conflict levels, and looked askance at nations with
downward spiraling defense budgets. The requirements of containment led us
into the Viet Nam Campaign of the Seventy Years War. That led to more
conflicts over conscription, and sanctuaries for those seeking to evade
conscription. And so forth.
Eventually Communism worked its economic magic of transforming food
exporting nations into food importers. (The story was, "The
Communists took over the Sahara Desert." What happened?"
"Well, for twenty years, nothing, then they announced a temporary
shortage of sand.")
Which brings us to the modern era, in which neither the US nor Canada
faces any serious threat from invaders, and the US holds escalation
dominance over most of the world -- and is no longer a status quo power.
The various "peace keeping" operations of the world are in fact
generally directed at changing regimes. The major exception, Desert Storm,
didn't change the regime of the enemy, nor did it enjoy the fruits of
victory, nor did it enforce its restrictions on the defeated regime: with
predictable results.
All of which comes to this: if the United States chooses to be
imperial, Canada has no choice but to be a client state. The US will never
say things that baldly, but the situation doesn't change. The wolf may pal
around with the lion, but nobody supposes them to be equals, and it's the
lion's attitude that governs the nature of the friendship. Thus it has
been since before Aristotle and Thucydides, and thus shall it ever be.
Now regarding the actual incident in which Canadian troopers were
killed through a rather monumental series of SNAFU's. First, it's clear
that the chain of command is flawed and needs some revamping. It's also
clear that so long as USAF thinks the right way to provide ground support
is through high speed jets rather than through aircraft designed for that
purpose and under the control of ground forces, this sort of thing will
happen again and again. It's hardly the first time. US columns in Korea
were strafed by USAF and Marine aircraft, and that wasn't the last of
those incidents. The Air Force wants its "independence" because
that's the only way to put air supremacy at the top of the objective list,
but the problem is that the Air Force then insists on holding on to many
other missions it doesn't want to perform. Given the nature of our
air/ground command and control structure I am astonished that we haven't
had many more of these incidents.
Take two hot jet jockeys whose real desire is to go shoot down enemy
aircraft; put them in high speed hot jets and keep them flying around over
a confused area with no front, no air targets, few ground targets, and a
tangle of friendly forces, somewhat friendly forces, warlords posing as
friendly, warlords not even pretending to be friendly but not part of the
enemy force, warlords friendly to the enemy, and, perhaps, maybe, we can
hope, some real live enemies; keep them on station long enough that they
need pep pills to keep going; and deploy a bunch of friendly but foreign
troops with an organization and equipment not instantly recognizable as
US; don't tell the hot jet jockeys there are friendlies conducting live
fire exercises in the patrol area; and what the heck does anyone expect?
So: these guys were overly aggressive. Fighter pilots usually are. It's
worse than submarine warfare (defined as months of boredom interspersed
with hours of sheer terror) because even a couple of minute's
inattention can get you messily deaded, the airplanes aren't easy to fly
and you still have to be alert and competent enough at the end of the
mission to get back down to the ground. Of course they were overly
aggressive.
In war, everything is very simple, but the simplest things are very
difficult. The friction is unbelievable.
And our remedy is to charge two jet jockeys with murder. Why? If they'd
blown up an Afghan village of women and children we'd all be upset, but
they wouldn't be charged with murder. If they'd shot up one of our columns
it's unlikely we'd charge them with murder. But they dropped a bomb on
Canadians, who have their spokespeople. An investigation was required. It
turned out that the command and control structure was flawed, but everyone
has always known that, and it will be as long as the Air Force hangs on to
missions it doesn't really want to fulfill, and we're about to get into a
major war and it's sure as heck not time to start THAT debate up.
So how do we get out of this and cool down the allies to the north who
furnish 8,000 troops a year to peace keeping operations? Why, look! These
were Reservists. Well, what do you know, the lion can fling a few
scapegoats to the wolves. And it's all right, because who's going to stand
up for a couple of guys who had the wrong equipment for the wrong mission
and were put out at the end of the string with inadequate information? And
we can always sentence them to Leavenworth and commute their sentences,
and everyone will be happy, and as I said, it won't matter much except to
the two officers involved.
I'll have some of the mail on this
posted shortly. The answer to it all
is above.
If you would have peace, be prepared for war. And if you would have
war, be prepared for the costs of war. What cannot be cured must be
endured, and the frictions of war can never be removed.
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