In the comments on the post regarding the death of Andy Olmsted, regular commentor Graham Bell suggested:
Suggest a topic for some time in the future: the nature and the future of the social contract, not the legal contract, involved in military service.
Newcomers should probably read MarkL’s and Katz’s comments for some background. I’m not going to offer anything and let those who want to discuss it frame the issue.
So have at it. And please do not comment on the Andy Olmsted post. All discussion concerning the topic of this post is to happen here.
Ok I’ll stick my neck out on this one.
It is probably arguable that ‘modern’, volunteer militaries are not bound by the social contract in the same way that national service style militaries are as the modern military is in no way demographically representative of the general population.
Then again, I personally would argue that the modern military machine as a tool of state power is declining in relevance. Just as the westphalian style nation state itself is and just like civic or ethnic nationalism as justification for its existence is too.
The Nature of the Social Contract Involved in Military Service
Note to Graham: I fully understand and agree with your point in the Olmsted thread. For that reason, I am certainly not going to use the death in action of my brother-in-arms for any political purpose. That would demean the profession, him, and me.
The root cause of this discussion point was Major Olmstedâs comment that:
âSoldiers cannot have the option of opting out of missions because they don’t agree with them: that violates the social contract.â?
This is a statement so obvious I literally cannot imagine any military person disagreeing with it, or understanding how such disagreement is even possible.
Katz noted that:
Yet also some other soldiers who doubtless accepted the solemnity of the social contract mentioned by Major Olmsted also accepted the proposition that torture was legal if it was ordered by persons higher in the chain of command.
Thus this proposition is more problematic than it may seem at first reading:
I responded to this with:
If you knew any military personnel, you might understand that the social contract mentioned is based on oneâs agreement with that society to protect it from those who would attack it.
This raises the issue of the nature and scope of the social contract. It also raises the issue of context: this context is really that of the USA during the enlightenment, the USA now, and how, as Australians, we relate to that. The words above were written by a US soldier.
The original social contract theory proponents (David Hume, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), noted that the social contract grew almost as an extension of the filial contract. The implication is obvious for anyone born into a civilisation: we are never in a state of nature. None of us have ever been North Sentinelese! In other words, to understand how the social contract evolves, we need to look at the kinds of contract that prevail during each stage in the development of a human being in society.
So we grow as children nested within existing social contracts but only connected to them by our filial contract. This is one reason why we have special rules for children. We enter into our own individual social contract when we reach our majority and are recognised by society as being able to join it as a full member. The social contract is our agreement with others (also in their majority) to live together in harmony for our mutual benefit. At this point, we are living in a state of society and members who breach this we term âcriminalsâ. As part of the social contract which expresses this, it involves:
- the retaining of certain natural rights
- acceptance of (hopefully minimal, but this depends on the society) restrictions of specified liberties
- the assumption of specified duties
- the pooling of specified powers to be exercised collectively on behalf of society
The military view of this is something I learned in exercise of military duties, study of military theory and history. Democratic societies such as Australia and the USA have an unwritten (but quite real) social contract between the society at large and those individuals that makes up the armed elements that defend that society. The contract terms vary temporally and from country to country.
Such contracts routinely change with the passage of time and as the society changes. They can collapse where democratic countries collapse into totalitarianism (witness both socialist Germanies: National Socialist and Communist). The military social contract authorises individuals to take up arms and exercise lethal force on behalf of that society against the identified enemies of that society. These individuals are empowered to perform duties in the name of that society which, if performed within a western society, would be regarded as criminal acts.
This establishes a very clear distinction between warfare and domestic criminal behaviour within Enlightenment societies such as ours.
Warfare is not a criminal act.
Killing in warfare is not a criminal act unless it violates the Laws of Armed Conflict â yes, we have our own laws and rules and we work by âem. These are aimed at ameliorating, as far as possible, killing of non-combatants and unnecessary destruction. We apply extreme violence, but it is carefully limited and controlled. As Clausewitz noted, war really is the continuation of politics by other means and few of the political intentions of an Enlightenment society are served by indiscriminate slaughter or unnecessary destruction (this is why we are still uncomfortable about Air Marshal Harris and Bomber Commandâs campaigns post the deployment of OBOE).
It also has to be noted that ONLY western civilisation has developed these and applied them in the modern era. Sorry, Mexica âflower warsâ do not count. Western civilisation is unique in applying these as best possible even in guerre a outrance.
This is worth noting. Nobody, absolutely nobody except us has ever applied LOAC in such circumstances.
Military work is personally dangerous work: we Australians have lost more people in training accidents and other accidents than in combat since the end of WWII. This is recognised legally in domestic law. The CDF has authority to exempt most ADF activities from the OHS Act, for example, and they are so exempt in fact.
Those who enter military service surrender most of their political and many societal rights: in response to that and in return for their willingness to fulfil these duties, the society agrees to honour and reward them, support them, support their families should they be killed, and within specified bounds protect them from any consequences of their actions on that societyâs behalf. (Hereâs where the LOAC come in again.)
What this means to the military person is that we agree to a more complex social contract than usual. We agree not to exercise most of our political rights (an ADF member has no right to comment positively or negatively on any government policy while identified as an ADF member, for example. Indeed, such an act is a military crime), restrict many more of our liberties, assume orders of magnitude more duties and agree to exercise the collective power of our society irrespective of levels of personal risk. Note that this social contract is still individual. In a very real sense, each military person can only speak for himself â but we understand that other military personâs social contracts are variations based on a common values foundation we all share with each other. In turn, these values are based on that of our society, and so (in reality) on those of the Western Enlightenment.
This ties fundamentally into what a western military person regards as the three highest intellectual achievements of the finest and highest civilisation (Judaeo-Christian western civilisation) humans have ever achieved. These are the concepts of loyalty, duty and honour. This form of social contract with Australian society is deeper and more complex than that of the average citizen because it has to be. The military person is exercising some of the pooled authority of that society. He, and only he, is permitted to exercise deadly force on behalf of Australian society. He, and only he, can order other members of that society (military subordinates) to undertake actions so individually dangerous as to nearly guarantee the death of those subordinates. He and only he will routinely accept and undertake those orders, and the associated extreme risk. All of this is voluntary: in a very real sense, âdutyâ is a debt I owe to myself and it is founded on loyalty and honour and a shared sense of value within military structures. Why would I do it otherwise? Essentially, then, a military person understands very clearly that certain moral and philosophical values of the society are worth vastly more than your own life. Again, this is so obvious that I need not discuss it further.
This is not new at all, of course.
While individuals have a right of self-defence in the state of nature, when they enter into a society under that societyâs social contract, the pooling of that right transforms their right of individual self-defence. It becomes a duty to defend the society. Part of everyoneâs social contract, then is to risk or sacrifice one’s life, liberty, or property if such common societal defence should demand it. There is a good reason why conscription in WWII was non-controversial in Australia, whereas it was highly controversial in WWI. There is a good reason why, in WWI, the all-volunteer AIF voted overwhelmingly against conscription (98% anti IIRC)
So the right of individual self-defence is no longer supreme in society, but constrained. This is not to say that it does not survive the transition to society as a duty to defend oneself as part of the community. It does â for that right is inalienable. A person going about his peaceful affairs has an inalienable right to exercise deadly force against any attacker who threatens his life or the lives of those he is in filial contract with. The view that he may do this to protect others he is in social contract with (or even property) is also accepted by most societies.
What of âPacifismâ, then? Well, in the face of mortal danger to oneself or others this is inconsistent with the social contract. Effectively, the âPacifistâ desires to utilise the protective factors of his societyâs social contract without contributing to it. This treats the protective functions of the society like a common good, and must result in âthe tragedy of the commonsâ and the inevitable destruction of that society over time if this attitude spreads. The persons who insist on this position must be considered not to be members of society or entitled to any of its benefits. Should they live in the same country, they should have the status of resident aliens.
Please note âThe Quaker Issueâ here. Defending ones society does not have to be active, it can be passive. Nobody had a problem in 1914-18 UK with Pacifist Quakers because a substantial number of them chose to join the Army as stretcher-bearers. Forbidden to handle arms, they assumed the full risks of protecting their society and fulfilling their social contract with it by a passive, but personally still extremely dangerous, contribution. A US Pacifist in WWI won the Congressional Medal of Honour for valour under fire by lowering wounded men down a cliff into safety while ignoring the fact that he was fully exposed to enemy fire. Their social contracts were vehemently fulfilled.
MarkL
Canberra
“Nobody had a problem in 1914-18 UK with Pacifist Quakers because a substantial number of them chose to join the Army as stretcher-bearers. Forbidden to handle arms,”
That comment is simply not true. Quakers were lumped in with all the other conscientious objectors of the time,and as the war became more desperate men that would not wear the uniform, carry ammunition,build ranges,and other tasks involved in the prosecution of the war were put in jail,in some cases being fed bread and water to change their minds.
Some one had a problem, obviously the authorities of the time.
Tony D [1]:
You are absolutely right about modern armed forces, in some countries at least, not reflecting the general demographic make-up of those countries but nonetheless they are still involved with a form of social contract. Similarly, those members of organized armed political/religious groups who blow themselves – and others – to smithereens are involved with a form of social contract too …. an exceedingly different one and not one that would ever appeal to me!
Leaving aside other aspects, the corporate world [whether groups of merchants working together or established churches] and the state [whether feudal kingdom or any form of nation-state] have been rivals for milllenia [the model for their rivalry is a see-saw, not a pendulum]. No matter which form is in ascendancy at the moment, one type or another of social contract applies to military service for it. For instance, speaking of a soldier’s expectations, if a soldier was fighting for Holy Mother The Church, he would expect to be remembered in the Prayers for The Dead; if fighting for John Company, he would expect his pay in good coin of the realm; if fighting in the AIF against the Imperial Japanese, he would expect that his family would not be left destitute if he was killed in action. All of these are beyond any formal legal contracts.
Mark L [2]:
In marked contrast to your thoughtful and well-organized post, here is a rough-and-ready look at some of the specifics of a social contract as it applies to soldiers, from a thoroughly biased source http://ungrateful-troublemaker.blogspot.com/2008/01/social-contract-military-service.html
But who decides who the enemy is?
Thomas Jefferson, a man thoroughly associated with the European and American Enlightenment, opined, “From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” He was referring to the necessity of people to rise up periodically to overthrow tyrants. He wasn’t talking about the dictator in the country next door. Jefferson was talking about one’s own dictator who perhaps was elected legally but who later arrogated illegal power, and/or commanded the nation’s soldiers to do illegal acts.
Individual soldiers’ private views of a nebulous concept called the “social contract” seems to me to be a very poor guide for what soldiers must do in that situation to do their duty. As MarkL admits conceptions of the “social contract” change over space and time. A soldier needs and deserves a much firmer guide to action than a mere vibe.
Luckily, civilised nations have enacted rules of conduct. and they have been augmented by many pieces of international law.
Unfortunately, MarkL of Canberra has elided the possibility that even democratically elected executives and military officers commissioned under their authority can order subordinates to commit war crimes.
Nebulous concepts such as “social contract” are all very well when the going is smooth and when consensus is easy to achieve and maintain. In fact, such a concept is almost guaranteed to give one a warm and fuzzy feeling.
But when things turn difficult the concept is useless. Soldiers need and deserve firm guidelines and certainty of process should they be required to refuse to obey an order they deem to be illegal.
Because sometimes the enemy is the person giving the order.
On war crimes – after Nuremberg I would have thought it would have been part of a soldier’s social contract in Western societies, not only not to commit war crimes, but to refuse to commit them. Or am I being unrealistic?
Katz [5]:
It’s good that the concept of what forms a social contract changes over time and place; it’s good that the social contract between the German people [later, their allies too] and the Waffen-SS would be inappropriate for the bonds between the Australian people and the Australian Defence Force.
You are wrong about a social contract being only for when things are going smoothly. Quite the opposite. For instance, the conduct – and consequent survival – of so many Australian prisoners-of-war of the Imperial Japanese relative to the survival of other Allied PoWs was due, in part, to a belief – however imperfectly understood – in this concept by those in captivity.
The rules regarding war – whether universal, such as the Geneva Convention, or very local, such as the Visiting Forces Act – are clear and specific guides to the conduct of members of armed forces. So too are the orders and regulations of armed forces – regardless of whether they are the armed forces of a parliamentary democracy or of a brutal dictatorship.
It is the nebulousness of social contract that is its strength; it is the guide for those situations that are novel or where the orders are unclear, contradictory or just plain evil. For example, IMHO, it was the feebleness of the social contract with the American people that contributed to the evil that was done by SOME of the Americans at Abu Ghraib prison. The orders and instructions were wrong – morally, legally, politically and militarily wrong – all the laws and regulations were there in black-and-white for anyone diligent enough to dig them out …. but the soldiers concerned, the ones on duty at night, really did not have much they could fall back on themselves to stand up to their superiors and refuse to carry out those orders. there-and-then.
That soldiers are involved in the day to day political discourse,and involved in having an opinion on any thing made public, must be something that is new.I must be missing some thing here? The Australian Army of which I was a member from 1968 until 1975 was never ever a debating society.
I was given orders and was expected to carry them out,I must confess due to medical reasons,I have never fired a shot in anger in my life,and for that I truly believe I am lucky,I had first hand experience of what war could do when my brother came back from Viet Nam with 2 RAR.He sits around most of the time now pissing himself.
Graham I don’t know what rank you reached in the Army,I reached the dizzy height of full corporal but you must agree that there is only an appeal process from not following an order.Unless it is something really over the top like shooting women and children in the head, Officers would close ranks and although you may have your own conciense in tact, you may end up in prison.
My social contract was with the Australian Army everything else did not matter.
Katz — Thomas Jefferson did indeed say that; but of course, his personal opinion was not enshrined in law through the ordinary channels. Or, insofar as it was, this was achieved via the Second Amendment, which so horrifies lefties. And when his opinion was indeed finally acted out in history, this was done by characters like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Note Davis’s first name.
Which way is it to be? Viva Rebellion, but only when you give your personal approval? But isn’t that what we used to call… tyranny?
As regards the social contract in general, and esp. this more particular version under discussion, it’s certainly a very solemn topic, and one which I’m reluctant to approach directly. One text for meditation that might prove somewhat interesting is J.L. Borges’ parable about Dante and the leopard.
“This is worth noting. Nobody, absolutely nobody except us has ever applied LOAC in such circumstances.”
Hmmm, I’m not so sure about that assertion, MarkL.
I’ve got a historical study of armies in the time of the Macedonian Wars, by Duncan Head. It includes some details of the Hindu Indian forces which Alexander the Great fought.
Based on a military manual written by a Hindu leader around 300 BC, Head states: “Indian warfare was a rather stylised business, conducted at least in theory according to a chivalrous code of rules, and rarely aiming at the destruction of the enemy. … Poisoned weapons were abhorred; non-combatants, wounded or surrendered enemy were not to be harmed.”
Whether or not these principles were genuinely applied in practice, it shows that there was an equivalent of LOAC, in a primitive form, arising in some places outside the West.
Tsk . Tsk. Japerz. Semantical distortion!
It was enshrined, but it wasn’t? Listen to yourself!
Of course it was enshrined. The problem is that subsequently the Second Amendment has been distorted out of all recognition to satiate the psychoses of every drooling gun-hugger.
As the Second Amendment was drafted and property to be understood every sane leftie should love it because it denies power to the executive and keeps it in the hands of the people.
Tsk . Tsk. Japerz. Fallacy of the excluded middle!
The problem here was the bizarre doctrine of indissolubility. According to this doctrine, once a state was part of the union it forever surrendered its right to leave the union. This is an hysterical approach to governance and to nation-building. Of course I don’t like the cause for which the Confederates fought. But that is not the same as saying that I agree with the doctrine tricked up to prevent them from leaving.
And in any case, Texas joined the Union on the specific proviso that Texas could leave the Union should it so desire. So how sincerely held was the doctrine of indissolubility? But this issue leads us away from the topic at hand.
Insofar as the “Social Contract” is part of an education in civics and a basis for an understanding of military law, I’d agree with this. You may be addressing the way in which an ordinary soldier gets a queasy feeling about an order. The soldier then confirms his intuition by studying the laws of war. That queasiness is the sense of justice and injustice — of right and wrong — that serves as a moral compass.
These laws were a firm basis for disobeying order at Abu Ghraib. Lindy England is still in jail because she carried out these orders. If she had refused to carry them out and had been court-martialed it would have been her superior who would be in jail now. The travesty is that the entire chain of command from Rumsfeld down isn’t in jail.
Excellent point Paulus.
This issue is discussed by Geoffrey Parker, “The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800″
He contends that after 1500 Europeans became uniquely ruthless and dedicated to imposed military solutions to a broad range of political, dynastic and economic problems. In that sense Europeans breached the “social contract” that existed about when war was acceptable and how that war should be fought.
You can of course point me, Katz, to the piece of paper or electronic message from Rumsfeld through the chain of command ordering Lynndie England to pile up naked prisoners in pyramids, put dog collars on them, etc etc.
England subseqently told the media that she was acting on higher orders — which might at least have been an issue in mitigation, if it were true — but she could never prove the existence of those orders.
Kinda like Breaker Morant and the mysterious orders for him to shoot Boer prisoners.
P.S. England is not “still in jail”. According to wiki, she was paroled in March last year.
Now you’re being silly.
Should Pol Pot be let off because there are no death warrants signed by him for what happened in the Killing Fields?
There is no doubt that Rumsfeld pushed for and achieved a regime of torture. How and when it was applied was left to decision makers further down the chain of command.
See here:
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/4811/printer
Torture is illegal under both US and international law. And those persons who obeyed illegal orders were also law breakers.
The problems at Abu Ghraib seem to have stemmed not from any orders, or from any “regime” established by higher authority, but on the contrary from a lack of guidance.
“Rather interviewed Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, a participant in the abuse, whose civilian job was as a corrections officer at a Virginia prison. Frederick stated, “We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things … like rules and regulations,” says Frederick. “And it just wasn’t happening.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
Personally I feel that Rumsfeld was responsible through negligence for what happened at Abu Ghraib (and for many, many other mistakes and oversights during the course of the war). His resignation was long overdue. However, to call him some sort of torturer-in-chief and suggest he should have gone to jail is stretching things way too far.
It is important to note that the US army, while he was still Secretary, investigated, condemned and prosecuted the abuses. I can’t see any part of Pol Pot’s government doing that. Let’s keep things in perspective.
Regarding Parker’s book, I actually put that on order from Amazon a few days ago, as part of my Christmas present to myself! I’m looking forward to it.
I will be interested to see Parker’s explanation for why Europeans became “uniquely ruthless and dedicated to imposed military solutions”, as you put it, which I think is absolutely correct.
I would ascribe it myself ultimately to geography: large cities and densely-populated rural areas all packed into a relatively small space, jostling up against each other, leading to very frequent conflict.
But at the same time, Europe was dissected by rivers, mountain ranges, and areas of dense forest, making it very difficult for any one power to dominate and impose a peace. Rome, of course, achieved that, but no one afterwards, and one can look at the Spanish wars to control the Netherlands as an example of how difficult it was to achieve any sort of lasting domination in Europe.
Frequent war led to well led and organised armies, with the best equipment, and extremely aggressive. The denizens of the other parts of the globe never really had a chance!
I’ll see your Staff Sergeant and raise you a Brigadier General.
Janis Karpinski, commander of Abu Ghraib, has specifically accused Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone of organising, assisting, and aiding and abetting the torture perpetrated in Abu Ghraib.
Her claim is that even though she was commandant of the prison, the torture areas were beyond her authority and under the control of contract employees outside the military chain of command and under direct orders from the Pentagon.
Interestingly, although the report into Karpinski’s conduct found her guilty of negligence, she was merely demoted rather than discharged. It is likely that this ruse was to forestall formal court-martial proceedings which may have revealed some unpalatable truths about the way Abu Ghraib was administered.
There is little doubt that Karpinski was negligent. But her allegation of divided authority within the walls of Abu Ghraib points to direct responsibility for what was happening in there coming from higher up the chain of command, a;; the way to the Pentagon and the infamous Torture Memo.
Karpinski should have got written confirmation that the torture wing was beyond her authority.
Thus Rumsfeld remained beyond prosecution because the Administration refused to investigate itself, in ways that were more sophisticated than, but at the same time analogous to, Pol Pot.
In the US, does the military have the ability to lay criminal charges against the executive (or any other) branch of government for issuing illegal orders?
Interesting question.
My guess is probably not.
But take the Karpinski case. Let us say that she was court-martialed for her part at Abu Ghraib. In the course of that case there would be a discovery process that might reveal orders from the Pentagon on torture, and/or the transcripts of torture sessions proving accessory liability on the part of Rumsfeld.
Once those documents enter the public sphere, then it would be up to Congress to decide who should be impeached, and for what. This liability for impeachment hangs over all Federal officials, from the Federal Dog Catcher (if there is such a personage) to the President.
Thus, these prosecutions would take place outside the ambit of courts-martial but the process may well be initiated by the proceedings of a court-martial.
Katz: I wondered about a LOAC mechanism to constrain political wars of choice? In terms of social contracts it would be something for the Mil to use to restrain/punish the Pol for failing to uphold its end of the contract.
Graham Bell: I was thinking along the lines of who does the deciding as to the conventions of the social contract. The ‘western’ style volunteer militaries have their own internal warrior cultures that are distinct from the general public (not necessarily a bad thing but it can be). Drafted armies share more of the attitudes of the public, its always been one of the better points in favour of drafting. If these cultures diverge to far…?
“Every care must be taken that our Auxillaries, being stronger than our citizens, do not overwhelm them and become as beasts…” can’t remember the quote exactly or who by, think it was Plato, could be dead wrong. Was thinking along those lines.
Of course osmosis occurs between the military and civil cultures too (viva la Hollywood!), perhaps the real problem there is if either civil or military becomes too dominant. Either way it’s an issue only if a states armies are unrepresentative of The People(TM)
Again, probably the way to go for the military is to prosecute an officer who refuses to serve in such a conflict. The officer’s defence would be that the war is in breach of LOAC.
If the court-martial finds him innocent, then that is a signal for all soldiers to choose refuse to serve in such a conflict, should the so desire.
Such a breakdown in the authority of the chain of command would be very damaging to the Executive.
Katz [19]:
I love your delightful faith in the Discovery Process [which you mentioned in relation to the Karpinski case]; it’s worth a try, of course, but it was probably foremost in the minds of the evil-doers so I myself don’t expect too many incriminating documents to leap out into the light of day …. or out of the shredder either.
Everyone:
Is there an obvious boundary between social contract and, say, custom – or accepted behavior of and in a community – or religious/ideological imperatives?
In the context of military service, how does social contract differ from military tradition – or from war aims – or from trainingand doctrine?
J-P-Z:
Although Shaun asked for comments to be moved from the earlier thread ‘Vale Andy Olmsted’ I shall try to post an off-topic comment there on what the man himself wrote. So here goes ….
The discovery process did discover Nixon’s Watergate Tapes. No mean feat and a credit to America’s respect for the rule of law.
The discovery of mere adminstrative documents from the Pentagon files would be a piece of cake.
Of course there is always the dreaded military coup as a check on government!
Under what circumstances is the military bound by the social contract to overthrow an elected government that is commanding it to violate the social contract?
Under what circumstances is the citizen entitled to do so? If the government breaks with the understood notions of a social contract and no recourse to law is available, is the individual not in a situation approximating a Hobbesian state of nature?
MarkL, this is pedantic I know but Clausewitz never said “war is the continuation of politics by other means”, he said that war is “the continuation of political intercourse, using a mixture of other means”. This has different connotations as to the use of force as a tool of political will.
One of the ironies of the “pure evil” of Abu Graib shtick – folded in with the “unique evil” of whitey shtick – is the sheer anodyne reality of Abu Graib. Dude we are talking about fricking war here, not the Adelaide Writers Festival (though the warriors that battle there can be quite nasty).
Interesting question, Tony D.
I’d argue that the social contract as we’re discussing it applies really only to militaries in which there’s a clear distinction between military authority and civilian government. We don’t see the Army as a check on Government, because we don’t imagine the Army as a vital institution of nationhood; but that’s not always the case in every country.
In the Spain of 1936, for instance, the Army’s rebel Generals had an arguable case under the social contract to protect the country from an elected government behaving irresponsibly and risking ‘anarchy’, but then, the Spanish Army had been an institution of Government for a century or more. Likewise, the modern Fijian Army clearly sees itself as a competitor for power rather than as an instrument of it—with some justification, considering Fiji’s ethnic/democratic problems.
Along with Liam’s distinction, we could also distinguish between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ actions that are against a government commanding the violation of the social contract. This is a grey area, but I think that Katz proposal is interesting:
“Again, probably the way to go for the military is to prosecute an officer who refuses to serve in such a conflict. The officer’s defence would be that the war is in breach of LOAC.”
Tentatively then: we could classify this as a ‘negative’ action since it highlights the limits of power and only ‘negatively’ endorses resistance, and the military coup as a ‘positive’ action since it involves taking power.
In the cases of Spain and Fiji the military putschists based the legitimacy of their actions on a closed and prescriptive view of national interest. The Spanish putschists declared that anyone who proposed a secularist Spain could not be Spanish. The Fijian putschists declared that no one with non-Melanesian blood had the right to wield executive power in Fiji. Thus, their social contract was to the nation that existed in their mind, not the nation that existed in political and demographic reality.
I think it is possible to refine somewhat KK’s duality positive/negative.
By declaring that there are laws that are superior to the fiat of government my hypothetical court-martial is actually making a very positive statement.
The court-martial is challenging the government to reconsider its actions in the light of law.
The government can do three things after all legal avenues have been exhausted. (Courts-martial decisions can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.)
1. Back down and end the illegal conflict.
2. Attempt to repeal any domestic legislation and repudiate any international treaties that supported the defence of the accused. This would require the consent of the legislature. If the legislature agrees with the executive and enacts those repeals and repudiations, the military are in a very sticky situation. At that point any objector would have to appeal to conscience like the officers implicated in the 1944 plot against Hitler.
3. Proceed as if the case were a nullity. That would serve as a legitimate cassus belli of the military against its government.
Clearly, scenario 2 is the most vexed and complex.
Yes, Katz, but not self-evidently wrong. As I said, the conception we have of a ‘contract’ between the Government and individuals in military service is based on the preconception that they’re different entities: hardly a universal phenomenon.
You asked earlier:
This is the point, really. In lots of parts of the world, the military is an instrument directed not against other countries, but against the internal enemy. How can a social contract as Australian soldiers know it be compared to a social contract as Burmese soldiers do?
…
I don’t think a negative/positive distinction as Klaus has described it can be sustained. Militaries (and to a lesser extent police forces, and registered mercenary outfits like Sandline and Blackwater) have a unique monopoly on legally sanctioned violence, and receive it from the State—any action asserting independence from Government, even desertion, is a positively State-defying act.
I certainly agree with this observation.
And to extend the thought, this perception puts a lie to the notion of the universality of the existence of social contracts between governments and members of the military.
It is an absurdity to say that one can have a social contract with one’s self.
Indeed you are right Liam, although I remain interested in the possibility of a military challenging the government over matters of law without effectively endorsing a coup. Perhaps the effectiveness and ultimately the structural consequences of such a challenge can only ever be incredibly risky in terms of precedent etc.
Katz, by ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ I was only suggesting an arbitrary set of terms for different types of action: positive in the sense of creating something new, ie a potential military dictatorship; negative in the sense of a refusal of sorts that seeks to maintain the rule of law and affirm a higher set of restraints on action.
I have only had the ability to respond as far as comment 17.
Phil: (Comment 3). I believe I was not very clear. I wrote from an individual perspective which I thought was clear. No military person has a problem with Quakers who served as stretcher-bearers rather than with a rifle. I have no problem with a Pacifist who says I’ll serve as a medic or stretcher bearer or labourer and bear the common danger to honour my social contract, but my beliefs forbid me to operate or use weapons. Those who refused to honour their social contracts were indeed treated as resident aliens. Again, a military person will have no problem with that, as I discussed.
Graham (Comment 5). Good link, thanks. I like the way Ungrateful Troublemaker talks – and he talks with the bitterness of someone who followed his social contract only to have the left (and others) of the 1960s-70s not only deny their own social contracts, but attack him for following his. Fortunately, Australian society has recognised the (frankly cowardly) wrongs done to him and in doing so reaffirmed that he followed his social contract, and that his denigrators were wrong.
Comment: (Katz, comment 6)
But who decides who the enemy is?$B
Since 1914 the enemy tends to self identify very early. This is then followed by a long period of denial-of-reality in the form of wishful thinking, appeasement, sophistry etc etc. It is like watching a demented pantomime in many ways. We have seen all of this before in the 30s and in the actions of (as it turned out KGB-funded) activist Groups during the Cold War such as the Greenham Common$B groups in the UK and Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament group here in Australia. We are, of course, seeing the same thing now with respect to islamic fundamentalism. As that formal declaration of war known as the Ladenese Epistle (1998) shows clearly, these groups self-identify early as enemies and then begin using deadly force. It has been 10 years since the formal declaration of war and arguably 40 since the informal one (when Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan murdered a certain Kennedy).
Yet, if I asked how many of the good people on this board understood that their society was at war and had been for at least one and arguably four decades, I wonder what answers I’d get? Funny thing is that just because you might not think that you were at war with Bin Liner and his charming followers, it does not mean that they would orgasmic with joy if they got past the sheepdogs and killed you. You are, after all, just a kaffir, an infidel, merely the son of a pig and an ape (these are quotes from the Koran BTW).
Thomas Jefferson, a man thoroughly associated with the European and American Enlightenment, opined, from time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.$B!I(B He was referring to the necessity of people to rise up periodically to overthrow tyrants. He wasn$B!G(Bt talking about the dictator in the country next door. Jefferson was talking about one$B!G(Bs own dictator who perhaps was elected legally but who later arrogated illegal power, and/or commanded the nation$B!G(Bs soldiers to do illegal acts.
Individual soldiers$B!G(B private views of a nebulous concept called the $B!H(Bsocial contract$B!I(B seems to me to be a very poor guide for what soldiers must do in that situation to do their duty. As MarkL admits conceptions of the $B!H(Bsocial contract$B!I(B change over space and time. A soldier needs and deserves a much firmer guide to action than a mere vibe.
Comment: You misunderstand, I think. This is the individual social contract. Guiddes to action are very firm indeed and are in a nested hierarchy ranging from the LOAC down to handcards telling soldiers precisely what to do in specified circumstances. Every ADF member in the Solomons or Timor L’Este today has such a card. All of these, and all the states in between, are supported by training, briefings, policies, regulations and so forth. Each of these in turn is carefully aligned with LOAC, international agreements, conventions and treaties, Australian, ADF, and local laws.
I am coming to understand that you have a view of the military which regards them as fundamentally stupid/ignorant/uneducated people. The reality is that every ADF officer has at least one degree. Most officers of Major rank and above have post-graduate qualifications. Most obtain these at Captain level. I wandered in to a workplace today and straw-polled 8 officers (junior Major to LTCOL) and 4 SNCO ( SGT to Warrant Officer). 18 Degrees between them and 9 post graduate degrees. The one SNCO with no degree was alternatively skilled. I asked his civilian peers (engineers) about him. They rated his skill level as formal-equivalent of BE (electrical) ME (Systems Design) and PhD (Systems integration). However, I have not counted these in the prior total.
These days, even your basic infantry soldier is a highly trained specialist with multiple skills.
Luckily, civilised nations have enacted rules of conduct. and they have been augmented by many pieces of international law.
Unfortunately, MarkL of Canberra has elided the possibility that even democratically elected executives and military officers commissioned under their authority can order subordinates to commit war crimes.
Comment: As mentioned I am discussing this from an individual perspective. This is a circumstance in which I have never found myself. Can it occur – yes, and it has. He result is that these are investigated and people held to account for their actions. This is routinely done by the military itself within a framework of external oversight. Such dysfunctions are normally caused by poor leadership at more than one level.
Nebulous concepts such as $B!H(Bsocial contract$B!I(B are all very well when the going is smooth and when consensus is easy to achieve and maintain. In fact, such a concept is almost guaranteed to give one a warm and fuzzy feeling.
But when things turn difficult the concept is useless. Soldiers need and deserve firm guidelines and certainty of process should they be required to refuse to obey an order they deem to be illegal.
Comment: This is an intriguing inversion of reality from my personal perspective. All the guidelines/processes etc alluded to have existed for many decades in the ADF (and US, UK, Canadian, NZ forces with whom I have worked). In this arena, the social contract is a background assumption set.
Where the social contract is critical is in why we are willing to do all of this fighting stuff. After all, there has to be some reason to put ones delicate and unscarred hide into a circumstance where rude strangers might put large holes in it with high velocity metal.
Why do military people do that? Why take the personal risk?
The answers to those questions are primarily philosophical and relate directly to the social contract. In the western context, military people take those risks because the values and philosophies of their societies are of importance to them – so important that they are willing to sacrifice most of their own liberties to defend them, and are also willing to endanger their lives. It is literally the case that anyone who desires (for example) to expunge the freedom of and the liberties of the Australians on this site will only be able to do so over the dead bodies of the ADF.
What is that worth to you? Does your society have that much value for you personally? If not, why not?
On war crimes – after Nuremberg I would have thought it would have been part of a soldier$B!G(Bs social contract in Western societies, not only not to commit war crimes, but to refuse to commit them. Or am I being unrealistic?
Comment: (Paul Burns post 7) You are correct. A military person can legally refuse an order to commit a war crime. What is, and is not a war crime therefore cannot be decided by the military (although it should provide input on what is and is not physically possible), and is not in our societies. It is decided by the values of that society, international convention and a whole host of other things, with the final decision being made by a civilian leadership to whom the western military is subordinate. The result of this is an exemplary record in western militaries for NOT committing war crimes. For example, My Lai is literally a legendary case in the west. Yet, what happened there was conducted scores of times a day, every day, from 1941 to 1945 by BOTH the Wehrmacht and Red Army (both serving fine socialist societies). See the works of Omer Bartov (especially The Eastern Front, 1941-45 : German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare and Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich). What Cally did at My Lai made him universally reviled by western military persons: those who earned universal respect were the US military personnel who physically interposed their own bodies in between Cally’s men and the villagers.
This raises a number of moral issues. We know of cases in Holland where Wehrmacht soldiers who vehemently disagreed with execution of hostages and undeniable war crimes were tried and acquitted. Why? Because if they refused to shoot, they themselves would have been executed. Morally (as Fullenwider IIRC notes) this absolved them of responsibility. That lay with those who gave the orders and indeed they were executed.
You are wrong about a social contract being only for when things are going smoothly. Quite the opposite. For instance, the conduct – and consequent survival – of so many Australian prisoners-of-war of the Imperial Japanese relative to the survival of other Allied PoWs was due, in part, to a belief – however imperfectly understood – in this concept by those in captivity.
Comment: Graham post
Concur. This is demonstrably true and remained so in Korea, too.
It is the nebulousness of social contract that is its strength; it is the guide for those situations that are novel or where the orders are unclear, contradictory or just plain evil. For example, IMHO, it was the feebleness of the social contract with the American people that contributed to the evil that was done by SOME of the Americans at Abu Ghraib prison. The orders and instructions were wrong – morally, legally, politically and militarily wrong – all the laws and regulations were there in black-and-white for anyone diligent enough to dig them out $B!D(B. but the soldiers concerned, the ones on duty at night, really did not have much they could fall back on themselves to stand up to their superiors and refuse to carry out those orders. there-and-then.
Comment: I will not comment much on this matter. It was a failure of leadership at several levels, exacerbated by the employment of personnel in roles they were not trained for. PVT England, for example, was a 19 year old clerk from a West Virginia National Guard military police unit. She received absolutely no training in her new function a guard (not a junior clerk) and at 19 was hardly in a position to overrule her direct superiors who were already behaving in contravention of the UCMJ. All of the factors which led to her actions were the result of previous failures of leadership before she got there.
Comment (KATZ comment 9): I have always been amazed by this. Why does the guarantee of radicalism and radical government in the US Second Amendment so horrify today’s self-styled radicals? It merely states that nobody can take way the right of the militia (in 18th century parlance this means every able-bodied male citizen who has attained his majority) to be armed. And an armed citizenship is as close to totalitarian-proof as is possible in practical terms. Among the very first actions of authoritarian or totalitarian governments throughout history is to disarm the citizenry. Then they are helpless in the face of the government and the pogroms/gas chambers start up. Why do ‘lefties’ get ‘horrified’ by the idea of an armed citizenry? It is essential to liberty and freedom, surely? Government should be in awe of its citzens.
Paul
Comment: I do not know enough about this example to comment sensibly. What is the reference? I’ll try to get hold of it (sounds interesting).
The problem is that subsequently the Second Amendment has been distorted out of all recognition to satiate the psychoses of every drooling gun-hugger
Comment: (Katz post 11) This is not so regarded in military circles. Leaving the emotive language aside and looking at what they intended 200+ years ago, it is plain that they regarded arms as tools (which they remain) which could be used by an armed citizenry to place limits on ‘tyranny’(broadly defined as excessive government control over individuals). What’s bad about that?
Thius issue is discussed by Geoffrey Parker, (The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800)
He contends that after 1500 Europeans became uniquely ruthless and dedicated to imposed military solutions to a broad range of political, dynastic and economic problems. In that sense Europeans breached the ‘social contract’ that existed about when war was acceptable and how that war should be fought.
Comment: (Katz post 12). This contention is fallacious. A Roman would laugh at it, as would the Emperor Chiin (or for that matter Jade Jaguar, Lord of Tikal). Man exists in natural state in an endless state of continual war. Hunter-gatherer societies were so much at war that they had no word for it, there was no countervailing state to call ‘peace’ That became an artifact of the agrarian revolution of the Natusian era (although you’ll know, agriculture was invented independently in 6 different places on this world)”… archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high-usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.(The Economist: Noble or savage? Dec 19th 2007)
The role of the Europeans was actually to try to limit and civilise warfare as much as possible and ameliorate its impacts. This was the lesson of the Thirty Year’s War for the nation state: prior to that they tried to do this via chivalric codes during the feudal ear. Far from beaching the ‘social contract’ that existed about when war was acceptable and how that war should be fought, they CREATED it! Hume, Rousseau etc were not Patagonians.
The Europeans were amateurish at warfare in many ways for much (but not all) of their history. They fought many small and limited wars locally, sure. The peoples who were indeed ‘uniquely ruthless and dedicated to imposed military solutions’ post-Rome were the horse empires, Mongols, Turks, Arabs, Scythians because these were predatory mobile military societies predicated on expansionary warfare, not sedentary military agrarian powers or hydraulic empires. All the great agrarian Empires were conquered in time by these predatory mobile military societies predicated on expansionary warfare. From the Hittites to the post-Conquest period muslim hydraulic empires of the Stans and the Crescent and the Chinese and Hindu Empires: they all fell before the horsemen. And not one of these was European. It was not until the Europeans coupled the ‘new legion’ concepts of the Turkish Yeni ceri to individual fire discipline that they finally found the measure of the horsemen. And that was not proven for all to see until 22 July 1798: we forget that a horse Empire army besieged Vienna as late as 1683 and damn near won the game: all thanks to the Lord Hetman Jan Sobieski for the relief of the seige.
$B!H(BFrequent war led to well led and organised armies, with the best equipment, and extremely aggressive. The denizens of the other parts of the globe never really had a chance!$B!I(B
Comment: (Paulus comment 17) This is Eurocentric nonsense. Check the history. The first professional post-Roman standing army in Europe was the Porte’s Yeni ceri. And the Ottoman Porte then proceeded to use them to conquer much of Europe, destroying Christian Kingdoms in job lots (just ask the Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldovans, Crimeans, just about everybody in the Balkans, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Russians (both types) and Ukrainians. It took centuries for Europe to adopt the same levels of professionalism in their armies for the simple reason that they obliterated everyone who faced them. Hard to learn lessons when the Kingdom no longer exists. From about 300AD to 1500 AD the Europeans were beaten like a drum by most of their neighbours (rude sods the lot of them). Hard to explain muslim slave raiders attacking the coasts of Britain, Denmark and France, muslim armies in France, Poland and Hungary, the conquest and destruction of 70% of the Christian world during the Arab Conquest Period, the collapse of the South Russian kingdoms before the Khanate of the Golden Horde, even the localised disasters at Agordat, Isandhlwana etc etc in this world-view. Even the Spanish noted that it was only their powerful Tlaxcallan Allies who gave them the strength to take Tenochtitlan.
The expansion of the Europeans was maritime, it was driven by trade. May I recommend Deepak Lal: ‘In Praise of Empires’ on this topic, as well as ‘The Spanish Seaborne Empire’, ‘The Portuguese Seaborne Empire’, and ‘The British Seaborne Empire’ The classic case is the Second British Empire and how it came to dominate India. This was not done so much by conquest as by alliance with local powers to guarantee continuation of a (collapsing) common economic space as the Islamic Mughal Empire disintegrated under locally resurgent Hindu Kingdoms rejecting muslim efforts to exterminate their religion and culture. Those Hindu rulers knew damned well what the muslims had done to the Zoroasterians and did not want it to happen to them. So they allied with the British and French, and generally these days regard that as one of their better bargains, as their religion and culture survived as a result. The british liked it and had no interest in destroying it like the muslims did. Sure, they had a tough couple of centuries but you get that occasionally, and the British as Allies and overlords were infinitely preferable to the Mughals in the view of at least some Indian historians I… erm…discussed the matter with. As one said to me a few years ago, ”We got PG Wodehouse and Kipling, wealth-creating western-style industrialisation on our own cultural terms and the rule of law instead of the destruction of Hinduism and a goat-based economy based on some stupid book an illiterate murdering thug of a paedophile wrote! (From that night I learned never to try and drink more than your bodyweight in Indian beer during a curry frenzy with demented Indian historians and army officers. I like those guys… They bloke who said those words had earned the right to say them. His career (IIRC) had revolved around killing muslim terrorists in Kashmir and he was a heck of a racontuer
MarkL
Canberra
In the cases of Spain and Fiji the military putschists based the legitimacy of their actions on a closed and prescriptive view of national interest. ⦠The Fijian putschists declared that no one with non-Melanesian blood had the right to wield executive power in Fiji. Thus, their social contract was to the nation that existed in their mind, not the nation that existed in political and demographic reality.
Comment: I am not qualified to speak of Spain. I am in relation to Fiji, for I have discussed the coups with a number of people there, including Rabuka, Ratu Madraiwiwi and a number whose names I will not mention as I will not endanger them. The first coup can crudely and superficially be described as a âMelanesianâ one which Rabuka rather regrets as it broke the social contract. The second coup was the Speight Coup. Phase II of that was Bainimaramaâs recent coup: but these are much deeper events than stated here. They reflect a political struggle deep inside the vanua between two competing Fijian power-elites. The Indians are incidental (despite the vacuous media jabber on the topic) and mostly involved as financiers and victims.
Bainimarama is championing a group with a much less racially based focus than Rabuka. His actual actions in regard to the Qoliqoli bill and native land commission issues shows this quite clearly, as do his intentions to hunt down and destroy those who came within 3â? of assassinating him during the Speight coup.
I wonât go much further on this as anything involving vanua politics is fantastically complex. It makes our politics look like a kindergarten game.
MarkL
Canberra
To much to digest in one lump. Let’s start here:
Individual social contract?? Sounds like a contradiction in terms.
I bet none of those cards explains when it’s ok to disobey an order and when its ok to overthrow one’s own government because it has become a tyranny.
The process of formulating those cards is opaque and not subject to consultation with serving soldiers. And you wouldn’t expect it to be otherwise, because as far as the Executive is concerned, it’s own legitimacy is not a topic for discussion by soldiers. Yet soldiers are duty bound to be sceptical of the legitimacy of every order given.
Any social contract which removes from soldiers the duty to be sceptical is not a social contract, it’s a criminal conspiracy.
Your discussion of Parker ignores the dates in his title. As a result you have committed the error of anachronism. As far as I know the Roman Empire no longer existed in 1500. When Europeans erupted into the world after 1500 they never encountered anything like the Roman Empire, much less the legions of the Roman Empire itself!
This concept of a social contract and Abu Ghraib has been discussed. What about Gitmo and the euphemistic ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’?
Everyone:
As a non-philosopher, having today waddled around and scrambled over contractualism, contractarianism, social contract and heaven know what else [including the 324 angels dancing on the head of a pin], I still see what we are calling “social contract” here as an important but nebulous concept.
It gives some assurance and and a touch of certainty in situations where law and regulation are absent or unclear or unavailable or have been obscured. It has the potential to prevent officers giving foolish orders and subordinates carrying them out.
Debbieanne [36]:
The situation regarding Gitmo, “rendering” and the whole box & dice is just a variation of the situation at Abu Ghraib; my remarks on post [7] stand – regardless of the level of training, rank, experience and authority of those involved.
“I bet none of those cards explains when it’s ok to disobey an order and when its ok to overthrow one’s own government because it has become a tyranny.”
You’ll be waiting a long time before you see any government issue rules for the armed forces on the circumstances in which it would be OK to launch a military coup!
Fact is, it’s impossible to be prescriptive about such things. It comes down to the individual conscience of the people involved.
It is worth noting that the German officers involved in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler could not persuade a majority of their brother officers to join them, even the ones who were convinced the war was lost.
And this was under the world’s no. 2 most evil and genocidal tyranny of all time (second only to the Bush/Cheney regime, of course!)
MarkL (at #33) — Nice job. Well done.
Katz — so good to know you can be counted on to crack me up. The little spat about Jefferson etc. up-thread is hardly the most burning question here, but since you took the trouble, well, one good custard pie deserves another, I think.
“Tsk. Tsk. Japerz. Semantical distortion! It was enshrined, but it wasn’t? Listen to yourself!”
Listen to myself? Well I wish you’d accord me that very courtesy. Jefferson’s high-flown rhetoric about the tree of liberty is hardly congruent with the language of the Second Amendment, though they share similarities; so it pays to speak somewhat indirectly about the degree to which J’s thought here was ‘enshrined’. Semantical distortion? Logical contradiction? Nah, I think of it as treading carefully. You should try it some time. Not every argument is suitable to be parsed in the restricted language of contract litigation, nor are we in the county courthouse. You have this habit of treating words like billiard balls, being of equal size, shape, and weight. They aren’t. Some words are the size of beach balls, and some are bigger and more capacious than the whole damn pool-hall. “Liberty,” “tyrants and patriots,” “a free State,” “the right of the people” — these words and phrases are as big as a house, and will not fit comfortably in the back seat of your Volkswagen Beetle.
“The problem is that subsequently the Second Amendment has been distorted out of all recognition to satiate the psychoses of every drooling gun-hugger.”
Or maybe the problem is that you have a sweet tooth for oversimplification and cliche name-calling.
“Tsk. Tsk. Japerz. Fallacy of the excluded middle!”
Well, since you don’t seem to have paid much attention to what I wrote, perhaps we could more accurately say that you’ve committed the fallacy of knee-jerk categorical fallacy application, also known as not thinking very hard. There isn’t a binary opposition in my text: one possibility is proposed. You have assumed that there is only one other alternative. The phrase “which is it?” frequently suggests that only two alternatives are on offer, but it hardly demands that reading to the exclusion of all others. In any event, this middle-school-level ‘fallacy’ gotcha business is rather dull going amongst grown-ups. You’ll be talking about straw men next.
As President Clinton (not Bill, I’m talking about the president of the United States of Funkadelica) once said, Free your mind, and your posterior responds accordingly. I’m paraphrasing of course; he had a much better way with words.
“The problem here was the bizarre doctrine of indissolubility.”
Or maybe the problem here is your introducing extraneous matter into the discussion. If ol’ Jeff Davis and his pals wanted to secede and did so, they did it on their own terms and for their own reasons, and one of them was that they thought the Federal government had become a ‘tyrant’. (Remember John Wilkes Booth’s talent for Latin epigrams?) The tools that were rigged up to oppose them are not strictly relevant to their original desires and decisions. I’m not stumping for a cause here, I merely pointed out that the first full-blown historical example of the line of thought you were extolling was, um, less than admirable. A thing to be put in one’s pipe and smoked, nothing more.
And now we are blown way off course, and I fully expect to land on an island populated by Caliban and Ariel. But I can’t say this sort of thing isn’t fun. I now return you to your regularly-scheduled stoush.
The rhetoric of the US Declaration of Independence was high-flown.
The language of the US Constitution was C18th legalese.
The ideas of the first were enshrined in the second. What’s the problem here?
In 1776 Jefferson needed cannon-ball sized balls. In 1787 the framers needed finely-machined ball-bearings to enable their engine of government to run smoothly. The size of the ball is immaterial. The important feature is their “ballness”.
That was my point, especially the bit about individual conscience.
Shaun and All:
Let’s look over a few features of what we have been calling a military ‘social contract’:
It is not an oath or a document or anything with specific wording given in a ritual or specific occasion; it cannot be dated from the moment an oath is made or a document signed; it has effect well before the commencement of military service and the effect persists long after the completion of military service [even where that service ended with that side's defeat].
It is:
a. Informal.
b. Unwritten [except when being reported upon].
c. Accepted and understood, with minimal interpretation, by nearly all the community or nation.
d. When it is expressed, it is done in simple words – which vary from one person to another – and the expression of it will almost certainly include specific quotes or slogans [i.e.: "a land fit for heroes"]. No matter how expressed, the underlying idea of what makes up each social contract is always consistent.
e. Seen as being separate from, and SUPERIOR TO, any written laws and codes because it comes straight from the soul of the nation or community itself. Its perceived superiority – whether desired by rulers and commanders or not – is usually poorly understood by those in authority. [[I'll mention how this caused unexpected resentment to war crimes trials in a later post]].
f. Although promises of reward and threats of punishment are important in enlisting troops, enforcing discipline, maintaining morale and safely getting rid of the troops once the need for them has passed, they themselves are next to useless without a social contract underpinning it all.
g. An exchange – but not necessarily a surrender – by the individual to a state, party, church or corporation. [An extreme example of this was the incident where a hundred Vikings was asked who their leader was and everyone of them said he was - though they were all operating within an obvious social contact and in a hierarchy].
There you go, I’ve left the remaining 19 letters of the alphabet for others to make their points about what distinguishes military social contracts [by whatever name] from other factors.
[[by the way, in using the term "military", I include all forms of service in armed forces, so steady on all you sailors and blue-jobs
]].
MarkL: “Yet, if I asked how many of the good people on this board understood that their society was at war and had been for at least one and arguably four decades, I wonder what answers I’d get?”
I thought the term was ‘Operations Other Than War’, or is that US specific jargon?
As a curiosity, have you read Martin van Creveld? If so I’d be honestly interested in your opinions of his work – he talks a lot these days about ‘non-trinitarian’ warfare – i.e. warfare outside of the Clausewitzian trinity. I’ve been reading some of his and related works recently, ‘Transformation of War’ was particularly interesting but I don’t know enough on the topic area to be objective about it.
Shaun C: Much thanks for removing drunken ramblings that were completely and utterly irrelevant!
35 Katz: ‘Too much to digest in one lump’.
Agree, regrettably, during the week I normally cannot revisit any site more than once or twice a day. So I have to wait, copy out all the comments, then respond.
The perils of more than one job!
MarkL
canberra
TonyD (42)MarkL: âYet, if I asked how many of the good people on this board understood that their society was at war and had been for at least one and arguably four decades, I wonder what answers Iâd get?â?
I thought the term was âOperations Other Than Warâ, or is that US specific jargon?
Comment: Not really, thatâs more a US descriptor for what the British Empire called âpolice actionsâ on the NW Frontier. The fact of the matter is that we have been in what we used to term a âreligious warâ since they destroyed two-thirds of the Christian world in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. My Maronite friends do not call it âthe Forever Warâ for nothing. All we have had since 1968 or 1998 is a minor upsurge in a war approaching 1400 years long. It only takes one side for a war to exist.
As a curiosity, have you read Martin van Creveld? If so Iâd be honestly interested in your opinions of his work – he talks a lot these days about ânon-trinitarianâ warfare – i.e. warfare outside of the Clausewitzian trinity. Iâve been reading some of his and related works recently, âTransformation of Warâ was particularly interesting but I donât know enough on the topic area to be objective about it.
Yes, I have even met him once. I regard his âSupplying Warâ as an exceptional work, and view his non-trinitarian concept as sound. It seems to me to be a modern war to describe the deeply atavistic war we have with islam. We are fighting an unevolved 7th century âmemeplexâ or ideology (although the latter term is not a good fit). We do have terms for it, but they have been little used since 1648.
Graham (41)
A thoughtful list, and one which gives me food for thought.
At this stage, Iâd add one point: without this social contract, the society itself is finished. That is because without it, you cannot have armed forces, but only mercenaries. This is a âlast gaspâ for any society because it means that the society has insufficient belief in itself to think itself worth defending. No society without a belief in itself can survive very long. It might eke out some extra time, perhaps a century or two, but it is doomed.
This is very well understood in the ADF (and other Western militaries). It is also why military persons understand the ideologies of âcultural relativismâ and âmoral equivalenceâ to be both morally wrong and actively dangerous to the integrity of the western nation-state. It is also why military persons regard very poorly anything at all which infringes on the freedoms and philosophies of the Enlightenment. If nothing else, I suspect the military persons understand all too well just how fragile Western society is.
Unfortunately, I think that all too soon will come widespread understanding of this fragility. Looking to Europe today I see civilisations committing suicide through abandonment of the core values that make them part of western civilisation. There are some societies there which I suspect are doomed. Their choices are, I think, âvery badâ (abandonment of western liberal values in a desperate flight to totalitarianism in an effort to avert cultural extinction) and âmuch worseâ (cultural extinction).
I hardly need to say that I hope I am wrong. But the storm clouds are there for anyone to see.
MarkL
Canberra
I haven’t read ‘Supplying War’ yet but will certainly do so soon after your recommendation MarkL, thanks!
And I’d agree with “without it, you cannot have armed forces, but only mercenaries” and question how or if the growth of Blackwater style firms undermines it.
What sort of “social contract” permits this behaviour?
Juan Cole reveals how some fabricators in the US administration falsified the encounter between an Iranian patrol and some US naval vessel in the Straits of Hormuz.
http://www.juancole.com/
To be specific, the US video dubbed some inflammatory words onto their video. while the Iranian video shows incontrovertibly what was said (it wasn’t inflammatory in any way) and when it was said.
In other words, someone in the US administration concocted and then released a tricked up piece of footage clearly designed to serve as a cassus belli.
To relate this event to the subject of the thread, doesn’t a deliberate and dangerous lie weaken the legitimacy of a government’s orders to commit troops to a conflict?
Does not that deliberate and dangerous lie help to justify a refusal for a soldier to obey orders for the lying regime?
Post 46: Katz.
Which encounter? There have been hundreds. I do not understand the fuss. These happen every week. There seems to be an inbuilt assumption in your post that the Iranian video/audio is more trustworthy than the US one, and that only one Iranian was on the circuit. That may or may not be so – in both cases.
To return to the subject of the thread and answer your question: possibly, but it depends on circumstances. There are circumstances when when you might call a ‘dangerous lie’ is merely maskirovka, and as such a normal part of conflict. Part of the cover plan for OVERLORD was to have the press publish many ‘lies’. They cooperated with a will, and for morally and ethically sound reasons.
One if the things this discussion is showing me is how very little this audience actually knows about their military services, how they operate, and why they act as they do. This is actually quite worrisome.
I do not think you understand the depth of the social contract in a western military. It is with the society not the regime. That is why western militaries are apolitical: this is why their members give up most of their political rights. Even if the politicians lie, that is not a military matter. That is a political/judicial matter – a civil matter not a military one. And no military person would want it to become a military matter. That way lies military involvement in civil political affairs – and this is anathema.
MarkL
Canberra
Please post a reference to the US Congress’ declaration of war on Iran.
A soldier goes to war because the regime sends him. If it had been up to “society” no Australian soldier would have set foot in Iraq in 2003. To claim that a soldier practises his trade for any other reason is self-mystification.
Oh, come now. Victorian troops were used against the Eureka Stockade and Queensland troops were used against striking shearers. General Blamey was closely associated with right wing secret armies during the 1920s. Australia has been lucky that these crises have been few and far between. But when they cropped up the military intervened willingly in Australian political affairs.
Our traditions have derived from British traditions. In 1914 the officers of the British Army mutinied and refused to assist the British government in its attempts to enact Home Rule in Ireland. They didn’t regard mutiny as anathema.
MarkL, I can see that you have a very disciplined and well educated mind, but there is something in the demeanor of your last post, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but you come across as evasive and dismissive about a subject dear to my heart, the presence or absence of, as Katz puts it, a “cassus belli”.
It seems that, these days, almost any excuse will do.
Are my concerns misplaced?
MarkL [43. to Katz]:
L=O=L.
No worries …. but it did upset my image of those in Canberra having unlimited time to contemplate the beauties of nature and the nature of the universe. Shall download this thread anyway and read and re-read it later. [I'm just a plodder, not someone who can catch a glimpse of something and understand all its implications in an instant]
Everyone:
Watched that program on the Russian Revolution [ABC TV] yesterday. The Kronstadt Uprising was an example of a regime [Lenin and the Bolsheviks] failing to keep its side of the bargain in a social contract [with the heroes of the revolution - and specifically, the Kronstadt sailors]. Shay’s Revolt after the American Revolution was a bit like that too. However, I’ll have to add another item to my list above [post 41]
…. [h]. A military social contract is rarely on its own. It is usually associated with but separate from, a formal matter such as a king’s/leader’s/PM’s speech, a declaration of independence or war, an oath, a published pay-scale, a call-up notice. a law or whatever.
The Viking band I mentioned earlier would indeed have been operating under a well-understood social contract …. but they all would have sworn an oath too.
History will date the end of Europe to the insane decision to omit explicit reference to Christianity in its Constitution. Without Christianity there is no Europe.
JG, 51.
I would love to respond to this inane observation and will do so on Saturday Salon, rather than disrupt this fascinating and informative thread.
Martial law is the ultimate denial of civil rights. Executives use soldiers to enforce martial law, thus annulling the civil rights of citizens.
Here is an interesting example.
In 2006 under the provisions of the Defense Authorization Act (2006) the US Congress conceded to Bush the right to declare martial law unilaterally. Congress did this by allowing the President to waive unilaterally the Insurrection Act (1807) and the Posse Comitatus Act (1878). Both of these Acts had severely limited the power of the President to declare martial law domestically. In fact, the latter act prescribed a prison sentence for anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress.
Thus the legislature has surrendered more of its authority to the Executive. (There were some states rights issues involved as well, but they aren’t particularly relevant.)
The Insurrection Act (1807) allowed the President to deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The 2006 law allows the president to decide unilaterally when troops may be deployed without any stated limit.
As far as the military are concerned this untrammelled power to declare martial law is nothing short of an Enabling Law. Where does anyone in the chain of command go to seek legal redress should that officer conscientiously believe that the application of martial law in any circumstance is wrong?
It is true that the legislature voluntarily surrendered its previous powers when it passed the 2006 Act. But it can legitimately be argued that legal this manoeuvre is a textbook example of a legal revolution wherein the powers vested by the constitution are used to subvert the constitution.
At the risk of provoking the invocation of Godwin’s Law, this manoeuvre is akin to Hitler’s insistence that all German officers swear fealty personally to him. Thus, the soldier can do his duty scrupulously by the Uniform Military code, yet still be a tool of tyranny.
Can the “social contract” with “society” provide a soldier with a reliable guide as to what to do in these circumstances? And if so, how?
Katz, on a roll you are formidable. Couple of links here to buttress your stance.
First, Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker on the chain of command from Rumsfeld to Lindie England. Sy’s prose is smooth as a billiard ball with lots of applied English.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/17/040517fa_fact2
Secondly, After B43 kyboshed Posse Comitatus with a “signing statement”, one of the same “signing statements” that rendered the Geneva Convention “quaint”, BushCo ordered BlackwaterUSA mercenaries into New Orleans after Katrina to “keep the peace”. The Louisiana National Guard were either in Iraq or watching television at the time, apparently.
The speaker in the You Tube clip is Jeremy Scahill who wrote “Blackwater The Rise of the World’s most powerful Mercenary Army” in 2007. Easier to read than Thomas E. Ricks’ Fiasco, and Scahill’s journalism compares favourably with that of Hersh.
So in America, a recent example of âThe nature of the social contract involved in military serviceâ?, was the nixing of Posse Comitatus and the establishment of a Green Zone in New Orleans after Katrina.
Two years on and Blackwater are still there. Peace keeping, of course. Right outside the Green Zone gates.
Katz [53]:
So then, it seems there has been a slow coup-d’etat in the United States – by the Bush insurrectionists. I like your analogy with the betrayal of the Prussian and other German officers by the Nazis.
Sorry, can’t think of anything, right at this moment, in military social contract, that would enable a soldier of any rank to resist the imposition of tyranny whilst carrying out all duties in his or her nation’s military code. Everything I can think of just now – and that’s enough to start a dozen mutinies, rebellions, uprisings, restorations of power, overthrows of dictators, restorations of democracy, etc. – would be classed as tradition rather than as military social contract. Hence my question way back at post 23 above.
Everyone:
For a read on the descent of military forces back to even worse brutality, try:
Micheal Glover
THE VELVET GLOVE: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF MODERATION IN WAR
London; Hodder&Stoughton. ??1982?? hardback.
A copy or two might have survived the Great Culling of Libraries.
Can’t remember if he mentioned the abrupt change from the traditional ritualized warfare with few casualties to the murderous total war that launched the career of Shaka, who became Zulu King.
“The nature of the social contract involved in military service”
When they’re home, but still there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html?hp
I am having odd computer problems, so I cannot copy from the posts right now without it garbling. Lord know why, so any misquotes are due to that.
Katz #48
Iran and the US These states are certainly in conflict, perhaps even cold war. They are not at war. There is an entire spectrum of meaning in the differences. The Iranians are using an intriguing variety of proxies of which Hizbâallah is only one, for example. Both sides are playing propaganda games and are conducting intricate manoeuvres against the other. We see only the very edge of a small amount of this.
A soldier goes to war because the regime sends him. If it had been up to âsocietyâ? no Australian soldier would have set foot in Iraq in 2003. To claim that a soldier practises his trade for any other reason is self-mystification.
Comment: The first sentence is correct. The second is not, and such decisions are not taken by plebiscite. You can validly say that within the circle of people you know, the second sentence is correct. Within the circle of people I know, it is certainly incorrect and remains so (with bells on). The third sentence is also incorrect. A soldiers trade is not war, that is what happens when his primary function has failed. The primary function of the ADF is deterrence, or even insurance, if you will. This is not self-mystification (a term I have not heard in many a long moon), it is fact borne out by how little of ones career a military person spends in a combat zone.
Oh, come now. Victorian troops were used against the Eureka Stockade and Queensland troops were used against striking shearers. General Blamey was closely associated with right wing secret armies during the 1920s. Australia has been lucky that these crises have been few and far between. But when they cropped up the military intervened willingly in Australian political affairs.
Comment: as has been noted, the social contract varies over time and is individually based to a significant degree in any case. I was not at Eureka Stockade etc so I do not know what the social contract (or political venality) was like in those specific circumstances. I can describe with, I think, reasonable accuracy what the military social contract is like NOW and I have done so.
Our traditions have derived from British traditions. In 1914 the officers of the British Army mutinied and refused to assist the British government in its attempts to enact Home Rule in Ireland. They didnât regard mutiny as anathema.
IIRC this was also an individual thing and the army did not mutiny, it was in some form of crisis. Irrespective of that (I am not especially knowledgeable about this issue), that was then and this is now: things change as society changes, and the social contract changes with it. And the UK of 1914 really is a foreign country! There is not much congruence between then and now, society has changed too much.
#49 Blogreader (nice handle, BTW!)
⦠there is something in the demeanor of your last post, I canât quite put my finger on it, but you come across as evasive and dismissive about a subject dear to my heart, the presence or absence of, as Katz puts it, a âcassus belliâ?.
It seems that, these days, almost any excuse will do.
Are my concerns misplaced?
Comment: I do not think I am being evasive or dismissive (except perhaps of conspiracy theorists and folk like that). There has been an ongoing conflict (not âwarâ) between the USA and Iran since 1979. A cassus belli has existed since that time and it can be activated at any time the USA chooses: the occupation of US sovereign territory in the shape of the US Embassy. One minor incident between ships in the Hormuz, out of hundreds of such incidents is hardly an event out of the ordinary. Compare it, for example, with Operation Praying Mantis (1988 IIRC) where the conflict hotted up for a while and the USN sank a large % of the Iranian Navy. Compared to that, it is rather hard to get excited about one more minor incident in the Hormuz.
#53 Katz
Martial law is the ultimate denial of civil rights. Executives use soldiers to enforce martial law, thus annulling the civil rights of citizens.
Comment: The second half of this is missing. That is the part that says that this usually occurs in western societies when civil order and rule of law has collapsed, such as in civil insurrection or natural disaster.
I know too little of the middle section of the post to comment about it.
At the risk of provoking the invocation of Godwinâs Law, this manoeuvre is akin to Hitlerâs insistence that all German officers swear fealty personally to him. Thus, the soldier can do his duty scrupulously by the Uniform Military code, yet still be a tool of tyranny.
Comment: No, this is a serious matter and Godwinâs Law does not apply IMHO. The Oath of Fealty by Hitlerâs National Socialists cynically exploited the social contract of the Heer. Even so, the Socialists still felt so threatened by the Heer as to create their own partyâs Army, the SS. In this case, the Heer was a threat to the Socialist tyranny, which took steps to subjugate the threat. So I think that you have placed the cart before the horse here.
I offer as support for this argument for this Omer Bartovâs scholarship, which documents the intense (and highly successful) long term efforts which followed whereby the National Socialists thoroughly infected the Heer with their disgusting ideology. The British, who studied this closely, called it the âNazification of the Wehrmachtâ.
What this case shows, I think, is the importance of things like the US second amendment in our own societies. Such things keep alive the idea that government should be subservient to and actually awful (in the 18th century meaning, which means âin aweâ) of their citizenry, not the other way around.
Perhaps without knowing it, Katz, you have raised the central issue here, and validated what the authors of the US Constitution intended.
Can the âsocial contractâ? with âsocietyâ? provide a soldier with a reliable guide as to what to do in these circumstances? And if so, how?
Comment: In the specific case of the Oath of Fealty it was already far too late. The German officer class had failed to recognise what Hitler was, and to act against him. In this, they cannot be blamed IMHO, because German society had already made the same failure. It was already far too late. The society had surrendered its freedom, liberty and sanity to a murderous socialist ideology. The real tragedy is what you find when you read that vile book âmein kampfâ. Hitler laid it all out, he told them in advance exactly what he was going to do and he told them in writing and in his speeches, and in his actions. The Germans deluded themselves that he did not actually mean it, and the world went up in flames in consequence.
Today, in the contemporary world, we have equivalent monsters also telling us what they want to do, and how, and why. And far too many people are deluding themselves that âthey do not mean itâ. And it is so much easier to send parts of the world up in flames these days.
I wonder: how much of the world will burn this time?
I already know who will get called on to fight the fire.
For itâs Tommy this, anâ Tommy that, anâ âChuck him out, the brute!â?
But itâs âSaviour of âis countryâ? when the guns begin to shoot;
MarkL
Canberra
Enemy Combatant [57]:
That’s scary. Has this arisen from a failure of training [especially of deprogramming to get rid of Hollywood/TV fantasies] prior to war service and of debriefing on returning home; a neglect or misapplication of duty-of-care by the US govt.? If that is so, could that then be seen as yet another breach of the social contract between the nation and its soldiers?
Katz:
].
MarkL [on 58] is right this time: Fighting happens when a soldier has failed in his primary duty, which is to deter. [Now, back to stoushery par excellence
MarkL;
Computer problems? Percussive maintenance does wonders – 14lb sledge and a ball-pein should do the trick.
[on 47] Lack of a general understanding of military matters is, in part, the result of a couple of decades of allowing ex-service personnel to be kept to a minimum in the education system. Doesn’t happen in China or in U.S.
Damn you! I was going to quote Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins” myself later on this topic!
Just a minor historical point. Despite their name the National Socialists were not, repeat, not Socialists. Gregor Strasser, one of the Party’s founding members before Hitler got control of it had intentions of it being a socialist party but Hitler quickly got rid of him when he got control of the Party. Hitler put German Socialists (and I don’t mean Communists) in concentration camps quite early on. The Nazi Party was a Fascist Party, not a socialist party.
MarkL, thank you for the considered responses. Too often exchanges degenerate into slanging matches.
True, but in all countries with a rule of law “war” has a specific legal meaning. It is said that tyrants hate dictionaries because tyrants thrive on ambiguity.
A soldier goes to war because the regime sends him. If it had been up to âsocietyâ? no Australian soldier would have set foot in Iraq in 2003. To claim that a soldier practises his trade for any other reason is self-mystification.
All polls indicate that I’m correct, but it is a subsidiary point.
Incorrect. It is the function of the government to project to the world the will and the ability of its armed forces to achieve victory. On rare occasions an army is ordered by its government to feign weakness in order to draw its enemy on to self destruction. The Russian strategy vs Napoleon was something of that sort.
Not responsive to my arguments.
This is a very slippery argument. Australia can be said to have change between between before and after lunch today.
Not necessarily, as you acknowledge. These arguments, per force, concern themselves with worst case scenarios.
This is a spurious argument. Why should the existence of the SS have any influence on whether a German officer swears an oath of personal fealty?
I don’t understand why you absolve individual German officers of the responsibility of acting according to their individual consciences. That’s what draft resisters did when they refused to obey the call-up for Vietnam.
“There has been an ongoing conflict (not ‘war’) between the USA and Iran since 1979. A cassus belli has existed since that time and it can be activated at any time the USA chooses:”
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that cassus belli exists because of what happened in 1979. It’s not exactly hot pursuit.
I think you would have a problem selling that as a reason to start a war with Iran now.
I suggest a more conciliatory approach to any concerns, real or imagined, that we have about Iran.
Force can sometimes be counterproductive
“(except perhaps of conspiracy theorists and folk like that)”
People conspire all the time, however not all of them conspire to commit criminal acts.
If people don’t have sufficient information about an event, then we must expect various interpretations of that event to arise.
People will always draw their own conclusions.
Conspiracy theories about the various machinations of the state are themselves an indication of some malfunction of the state.
The social contract extends to all members of society, not just the military.
In a democracy, openness and transparency are a vital part of that contract.
The social contract is the glue that binds societies together, we need to take care that it is not weakened.
Katz [61]:
Don’t like to sound as though I keep disagreeing with you – I usually don’t – but the outcomes of resisting conscription during the Viet-Nam War and of officers resisting the hijacking of the military by the Nazis differed considerably …. and that’s not taking the deceiving of officers by the Nazis into account.
Draft resisters went to jail.
How many German officers went to jail for refusing to take the Hitler oath?
âThe nature of the social contract involved in military serviceâ?
This is not very encouraging either.
http://www.vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfSEP07/nf092407-2.htm
” Christopher Gearhart served 13 years in the military. He would have put in more time were it not for a hospitalization, a diagnosis and a discharge last year….
…Gearhart said he was told he could not receive benefits because of the diagnosis, which is generally considered a pre-existing condition.
Similar stories have been echoed in media reports across the country. About 22,500 service people have been diagnosed with personality disorders since 2001.
Now, some watchdog groups and lawmakers are charging the military has turned the diagnosis into a catch-all, used to discharge those with a multitude of ailments, including post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Damn you! I was going to quote Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins” myself later on this topic! .
Comment: I’m trying for my favourite, M’Andrew’s Hymn, next. Among my most treasured books is a first edition (1907) Doubleday hardback of Kipling’s collected verse.
Paul Burns #60
Just a minor historical point. Despite their name the National Socialists were not, repeat, not Socialists. Gregor Strasser, one of the Party’s founding members before Hitler got control of it had intentions of it being a socialist party but Hitler quickly got rid of him when he got control of the Party. Hitler put German Socialists (and I don’t mean Communists) in concentration camps quite early on. The Nazi Party was a Fascist Party, not a socialist party.
Comment: Sorry, this is covered in the new German and Russian scholarship coming out of STASI and KGB/NKVD files. Stalin had a strategic problem in East Germany post-war. The CPSU knew that the NSDAP was similar to them, a socialist political party. Yet, as the footage of the camps etc etc gave them a bad name (just as footage of the Gulags would have for Stalins merry band of mass murderers and their western apologists), so a decision was taken to posthumously change the view of the NSDAP from a standard 1920s/30s socialist party to something else: and to shout loudly from the rooftops that East Germany contained none of these people at all and never had, they were all good communists and all the bad buggers came from West Germany. Much of the modern definition of ‘fascism’ is actually a postwar Soviet propaganda view designed to ‘kick the NSDAP out of the Socialist camp’.
Even a sketchy study of the various NSDAP political platforms shows quite plainly that it was a bog-standard 1920s/30s socialist party with a super-nationalist overlay. It was a totalitarian horror but it had ‘socialist’ in its name and in its policies for good reason. These policies differed greatly from its contemporary right wing authoritarian ally, Franco’s Spain. Was it Vaclav Havel (?? )who noted that the historical outcome of totalitarian socialism is a slave state sitting in an ocean of blood (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba) while a right wing authoritarian state seems to lead to a return to democracy (Spain, Chile, Argentina, Greece). Personally, I think this an over simplification (East Germany, Poland, the Baltics etc), but whoever said this does have some kind of a point. I’m just not fully sure what it is!
In my view, this is a side issue in any case. For what made the national socialists and communists so loathsome was their totalitarian nature. History seems to indicate that totalitarianism is much more easily reached from socialist ideology and the islamic conquest/enslavement ideology than from anything else.
Katz #61
A soldiers trade is not war, that is what happens when his primary function has failed. The primary function of the ADF is deterrence, or even insurance, if you will.
Incorrect. It is the function of the government to project to the world the will and the ability of its armed forces to achieve victory. On rare occasions an army is ordered by its government to feign weakness in order to draw its enemy on to self destruction. The Russian strategy vs Napoleon was something of that sort.
Comment: This statement deserves a carefully considered reply as it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the military is actually for. What is the western soldier’s function? It is to guarantee the peace. If that peace fails, he then applies his military skills directly. The military skills are applied in precisely graduated levels of violence until the enemy is forced to accord with requirements we can live with and return to a peaceful state. This is his trade. This ‘trade application’ can range from our intervention in the Solomons to overawe wannabe bandit-warlords like Harold Keke through a display of massive and overwhelming force (in relative terms) without a shot being fired, right through to the complete destruction of a major civilisation gone mad, like the total war with national socialist Germany.
As an aside, I do not trust polls unless I have full access to the questions and can dispassionately analyse their biases (they all have them). This is just good logical practise. Especially important is identification of the hidden assumptions in those questions. Some of the poll questions I have seen on that topic (Iraq) were phrased in such a way as to permit only one answer. Polls are dangerous ground in logical discourse as too many people fall into the logical fallacy of using them as an appeal to authority. This automatically invalidates an argument. AT best, they are a data point, but even there they are useless unless the questions are carefully examined first to see what the biases were.
“It is the function of the government to project to the world the will and the ability of its armed forces to achieve victory.”
This a very simplistic view, and fundamentally incorrect. It is incorrect because military strength is relative. An example. What form of ‘ability to achieve victory’ can be projected by Australia relative, say, to the PRC? None. We’d lose, simple as that. Even if we became a nuclear power we’d lose because MAD is impossibly expensive for us and cheap for them. So what to do? This is a very complex field, but (grossly oversimplified) what we do is to judge what PRC intentions might be and build the force which makes the achievement of those intentions too expensive to be worthwhile. This is classic deterrence theory. See:
Stephen J. Cimbala: Strategic Impasse: Offense, Defense, and Deterrence Theory and Practice (Contributions in Military Studies, no. 89)
Ivan Arreguín-Toft: How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)
Philip Green Deadly logic: The theory of nuclear deterrence
Comment: as has been noted, the social contract varies over time and is individually based to a significant degree in any case. I was not at Eureka Stockade etc so I do not know what the social contract (or political venality) was like in those specific circumstances. I can describe with, I think, reasonable accuracy what the military social contract is like NOW and I have done so.
Our traditions have derived from British traditions. In 1914 the officers of the British Army mutinied and refused to assist the British government in its attempts to enact Home Rule in Ireland. They didn’t regard mutiny as anathema.
IIRC this was also an individual thing and the army did not mutiny, it was in some form of crisis. Irrespective of that (I am not especially knowledgeable about this issue), that was then and this is now: things change as society changes, and the social contract changes with it. And the UK of 1914 really is a foreign country! .
Not responsive to my arguments.
Comment: Correct. I do not know enough of these examples to comment properly. So I will not.
There is not much congruence between then and now, society has changed too much
This is a very slippery argument. Australia can be said to have change between between before and after lunch today.
Comment: I do not think such an argument is sustainable. The argument that the Imperial Britain of 1914 is a completely different society to that of Australia in 2008 is sustainable. The societal norms are radically different, let alone the technology.
Comment: The second half of this is missing. That is the part that says that this usually [my emphasis] occurs in western societies when civil order and rule of law has collapsed, such as in civil insurrection or natural disaster.
Not necessarily, as you acknowledge. These arguments, per force, concern themselves with worst case scenarios.
Comment: This is ambiguous and I request clarification of the point being made. This, as written, does not address the point I made, it evades it.
The Oath of Fealty by Hitler’s National Socialists cynically exploited the social contract of the Heer. Even so, the Socialists still felt so threatened by the Heer as to create their own party’s Army, the SS. In this case, the Heer was a threat to the Socialist tyranny, which took steps to subjugate the threat. So I think that you have placed the cart before the horse here.
This is a spurious argument. Why should the existence of the SS have any influence on whether a German officer swears an oath of personal fealty?
Comment: You have created a linkage where none was stated, so perhaps my point was ambiguous. The point was that the German national socialist government was afraid of the armed forces. So they worked out a way to exploit the social contract to subjugate the Heer to national socialist will. But even then, the national socialists remained sufficiently afraid that the armed forces might act against their national socialist tyranny that they created their own armed forces within the national socialist party. The primary task of the SS was to protect the party leadership from the military or sundry wannabe assassins. They did this by becoming a powerful army in their own right, with first pick of the 3rd reich’s weapons.
Comment: In the specific case of the Oath of Fealty it was already far too late. The German officer class had failed to recognise what Hitler was, and to act against him. In this, they cannot be blamed IMHO, because German society had already made the same failure. It was already far too late. The society had surrendered its freedom, liberty and sanity to a murderous socialist ideology.
I don’t understand why you absolve individual German officers of the responsibility of acting according to their individual consciences. That’s what draft resisters did when they refused to obey the call-up for Vietnam.
Comment: The unaddressed point first.
Why should any individual take action which endangers him personally when society has already surrendered to this type of tyranny? It is impossible for an individual to change the decision that the society has made. AT best he might become a martyr, but usually he merely finds an unmarked grave.
Secondly, as Nuremberg showed, German officers and men were morally absolved from acting according to their individual conscience by the extremity of the consequences of doing so. If the officer acted according to his own individual conscience in this manner, the national socialist response was to immediately execute him (and often his family) without trial. ‘Draft resisters’ in national socialist Germany were murdered by the state.
This was hardly the case in Kennedy/Johnson’s Democrat-ruled USA. The comparison is completely invalid.
“There has been an ongoing conflict (not ‘war’) between the USA and Iran since 1979. A cassus belli has existed since that time and it can be activated at any time the USA chooses:”
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that cassus belli exists because of what happened in 1979. It’s not exactly hot pursuit.
I think you would have a problem selling that as a reason to start a war with Iran now.
I suggest a more conciliatory approach to any concerns, real or imagined, that we have about Iran.
Force can sometimes be counterproductive
“(except perhaps of conspiracy theorists and folk like that)”
…
Comment: (Blogreader #62). Cassus belli do not have to time expire. Please note that when you read the 1998 Ladenese Epistle (bin Laden’s declaration of war on the West) he uses the eviction of the Moors from Spain 500 years ago as a cassus belli, and that is one of many such examples in that document. Australia (under UN auspices) still remained in a state of war with North Korea until recently, the cassus belli being their invasion of the South in 1950.
There is a problem with conciliation where that is interpreted by the party one is in conflict with as weakness. In other words, this is a negotiation with two sides. As with Munich in 1938, what happens if conciliation on our part is interpreted and exploited as a weakness by the other side?
The potential stakes here are just too high for that. Once we are talking nukes, the stakes are too high for any ambiguity, let alone double-dealing to obtain advantage.
Let us take the comparison between now and the Cold War. During that time, we had no doubt about the ability of the USSR to destroy us. (This is the western ‘us’.) What was in doubt was their intention to do so. So we paid a lot of attention to what their intentions were. That is what ‘Kremlinologists’ did: they winnowed through acres of newsprint interpreting the small clues and internal ‘insider’s codes’ their unfree media printed.
That situation now is inverted. We have absolutely no doubt as to the intentions of Islamic theocratic fascists of all stripes. They endlessly tell us that ‘allah’ has told them that we must be killed and our civilisation annihilated.
What is in doubt is their ability to achieve this stated aim: that and nothing else.
Now add a nuclear, biological or effective chemical weapons arsenal to the mix. Does anyone doubt that such weapons would be utilised by theocratic islamic fascists? If one does, then study what they say and what they do, and try to come up with a logical argument why they would abjure such weapons, if freely available to them. I’d be very interested in such a fact-based argument because it would be a first.
I think that if they acquire such weapons, they will use them. Their actions and their words demonstrate this clearly.
We then must respond, if such weapons are used.
Here is where the real trouble starts. Let us assume that (say) Hamas, the Judaean Liberation Front (islamonutters branch) and Hizb’allah have obtained access to nuclear weapons, and have the ability to produce and detonate, say, 5 a month in the USA and 5 a month in Europe. Let us say that we know that Jihadistan was the original supplier, but that so much material has been disbursed by them that manufacture is now occurring all over the muslim world, in small towns and villages.
The butcher’s bill will look something like this
Month 1 (TMD=total megadeaths)
West: 10TMD / muslim world(mw):25TMD (a proportionate western retaliation)
Month 2
West20TMD / mw 50TMD (a second proportionate western retaliation)
Month 3
West 30TMD / mw 100TMD (a third but escalated proportionate western retaliation)
Now, we can go on like this for a while, but by somewhere in Month 2 or maybe early Month 3, the West is going to substitute 1000TMD in that right hand column. Desperate western civil populations will force this on their governments. This is because there is no other way out. Even if the West agreed to surrender, this is impossible. There is nobody to surrender to because nobody on the other side has the authority to either accept the surrender or to stop the attacks. Theofascist islam has no capital and no supreme leader, it is a dispersed, loosely networked entity at best. Even if Bin laden appears on the steps of the US Capitol accepting the surrender of the USA, the attacks cannot be stopped because there are no subordinates to control. Bin laden has no ability to order anyone to stop, and the nature of fanatics is that they don’t cease attacks when they have the weapons to do so.
So the logical response to the second wave of Islamic nukes in this appalling example is total retaliatory extermination: complete annihilation of the entire muslim world. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the logical response to the first attack. This is a frightening thought.
This is the elephant in the room. Yet, it is the core issue of these times. I will bet my bottom dollar that this issue has long been modelled and exercised by the nuclear strike planners in Russian Federation, PRC, USA, UK and France; and that India has done the same on a smaller scale in case Musharraf falls and the imams take over in Pakistan. The stakes are simply too high, all possible permutations in that arena are modelled and exercised. They always are.
So Iranian nukes are important. Pakistani nukes were just as important, as the feverish and continuing efforts to force them to zeropoint safe their warheads, institute flawless weapons control protocols and to stop the spread of the technology from that country demonstrate. (Damn Khan to hades for proliferating as he did) The Pak’s have accepted all of this under Musharraf. The Iranians will not do so. All that restrains them is that they want regional hegemony and control of the world oil supply… except perhaps, just perhaps, for the Basij and the Mahdiviat. We do not understand their real intentions, and they are the ones calling for the first Iranian weapon to be tested… over Tel Aviv.
With the stakes even potentially able to get to the levels illustrated, just how much risk are we willing to accept?
OK, how does this relate to the social contract, which is much more of an individual thing – and this is a grand strategic issue. I think it relates in that informed members of our society should look at the potential for the logical outcomes of the problems posed by this sort of lethal ideological/religious/technological cocktail. Understanding the possible outcomes means that the individual can make a fact-based assessment of just how much risk he/she is willing to accept, and ensure that the government is aware of this.
Sure, a large fraction of people will lack the interest, education, analytical skills or even the ability to view things dispassionately. There are people sufficiently biased in view to reject facts in favour of fantasy, propaganda or conspiracy theory. That does not excuse those who can do this from doing so.
Katz #64
Draft resisters went to jail.
How many German officers went to jail for refusing to take the Hitler oath?
Comment: Their choices were to take the oath or resign. A lot of them resigned IIRC and later paid heavily for it. But that was not your original comparison, that was to draw an equivalence between Vietnam-era draft dodgers in the USA and people trying the same stunt in national socialist Germany. That comparison is not valid.
MarkL
Canberra
Phill [way back at 8}:
[Sorry about the delay]. Back in the Olden Days, an ordinary digger appealing against an unreasonable order or making a reasonable complaint used to trigger a mindless reactive closing of ranks among superiors; the actual boundary between the solidarity of a strong group and the behavior of a mongrel dog-pack was unclear back in those days. Apparently, the ADF has learnt from several scandals and now has more efficient ways of accommodating objections to outrageous and illegal orders.
Blogreader [61]:
L=O=L..
Thanks for that link to V A watch dot org. Not surprised at anything the Inadvertent Supporters Of Osama bin-Laden Club do in the name of saving the taxpayers’ revenue these days. My guess is that the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs too will rely on mysterious pre-existing diseases and nebulous personality disorders to knock back claims for pensions and “save” us millions. They’re fashionable nowadays. That’s if Kev08 doesn’t abolish the Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs altogether
“Apparently, the ADF has learnt from several scandals and now has more efficient ways of accommodating objections to outrageous and illegal orders.”
With that I assume “Skyville” has been closed ?
With all its faults Graham the Australian Army even back then was run as good as it could be under the circumstance.Of course as you are aware they didn’t have the population to draw on then,as they do now,and a lot of numpty’s got into positions that were well over their heads. I was stationed in Canberra during part of the Viet Nam conflict,and some of the dispatches were less than flattering at the time for some of the shall we say “fast tracked trainee’s”
One of my sons is currently a member of the reserves, and I must say,only from what he tells me,they are treated more like employees of a company now than “Cannon Fodder”.
I was bashing recruits at Kapooka when Gough got the job,not to many National servicemen pulled the pin at the time and could have resigned if they desired..That was the era of huge pay rises and conditions,under the conservative governments you only got pay for luxuries like food and clothes.Your wife was something you were allowed to see from time to time to breed more soldiers.It can only have improved.
A significant percentage of the regimes of history built armies with the idea of attack in mind. Recently, Bush added the US to that list. That is the definition of pre-emptive war. MarkL’s understanding of the role of soldiers is ahistorical. Perhaps he seeks to universalise the status of the ADF.
British officers’ commissions in 1914 were worded almost identically to Australian officers’ commissions in 2008. These officers related identically to polities that were in their fundamentals identical.
No amount of special pleading can absolve German officers from the moral consequences of taking the Hitler oath. My reference to Vietnam draft resisters was only in relation to the oath and nothing else. Nuremberg legally absolved German officers. It was a court of law, not a court of morals.
Many Germans did what they could to resist Hitler. They were weak. German officers were collectively a very powerful group. The truth is that many of them hated democracy slightly more than they hated Nazism.
All in all, MarkL has made a weak case for the existence or the potency of a social contract between soldiers and their society. He has not shown how it comes into being, how it is to be understood by the alleged parties to it, whether and how it is acted upon, and how it goes out of existence, if it ever existed in the first place.
The behaviour of soldiers be perfectly well described and explained without any reference to a “social contract”.
The application of Occam’s Razor easily disposes of the chimerical soldiers’ “social contract”.
Katz: I wrote above, in the context of the German officers’ plot, that, “It’s impossible to be prescriptive about such things. It comes down to the individual conscience of the people involved.”
I didn’t state a very important qualifier which was in my mind. It was that a military coup or military disobedience is only ever justifiable against a government that is taking the nation to the brink of destruction.
Under those circumstances, each officer should search his conscience. Some may decide, like Graf von Stauffenberg, to rise up against the regime, and I have enormous admiration for them. Many others, however, decided that they still had to follow the oaths they had sworn; while I regret their decision, I do not condemn it.
What if the nation is not on the brink of ruin, but an officer still has deep qualms about some aspect of policy? Firstly, he may wish to wait for the problem to be resolved through normal channels. In the case of Congress allowing the President to declare martial law, if the right is ever exercised, someone would quickly bring a challenge before the Supreme Court, which would then rule on its constitutionality.
Another possibility for the officer is the time-honoured option of resigning his commission. If enough officers do that simultaneously, it sends a very strong signal to the administration.
If a specific order is obviously unlawful, of course, a serviceman can (and should) choose to not obey. An example would be to torture a prisoner. A US serviceman could legally defend his disobedience on the grounds that the UCMJ only makes it an offence to disobey a “lawful order”.
This only applies to orders that are directly and obviously unlawful (torture, murder of a non-combatant or prisoner, rape, etc). More complex and contested legal issues — such as the legality of the invasion of Iraq — do not justify disobedience. Servicemen are not lawyers (apart from a handful that are!). Armed forces would collapse if all their members were coming to a variety of conclusions about the legality and morality of orders, and then obeying/disobeying accordingly.
Example: what if a perfectly good humanitarian mission under UN auspices — one you whole-heartedly supported, Katz — was derailed because US servicemen involved were coming to weird conclusions about the constitutionality of US troops wearing blue berets? (This isn’t entirely hypothetical. See below. Thankfully only one guy was involved. But what if half his unit had gone along with him? Do you really want chaos in our armed forces?)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42102
MarkL: agree with you 100% re Iranian and Pakistani nukes. While I think the chances of an Israeli-Iranian nuclear exchange would be low, the probability would still be > zero, and the consequences would so horrific as to justify any military means now to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power.
As for Pakistan, if there’s an Iranian-style Islamic revolution there, I hope and pray that the US removes every nuclear weapon and all material. I have seen suggestions that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US demanded to know the location and condition of all Pakistani nukes. In the event of Islamists taking over, perhaps clever approaches might be made to the Pakistani military and nuclear elites (who would no doubt be greatly desirous of green cards for them and their families) to help US special forces secure the nukes.
You asked me (WAY upthread) for the reference I was quoting from about ancient Indian armies. It was this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Armies-Macedonian-Punic-Wars-359/dp/B000J2ZCWA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200310795&sr=8-1
Primarily intended for modellers and gamers, but with a lot of interesting analysis of Alexandrian-era army structure and tactics.
Re my views on the efficiency of European armies — which you called “Eurocentric nonsense”
— it was a sort of nutshell summary of Jared Diamond’s views:
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200311077&sr=1-1
You were perfectly right about the Ottomans and Mongols, but the argument was directed at the societies a long way removed from Europe who, almost without exception, were defeated by Europeans and incorporated into European empires (which, by the late 19th C, encompassed most of the globe).
Yes, Europeans were great at playing ‘divide and conquer’, so they often fought with local allies. However, in such battles, you usually find that the tiny European contingent had an impact out of all proportion to its size.
The historian has to find some explanation for Europe’s unprecedented success at empire-building, and Diamond’s theory is well worth a look, if you haven’t already.
There is no better forum than a court martial to test that proposition. That’s what courts martial are for.
I don’t want it, but sometimes it’s necessary if the alternatives are worse.
When there is a potential for enormous violence, which is what armies are better equipped to wreak than any other institution, then the precautionary principle should be very liberally invoked.
Well, you’ll get your wish, Katz, when the case of Lieutenant Ehren Watada goes back for a second trial (which may or may not happen, since there’s a double jeopardy issue which must first be resolved).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehren_Watada
If the second trial does go ahead, I would not place any wagers on the defence winning, particularly since …
“On January 16, 2007, Judge John M. Head ruled that Watada would not be allowed to present any defense based on the Nuremberg principles, stating that the legality of a war was a “nonjusticiable political question”[25] and ruling also that the order that Watada had refused was lawful.”
Courts Martial can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Such a judicial ruling can be readily set aside.
For example, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the interpretation of international treaties signed by the US.
Under the constitution these treaties have the status of legislation.
Paulus [71]:
My list: Alphabet. Efficient rope-making. Gunnery [which eventually led to steam-engines]. Double-entry book-keeping. Christian concept of Redemption. Separation of Church and State [even if only nominal]. Universal language – first Latin, later French.
Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel is worth reading even if you disagree with him.
Katz [69]:
The situation of Viet-Nam War draft resisters does have analogies but not with the situation of German officers having to give an oath to Hitler. Any German officer who declined to take that oath would have been treated exactly the same way as any lad who declined to join the Hitler Youth …. or any PLA Armyman who declined to to chant the praises of Chairman Mao during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution …. or [the list goes on and on]. The social environments of the two cases was too different for a good analogy to be made.
Contrary to the popular stereotype on TV and in novels, many Prussian junkers were progressive and liberal [so long as nobody was trying to confiscate their small estates]. Like many Jews, some officers believed that things come not possibly become more outrageous – but they did – and by then it was too late to do anything about it. Hitler was a real gambler and he risked death by forcing this oath on the Army.
“The butcherâs bill will look something like this
Month 1 (TMD=total megadeaths)
West: 10TMD / muslim world(mw):25TMD (a proportionate western retaliation)
Month 2
West20TMD / mw 50TMD (a second proportionate western retaliation)
Month 3
West 30TMD / mw 100TMD (a third but escalated proportionate western retaliation)”
Iâll see your Butcherâs Bill and raise you Hermieâs âStairway To Heaven.
By now it should be clear that regardless of MarkLCanberraâs glib miljargon, heâs basically one big paranoid fruit loop. A Doctor Strangeglove ahoping and apraying for one big showdown with somebody, anybody, anything that can jerk him out of his rut.
And slips and tumbles here and there – his misuse of âvanuaâ? when talking about Fiji comes to mind for one.
And always amused by how the most strident defenders of Western Civilisation online seem to have so little faith in its real and staying powers.
So let us assume the worst case scenario – some ragtaggle bunch of islasmowhackos actually get it together enough to raise the big mushroom man over DC, London, NYC, or even worse Zurich â do you really think western civilization would come tumbling to a halt?
Us westerner civilisters are one smart, ever-expanding, globalised, party-hearty, stylish, flexible, skilled and pretty ruthless bunch. Over the past 800 years or so, weâve beaten down, seen off and/or absorbed the Ottoman and Romanov Empires and a bunch of Shoguns, totally crunched the Nazis and Commies, quite subverted the Middle Kingdom and handed the Moghuls their arses on an ivory plate.
Weâve throughly won. Western secular capitalist semi-republican/democratic centrist techno city states is pretty much the default position globally desired by anyone who wants to build an adequate life. You donât see any refugees and immigrants heading the other way do you?
And of course two thirds of the worldâs population couldnât give a shit about some bloody squabble between the extreme ends of three monotheistic skygod cults âexcept for the oil underneath the stage.
Meanwhile too many get lathered up by whacko pronouncements like the Ladenese Epistle â delivered by a cave dwelling psycho who did achieve one goal, the US visibly bugging out of Saudi Arabia, but who now hides underneath big rocks, wondering what will get him first – failing organs, a USAF bunker buster, the ISI tidying things up or some turncoat after the US$50 million reward beckoning a Delta Force snatch squad down a ravine. Some Caliph.
Only an equally hysterical person like MarkLCanberra would see Osama and his dopey acolytes as a serious threat. Theyâre a bunch of fucking losers running off a 1500 year old script. These fuck knuckles canât build infrastructure, boost trade, improve services or even deliver quality entertainment. All theyâre good for is hysterical and ultimately useless displays of murderous pique. A historical footnote basically.
We in the West shit all over them in every possible way. And over the past six and half years, our police, security and data-monitoring apparatus have been steadily taking down killer islamofundie cells. Not always100% accurately but certainly with less collateral damage than a B1B dropping hastily rigged JDAMs on a GPS co-ordinate somewhere over there. Itâs basically 21st century nerds nailing these fuckers through communication leaks and the money trail.
And incidentally, can we finally put that stupid âsheep dog and sheepâ? analogy so beloved of couch crusaders to rest? These days, sheepdogs donât fend off wolves bur rather herd the flock for regualar shearing and eventually slaughter.
But GB, MarkL of Canberra has already conceded that some German officers did refuse to take the oath and resigned.
Here is a data set.
What did happen to these characters?
Did they go to jail?
C’mon Nabs, are you always so mean towards the janitorial staff in the basement of the ONA with a dial up connection to one Google page–”Operation Blind Attack”?
Katz [77]:
Can appreciate your position on this [having met quite a few draft resisters and also members of of the American returned servicemen's anti-war organization, VVAW] but my opinion stands [post 75 above].
Jail and ostracism are not the worst or only penalties for defying a regime either. In a similar context under the evil Nazi regime, one of my mother’s relatives was exceedingly lucky; he had a distinguished himself during the Great War and during the Weimar Republic. His superiors and colleagues reminded him that he had been gassed in France and that his health was not likely to improve in his current situation. “A word to the wise is sufficient”. He retired unpunished – watched but left untroubled – and so was able to live into old age; don’t know how few or how many survived in that way. [In the present discussion, that incident was clearly the tradition of brother officers looking after one another and not anything to do with a social contract].
Nabakov:
Where have you been? We all missed your insights earlier in this discussion.
Bit harsh on MarkL though; he seems decent enough.
Yeah but …. all that spread of the Western way of doing things didn’t happen without a lot of blunders, disasters, dead-end roads and self-destruction along the way.
Try this for harshness GB, some military
fruitloop pananoia“social contract” for benevolence in 2005.http://larvatusprodeo.net/2005/08/08/the-question-on-everyones-lips/#comment-18920
Graham #67
Back in the Olden Days, an ordinary digger appealing against an unreasonable order or making a reasonable complaint used to trigger a mindless reactive closing of ranks among superiors; the actual boundary between the solidarity of a strong group and the behavior of a mongrel dog-pack was unclear back in those days. Apparently, the ADF has learnt from several scandals and now has more efficient ways of accommodating objections to outrageous and illegal orders.
Comment: Graham, IMHO it has not learned much. This still happens, with some new twists. One of the nastier is to use Psychs to ‘medicalise’ administrative issues and get rid of people that way, on medical grounds. AFAIK the closing ranks still happens. It is just better camouflaged.
#69 Katz A significant percentage of the regimes of history built armies with the idea of attack in mind. Recently, Bush added the US to that list. That is the definition of pre-emptive war. MarkL’s understanding of the role of soldiers is ahistorical. Perhaps he seeks to universalise the status of the ADF.
Comment: I have clearly been stating throughout my comments that mine is an individual view.
British officers’ commissions in 1914 were worded almost identically to Australian officers’ commissions in 2008. These officers related identically to polities that were in their fundamentals identical.
Comment: perhaps. But do the words still mean the same things? Are the societies the same? I’d argue that Australian society of 2008 is completely different from UK society of 1914. Are you arguing that they are the same?
No amount of special pleading can absolve German officers from the moral consequences of taking the Hitler oath. My reference to Vietnam draft resisters was only in relation to the oath and nothing else. Nuremberg legally absolved German officers. It was a court of law, not a court of morals.
Comment: This is not what you said, but I am happy to grant that there may be an ambiguity. I agree that they were legally absolved. Morally, I think we have a spectrum again. A German officer who fought a ‘clean’ war (say, one who went thru the French Campaign, then went to the Afrika Corps and who was then captured in Tunisia in 1943) would probably have little or no moral case to answer. One who fought on the Eastern Front almost certainly would. And as for the Einsatztruppen…
Many Germans did what they could to resist Hitler. They were weak. German officers were collectively a very powerful group. The truth is that many of them hated democracy slightly more than they hated Nazism.
Comment: There is a lot of very high quality scholarship on this, including exhaustive studies of the ‘German Resistance’. There was, overall, rather little of it [See Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement by Wolfgang Benz (Editor), Walter H. Pehle (Editor), Lance W. Garmer (Translator)]. This is understandable when we examine how quickly and thoroughly even innocuous resistance was crushed: recall the dreadful fate of the White Rose group in Munich in 1943: ‘After a very brief trial, Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were immediately executed by guillotine. Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Professor Kurt Huber were tried by the People’s Court in April of the same year and executed later.’ The national socialists played by brutal rules.
Your point on democracy is a good one, but we do have to recall that their experience of democracy was Weimar democracy.
All in all, MarkL has made a weak case for the existence or the potency of a social contract between soldiers and their society. He has not shown how it comes into being, how it is to be understood by the alleged parties to it, whether and how it is acted upon, and how it goes out of existence, if it ever existed in the first place.
The behaviour of soldiers be perfectly well described and explained without any reference to a “social contract”.
The application of Occam’s Razor easily disposes of the chimerical soldiers’ “social contract”.
Comment: What is missing here is argument in favour of your case. I’ve argued that the social contract exists between the individual and the state, has a history and that we have gone through its impacts and effects. We even have what I think is a pretty good personal description of one from a Vietnam era vet (thanks to Graham’s link). You seem to be waving all that away. To briefly address the issues you raise:
It comes in to being as a variant of the civilian’s social contract
The parties to it are the individual, the service he works for, the government, and the society itself.
It is acted upon through the interaction between the individual’s conscience and moral code (based as they are on his society’s mores) military rules and regulation, and LOAC.
It does not go out of existence.
While behaviour may be explained without reference to it, WHY they are volunteer servicemen in the first place cannot be unless one assumes that ‘only idiots and losers join the military’. This is demonstrably incorrect based on the much higher recruiting standards, educational standards, training standards etc of the ADF as compared to civilian society. So there has to be something other than purely economic factors at work here. The social contract explains at least part of that.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.
Paulus #71
MarkL: agree with you 100% re Iranian and Pakistani nukes. While I think the chances of an Israeli-Iranian nuclear exchange would be low, the probability would still be > zero, and the consequences would so horrific as to justify any military means now to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power.
Comment: Agreed, that thought-example was meant to illustrate just how ugly the potential risks are, and to ask what level of such risks they find acceptable. My personal opinion is that the consequences are so high that only a very low level of risk is acceptable. I fully support non-proliferation efforts in consequence, and an IAEA with genuine teeth and lots of them. If those circumstances apply, then I have few quibbles with countries using nuclear power in forms where ‘weaponisation’ is as close to impossible as we can get it.
As for Pakistan, if there’s an Iranian-style Islamic revolution there, I hope and pray that the US removes every nuclear weapon and all material. I have seen suggestions that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US demanded to know the location and condition of all Pakistani nukes. In the event of Islamists taking over, perhaps clever approaches might be made to the Pakistani military and nuclear elites (who would no doubt be greatly desirous of green cards for them and their families) to help US special forces secure the nukes.
Comment: Agree.
You asked me (WAY upthread) for the reference I was quoting from about ancient Indian armies. It was this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Armies-Macedonian-Punic-Wars-359/dp/B000J2ZCWA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200310795&sr=8-1 HYPERLINK “http://www.amazon.com/Armies-Macedonian-Punic-Wars-359/dp/B000J2ZCWA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200310795&sr=8-1″ [link]
Primarily intended for modellers and gamers, but with a lot of interesting analysis of Alexandrian-era army structure and tactics.
Re my views on the efficiency of European armies – which you called “Eurocentric nonsense”- it was a sort of nutshell summary of Jared Diamond’s views:
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200311077&sr=1-1 HYPERLINK “http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200311077&sr=1-1″ [link]
Comment: Thank you for those links. I have not read Diamond, as yet. More for the reading list. FYI I have since been informed that a similar but much superior thought model has been written and can be located at:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html
I have read it and found it quite dispiriting. Not to mention terrifying. I hope the author is wrong.
Nabakov #76
“The butcher’s bill will look something like this
…
By now it should be clear that regardless of MarkLCanberra’s glib miljargon, he’s basically one big paranoid fruit loop. A Doctor Strangeglove ahoping and apraying for one big showdown with somebody, anybody, anything that can jerk him out of his rut.
Comment: I clearly stated that to be a made-up example of potential consequences: a simple thought model to illustrate potential levels of risk. You may note that “Jihadistan” and “The Judaean Liberation Front (islamonutters division)” do not actually exist. Nor does (to my knowledge) an ability to manufacture nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in a distributed manner. You have extended the argument here, a fallacy in logic. This invalidates whatever point you were endeavouring to make.
This is the first direct ad hominem in this thread so far, and it was unprovoked in any way.
As occurs when one uses ad hominem, such points as you may have been trying to make are automatically rendered invalid.
I will not respond to your ad hominem in a like manner. It would be inappropriate to do so as everyone involved in this thread has taken considerable care to be civil and rational. That is how it should be IMO.
Peter’s is the second ad hominem, and again does not contribute to the discussion at hand. Again, I’ll not respond in kind for the reasons above. Discourtesy on my part when everyone is taking care to be civil would reflect poorly on me, so I abjure it.
MarkL
Canberra
MarkL,
Newspoll results from the weekend of 31 January – 2 February 2003.
Q. THINKING NOW ABOUT IRAQ AND AUSTRALIA’S INVOLVEMENT IN MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAQ. ARE YOU PERSONALLY IN FAVOUR OR AGAINST AUSTRALIAN TROOPS BEING INVOLVED IN MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAQ, IF THE UNITED NATIONS SUPPORTED SUCH ACTION?
Total in Favour 57%
Total Against 39%
(Others – uncommitted)
and crucially:
AND IF THE UNITED NATIONS DID NOT SUPPORT MILITARY ACTION, ARE YOU PERSONALLY IN FAVOUR OR AGAINST AUSTRALIAN TROOPS BEING INVOLVED IN MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAQ?
Total in favour 18%
Total Against 76%
contrast these polls with the polling taken on the weekend of 26-28 October 2001:
THINKING NOW ABOUT AUSTRALIA’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE WAR EFFORT IN AFGHANISTAN. ARE YOU PERSONALLY IN FAVOUR OR AGAINST AUSTRALIA SENDING TROOPS AS PART OF THE WAR EFFORT IN AFGHANISTAN?
Total in favour 66%
Total Against 27%
I really don’t want to derail the thread into an Iraq war debate – just wanted to put these polls up for you MarkL – as a reminder of the glaring (76%) disconnect between the Australian people and their Govt. on the decision to join the COW.
continue.. or at ease, or sumthun.
Everybody:
At last. This topic has now been promoted to Older Entries; the casual lurkers have gone; the field is now clear for participants and for committed lurkers. Play on.
MarkL [81]:
Whoa! Hold ‘er Rolly! The old Kingdom of Prussia already had a lot of democratic institutions when most of the world was still run on the word of the local robber-baron; there was a lot of experience of democracy [imperfect though we ourselves may regard it] prior to the Weimar republic, hence my remark about liberal and progressive attitudes back on post 75.
To argue that the two societies are “completely different” is arrant nonsense. For a start, our judiciary still appeals to precedents that were established in England at that time. The connections between the two societies are powerful and manifold. I’m sure both of us could slip fairly seamlessly back into 1914 British society.
That’s not to say they are identical, but the family resemblances are quite uncanny.
More brutal than a suicidal war against the Red Army? I think not.
In any case, when the German officers took their Hitler oath in August 1934 the killing had hardly started.
But all of the above is subsidiary in comparison to this:
I don’t know whether you mean to do this , but here you are asking me to prove a negative. And we all know that that is impossible. My task in this debate is simply to shoot down you claims that a military “social contract” exists.
You haven’t done that.
I also deny the existence of this. So you see I’m not discriminating against soldiers. Social contracts are metaphysical mumbo jumbo. Individual conscience exists. but that’s the point, it’s individual which is the opposite to social.
Why does anyone do anything? Different folks do things for a range of reasons, from noble to base. To try to gather up all those untidy odds and ends of human motivations, dreams and desires and to crush them into a uniform mould called “social contract” is romantic nonsense.
Proof please MarkL, otherwise my Google/anecdotal pisstake is equally valid.
Recruiting standards: Above 5′ 6″?
Education standard:
http://www.defence.gov.au/news/armynews/editions/1111/letters.htm
Training standards:
Literacy/written expression:
Military Intelligence: A contradiction in terms.
Social contract and the military is simply bunkum. It’s just a job for most, while hoping that the pollies don’t start some stupid war to get them killed. Most do their job well, but no more than in civvy street, often less, due to the inherent contradictions in a massive bureaucratic clusterfuck.
(Robert Graves: “Goodby To All That” [WW1] Why did you shoot your Regimental Sgt Major–did you think he was a spy?” “No Sir, we mistook him for our Company Sgt Major.”)
Katz, MarkL and all:
LYING AND TRUST.
Trust is an essential component of any miliary social contract. No trust; no compact – it’s as simple as that. Not an absolute unquestioning trust – that’s very rare – but a dependable workable trust. Underpinning that trust is truth; not an absolute truth – if such ever exists – but sufficient truth for a social contact
[[Aaah. So that's where the first "blockquote cite" disappeared to
]]
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That’s rather a different take on the social contract between the military and civil society!
This thread is seriously bloating my ‘books to read’ pile.
Working on the assumption that a social contract exists between military and state, to what extent would the nature of this contract be influenced by national(ist) rhetoric, mythology and exceptionalism? To a very high degree I would have thought but I’m wondering if these days people are getting a bit sick of nationalist exceptionalism.
Joe Nye Jr’s work seems to suggest that the fairly rife anti-Americanism of recent years has a lot to do with a growing dissatisfaction with nationalism and its perceived failures, especially in the Mid East.
Wan, wanna, wannest.
__________________
GB, attempting to tell lies to anyone is stupid and counter-productive if it is at all likely that those lies will be discovered.
It is pragmatically good policy not to be caught lying.
The critical question concerning governments and their lies to the military is what will the military do when they discover that they are being lied to.
Some members of the military defend steadfast loyalty to a lying government by intoning the slogan “My country, right or wrong.” In other words, there is no limit to the number of lies that they will tolerate.
In those cases, the government assumes that the individuals concerned have valued obedience over all other qualities, including critical thought. These persons have made a unilateral decision to forego the rights of citizenship.
Yet, I would suggest, by far the majority of the military would agree that the is a limit beyond which they would not obey the orders of an evil, lying government, even their own.
Perhaps, on average, soldiers are slower to rouse to that point of resistance than civilians. Although, my understanding of the political history of a wide range of countries over several centuries would suggest to me that soldiers have often been at the forefront of rebellions against the governments they swore to defend.
This observation would suggest to me that there is no special, enduring social contract between soldiers and governments and between soldiers and the rest of society.
MarkL [your response on 81]:
Firstly. Not so long ago, Australian armed forces personnel were informed that one of the many, many things that distinguished our way-of-life from, and made it superior to, Communism was that in our enlightened benevolent society, medical science, and especially psychiatry, was used only to prevent and treat illness, to promote good health and to benefit the patient …. whereas in the USSR and other Communist dictatorships, psychiatry was often perverted so as to silence dissent and to punish those who aspired to liberty, democracy, prosperity and justice.
Secondly. A very basic component of all military social-contracts – of any time and under any regime – is the expectation by the troops that their leaders will be as competent as they are or, at least, not grossly incompetent. This is an attainable and quite reasonable expectation.
These two assertions are not unrelated.
Your post [81 above] gave me the impression that some officers in the present ADF, the ones lacking leadership skills [especially those basic supervisory skills of dealing effectively and profitably with a diversity of opinions for the overall benefit of the organization and in resolving complaints swiftly and fairly] …. preferred to use Communist-style methods as a substitute for competent basic management.
I do hope this is not the case. Because doing so will intimidate the troops; no doubt about that.
It will get the appearance [though not the substance] of obedience, compliance, conformity and all those other nice warm cuddly fuzzy things.
It will also get resentment, “respect” that is only superficial, incurable mistrust and a strong desire to get to the hell out of there before the same fate befalls them too.
Worse yet, it will stifle innovation, it will silence the challenging ideas you need to hear if you are going to overcome the Enemy and it will drive dissatisfaction underground, away from the light of day where it will fester and ferment unheeded until ….until it erupts causing chaos and fury.
Psychiatry is great when it helps traumatized troops return soon to effective service or, where that cannot be done, helps them resume a fulfilling civilian life.
Psychiatry is not so great when it becomes a tool to prop up the careers of incompetent duds.
If psychiatry or any other medical science is being misused then it is a clear and unnecessarily dangerous breach of that social contract which holds the armed forces together.
Katz [91]:
Exceedingly well and concisely put.
However, I don’t see where that disproves the existence of a social contract involving the military …. rather, it shows what does or can happen when that social contract breaks down.
I’ll resist the temptation to point out MarkLCanberra doesn’t seem to know exactly what the phrase “ad hominem” really means (A hint: it’s not just a posh way of saying “look ma, he’s calling me names again”) but instead take my cue from him to wrestle manfully with the central topic.
I feel the kind of social contract under discussion here extends beyond just about how the military should deal with elected representatives of the populace in assumed good faith. It cuts all ways.
Armed forces, for better or worse, are always a reflection of the society that resources them. The Wehrmacht during WW2 was full of honorable, decent and professional soldiers. Yet, as MarkLCanberra observed, they were in the service of a broken and corrupt regime which broke and corrupted them in many ways.
A good measure of the health and strength of the political leadership of a society/community can be seen from some key angles in the morale, morals and skills of their armed forces. Especially when conscripted.
Exhibit A: Sov ballistic missile crews in the 80s drinking the antifreeze from their rocket haulers.
Exhibit B: The US Army collapsing into sullen slow-motion mutiny in Vietnam from about 1969 onwards. Has any another army come up with such a catchy term as “fragging” for killing their dumb and unpleasant officers?
Exhibit C: The Russian armed forces just walking off the job during WW1.
Exhibit D: The Iraqi military folding like a pack of cards every time the Yanks take ‘em on.
Exhibit E: Robert E. Lee’s army just melting away by Petersburg and Richmond.
Exhibit F: And let us not forget mon amis that France’s most maximum leader since Bony was targeted for assassination by members of his own armed forces who did all that oath-swearing crap too. Fortunately for De Gaul (if not for Harold Wilson), the OAS turned out to be more Force de Farce than Frappe.
Exhibit E: The previous exhibit doesn’t really amplify my overall point. Ignore it.
In short, your military is only as good as the strength and consensus of your society. It never works the other way around in the long run.
Judging from my own dealings with the ADF in recent years, where I’ve found them to be a smallish, under-resourced but pretty cluely, energetic, resourceful and generally level-headed and good humoured mob, I’d say the Australian body politic, and how it defines the terms of the national social contract, has been in general good health.
You’ll still find an expected quota of fuckwits, crims and arse polishers amongst our armed forces but I see no danger of any kind of New Guard movement emerging again. However MarkLCanberra may be better informed about the rise of secret fanatic cells in the ADF than me.
GB, like I said to MarkL of Canberra upthread, it is impossible to prove a negative.
I am limited to attempts to refute positive arguments asserting the existence of any special military social contract.
I believe I have addressed all arguments proposed asserting the existence of a special military social contract.
82 jo
Thank you for that information. Most interesting
83 Graham Bell
Whoa! Hold ‘er Rolly! The old Kingdom of Prussia already had a lot of democratic institutions when most of the world was still run on the word of the local robber-baron; there was a lot of experience of democracy [imperfect though we ourselves may regard it] prior to the Weimar republic, hence my remark about liberal and progressive attitudes back on post 75.
Comment: Good point. And it was a militarised society too, its location guaranteed that. Know any good sources which cover the interaction between that democratic tradition and the militarised nature of the society? I have studies FDG’s campaigns in th Seven years War, but not Prussian society.
84 Katz
… For a start, our judiciary still appeals to precedents that were established in England at that time. The connections between the two societies are powerful and manifold. I’m sure both of us could slip fairly seamlessly back into 1914 British society.
…
That’s not to say they are identical, but the family resemblances are quite uncanny.
Comment: Agreed. I still think that a non-immigrant, Imperial, caste-stratified society a century ago is radically different from an immigrant, relatively unstratified society today. My great-uncle and his cohorts noted very strong differences in the two societies in his letters back from the UK in 1916. Australian society of that era worked differently in his view. How much more so is that now?
…
More brutal than a suicidal war against the Red Army? I think not.
Comment: Not really a good comparison as it compares what the national socialists regarded as thought-crime (domestic criminality in their perverted view) to open warfare.
…
I don’t know whether you mean to do this , but here you are asking me to prove a negative. And we all know that that is impossible. My task in this debate is simply to shoot down you claims that a military “social contract” exists.
Comment: Fair comment and apologies for the ambiguity. It would be silly of me to ask you to prove a negative. What was after is your views on why there is no social contract for a citizen who volunteers for military service. I assumed that you accepted that a social contract does exist for an average citizen. As you reject the whole concept of a social contract, fine, that answers it. I might not agree with your views, but so what?
I think this may re-cast this discussion somewhat, too.
Do social contracts exist? Is the whole field of social contact theory invalid?
86 Graham Bell
Comment: ‘LYING AND TRUST.’ – Good points!
…
Peter Kemp [85]:
So you believe
Social contract and the military is simply bunkum.
do you?
I myself think the Easter Bunny is bunkum. But, having had a bit to do with former deserters and with the survivors of defeated armies, I do believe the concept of social contract being intertwined with military service is anything but bunkum. When whatever social contact that holds that army together is eroded or smashed. no huge amounts of money and no savage punishments and no appeals to patriotism or deity and certainly no lavish promises can hold it together – nothing!
Comment: As above, perhaps we should take a step back and look first, more broadly, at Katz’s comment: do social contracts exist at all?
90 Tony D
This thread is seriously bloating my ‘books to read’ pile.
Comment: I have the same problem. The damn thing just topped 50 again after I had got it down over Christmas. And 30 of them are sitting on the shelf making me feel guilty.
Not to mention the boxes of thesis material…
Working on the assumption that a social contract exists between military and state, to what extent would the nature of this contract be influenced by national(ist) rhetoric, mythology and exceptionalism? To a very high degree I would have thought but I’m wondering if these days people are getting a bit sick of nationalist exceptionalism.
Joe Nye Jr’s work seems to suggest that the fairly rife anti-Americanism of recent years has a lot to do with a growing dissatisfaction with nationalism and its perceived failures, especially in the Mid East.
Comment: Oh great, sounds like one more book for the list. Is this: Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization?
This is a thoughtful comment. As Katz has noted, though, it may well be worth questioning the assumption.
91 Katz
…
Perhaps, on average, soldiers are slower to rouse to that point of resistance than civilians. Although, my understanding of the political history of a wide range of countries over several centuries would suggest to me that soldiers have often been at the forefront of rebellions against the governments they swore to defend.
This observation would suggest to me that there is no special, enduring social contract between soldiers and governments and between soldiers and the rest of society.
Comment: I think that may well be true on a case-by-case basis. We’d have to know a bit about the society involved in each case and why it was in such crisis. My view of that is that the government betrayed the social contract to such a degree that the individual military personnel regarded it as broken – so all bets were off. Same with the civilians. So in that view, what they did was to revolt in the hope of establishing a new society where such social contracts would again function.
I still think you are interpreting ‘society’ as ‘government’. I think they are two separate entities.
Graham Bell #92
Comment: In relation to your two assertions, I agree. Of course, there is always a rime of poor personnel in any organisation. What compounds this in the ADF is the existence of a number of communities of ‘little tin gods’ (in their own view). Aircrew in the RAAF and warfare officers in the RAN are the best-known examples. I’ll talk about fast-jet aircrew as the most obvious example. These are carefully selected and intensively trained young men from the start of their careers. Existing ego’s are expanded because the rules are different for them (they are a very valuable resource) and there are relentlessly told that they are the best the country has. This is actually necessary: the RAAF is the only service which sends its officers out to fight and die, and fast jet warfare is exceptionally lethal against a peer competitor. A within-visual-range action (a ‘dogfight’ to use an obsolete term people may be more familiar with) has been accurately compared to two naked men armed with flame-throwers conducting a duel in a telephone booth.
So you actually need to do this: the aircrew need to think of themselves as ten feet tall and invincible. They still die in training anyway, the price of the game. The problem comes when they can no longer fly fast-movers. After, say 15-20 years, they are too senior and move into staff/command positions. This is a recipe for problems, as they have had little supervisory control over junior personnel (especially the very junior ranks), are not trained for it, and are, in some cases, just as egotistical as ever.
All that said, those who make the adjustment tend to be excellent officers indeed.
But those who do not are a worry.
SO your comments in #92 are spot-on.
The ADF has, over the past 20 years or so, developed this habit of ‘medicalising’ administrative problems. These are often minor, and resolvable at a low level, unless poor management escalates them. In these cases, management obtains a judicial outcome (often termination of employment) through administrative means, nearly always where no case exists under the Defence Force Discipline Act. I am forced to agree with the bleak assessments of William de Maria in his Deadly Disclosures: Whistleblowing and the ethical meltdown of Australia (Adelaide: Wakefield Press 1999).
The management’s new weapon in this is the ADF-employed psychologist. I have knowledge of cases where these creatures receive an extensive briefing from managers about the desired outcome, which is usually ‘help get rid of X’, and then conducts the psych interview with X as the ‘neutral’ judge!
Personal networks being wonderful things, I have privately discussed this issue with a couple of senior psychiatrists. Most illuminating. I never knew just how much contempt psychologists are held in by psychiatrists.
As for the impact, it is bad. For each person affected, well, let me say that military personnel have excellent networks, so the knowledge spreads. I know of a case where a friend, a junior NCO, was ‘shafted’ in this manner. In the years since, that has played a significant role in eight expensively-trained and experienced people leaving that particular service. Because if what started as a personality clash can lead to the ‘whistleblower-level-severity’ impacts on person, their life and marriage seen in that case, then you really think about things and look at other options when your time comes up to think about the future.
So your post is deadly accurate. ADF separation rates reflect it.
Graham Bell #93
Katz [91]:
Exceedingly well and concisely put.
However, I don’t see where that disproves the existence of a social contract involving the military …. rather, it shows what does or can happen when that social contract breaks down.
Comment: Agree
Katz #95
GB, like I said to MarkL of Canberra upthread, it is impossible to prove a negative.
I am limited to attempts to refute positive arguments asserting the existence of any special military social contract.
I believe I have addressed all arguments proposed asserting the existence of a special military social contract.
Comment: As you do not agree that the concept of a social contract exists, this is a logical stance. I do not agree with it, as mentioned above, but that is neither here nor there. Be a dull discussion if we all agreed!
MarkL
Canberra
But when you keep asserting the existence of this “social contract” you must at least be able to point to some of its leading characteristics, demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that these characteristics belong to a “social contract” and to nothing else.
Perhaps an analogy might help. For a long time chemists theorised the existence of phlogiston, a compound that purportedly existed in all combustible entities. Whole explanations of the nature of matter were constructed around the existence of this mythical stuff. And even when it was proven that burning stuff didn’t reduce its mass, phlogiston enthusiasts countered that phlogiston in fact had a negative weight. The theory was incredibly resistent to challenge.
I think that I have shown that soldiers and civilians do not behave very differently to similar stimuli. Thus there seems to be nothing inherently different between them. In the absence of any remarkable differences in behaviour, it seems to me, one is very hard pressed to assert that soldiers and civilians are essentially different from each other. Thus there seems to be no prima facie evidence for the existence of a military social contract.
Now even if you did demonstrate that there were major differences in the way that soldiers behave in comparison with civilians, that fact alone does not prove the existence of any social contract. There are other potential explanations for differences in behaviour.
So in order to demonstrate the existence of a social contract you must:
1. Demonstrate any effects that may arise for its existence.
2. Demonstrate that those effects were caused by a social contract and no other cause.
That is how phlogiston was eventually debunked.
Shaun Cronin:
Thanks for putting up this topic. It has challenged some of my ideas – and that’s good. Only a short visit here this evening; shall return.
Nabakov [ ]:
You are right about military social contracts being multifaceted.
MarkL [96];
Just on Prussian social history: can’t point to specific texts at the moment; Iron Kingdom might be worth a look, [haven't read it myself], especially bibliography. Own impression is that the relative poverty of Brandenburg then Prussia [before gaining Silesia] probably restrained the excesses of the nobility better than in rich kingdoms like England or France or Spain; that every second lord was a marcher lord definitely made them more respectful of the views of their own people – they had to depend on them in war so there were powerful incentives to be nice [or, at least, not nasty] to them; being of necessity in daily contact with the locals was still a long way from democracy but it was streets ahead on what was on offer in a lot of other kingdoms, bishoprics and whatnot. FdG himself encouraged a lot of Enlightenment ideas and institutions – without relaxing the iron-hard military discipline – but it was not until after Napoleon had been driven out in 1813 that democracy really got underway.
[More comments/responses when I return]
97 Katz
So in order to demonstrate the existence of a social contract you must:
1. Demonstrate any effects that may arise for its existence.
2. Demonstrate that those effects were caused by a social contract and no other cause.
Comment: see below (again with apologies for length.
98 Graham Bell
Just on Prussian social history: can’t point to specific texts at the moment; Iron Kingdom might be worth a look…
Comment: Thank you.
Katz: Social Contract.
According to social contract theory, consent is the basis of government. People have agreed to be ruled (out of self interest) and it is this appeal to two basic human emotions, fear and greed that enables governments to be formed and entitled to rule. Greed because you can get more than you give, and fear because a state of nature is a bloody awful, brutal way to live. One can visit clan-based ‘state of nature’ societies like Melanesia if you do not believe me (Bougainville is a good example). While the people in these societies are wonderful folk, they will be the first to tell you how ‘nasty, brutish and short’ life in them is.
Social contract theorists envisage a transition from this ‘nasty and brutish’ state of nature to a state of society. Individuals come together and form contracts which serve their interests, and these contracts established rule, empowering government.
So… ‘thinking of government as a social contract which has been made between its citizens is a powerful way of thinking about the authority of the state–the origins, extent, and limits of its powers.’
The social contract theory begins with a basic assumption that individuals ought to be considered as ‘free’, prior to government. This has to be tempered by the nature of that freedom, you are also free to be enslaved or killed by a stronger person, you are ‘free’ of all laws so it is literllay the rule of the strong over the weak, and societies above clans/tribes do not exist.
Thinkers like Hobbes and Beccaria argued that if we accept these assumptions, then we can rationally deduce what will be the best possible government. Their definition was that it was one that allows us to retain as much of our ‘natural state freedom’ as possible, while creating as much order and stability as is necessary for us to live happily together without the endless and bloody warfare inherent in the ‘natural state of freedom’. BTW, actually seeing such ‘naturally free’ states of human existence is educational – you see very quickly how foolish and wrong are those who quack on about the ‘noble savage’.
Social contract theory is based on reading Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Jean Rousseau’s The Social Contract: Or Principles Of Political Right 1762 (available online at http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm) and David Hume (1711-76): the ‘Great Sceptic’ and anti-social contract theorist. I particularly like his comment:
“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical, and depending upon more invention than experience. Every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and of happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”
Katz, you’d like Hume if you have not read him. I appreciate his work as a Lockean empiricist very much, without finding it convincing. He rules too much out and I question some of his assumptions on inductive reasoning. But he is a splendid devil’s advocate even so.
So social contract theory is:
“A State of Nature” = anarchy
The state of anarchy makes life “poor, nasty, brutish and short”
This is because of 4 features of the human condition:
• equality of need
• scarcity of all resources
• the essential equality of human power
• limited altruism even inside the clan
In a “state of nature”, there are no social goods. So there is no farming, industry, education, housing, technology, social cooperation outside clan etc etc.
This is because the social cooperation needed to produce these things doesn’t exist. Instead, there is an endless state of warfare with neighbouring clans. These parts of the world never progress above this state, they can’t. Much of Melanesia is again a good example, locked for tens of millennia in this state of savagery. Aboriginal Australia was similar. There are innumerable others.
To escape this, there must be guarantees that people will not harm one another, and
people must be able to rely on one another to keep their agreements.
Only a government above the clan/tribal level can provide for the above. This is usually done in human history by EMPIRE. Empires, therefore, are normally good things as they improve life for most people in them, if only by creating a common economic space and imposing a pax. The various mexica Empires were stone-age in technology, but arguably created a better life for most of their inhabitants: see Deepak Lal ‘In Praise of Empire’. Logically therefore, we need a government to form a society. In establishing a government, people give up some of their personal freedom (the freedoms of anarchy, such as they are) and give the government the authority to enforce laws and agreements.
In my view and those of the social contract theorists, this means that those living under a government are parties to a social contract. The most basic specifics do not alter much:
Each person agrees to follow the laws of the state on the condition that everyone else does the same.
That way, we are all relatively safe from each other and we all benefit from the other cooperative social goods and vastly broader resource base that results.
This links to morality in the eyes of some because while the state exists to enforce the rules necessary for social living, morality consists in the whole set of rules that facilitate social living.
So government is needed to enforce the basic rules of social living. These are what you’d expect. No robbing/raping/killing people, no nicking other people’s stuff. Keep agreements. Private property is protected. That sort of stuff.
Morality, of course, may encompass some rules that are important for social living but are outside the scope of the state. This includes the usual stuff: don’t insult people for no reason, observe a moral framework in life, do not deliberately deceive, keep filial bonds, protect those weaker than you etc etc.
So if that is the everyman social contract, what changes for a military person?
Well, he gives up even more of his natural freedoms, some of his societal freedoms, and risks his life to protect that society from the most dangerous threats to it.
Therefore, his social contract expands a bit. He is volunteering to place himself in deadly danger to protect that society. He agrees to all of the above, plus more in so offering himself. In return, the society must provide additional guarantees. Still think that this below is a good example of perception of the social contract is from someone who has ‘been there done that got attacked for it’.
MarkL
Canberra
An old concept has turned up in discussion again; this time following the death of a good American soldier in the Iraq Conflict. It is the concept of the Social Contact that is implied in Military Service.
It is a social contract that is implied not just in voluntary military service; it is implied – in a slightly different way – in conscripted military service too. It is implied whether the service is within one’s national borders or overseas. It is implied – in various ways and in varying degrees
In a grossly over-simplified way, the social contract goes something like this:
I will risk my life fighting for your cause [which is usually but not always, my cause too].
I will attack your Enemies where this is unavoidable and I will defend you against your Enemies where this is necessary.
In return, you will not attack nor abandon nor despise nor cheat me for having done so.
If I am injured in your conflict with your Enemies, you will not scorn me nor exacerbate my injuries nor prevent these injuries being ameliorated nor deprive me of whatever living I can then make nor rob me.
If I die in doing this service for you, you will not attack nor shun nor neglect nor ill-treat nor defraud my loved ones in their grief.
You will make clear to me exactly who your Enemies are and who are not your enemies. You will also tell me why these people – who themselves may be good decent people in normal circumstances – have become your Enemies.
I will do everything in my power to overcome your Enemies, to frustrate their schemes and, if it is at all possible, to deflect their hostile attention from you.
If there is no alternative but to do so – and your Enemies wilfully and repeatedly refuse to go away or change their hostility to you – I will strive to destroy them.
If you decide your Enemies are no longer your enemies, you will tell me by the swiftest possible means so that unnecessary suffering and destruction can be stopped abruptly – or even prevented.
You yourself will strive, in every possible way, to overcome your Enemies too. Furthermore, you will not make profit from my suffering or death by doing normal business with your Enemies, either directly or through third parties.
You will keep open channels of communication so that you could – if the opportunity arises and it is ultimately beneficial for our cause to do so – enter into negotiations for the end of fighting, suffering and destruction [whether that results in a win, a loss, a draw or whatever].
However, you will not betray me or my family merely because you have become tired or bored with the conflict or because you lack the courage to face up to the consequences of going into conflict with people you deemed to be your Enemies.
You will keep me regularly and truthfully informed [in the broadest terms and without revealing our side's plans or other secrets] about how the conflict is going – whether that be good or bad – so that my morale is not shattered by hearing the truth first from the lips of the Enemies. I will not be lied to. I will be given the truth so that even if things are going very badly, I can still be resolute in carrying out my duty to you and in so doing, preserve your honour as well as my own..
You will supply me with sufficient and suitable material in serviceable condition and in a timely manner.
I will use that material as best I can to overcome your Enemies.
You will supply me with the best material that can be obtained at the best price and not with the material that can get you the most lucrative kick-back from the supplier.
You will not make false promises of reward for my service nor will you steal from me any rewards or payments you have already given to me. If my only reward is the praise and respect of my fellow citizens then so be it. You will not condemn me nor humiliate me for having done my duty. If the treasure or other assets of your Enemies falls into our hands, you will not plunder it for your own selfish purposes but instead you will stand aside and allow it to be added to our own national treasury for the benefit of all the people of our nation.
There is probably a lot more in such a social contract – but you’ll get the idea.
This is a social contract. It is definitely not a legal contract.
…
There is not a court of law in the whole wide world that could or would enforce such a social contract.
Jaysus B. MacFuckkery MarkLCanberra, that’s the most longwinded and pompous dissertation I’ve ever encountered about why communities arrange for their young, testosterone-charged, adventure-seeking blokes to be issued with big sticks to whack any outsiders after the communal goodies.
The question which still remains unanswered here after 100+ comments is how do you actually define and then manage/enforce a social contract between the military, civil and political entities to everyone’s mutual satisfaction? History, old and recent, is littered with examples of apparently stable and very civilised nations like Germany and Argentina suddenly getting all psycho over this issue.
Maybe there is something to Anglosphere exceptionalism after all. The only prominent nations that have not experienced their military getting seriously out of control vis a vis the political and civil order over the past century are the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Perhaps because we invented the modern military-industrial complex that can absorb, ship off here and there and put a profitable price list on everything to do with young, testosterone-charged, adventure-seeking blokes wielding state-of-the-art wired and armoured sticks with laser sights, while we got everyone else to now make and sell the goodies back to us? The nature of what we now want our armed forces to do and who joins to do it has changed rather more than we may think over the past few decades.
“I joined the army to kill Nips.”
“I joined the army to rebuild East Timor.”
“I joined the army to get a formal tech qualification in electronics, then I’m pissing off to join BAe System at twice the salary.”
“I joined the Navy to drink the world.”
Interesting point Nabs.
And perhaps it is worth noticing that these societies, of all European-based societies, were the least infected by Rousseauvianism with its concomitant qualities of irrationalism and romantic nationalism.
It was Rousseau who turbo-charged the previously inchoate notions of “social contract” thereby making it item Number 1 in many discussions about nation-building.
Perhaps, therefore, it may be argued that the very idea of a “social contract” serves not to preserve societies, but to make them violent, unstable and prone to breakdown.
Katz [101]
Interesting point about making societies violent, unstable and prone to break-down.
Nabakov [100]:
Just wait until the social impacts of the SubPrime Depression really hit home in Australia and you’ll find out just how UNexceptional this part of Anglosphere can become: “Move over Zimbabwe, you’re sitting on OUR seat”.
Everyone;
As a Parthian Shot ….
WAR CRIMES TRIALS
Nobody likes victor’s justice – when it happens to them – but it is usually endured with not much more than grumbling.
In contrast, SOME Germans and Serbians saw the war crimes trials of their compatriates as being monsterously unjust – not because the war crimes were in breach of international laws and conventions as well as of The Ten Commandments, which they were – but because they felt their compatriots had been carrying out their duties in accord with a higher compact: that unwritten one between the nation or community and its soldiery.
Military social contract [by whatever name] does get mentioned in the day-to-day running of war crimes trials but seems to be ignored when judgment is handed down – is this because the tribunals are made up of lawyers and do not include sociologists?
BREACHES OF MILITARY SOCIAL CONTRACT IN AUSTRALIA
Apart from a few bastardization and bullying scandals involving relatively few individuals, EVERY breach of military social contract has been against – not by!! – the troops. Here are just a few examples:
i. Hushing up former Prisoners Of War of the Japanese Empire in the ’50s and ’60s in case they hurt trade with Japan [the Japanese themselves were probably aware our two countries had been at war - "Don't mention the war!" as Basil Fawlty would say].
ii. The blatant misuse of security law to prevent troops who had been harmed by taking part in the British atomic weapons tests in Australia from getting treatment and pensions.
iii. Similar story with the chemical agents scandal [so-called "Agent Orange"]. The whole thing could have been sorted out in a couple of days and those affected helped go straight through the normal Veterans’ Affairs system. Except for the sadistic vanity and habitual delight in fraud by a handful of senior officers. That cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, caused much suffering and loss – as well as quite a few avoidable deaths – and it has placed a powerful propaganda weapon in the hands of all our potential enemies.
iv. The “lottery of death” of selective conscription for National Service. Many of the wealthy-and-fit were rejected on quite spurious medical or psychological grounds then, worse yet, quietly and richly rewarded for being gangplank-dodgers [no, I'm not talking about anti-war protesters; they were only a nuisance].
These – and more – were clear breaches of that unwritten social contract involving our government, our armed forces and our troops.
We are at the point where at least positions are defined. Katz does not think social contracts exist at all and has defended that position, Graham and I think they do exist and have defended that position, and Nabs is seemingly providing lightweight comic relief. Sorry, nabs, I am simply not reading your posts unless parts of them are quoted by serious people.
Katz #101
“Maybe there is something to Anglosphere exceptionalism after all. The only prominent nations that have not experienced their military getting seriously out of control vis a vis the political and civil order over the past century are the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Interesting point Nabs.”
even Botswana). I have long though that the ‘Anglosphere’ is really just those former states of the first or second British Empires who have been able to internalise the highest philosophical ideals and achievements (like rule of law) of that admirable structure, and that includes India.
Comment: And wrong, as usual. Even the most superficial glance shows 5 Scandinavian countries (with Iceland rivalling NZ’s status as a ‘prominent nation’ in the set) India, Malaysia and Singapore also on that list. Botswana may also be depending on definitions. We also have Switzerland, Israel, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Eire… The point is too formless and generalised to be useful. If the ‘Anglosphere’ is ‘exceptional’ then we had better include India, Singapore, Israel and a few others (hopefully
The World Bank gives us an unique look at this in their report ‘Where is the Wealth of Nations?’. Reading it in concert with Lal is cause for much thought.
“And perhaps it is worth noticing that these societies, of all European-based societies, were the least infected by Rousseauvianism with its concomitant qualities of irrationalism and romantic nationalism.”
Comment: Those societies of that uninformative subset, possibly. I am unsure of many of the others. India certainly does have issues with irrationalism and romantic nationalism, at least at the sub-national levels within their democratic Imperial structure. While there is, arguably, a ‘romantic’ nationalism in India – they do appeal to Indian nationalist sentiments as a counterweight to national groupings: Singapore and Malaysia, not really. Singapore appeals to a very hard-headed and realistic nationalism. Switzerland and Israel seems to take the concept of social contact very seriously indeed, to the point of universal military service (as does Singapore, of course). So we have a spectrum here. It is much more nuanced than some apparently suggest.
…
Perhaps, therefore, it may be argued that the very idea of a “social contract” serves not to preserve societies, but to make them violent, unstable and prone to breakdown.
Comment: I really do not think so. The most unstable, violent and breakdown-prone states are those basket-cases and kleptocracies are those where the idea of the social contract did not or could not operate. I’d argue that these were mostly socialist influenced societies: national socialist Germany, the communist bloc and all the third-world places made untenable as societies by tribalism/socialism- we forget these days that roughly 2/3 of world’s population were ruled by socialist governments of various stripes as late as 1970.
So if your point is valid, the USA, where social contract theory is strong, should not be the oldest constitutional state around etc. I’d argue that it is the existence of social contracts in exactly these societies which has helped them to be stable and perhaps even successful. We have a chance to look at this, too. Previously stable, successful societies where I’d argue that social contracts have been strong are presently being ‘sapped’ (not the right word but you get the idea) by warped memes derived from cultural relativism, moral equivalency and a slew of problems derived from the socialist fantasies of the western welfare state. What happens in these societies over the next decade or so will help illustrate the validity or otherwise of your point. We should watch places like Sweden carefully to see what happens when the welfare state unravels within a collapsing native population open to nearly unrestricted inflows of poorly-vetted immigrants. I suspect it will all end in tears.
Graham Bell #102
“In contrast, SOME Germans and Serbians saw the war crimes trials of their compatriates as being monsterously unjust – not because the war crimes were in breach of international laws and conventions as well as of The Ten Commandments, which they were – but because they felt their compatriots had been carrying out their duties in accord with a higher compact: that unwritten one between the nation or community and its soldiery.”
Comment: Intriguing point. I do not think that the social-military contract is a ‘higher compact’, though. It’s an individual thing. SO I do not think their reasoning holds much water.
“Military social contract [by whatever name] does get mentioned in the day-to-day running of war crimes trials but seems to be ignored when judgment is handed down – is this because the tribunals are made up of lawyers and do not include sociologists?”
Comment: I think you have hit a nail on the head here. Social contracts are unwritten, they are not a legal document and are not legally enforceable. If they are anything, they are a bond of mutual trust between members of the society and government. This point may explain why they cannot exist in a socialist state like national socialist Germany or the communist Russian Empire. If the state has the ability to ignore laws and act at whim against the individual at any time for any reason, how can a bond of mutual trust exist? It also implies that social contracts cannot exist for a lot of people here in Australia: those who rationally conclude that social contract theory is invalid obviously do not believe it can apply, but there are also other, less salubrious subsets: criminals, head cases from the tinfoil hat brigade, any form of totalitarian wannabe, any person who is an irrational do-gooder who wants to impose their views on everyone else (like certain Greenies and other political and religious nutters) etc
…
Apart from a few bastardization and bullying scandals involving relatively few individuals, EVERY breach of military social contract has been against – not by!! – the troops. Here are just a few examples:…
Comment: Very good point.
MarkL
Canberra
I am a SGT/E-5 with 19 years in the AD and Reserve Army.
EVERYONE is taught in Basic Training about the Geneva Convention, part of which Torture of prisoners is NOT ALLOWED.
As soon as a Soldier sees a prisoner naked in a public area, RED ALARMS should be going off in their head and they should start reporting it immediately to superiors; all the way to the Chaplain if that what it takes.
I have no pity for Soldiers who do the opposite; they should be processed to the full extent of the law, no matter what their excuse is for having done what they did.
I agree 100% with the Soldier who took the photos to the press on Abu, if noneone else would listen. I would have done the same.
Since I started reading the comments here I have found myself drawn to more questions then answers. I will put them out there and see if I can get any answers.
1. How do you define military social contract in a society that has at its base the idea that all things coem with a price tag?
2. How do you define the failures of a social contract from society to the individual when the governing body finds it easier to disenfranchise a miniority such as the Vietnam Veterans or the Philipino Veterans who fought for the U.S. in W.W. II rather then deal with them?
3. How do you define the parameters of the social contract when the individual’s see themselves as fulfilling their social obligations in the context of a companies such a Blackwater, BAE, PPI, Halliburton?