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Younghusband
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Younghusband

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December 14th, 2007

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Patriotism, nationalism and faith

On Forgetting the Obvious - Robert D. Kaplan

“… to believe in something is more important than to be blessed by mere logic” writes Robert D. Kaplan in his latest article On Forgetting the Obvious. The war on terrorism is not a war of ideas, but a war of faith. Not faith in a religious sense, at least not for the Western side, but faith in our country, system and government. Put simply: morale, or what he calls “moral stamina.” Kaplan admires the “patriotism” and “faith” of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and a number of other characters of yore. He cites Ralph Peters who “fears that Islamic revolutionaries believe in themselves more than we believe in ourselves.” Lack of faith translates into strategic liability. Kaplan describes two examples, first is a risk-averse strategic culture:

This lack of faith in turn leads to an overdependence on ever more antiseptic military technology. But our near obsession with finding ways to kill others at no risk to our own troops is a sign of strength in our eyes alone. To faithful or merely nationalist enemies, it is a sign of weakness, even cowardice.

A lack of faith means a lack of commitment to the goal. But even more dangerous is when the goal becomes lost in the fog:

As American society grows more socially distant from its own military, American warrior consciousness is further intensifying within the combat arms community itself.

Kaplan has always lauded the idea of a “military caste” as a strength for America. As long as the public reveres that caste then all is well; but when faith in the system is lost, that strength is undermined. A faithless public feels it has nothing left to fight for. This is where Kaplan’s admonition comes in:

It is in precisely such a situation that historical memory becomes lost, and forgetfulness obscures the obvious. When pleasure and convenience become values in and of themselves, false ends displace necessary means. It is as Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz said: While a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. The article is long and there is much meat to bite into so have a read and feel free to post your thoughts and observations in the comments.

Hat tip to long-time CA community member ElamBend for giving us the heads up on this article.

Comments to this entry

A.R.Yngve
December 14, 2007
9:39 pm
There is a kind of shaky, insecure "faith" (in oneself) which is expressed in bullying bluster and an urge to randomly threaten one's neighbors.

I do hope Americans do not confuse that sort of "faith" with faith. Bullies usually end up with egg on their faces.
subadei
December 14, 2007
9:53 pm
Bullies, as you describe them, generally have no faith what so ever, which is why they rely on strong arm tactics to maintain their dominance. I think most Americans can discern that from the above highlighted example.
I am just your humble messenger « Constitution Club
December 15, 2007
12:22 am
[...] If propaganda is designed to sap ones strength, to make one weary, then what is needed to win is “faith”. Faith as in “moral stamina”. [...]
IJ
December 15, 2007
9:17 am
Memories here of Hail to the Chief.

Robert Kaplan says that some kinds of war - "in between" wars he calls them [others call them "wars of national choice"] have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

Perhaps the rules for nations going to war should be tightened. And what about R2P. But how is this best arranged?
IJ
December 15, 2007
1:39 pm
Or are we doomed forever to fighting to the death?

Monty Python foresaw this weakness in the free market:

City Gent: (he goes to the intercom) Ah Miss Godfrey could you send in the pantomime horses please.

The door opens and two pantomime horses run in. Pantomime music. They do a routine including running round the room and bumping into each other. They then stand in front of the city gent crossing their legs and putting their heads on one side.

City Gent: Now I've asked you to ... (they repeat the routine) Now I've asked you ... (they start again) Shut up! (they stop) Now I've asked you in here to see me this morning because I'm afraid we're going to have to let one of you go. (the pantomime horses heads go up, their ears waggle and their eyes go round)
I'm very sorry but the present rationalization of this firm makes it inevitable that we hive one of you off. (water spurts out of their eyes in a stream)
Now you may think that this is very harsh behaviour but let me tell you that our management consultants actually queried the necessity for us to employ a pantomime horse at all. (the horses register surprise and generally behave ostentatiously) And so the decision has to be made which one of you is to go.
Champion... how many years have you been with this firm? (Champion stamps his foot three times)
Trigger? (Trigger stamps his front foot twice and rear foot once) I see.

Well, it's a difficult decision. But in accordance with our traditional principles of free enterprise and healthy competition I'm going to ask the two of you to fight to the death for it.
Sonagi
December 15, 2007
10:18 pm
Here's the money shot:

The killing of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001 might have temporarily awakened a warrior spirit in American democracy, but such a spirit is hard to sustain in the crucible of an ambiguous conflict. In Iraq, a country of 26 million people through which more than a million American troops have passed, the loss of a few Americans and three dozen-or-so Iraqis daily in suicide bombs is enough to demoralize a homefront 7,000 miles away.


Throughout the whole piece, Kaplan never questions the legitimacy of invading Iraq, and here he sounds like a Wolfowitz-Rove war propagandist smoothly gliding from 9/11 to Iraq without expliciting identifying the cause-effect link between the two, which surprises me as his educated audience isn't dumb enough to confuse Al-Qaeda and Saddam.

His essay is a lamentation of the loss of civilian faith in the US military yet never really offers any concrete explanations for this change.

Faith, no. Trust, yes. Trust may be earned or lost, depending on one's words and actions.
sglover
December 16, 2007
2:30 am
Kaplan is representative of a clique that's become a real pox on the shambling relic of our democracy: His **entire** definition of a society's merit is based on its capacity to steal and plunder through violence. To his kind, 1914-45 Germany was the summit of civilization. Those Germans sure had that "Warrior Spirit", yowza! If Kaplan and his ilk were **at all** reflective, instead of perpetually genuflecting before naked power, they'd ask themselves, Just how well did that "Warrior Spirit" work out for the Germans, or the Japanese of the same period, or the Spartans?

Sonagi, above, makes the crucial point: Kaplan's screed is long on emotional hand-waving, yet completely empty of any sort of awareness of how his own nostrums may have been, ahem, just a little off. I suggest that one very large contributor to American demoralization is that people like Kaplan have been allowed to run with their fantasies and abstractions, have (predictably) squandered immense advantages and resources, and have suffered not at all for their incompetence and criminality. In fact, they continue to profit from it all -- which suggests that our leadership caste exhibits an estrangement from basic reality that's a helluva lot more worrisome than insufficient bloodlust for the next military adventure.
ElamBend
December 16, 2007
3:39 am
Kaplan's recent writings have carried the consistent theme that America does best with the lighter footprint. He has consistently pushed his thesis that a small group of special forces officers in a country doing work that can hardly be called warfare (let alone bloodthirsty), can do America more good than an entire operation like that in Iraq. One of his templates of how to do this is the US's operations in the Philippines, which consists mostly of building roads, repairing schools and training local armed forces.

I must have missed the part of the article where Kaplan advocates a kind of warrior spirit as that advocated by the National Socialists or the Japanese in the late 1930's. It's a silly comment.

@Sonagi - The Kaplan piece is a little long on emotion but he is more concerned with the civilian disconnect at the individual level, not necessarily the institutional level. As he points out, there is hardly the distrust of the military that existed 40 years ago. The loss of faith is in the civilian policy makers who control the military (and there were many in the military who were against the Iraq invasion). Kaplan seems to be worried in the narrow band of the country that is joining and actively interacting with the military. As youself, how many people do you know that have been in the military, then take away anyone who served in Vietnam or further back (i.e. the draft years). As evident in some of his other writings Kaplan worries about the distance between civilians and the military causing both to become estranged from the other. I'm not sure I fully buy into this thesis, particularly as the military still draws from all over (though small towns like my own are over represented). I would also note the inter-war years between WWI and WWII where the military was in a similar state of disconnection from the overall culture.
jim
December 16, 2007
5:59 am
Kaplan is right. Our media have been complicit in their steady drumbeat of lies meant to sap morale. But the ignorance of the public and the readiness to believe the smears and distortions reflects poorly on our culture.

I understand why foreigners resort to anti-Americanism. I'll never understand why my own countrymen do. Among certain elites the more anti-American they are the more respected they are. Sad.
Rommel
December 16, 2007
12:18 pm
Wow. I have seen Kaplan called a lot of things, but sglover is, I believe, the first to place the blame for America's decline squarely on the shoulders of Bob and his brothers-in-thought.

That said, this article was a logical conclusion of where Kaplan's writing had been headed for some time now, and clearly his own reverence for the military only grows with each assignment.
Bill
December 16, 2007
12:34 pm
The contention that the citizenry lacks faith in the military, IMO, is based on the debates over Iraq. If that is the case, then Kaplan and his argument have major issues. The dissension in this country largely stems from an administration that made a bad decision to use force and then a worse decision in their implementation of that plan. People don't lack faith in the military, they lack it in certain leaders in Washington who misuse the military. If Kaplan is so worried about out country's faith he should be pointing his finger at the decision makers, not the citizens...
The American Empire » Blog Archive » Today’s Recommended Reading
December 16, 2007
4:05 pm
[...] to Younghusband at Coming Anarchy for pointing out this piece by Robert Kaplan in a recent issue of the American [...]
jim
December 16, 2007
6:38 pm
You can argue that the Iraq war hasn't been worth the cost, but the Left and the press have argued that it's been some kind of military disaster. That's just not true. And many who argue it know it.

We defeated a country of 25 million+ with a force of less than 200k (and took down Afghanistan with less than 50k). Our casualty rate, as well as the civilian casualty rate, is, by the standards of modern industrial war, astonishingly low. The reality is the military side has been remarkably effective and efficient.

We are entering the 5th year of a counterinsurgency in Iraq. These usually take a decade or so to quell -- something never mentioned in the morale-sapping defeatist media.

If every Iraq war decision had been made perfectly, which never happens in any war, then it's hard to imagine how much lower our own casualty rate could be. Remember, Iraq was essentially a large ammo dump with a displaced minority elite who had been running things for decade, not to mention the large # of outside agitators looking to interfere.

I can respect the argument that the Iraq war is not worth the cost in American lives, or that the end result will be worse for American national interest. But the Left and the Media don't stick to that argument. They also argue that the entire thing has been one gigantic military disaster.

And they, in their deep expertise on military matters, claim there were obvious screw-ups that anyone with half a brain could have avoided. The idea that there was a simple and obvious answer to how to deal with the ruling Baathists is naive and ignorant. Any decision on how much to de-Baathisize the Iraqi Army had the potential for serious downsides.

War is hard and mistakes are inevitable. But the end result, judged in the proper context of history and past counter-insurgencies, shows the Iraq War to be remarkably effective, efficient, and humane.

Whether it turns out to have been a wise decision from the standpoint of American national security remains to be seen.
A.E.
December 16, 2007
7:19 pm
Kaplan is the right trail here, but I would also point out that the decline of "warrior spirit" is one small part of a greater identity crisis. As a country, we lack a guiding narrative as powerful as the ones that have propelled us in the past. Our leaders have failed to articulate such a narrative, and quite naturally the people feel lost.
Curzon
December 17, 2007
2:47 am
Actually, I first posted this half a year ago "here.":http://cominganarchy.com/2007/06/17/hail-to-the-chief/ Although the comments here are much better the second time around. I just don't see any decline in how the US views the military. Far from it, when compared to how the military was viewed in the late 60s, 70s, and even up through the 1980s. President Bush I late said he felt that the Gulf War purged the ghosts of Vietnam that had haunted civilian-military relations since LBJ.
Younghusband
December 17, 2007
4:17 am
D'oh! Sorry 'bout that old chum!

The chigacoboyz are "having a nice discussion too":http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5404.html.
Samuel Glover
December 17, 2007
11:22 pm
Kaplan’s recent writings have carried the consistent theme that America does best with the lighter footprint. He has consistently pushed his thesis that a small group of special forces officers in a country doing work that can hardly be called warfare (let alone bloodthirsty), can do America more good than an entire operation like that in Iraq. One of his templates of how to do this is the US’s operations in the Philippines, which consists mostly of building roads, repairing schools and training local armed forces. I must have missed the part of the article where Kaplan advocates a kind of warrior spirit as that advocated by the National Socialists or the Japanese in the late 1930’s. It’s a silly comment.

Whether it's with Iraq-style invasions or "surgical" teams of commando ninjas, for people like Kaplan the solution is always military. Whatever the military fad of the moment is , the whole national security state approach is yielding severely diminished returns, and has been for some decades. Yet rather than examine basic assumptions about our place in the world, about whether its really our place to be telling the world how to live, "defense" solons like Kaplan make a pretty sweet living ginning up sophistries about better ways to meddle. (Didn't we ease into the brilliant success of Vietnam by following nostrums very similar to Kaplan's Phillipine therapy?)

For much of our history, it was taken as a given that large militaries, hell, standing national armies of any kind, were a symptom of the rot of the European royalist states -- something that Americans fled the Old World to avoid. To those Americans, talk of a "warrior spirit" as some kind of national virtue would have been simply nuts. I think the same remains true in any society that's worth living in today.

All this aside, what's really whacked about Kaplan's screed is how it's practically at right angles to reality. With a very brief Vietnam-era hiatus, America's been on an extended pro-military swoon since Pearl Harbor. No national politician can mention the military without using language that used to be reserved for saints. Military heroes are far more prominent in American movies and books than those of any culture I can think of. In public opinion surveys, the military typically rates as well or better than any of the professions.
Eddie
December 18, 2007
5:54 am
A large part of the problem is that the military is no longer trusted as much by the American people. The military simply cannot go a week without some form of blatant (largely incompetent and unnecessary) dishonesty coming to the attention of people, and its been this way since Vietnam. You can blame the media but the fault lies with the military for lying so damn much. They stonewall at nearly every juncture, they mislead whenever challenged on the "facts" and they see fit to hide behind the secrecy "required" by war (even when we were not at war, as in the 90's) on nearly all issues.

Were the military to make a conscious effort to earn back the trust of the American people and many of its own members, we perhaps could see a better relationship, one more in line with what we need in this day and age and for the future.
Consul-At-Arms
December 19, 2007
6:19 am
I've quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2007/12/re-patriotism-nationalism-and-faith.html