War Never Changes II

Military science fiction thoughts.

• A mil-SF writer—I won't say who—was discussing Israel's problems, suggested that things might eventually reach the point where the Jews will "overcome their aversion" to gas-chambers. But the idea is evidence of a very naive attitude, one that's quite typical of the "Realpolitik" aficionado (half of whose positions boil down to "ethical philosophy quitter-talk"). See...gas-chamber genocide is a funny thing. Because of the nature of the undertaking, it's basically only possible when it isn't justified—you can only do it to populations over which you already have control. If the Jews had not meekly submitted to being loaded onto boxcars, demonstrating that they were, if anything, excessively "good Germans", then the Holocaust would never have been possible.
  
  Now, some measures that can be characterized, albeit broadly, as "genocide", could be justifiable—I have previously mentioned, I think, that the 19th-century US could've executed every adult male Comanche as a war-criminal, something their culture would not have survived (not that the loss of that culture would be a bad thing...but the "women and children facing enslavement by their neighbors in return for shelter" issue would be). And you might kill so many of the able-bodied men of a small community that the community ceases to be, as I mentioned RE: the Hopi in their fights with the Spanish. And you might have some ethically-justifiable bombing campaign whose collateral damage renders a particular population (presumably one that wasn't that big to begin with) unsustainable, depending on the particulars.
  
  But notice that, though those justified acts could result in the destruction of an entire people or culture, that isn't the purpose of any of them. You simply can't deliberately, systematically eliminate a people, unless you already control them so completely that you have no need, and therefore no right, to do anything like that to them. Even executing all the Comanche men was only feasible after the smallpox epidemic rendered them vulnerable to being forced onto a reservation—and thus we were content to have them subdued and pacified, without pushing (wholly justified!) vendettas, not least because doing so might've made them a whole lot less pacified.
• That's actually kinda interesting, the idea that you may not be able to "press" the issue of war-crimes, if you want to have peace. I mean, consider the fact we let the Russians sit in on the human-rights courts after World War II, when they were worse offenders than the Japanese and Germans combined. If Germany had not reacted violently against nationalism after the war, their nationalists could've made quite a bit of rhetorical hay out of that bit of monstrous hypocrisy—probably enough to gin up another World War. Japanese nationalists certainly did and do make quite a bit out of it (also, unfortunately, out of laughable "America was just as bad" claims, which requires ignoring mountains of stats). The only reason there hasn't been another Pacific War is that, while the Japanese kept every inch of their nationalism, they reacted, almost as violently as German anti-nationalism, against militarism.
  
  In some other war, there might not be a convenient anti-militarist/anti-nationalist reaction, and so having war-crimes tribunals might just make another war all the more likely. That's the simplistic narrative of what happened after World War I, after all, and like most lies, it involves the distortion of a truth. The French shouldn't have insisted on doing to Germany what Germany did to them after the war of 1870; it was petty and shortsighted. Of course, the "German Empire" should also have been broken back up into its, what, over a hundred? component principalities—if they'd just done that, then if anyone was going to get scapegoated by populist rabble-rousers for the hardships Germans experienced after World War I, it would've been Prussia, which at least happened to be the people responsible. Unfortunately World War I ended during the last flourishing of the blood-and-soil nation-state, and nobody could understand why Germans should not all be one state (they also couldn't understand why Dalmatian Slavs shouldn't, with results I'm sure you know about).
• I realize that existentialism is a post-war literary phenomenon, and all (well, except for Kierkegaard—and Heidegger was post-First World War), but what's with the "soldiers not knowing what to do with themselves after the war's over" thing, that Japan's obsessed with, in its fiction? I'm pretty sure most soldiers do, actually, know what to do with themselves, once wars are over: they cause Baby Booms and economic growth so big it gets itself called miraculous.
  
  Warfare is an attempt to acquire a different set of peacetime conditions, and once those peacetime conditions are achieved, they become a new purpose, to replace the war itself. Nobody, not ever, really fought just for the sake of fighting. Even though Oda Nobunaga explicitly said he wanted to conquer the world (his actual motto, "Tenka Fubu", literally means "all under Heaven, by force of arms"), he wanted to conquer it, not just start wars everywhere. When Uesugi Kenshin died, Nobunaga said "Now the land is mine," not "Now I can finally start that war".
  
  What there is, admittedly, as part of the known "coping" difficulties after returning from war, is that soldiers know what they're supposed to do and when to do it; that doesn't exist in civilian life. But that's more similar to parolees' difficulties with free life's lack of regimentation (also a difficulty returning soldiers experience) than it is to any true "existential" issues.
• Incidentally, you know an idea you're simply not allowed to use? People starting wars to sell weapons. This brings up Japan again: they're the fourth to sixth best-funded, best-equipped military on the planet, and they're constitutionally forbidden from going to war. Military contracts are plenty lucrative when you're selling to a peacetime military, without all the hassle and economic uncertainty of wartime conditions. Anyone who says otherwise is a paranoid psychotic. Also someone who needs to find a grownup to read and explain Bastiat's "Candle-makers' Petition" to them.
  
  It's simply a fact that the whole "profiteering" theory of the "military-industrial complex" is, provably, Communist propaganda. Please, what profit did we make off Vietnam? Or any war since? The last profiteering conflict in US history was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, and that was a colonial-mercantilist enterprise demonstrably fomented at the behest of United Fruit, not any armament firm. Weapons manufacturers are like insurance salesmen: they profit whether you use their product or not. And making war just to sell weapons is like breaking windows just to sell glass—we fomented the coup because we wanted (as I said) different peacetime conditions, namely ones that were more favorable to the fruit industry.
  
  (I really do need to write a scene where the gunrunner in my books points out that a weapons-dealer is not a "merchant of death", any more than a lawyer is a "merchant of bankruptcy". Just as you hire a lawyer to keep other people from bankrupting you, you buy weapons to keep other people from killing you. Sometimes the other party has to get killed or bankrupted in the process—that doesn't mean you're obligated to prefer it happen to you, though, does it?)
• I think I've mentioned that the thing that actually will kill dogfighting, is drones, since they can take accelerations far beyond what pilots can. But that doesn't mean we won't have any manned aviation—you'd still probably have close-air support manned, for instance. CAS is the role where jamming would be much more likely (if you're fighting enemies with a tech-base)—not even calling in air-strikes requires consistent communications the way drone-control does.
  
  The Air Force hates its CAS role, or at least its brass does. And there really is no reason not to give CAS roles to the aviation of the Marines or Army, who both clamored to be given the A-10 after the Air Force decided to drop it. So what we might see is a future where there are no independent air forces, with the support roles being given to ground-based branches' aviation, and the fighter and bomber roles being handled by drones.
  
  I'm trying really hard to be saddened by that, but after the way the USAF brass treated the A-10, I'm kinda outta give-a-damn. Maybe you guys can get jobs explaining what you saw in the F-35—"See the people who don't know the significance of thrust-to-weight ratios for fighter-jets! Wonder at their deliberate obliviousness to everything learned in fighter design since the 1970s! Recoil in horror at their incomprehension of why 1,174 rounds of 30 mm is preferable to 180 rounds of 25 mm!" (Unfortunately, the heyday of the traveling freak-show is even deader than that of the fighter-jock, so that's actually another kind of change that's going to screw you guys. I'd commiserate, but, again, "outta give-a-damn".)
• I'm really almost tempted to put mules in my SF setting, since that would be the most efficient way to deal with increasing loads. Then again, the mindset behind the "give the soldiers prohibitively large amounts of equipment" trend is also a mindset that insists that military animals are as obsolete as carrier-pigeons (although you can't jam carrier pigeons). So I guess the "soft-lifting exoskeleton chaps" are still what I'm going with.
  
  Zledo might use mules, though, or rather the animal something like a dog that they rode (or one of its relatives). The "horse" ones kinda look like Cape hunting dogs, only the non-white patches are orange structural coloring and blue pigment; they're the size of horses, with a modification of the Lhãsai tetrapod form (an extra knuckle relative to Earth tetrapods, and making the last part of the hind leg out of elongated ankle-bones instead of the metatarsals) that allows them to have the same gait as horses, despite having clawed, multi-toed feet. Don't know what markings the "donkey/mule" ones would have; maybe like a blue (structural) maned wolf with a dark-blue pigment mane.
• It occurs to me that zledo might have bred the camouflaging into their "horses" (which are called zdhyedhõ'o, singular zdhyedhõ). Very likely, the ancestral stock of the species didn't have much in the way of disruptive coloring—wolves (or dholes, who are a slightly closer behavioral parallel) don't, they have a very slight degree of disruptive coloration—but zledo are ambush predators. Most jackals are much more strongly colored than wolves, that's why we name them things like "side-striped" or "black-backed"—they hunt much more by stealth, and thus have more need of disruptive coloration (not sure why Cape hunting dogs have it). Zled warfare, also, involves much more stealth than ours ever did (before they invented color-change fabric, all their military garb was reversible, with the other side being camouflaged), so their war-animals would need stealth.
  
  A zdyedhõ, although a member of the same taxonomic class as zledo, and having the same basic anatomy, is not in the same order; basically, instead of there being one major order of carnivores, like on Earth (we call them, well, "Carnivora"), Lhãsai has two, the one zledo are in and the one zdhyedhõ'o are in. Basically it's like if some of the major mammal carnivores nowadays were Creodonts instead of Carnivorans. The order zledo are in is characterized by hypercarnivory and obligate carnivory (zledo are both), while the one zdhyedhõ'o are in is characterized by hypercarnivory to mesocarnivory, with few obligate carnivores and even some omnivores. (I.e., the zledo's order is like the feliform sub-order of the Carnivora, while the zdhyedhõ'o's one is like the caniform one—which includes bears. Not sure if there's something like a panda in either order—the feliform equivalent being, probably, the aardwolf, although even that still has to subsist on animal protein.)
• The kerfuffle over American Sniper raises an interesting question: would the people accusing snipers of being treacherous consider feinting, in hand-to-hand, to be treacherous? Of course, that begs the question of whether Michael Moore or Seth Rogen even know what feinting is—or treachery, for that matter.
  
  There is nothing treacherous about stealth or surprise. Treachery is wrong because it involves betrayal of trust; but what trust is betrayed, in sniping? An enemy in legitimate conflict has absolutely no right to expect that you not kill his combatants in times and circumstances of your choosing, rather than his. (And, also, as in one of the movie's surprisingly uncontroversial scenes: when an enemy makes his women and children fight for him, the guilt for their deaths does not go to the soldiers who killed them while fending off their attacks, but to the people who made them fight.)
  
  War is very far from being hell ("war is hell" is all too often an excuse for diabolical wartime actions), but it isn't nice, either. Certain basic decencies are not suspended, whatever certain cowardly schools of "thought" may say, but at the end of the day, war is where we kill and hurt our fellow Images of God.