Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

This morning’s New York Times has an “op ed classic” that dates from January 1990 but asks a question a lot of people are pondering in light of the Myanmar government’s (lack of) response to the recent cyclone disaster: “Are Invasions Sometimes OK?”

The columnist, Steve Sesser, who had seen firsthand the people’s revolt of 1988, believed that at that time  “the smallest gesture of U.S. military support — perhaps nothing more than a couple of battleships off the Burmese coast and a few warplanes over its skies — could have won the day for the Burmese people. Even today [1990], with the army deeply split, merely the threat of American intervention might alone be enough to bring down the dictatorship.”

In such circumstances, mightn’t U.S. military intervention have been justified? If so, Sesser wrote, it raised a potential problem: “How could the principle of big-power intervention on behalf of human rights be established without a future American or Soviet government perverting it to prop up, as in the past, repressive dictatorships?”

Well, the Soviet government no longer exists. More to the point, in 2003, for better or worse, the United States established exactly the principle Sesser worried about: that of unilateral intervention, partially justified on the basis of human rights. So that metaphorical ship has pretty much sailed.

Why, then, isn’t a literal U.S. task force sailing toward Myanmar now?

For at least three reasons.

First, China and Russia both have opposed a proposal to have the United Nations insert massive humanitarian aid under cover of U.N. forces. It goes without saying that they would oppose a unilateral U.S. attempt — perhaps supported by a new “coalition of the willing” — to do the same thing. China is a particular problem since it shares a border with Myanmar and is the principal backer of the Myanmar military regime.

Second, a U.S. military intervention would have to be on a fairly massive scale. If the Myanmar regime were tempted to respond with force, which it almost certainly would, then enough assets would have to be in place either to deter such a response or to defend against it. And if the regime abruptly collapsed, the Pottery Barn principle would apply: having broken its government — however richly that government deserved it — the United States would suddenly own the problem of providing security and administrative order to a country the size of Texas and an impoverished population of 47.8 million.

Third, by the time such an intervention could be mounted, the humanitarian disaster it was intended to abate — a second round of massive deaths from starvation and disease — would already have occurred.

Taken together, these considerations mean that however much we might like to help a desperate people and, in the bargain, get rid of the creeps who govern Myanmar, the proposition is not realistic. And since the Myanmar regime has begun, however haltingly and corruptly, to allow the insertion of humanitarian aid, the best policy remains the one the Bush administration is pursuing:  to coax along the regime as best we can and get the forces in place to assist as much as they will let us.

Romesh Ratnesar, in the May 10 Time.com:

… “We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.”

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the US to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the US has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

Full article

Amitai Etzioni, in the May 9 Huffington Post:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated earlier this week that he “couldn’t imagine the United States dropping aid by air” to the million displaced people of Myanmar “without permission from the Myanmar government.” “It’s sovereign air space, and you’d need their permission to fly in that air space,” U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen explained to reporters. Such airdrops of urgently needed supplies like food, water and medicine have been suggested by, among others, Ky Luu, director of the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. However, so far at least, they’ve not been carried out. The reluctance to send in food and medicine, whether or not a given government grants permission, raises an important issue concerning humanitarian aid and even more generally, international relations in the 21st century.

Full post

Shawn W Crispin in the May 10 Asia Times Online:

BANGKOK - With United States warships and air force planes at the ready, and over 1 million of Myanmar’s citizens left bedraggled, homeless and susceptible to water-borne diseases by Cyclone Nagris, the natural disaster presents an opportunity in crisis for the US.

A unilateral - and potentially United Nations-approved - US military intervention in the name of humanitarianism could easily turn the tide against the impoverished country’s unpopular military leaders, and simultaneously rehabilitate the legacy of lame-duck US President George W Bush’s controversial pre-emptive military policies.

Complete article

Today’s lecture in my World War II class is on “Societies at War: The Totalitarian Experience.” Here’s the intro.

In the 1968 Star Trek episode “Patterns of Force,” Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet Ekos to re-establish contact with Federation adviser John Gill. Gill, a distinguished historian, was one of Kirk’s instructors at Starfleet Academy. It becomes quickly apparent that Ekos has somehow become a Nazi society, with Gill as its Fuehrer. Kirk and Spock spend most of the episode trying to reach Gill, and eventually discover that he has been massively drugged and has for years been a mere figurehead for the real fuehrer, Melakon. McCoy is beamed down to evaluate Gill and gives him a stimulant. Spock then uses the Vulcan mind meld to bring Gill to a state in which Kirk can question him.

Kirk: “Gill! Gill! Why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?”
Gill: “Planet . . . fragmented . . . divided. Took lesson from Earth history.”
Kirk: “But why Nazi Germany? You studied history; you know what the Nazis were.”
Gill: “Most efficient State Earth ever knew.”
Spock: “Quite true, Captain. A tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.”

Kirk accepts this explanation. However, if he’d known better, he would have replied: “Spock! Spock! Are you out of your Vulcan mind? Don’t you know that the Nazi war economy was an inefficient hodge podge of competing bureaucracies, often working at cross purposes, subject to the whim of an erratic dictator, and that the Nazis never even tried to fully mobilize until it was too late?”

Complete episode on video

Jill Russell, a doctoral candidate in Contemporary American Military History at The George Washington University, responds on Small Wars Journal Blog to LTC Bob Bateman’s dismissal of the New York Times article on the connections between the Department of Defense and retired generals working as military analysts for cable news networks.

I have known Bob Bateman several years through our mutual participation in H-War, another internet forum, and from that experience I have great respect for him. However, I must disagree with his dismissive critique of David Barstow’s New York Times article. To the contrary, I would argue that the muted tones of the piece belied problems far deeper than would be inferred from his recent blog post. That retired officers are acting as the puppets of DoD in their role as network and cable news military analysts is troubling when examined within the historical context of the Vietnam War’s effect upon the credibility of military officers and the subsequent decades-long effort to restore their reputation for integrity. Thus, if the NYT article deserves criticism, I would submit it’s for missing the real significance, in big historic terms, of the military “analyst” story.

It may seem almost heretical to suggest, but the single greatest casualty of the Vietnam War for the American military was not the damage done to cohesion and morale, or training and readiness. These are actually fairly common occurrences in the aftermath of any American war, successful or not. Rather, the real tragedy of that war was the American public’s loss of faith in the credibility of the military leadership….

Full post

Bob Bateman has a terrific post on today’s Small Wars Journal Blog:

Lawrence and his Message

By Robert L. Bateman

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”

- T.E. Lawrence

Of late there are quite a few people who have taken to quoting T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. The quote presented above is seen almost every day now, on military briefings and in State Department papers, in quotes in news articles and in public statements from people involved in all aspects of our effort. In the eyes of many Lawrence, it seems, holds the answer to our dilemmas both in our efforts to suppress an insurgency and helping develop a democracy.

Unfortunately, as seems to happen too often, almost everyone who uses this particular quote does so without understanding the context in which it was written. Many people, for example, assume that it comes from his 1922 classic, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Unfortunately, not so many of those who use the quote have actually read Seven Pillars of Wisdom in all of its sometimes mind-numbing “Oh aren’t these rocks and the shadows of the desert beautiful” glory. Even fewer realize that the quote is actually from a collection tidbits of advice Lawrence penned during the war in a British publication known as The Arab Bulletin. This particular quote was number fifteen (of twenty-seven) pieces of wisdom published under his byline on 20 August 1917. The salient points regarding the relevance of the citations are actually twofold. This is an issue is because, especially when quoting Lawrence, the context is important.

Full post

A guest post by Tom Kennedy

[Tom Kennedy is a student in my World War II class. — Ed. note.]

Exercise Tiger, 64th anniversary. A Grateful Nation Remembers.

My father, Joseph Kennedy, was a survivor of Exercise Tiger. He was aboard LST 289 with his unit the 478th Amphibious Truck Company. He commanded a DUKW, an amphibious 2 ½ ton GMC truck. It had wheels, a propeller and a watertight hull and was used to transport troops and equipment from ships to shore.

Exercise Tiger was held 22-30 April 1944, at Slapton Sands, England. It was the dress rehearsal for the 4th Infantry Division’s assault at Utah Beach, Normandy, France on D-Day, 6 June 1944. During the early morning hours of 28 April, German E-boats infiltrated the convoy. They sank two LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank). The LST carrying my father was heavily damaged but managed to limp back to port. After the attack, 551 soldiers and 198 sailors were dead or missing — the largest training accident involving American forces during the Second World War.

When the news reached Allied commanders they were worried that so many men had died, especially the missing officers who had copies of the invasion plans. They could not rule out that the enemy had fished out some of the bodies and gotten hold of some of the plans. However, the bodies of all of the officers carrying invasion plans were found. The invasion had not been compromised.

The tragedy was kept top secret. The survivors were ordered not to talk about it with anyone, not even other survivors. Many who died were buried in local WWI cemeteries. Next of kin were not notified of their losses until after the invasion in June. Many of the dead were then re-interred in cemeteries in France.

(Continued)

Tara Lee, a former Navy JAG now practising national security law, writing in yesterday’s forum on the Jurist:

Michael Walzer is wrong. That’s not an easy sentence for me to type. I’m a Naval Academy graduate and a former JAG. Most of what I know about the law of war was taught to me straight from the text of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. You can’t study ethical warfighting without concluding that Michael Walzer knows his stuff. But, in a recent piece in The New Republic, Walzer lent his voice to the swelling chorus condemning the use of private security contractors in Iraq. Walzer is wrong, and so is everyone else who argues that private security contractors are mercenaries who can’t be held accountable.

This is not just an academic error. When our respected scholars (like Walzer) get it wrong, it leads our politicians towards unnecessary and potentially harmful legislation (like the pending bill to ban the use of private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan) and creates momentum for misguided political pledges (“If elected President I will cut 500,000 federal contractors”). So, before our candidates get too far down the wrong path, let’s be clear: private security companies are not mercenaries and they can be held accountable.

Complete column

Cross-posted from Altercation

I already established the fact that when things get real political I consider it wisest to gently absent myself. But in some areas of discussion I would be negligent were I to remain so indefinitely. The de facto relief of command of Admiral William Fallon from the command of Central Command, and his subsequent retirement, is one of those cases.

I refrained from comment, until now, for two reasons. First, while Admiral Fallon was still a serving officer, it would technically have been a crime were I to say anything very critical of him in an open forum. (I could do so privately, but not in public.) Though he was not in my chain-of-command, he was still an officer of higher rank, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice has some very clear things to say on that point. The second reason was because I wanted a little time to pass until some of the emotions died down. There was nothing I had to do in the immediate wake of the relief which would change things, and at the time it occurred a lot of people became fairly passionate. Passion is sometimes difficult to interact with. So now here is my bottom line.

The de facto relief of command of Admiral Fallon was good for the nation.

(Continued)

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed reviews a new book concerning the extensive role of reservists in the Iraq War, and interviews its authors:

Members of the U.S. Army Reserves are often called “citizen-soldiers” – an expression that definitely carries more honorific overtones than another label that has sometimes been applied to them, “weekend warriors.” The latter phrase is not just insulting but now hopelessly out of date. The men and women portrayed by Michael Musheno and Susan M. Ross in their new book Deployed: How Reservists Bear the Burden of Iraq, published by the University of Michigan Press, can hardly be called amateur soldiers. They were not only sent to Baghdad but assigned to guard an overcrowded and under-equipped prison camp. (Not the one at Abu Ghraib, though it sounds like they get that question a lot.) And like other reservists, they find themselves serving repeated tours of duty – drafted in everything but name.

Full review and interview

Like Rob Citino, I was interviewed for RateMyProfessor.com’s “Professors Strike Back” series, and the results are now online. There are four clips, but the most relevant for BOOTSA purposes is the second, in which I respond to a student who demanded: “Stop Telling Us About Your Blog or Your Time in the [National] Guard.”

Enjoy.  Or seethe at my arrogance. It’s all good.

Below are the remarks I made at a Presidential Session of the the recent SMH in Ogden, Utah. Thanks to Carol Reardon for inviting me to speak, and to Mark for inviting me to post.
———————–
These are good times, aren’t they? Military history has rarely been on such a roll, and certainly not in my lifetime. Two thousand seven was our year, with article after article on military history appearing in the major journals: Mark Moyar’s “The Current State of Military History” in The Historical Journal; an entire issue of The Journal of American History, with the centerpiece article by Wayne Lee, “Mind and Matter: Cultural Analysis in American Military History — A Look at the State of the Field”; my own piece in the American Historical Review, “Military Histories Old and New: A Re-introduction”. We also recently hit the U.S. News and World Report in Justin Ewers’s article “Why Don’t More Colleges Teach Military History?” I’ll admit, for someone of my age (Ph.D., Indiana 1984), this is all a bit bewildering. I’m one of those people who read John Lynn’s brilliant piece “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History” back in 1997 and thought “Dear God, this is the story of my life”! But rather than spend time speculating on the meaning of it all, I’d like to talk about my experience in getting the first military history article in the AHR since 1981.

What a marathon! Back in August 2005 I was invited to New York to do a shoot for The History Channel, in the network’s pre-”Ice Road Truckers” era. The topic, I believe, was Operation Barbarossa. My companion on that program was Maria Bucur-Deckard, an assistant editor at the AHR. During a break in the filming (my own memory is that this took place on set, with both of us in full facial makeup), she mentioned to me that the AHR was interested in a “current state of military history” piece, and floored me by asking if I’d like to write it. I said sure. There was some text messaging back and forth between Maria and Rob Schneider (the Editor of the AHR) back in Bloomington, Indiana. The idea that I originally suggested was a kind of “snapshot” of the current literature — I thought it would be interesting to concentrate on literature published since 2000, and that’s the idea we started with.

Well, I wrote the piece and sent it off to the journal in at the end of 2005, and it came back to me SHREDDED in March 2006. I have never been read harder. There were, I think, eight reader’s reports (I’ve only been able to find six in my own files, but I have a memory that there were more). At any rate, it seemed more like 800. With that many readers, the possible permutations were nearly endless — this reader liked parts 1 and 3, but not 2; that one liked part 2, but not parts 1 and 3, etc. No one particularly liked the piece; all of them wanted a larger coverage of the literature; some wanted to junk it altogether as unsalvageable. Part of me responded by crying, “Yes! We should ALL be PROUD of the high standards of our flagship journal!” But another part of me wanted to buy a rocket launcher. I rewrote it, a much bigger piece, with a lot more literature discussed, and sent it off, and it came back to me re-shredded in June 2006, leading to a major crisis of confidence on the author’s part. In general, it seemed to me like scholarly mission creep. It had started as a snapshot of post-2000 literature, but now the readers were telling me that I needed to discuss the work of John Keegan & Paul Fussell and to explain the origins of the debate over the military revolution of the 16th century–all important stuff, but literature that was in many cases decades old. In my more paranoid moments, I thought they might be doing it on purpose: “Let’s overload the military historian until he crashes and burns!” The more I thought it over, however, the more it actually made sense. The AHR and military history really had been out of touch for a long, long time; it really was time to reconnect.

And now, an interlude. In the summer and fall of 2006, I wrote another book, my most recent, called Death of the Wehrmacht, and put the article aside altogether. I didn’t contact Rob for a while, most of 2006, in fact, and we didn’t reconnect until early 2007. He probably thought I’d dropped off the planet, but in reality I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue with this project. He convinced me, and I wrote a third version, much larger than versions 1 and 2. Even now, the readers were giving me advice about discussing more books, but this time I managed to fend them off. A work of this sort would always have its omissions and gaps, I argued — that’s half the fun of reading and arguing about them. At any rate, a snapshot of some of the principal literature had now morphed into a comprehensive analysis of the current state of the field. The AHR accepted the article in April and printed it at the end of 2007 — over two full years since it was offered to me. It took longer to write, in other words, than a book, considerably longer.

From the start I tried to be guided by two related rules in writing this article:

First, I had no intention of apologizing for being a military historian, no intention of downplaying my (or our) interest in actual warfighting or trying to justify it to a queasy field. Indeed, these were issues that I didn’t even want to discuss in the article, and I stuck to that. Some of the readers thought that I should, but my position has always been that historians of, let us say, Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot never seem to have to explain why or apologize for it, and I don’t think we should have to, either.

Second, and in a similar vein, I had no intention of whining, or complaining about our “plight” as military historians, or asking “Why do they hate us?” or pillorying the leftist ideological bent of the profession at large. In other words, I had no intention of using this piece, which, after all, had been commissioned by the AHR, to fight a battle in the culture wars. You can disagree with me, or call me weak-willed, but I think the opportunity to put our scholarly foot forward, to frame the piece as an invitation and not a rebuke to the profession, to stay on the high road, as it were, was the way to go. I felt like a guy who had finally received an invitation to a place I’d long wanted to go, and I thought it would be bad form to enter the room and immediately yell at the host for not inviting me earlier. Looking back on it, I really do think that I made the correct choice. Your mileage may vary.

Finally, I’ll end with a plea: don’t let my article be a one-off. Send your work to the AHR, and keep sending it. Rob Schneider says he wants to see it, and we should take him at his word. If another ten — or god forbid, twenty — years pass and I don’t see any military history in the AHR, well then, to quote a famous Sicilian:

“I’m going to blame some of the people in this room. And that I do not forgive….”

Winging homeward yesterday from Ogden, Utah, site of this year’s Society for Military History annual meeting, I read the multi-page New York Times exposé about the cozy relationship between the military analyst talking heads on FOX, CNN, etc., the Pentagon, and certain defense contractor business interests. It made for awkward in-flight reading, since it’s hard to flip so many newspaper pages within the cramped quarters of economy seats. But my need for a full brief on this new manifestation of the military-industrial complex overrode the comfort of the hapless passenger next to me.

Several blogosphere pundits have given the piece the gravitas the NYT thought it deserved; e.g., Phil Carter in Intel Dump:

The most serious of these allegations boil down to this: that the Pentagon established a quid pro quo whereby retired officers would get access to people and information in exchange for positive public commentary; and that some retired military officers stood to gain financially through their ties to private companies holding government contracts with the Defense Department.

On the first issue, I’m shocked — shocked — to see commentators trading flattering comments for access. Such practices are hardly abnormal. But, there is something particularly unseemly about retired military officers playing this game in wartime. For better or worse, we hold these men and women to a higher moral standard. Their opinions are worth something on the air precisely because we expect these retired officers to know something about what’s going on and to tell the truth about it. I know this is politics-as-usual, but I’m still disappointed.

Second, the Times article raises the specter of impropriety for the retired officers with ties to government contractors with business before the Pentagon. I don’t know that this rises to the level of a procurement integrity issue; there seems to be little evidence on that point. But this certainly ought to raise major concerns for the media organizations that hired these guys. They owe the public a lot more due diligence when they pick pundits, and I hold them somewhat responsible here.

But LTC Bob Bateman, writing in Small Wars Journal Blog, has a very different take:

(Continued)

. . . is underway at The Cannon’s Mouth.