SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Military honor is
the only thing that will prevent them (the weapon technicians) from wrecking
the sum total, which fact peace mythology must emphasize, above and beyond
everything. Learners must appeal
foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every good warrior,
cleansing him of his filth. They will
recognize honor automatically and defend it against any crazy deviant deprived
of it, lethal as he may be. That honor
will help create PeaceWorld and guard it fiercely from then on. Honor and Learning should become one.
It may come as
some surprise to you, to stumble across a World Militia blueprint in Learners, a treatise on PeaceWorld. Actually, it shouldn’t strike you as such a
surprise. The
Second Amendment of the American Constitution forbids government from
infringing on its citizens’ right to bear arms—a well-regulated militia
“being necessary to the security of a free State.”
The solution does
not reside in private handguns in too many households (nor in fire harm + child
casualties); neither in paid bodyguards for the rich and weapon shakedowns for
the poor; nor in a ruinous, mercenary army anathema to the spirit and
letter of the Constitution, skirmishing against suicide bombers in residential
fire fights that mow down innocent victims along our streets, busses, political
and celebratory rallies—even the hallowed hallways of our schools. Those should be hallowed halls of the
religion of Learning, not mere public facilities to benefit weapon technology.
Learners,
what a disgrace! Americans, Westerners and the inhabitants of the whole world may have
accepted this travesty, but everyone should have known and done better.
Some people confound a world without war with a 100%
nonviolent world. They may be ultimately
correct. Then again, we may be mistaking
a tool (the most powerful one and therefore the most difficult to handle
properly: non-violence) with the task at hand: a world without war.
This topic (which should come first?) would take a full
chapter to address correctly. For the
time being, I will summarize it in the following few paragraphs tacked on to
the beginning of this chapter already too long.
The tactic of deliberate non-violence has just been
rediscovered by humanity; it may take centuries to perfect it in our
institutions and even longer in ourselves as free-willed individuals. Pacifism has been understood by humankind for
thousands of years; it might take mere months and years to institutionalize
across the planet.
Can you see the difference?
Learners is very confident when it comes to
criminalizing warfare and creating peace on Earth. We can do it; we have merely to try very hard
and all of us together. Criminalization
does not mean elimination; it means making it difficult and forbidden,
therefore much less rewarding, savage, frequent and prolonged.
Theft has been criminalized everywhere. That does not mean that there is no theft,
merely not as much, in proportion to the effectiveness of the institutions that
criminalize it. The better those
institutions, the lesser the crime; the better our peace institutions, the
lesser the war; perhaps to the point of its extinction―as with
cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery.
What would the world look like if we had done nothing
about theft until everyone had religiously obeyed the commandment not to steal?
This text is quite cautious when it comes to human
violence. Human nature has been deeply
rooted in violence: more or less valid in the long run, more or less removable,
more or less controlled by institutions.
After all, the proposal to eradicate it could back it into a corner and
provoke its ultimate adherents to worse extremes.
If the criminalization of warfare must be held back until
humanity has purged brutality from its collective psyche, then we are due for a
long wait. If PeaceWorld must be held
back until everyone is solely motivated by non-violence in any given conflict, then multiply those wait-times by hundreds. Since warfare has achieved such staggering
levels of hair-trigger devastation, those longer wait periods could allow
warfare to swallow us whole in the meantime.
Learners
concludes that we must criminalize warfare now, while we retain the means,
motive and opportunity to do so.
Absolute human non-violence can then be undertaken at leisure and
systematically, however long that may take.
The two are separate projects.
The former might be accomplished in the next decade; the latter might
take the rest of human existence to perfect.
What should we do: wait until every individual has
achieved perfection, or transform our institutions into peaceful ones now, then
turn to the project of universal perfection?
You choose. Let’s be realistic
about our priorities, ok?
Just keep this in mind.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is the enemy of the
worst. Would you hang on to the worst
until perfection had been achieved, or try to make the worst a little less bad,
pending eventual perfection?
Let me make this perfectly clear: these two projects are
not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, each would reinforce the other. It is merely a question of priorities. I ask you to work hard for good now and for a
perfect future later.
This said, we
could reduce the worst effects of weapon mentality, multiply the
benefits of peace and replace penal punishment with shrewder methods of
criminal correction. Moreover, we could criminalize warfare, which
provides the greatest scope for those who would
rather do harm.
Learners forecasts no end to human violence … It wouldn’t begin to tackle human
evil. I doubt if we could strain evil
from human awareness without damaging that awareness. A global majority of sane Learners, however,
could recognize weapon mythology, defy its intent
and demote weapons elites to cultural insignificance. We could relegate weapon technology – its
masterpiece – to vestigial status. Once
enough of us agreed to do so, we could make that happen virtually overnight.
Learners
will disband and decommission the world’s Harm Forces and reassemble their
remnants into four nested organizations:
·
World
Militia,
·
World
Court Foreign Legion,
·
Continental
Police, and
·
Local
Constabulary.
This chapter
contains the least effective of Learners’
prescriptions. What is outlined below is
mere cosmetic tweakage until Learner majorities adopt at least a semblance of
the following features first:
·
Laocracy (direct democracy through a World Agora),
·
Learning Networks, and
·
The
entire constellation of political metaphors
these features imply.
Indeed, without
these crucial supports, militia paramilitaries turn into nightmare
murder clubs. Examples abound: Colombian
and now Mexican death squads, the Afghan Taliban – Taliban: an ironic twist on the term ‘Learner’ in Arabic – and an
assortment of gangster organizations in the Balkans, South and Central America,
Africa and elsewhere. Eliminate them
there, or expect them to emerge in your hometown.
A well-regulated
militia will rely on universal drafts incorporating the best features of the
armies of Switzerland and Israel.
Civilization could obtain decisive strategic security from it.
At last, world peace!
Mandatory high
school training will emphasize tough, light infantry fieldcraft. Militia units will not have organic vehicles,
artillery, armor and aircraft; but be well endowed with dug-in, crew-served
weapons: automatic, anti-tank and anti-aircraft. Prepared
positions will dot the approaches of every community. In times of chaos, entire communities could
mobilize completely within a half-day.
Indeed, this Militia scheme will require Civil Defense
facilities comparable to those in Switzerland.
Local Militia garrisons will
offer a few high value targets to a mechanized aggressor; a multitude of
equally dangerous, low value, low signature targets; relative logistical
immunity and tremendous defensive depth against assault, bombardment and
military occupation.
During Operation
Desert Storm, air power dominated conventional targets because of the
relative prominence and vulnerability of motor/mechanized forces in desert
terrain and because of their fragile command, control and logistics
networks. None of these liabilities would trouble an omnipresent, static,
pre-positioned and virtually self-sufficient World Militia whose members would
defend their own homes and families fanatically and thus deter aggression.
Let’s set aside,
for a moment, the pros and cons of Yugoslavia’s dysfunctional
politics. Tito organized his Harm Forces to stalemate road-bound invasion from
any direction. For decades, his setup
stymied foreign aggressors, regardless of their strength and provenance.
This arrangement
backfired in Yugoslavia. One ethnic minority
monopolized access to weapons, and others were disarmed.
No minority would
remain disarmed in a Learner environment.
The World Court would see that every minority were equally able to
defend itself and that no group “of innocent civilians” would be handed
over, disarmed, to heavily armed chaosists … as happens all the time, these
days. We could forbid this eventuality around the world, avoid it
preemptively or buy our way out of it whenever it flared up.
Ideally, such
defensive dispositions would deter local Aggressor forces until their
preliminary preparations had attracted World Court investigators. These would arrest local ringleaders long
before organized fighting broke out.
Every once in a
while, the World Court might fail to pre-empt criminal aggression during
its conspiracy stage. In those cases,
Militia doctrine would permit the pass-through of gangster main force elements
and temporary occupation by them if inevitable. Thereafter, local guerrilla attacks would fall
on their logistics, command/control and combat support elements. Military
occupation would become prohibitive for any future Hitler with his homegrown
army.
In Vietnam,
thousands of mechanized infantrymen parked their armored vehicles around
the village of Chu Chi and seemed to root out every underground fortification,
in a frenzy of mayhem and destruction.
They departed thereafter, only to be forced to repeat the process soon
afterwards. The battles of Grozny I, II,
III, etc., taught the same painful lesson to the Russian Army. Faluja, in Iraq, likewise for the
Americans.
Standard-issue
military thought requires the accumulation of at least two generations of
painful lessons before they sink in and cause radical innovation in combat
doctrine. In the meantime, orthodox
military leaders tend to do exactly the opposite of what is required,
and suffer corresponding casualties, defeat and dishonor.
Short of total
extermination, labor-intensive fortifications, vast forest, desert and mountain
fortresses, and dense urban hardscapes manned by determined locals can
frustrate any amount of capital-intensive firepower. Cities are like enormous parked tank units
that shield the combatants within, though immobile.
As a mechanized
aggressor, there's not much one can do.
One can surround the city with one’s own troops that outnumber the
rebels by at least three to one, or occupy it against an organized guerilla
force (urban or worse yet, rural) with at least ten to one or better odds. One can try to extinguish them by hunger,
exposure and lack of reinforcements; or crush the city under salvoes of pure
firepower, block by city block. One
can kill an unforgivable number of innocent civilians, recruit their outraged survivors
into the next wave of enemies, get many of one’s own people killed, and then
lose one’s case in the court of world opinion.
This lesson was
as much a tribute to the heroism of the Vietnamese and Chechen people
(and countless others) as to their tactics.
The Serbians used similar
tactics to baffle Allied air power during the 1999 Kosovo Campaign. They ejected local inhabitants from their
homes and occupied them with their own military hardware. Short of blowing up every empty house, the
Allies could find nothing to shoot at.
Saddam Hussein’s shadistic partisans and opponents adopted the same
tactics in Iraq in 2003, and baffled American occupation forces for a
decade. That stalemate only confirms
such findings.
It doesn’t matter
how ‘decadent’ we become in the future.
Military heroism will remain constant among humans, regardless of their
provenance, riches, religion and ideology.
Common warrior valor is innate to humans in large numbers. Defeats in Afghanistan and Chechnya taught
this lesson to Russian chauvinists; those in Vietnam and Somalia, to their
American peers. Genghis Khan’s Mongols
and Alexander’s hoplites, otherwise undefeated, learned the same lesson, often
from the same people.
There is a
critical contradiction between conventional, set-piece warfare and partisan
warfare (guerilla or so-called low intensity warfare).
In the first
category, generals on both sides gather huge materiel supplies and maximum
permissible human resources (only
weapon technology could coin that expression without loathsome connotations),
and focus them into one locality and segment of time in order to dispute
their claim to victory by murder. It is
laborious and time-consuming to gather so much military logistics and train so
many men to operate effectively under unified command. Thus, long intervals must elapse, during
which both sides summon their strength in relative isolation from each other,
interrupted by shorter timespans during which they exercise their military marionettes
in close combat.
According to
Clausewitz, this period of open conflict must be of maximum intensity in order
to conclude it quickly and decisively.
In military parlance, this is called “establishing and maintaining
contact with the enemy”: sort of like sticking your hands in the coals of a
fire to put it out.
In the second
category, factionalists gather under local leadership – usually the
traditional one; if not, then chosen democratically –
in violent opposition to their neighbors supported by a distant authority
(whether some tyranny headquartered in a regional capital or a foreign
invader). Military contact and
destructive friction are continuous between these groups.
The sum of
casualties and devastation during a specific interval of guerilla warfare may
be lower than during pitched battles as organized above. However, since this attrition is ongoing and
cumulative, final casualty and damage assessments of partisan war may often
tally higher than those of climax battles.
Whole districts may be sterilized by guerilla warfare, which might
recover more quickly from a momentary tsunami of regular troops. The proportion of civilian losses is usually
higher during guerilla warfare than during organized battles. Many civilians flee set-piece battles that
may rage locally and then shift elsewhere, or dally and spare other areas;
whereas guerilla warfare is so widespread that most civilians cannot escape
it. Furthermore in typical situations,
neither side of a regular combat wishes to encumber the discipline and morale
of its troops’ with civilians. It is
easier to chase them from the field.
Both sides of a guerilla war come to view local civilians as expendable
hostages (mistakenly, as it turns out; see below). The intensity of guerilla warfare can only be
considered low during brief snapshots of time; it may be much more intense over
the long run. ‘Low intensity’ warfare is
thus another lie made up by weapon mentality to render it more palatable.
Contact is
maintained between conventional armies by cavalry, light infantry and
irregular forces, also by civilian spies favoring either side. Continuous skirmishing between these elite
units is rarely described in standard military histories whose authors are more
interested in the better-documented maneuvers of large regular Army units. Even though the success or failure of such
skirmishing usually induces corresponding success or failure by regular armies,
regardless of other factors such as raw numbers or relative superiority in
equipment and training. After all, it is
only by maintaining contact that vital information may be garnered: awareness
of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, and of his layout, plans and
intentions. This information is
vital. Without it, defeat is virtually
guaranteed. The likelihood is, if you lose this low-level war of information, you will
sooner or later lose the conventional one.
World War I, a
few wars before and most since, differ from those prior in that regular forces
on both sides were responsible for both conventional battle and low-intensity
warfare. For example,
conventional battles can be found in major offensives during World War I, when
tens of thousands of casualties and kilotons of munitions were expended in a
few days. Meanwhile, “low-level” warfare
persisted as each small unit (a battalion of 500 men) lost one, two or a
handful of men almost every week on the front line.
During most civil
wars, entire regular armies are build-up on both sides. Each develops its own central government, tax
base, geographical focus and regular army. Each seeks to come to open blows in
conventional warfare. So-called
low-level warfare is just the initial, developmental stage of this final outcome.
It may be crucial that low-intensity war is not a matter
of existential importance for the occupying power. In other words, whether it wins or not, its
physical existence is not in the balance – at least in the short term. Therefore, its military effort will not be
maximal and it will fight with one hand tied behind its back, by
definition. Whereas the home team has
nowhere to run and is fighting for its life.
This liability may be critical.
The rebel
organization has an automatic home advantage when set against a distant authority, its Regular Army and
local adherents. Most local inhabitants
identify with the rebels and provide them with logistical support, information
about the enemy, and reinforcements.
Foreign powers or regional governments with a long history of abuse of
local populations, have an obvious disadvantage. However, once these advantages and
disadvantages have been assigned, both sides’ combatants face the paradox
described below. They succeed or fail
depending on how well they handle it.
Given this
imbalance, “low intensity” warfare has one major distinction from conventional
warfare. Those who have ignored that
distinction in the past have lost the “low intensity” fight and, quite often,
the conventional war this skirmishing supported.
In conventional
warfare, scoring superior body count against the enemy and occupying his
terrain successfully, (for example, his capital and his resource extraction and
industrial centers) pretty much dictates military success, regardless of the
wishes of local civilians. Losses
among civilians can be ignored or worsened.
According to Clausewitzian doctrine, they will fall into line in any
case, once their army has been crushed while trying to block the way.
Whereas in ‘low
intensity’ warfare, the side will lose that antagonizes the largest
segment of the local population. This,
regardless of bodycount and terrain successfully occupied. The higher the bodycount among the local
population, the greater the advantage to the side that minimizes it, and the
greater the disadvantage to the one that terrorizes a lot of civilians and thus
antagonizes their survivors.
In guerilla
warfare, a general must be harder on his own troops than on the enemy. He must discipline them so fiercely that they
will allow their own casualties to increase in order to minimize
civilian casualties. As much as
possible, economic transactions between his side’s combatants and the civilian
population must be voluntary and fully compensated, his combatants must be
punished for every crime committed against local civilians, and more of his resources
must be spent on civilian reconstruction and civil affairs than on military
destruction. The sooner during the fight
that he enforces these requirements, the more likely he will be to succeed.
The U.S. Army
ignored this requirement during the Second Iraq War. It spent much more effort defeating the Iraqi
Army and its paramilitary supports than rebuilding its society and
infrastructure. In Afghanistan, our
undoing will result from the proliferation of collateral civilian casualties
from long-range bombardment. We will pay
for those mistakes with endless additional conflict.
Law and order must be restored, despite the fact that
almost everyone on both sides have the means to flaunt it; property rights must
be protected, even though local civilians are helpless to protect
themselves. It is always easier for
hungry soldiers to kill local civilians and rip them off, than to fight deadly
and resource-poor guerillas. Or do both
and still lose.
This rule applies just as much to a hungry trooper
stealing a peasant family’s last chicken, as to a general scanning his
battle-map for fewer and fewer good targets for the inexhaustible firepower at
his disposal, (indeed, much more so to the latter.)
The military
discipline required to succeed at guerilla war is much more ferocious and
difficult to enforce than that required for conventional war. The massive ideological education and
propaganda campaigns that guerilla armies such as Mao’s Red Army had to
self-inculcate, were not needed to fight the
enemy. Red Army troops were fully
prepared to fight without them. They
were required to prevent the Red Army from destroying its civilian base at
gunpoint.
An occupation
Army has an even greater challenge in preventing its troops and local
supporters from optimizing their security and sustenance at the expense of
native civilians. This challenge may be
insurmountable in the long run. A
foreign power may only guarantee short term military success by
promising that it will withdraw as soon as possible and allow locals to
reestablish their autonomy. Such a promise of military withdrawal would
be an admission of defeat during a conventional war, but the key to victory
during a guerilla one.
Conventional
generals have never grasped this idea and its ramifications. They would rather fulfill the requirement of
conventional war: the simple demand that our casualties be minimized and those
of the other side be maximized whatever the cost. Adherence to this standard formula guarantees
failure and defeat in guerilla war.
Adherence to its opposite – though paradoxical and extremely difficult –
forecasts success. Whichever side, guerilla or conventional,
kills, rips off and terrorizes more of the civilian population: that
side will lose a guerilla war in the long run.
The other side, no matter how much weaker militarily and unsuccessful in
the short term, will win by default.
There is also a double jeopardy based on the homeground
advantage. Even though native rebels may
murder more civilians, if they manage to shuffle responsibility for those
murders onto the foreign occupier and his inability or unwillingness to control
them, he will lose the fight.
Policing these murders must become the primary priority
of the occupying power, whatever the cost; it must honestly integrate into its
administration all the forces for peace in-country and grant them immediate
sovereignty and full support; otherwise surrender to defeat and strategic
withdrawal.
This would require occupation administrators as friendly
to locals and in tune with them as they would be loyal to the occupying power –
somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia – and fully responsible for local
administration. The sooner this is done
and the less interference from doctrinaire intruders ignorant of the country,
its traditions and language, the less difficult it would be. No tactical compromise, ideological
intervention or strategic delay would be permissible.
Finally, military support from another country immune to
follow-up invasion (for whatever reason), guarantees the survival of a local
guerilla and the eventual defeat of an invader.
If you plan to wage a guerilla campaign against a certain country, plan
to invade and occupy all its friendly neighbors, and their friendly neighbors,
and…
These are
Learner military doctrines that conventional generals and their civilian
leaders must learn from scratch.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld