It's worth re-reading works from the trenches of WWII. US troops haven't had to fight a war like that within living memory. Ukraine and Russia are fighting one now.
The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft.
Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.
If 1 good thing will come out of this russian war is the firm realization globally that russia is a solid dictatorship still/again actively opposing democracy anywhere in the world, with absolutely 0 regard for its own population and generally being very, very far from typical western values on which they frown as subpar, weak and a threat.
There was some solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades, merkel et al completely ignored warnings from baltic members or Poland that russia can't be trusted yet. Current german leadership still doesn't treat this as their top urgency, they naively hope russians will get bored or scared from human losses and do just tiny glacial moves. This won't ever happen, just look at WWII, they still have the same mentality. They have to literally run out of equipment to stop at this point, they won't run out of men, not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
I think it's more nuanced than naivety. Germany was willing to turn a blind eye for the cheap energy their powerful industrial economy relies on. I don't think it's wrong to take the cheap energy knowingly from your enemy -- you just can't lose sight of it.
Fundamentally it's ok to arbitrage with your opponent if it means more prosperity for you -- it gets complicated when you're doing it on the back of large deficits, and do it for long enough that you forget it was a gambit to begin with and now it's a dependency. Oops.
> solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades
I think there were some naïveté on the US side of thing, just like both were naive on how mainland China would turn to democracy as it opened to outside trade and industry
Yes. It wasn't inevitable that Russia would take this route. There were a few years of freedom, but with a broken economy. Then the era of the oligarchs. That didn't work out too well either. So now there's a strongman.
That it would be a strongman who wants to go back to the era of the tsars was unexpected.
I wouldn't call it naivete on the US side - most people with a functioning brain weren't snowed by that. However, the money men who make theirs on the backs of success OR failure trumpeted that it was a new dawn for democracy and capitalism in China because it was in their best interests to do so despite what centuries of history and decades of dialog told everybody who would listen.
> If 1 good thing will come out of this russian war is the firm realization globally that russia is a solid dictatorship still/again actively opposing democracy anywhere in the world...
"Realization" implies truth. I bet you couldn't even try to prove your theory.
> ...not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
If you keep posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, we're going to have to ban you. We've warned you countless times already, and it's not good that you're still doing it.
Flamebait I have no issue with (the "fact of the matter" as it is aspect of it; that mildly strict epistemology is necessarily flamebait on a forum of this (alleged) caliber, on subjects involving literal life and death, that I do have an issue with; also the misleading "and/or" connector, but I'll assume that's a copy/paste artifact).
The "unsubstantive" part is another matter. Stop and look at the actual quality of my counterparts' comments Dang. Is it (solely) me who is deserving of a scolding?
These are not minor or inconsequential topics being discussed here. If no community takes a stand and takes thinking more seriously especially when it matters, humans will continue to be tricked into forever war, indefinitely.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Most certainly, but not for the public to see (although we all know relatively where different countries are.) I recently read kill chain which is jarringly accurate for a 4 year old book, and it goes through what you're indirectly alluding to: US military ppp is not only too high, but the 'kill-chain' is too slow.
Just for anyone interested: Sweden actually stopped conscription in 2010, switching to a fully volunteer-based professional force. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, opinions began to change and conscription was reintroduced in 2017. The number of conscripts per year is much lower than it used to be (~5K last year compared to ~27K in 1997), but is planned to increase to ~10K/year by the early 2030's.
(Leaving NBC for a different comment:) Stalingrad had more Allied deaths alone (in ~half year) than Union and Confederate deaths combined of the US Civil War (in ~4 years).
To be fair, that was (part of) a big war without medevac, but given (a) the determination of modern actors to ignore Geneva Conventions, and (b) the tech level of the RU/UA war, I'm not sure medevac is still a thing.
Not the way it was for US troops from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Getting injured people out of the combat zone is much tougher. The combat zone is deeper. The first kilometer is now about as tough as it was before helicopters. Doing something major for a patient in the "golden hour" after injury is often not possible.[1]
Yes. Western ops in Afghanistan and Iraq - where we had total airspace domination - exhibited a best case view of medevac - all the way up to mobile operating theatres in Chinooks flying to the point of need. A full-on high intensity conflict between peer adversaries would be nothing like this.
I am always amazed by the sheer ego of the "Geneva conventions" or any other "rules of war".
Maybe I don't understand how the mentality works but for me, once you are at the point you are killing people - and killing them in the thousands - you are already either crazily desperate and/or have a complete loss of empathy for your opposition.
Once you are in this alien mindset, why would you pay attention to any "rules" that might limit your murderous psychopathy?!?
And this worries me. Seeing the world increasingly brace itself for war I fear there will be someone who thinks COVID was a great trial run for a bioweapon.
And that is my simple unimaginative first grab at horror. I am sure smarter minds than me can think up worse.
The idea is that killing enemy is not necessary, just destroying their ability to fight. And there's incentive to be not too murderous expecting the enemy will do the same.
Until you are losing. At that point the decision makers fear their lives are lost. That's when the rules go out the window.
War is not a polite game of chess played by a nation. It is emotions, fears, consequences for individuals at every level.
When the war goes well you may compromise, you may not. But when survival is on the line everything comes into play - no compromises. What do you have to lose?
If that were true, all wars would end in genocide rather than treaty.
That they do not* is evidence that often, people —even individually— eventually decide what they have to lose is that which they have not yet lost.
(War, like chess, is a negative-sum game. The same calculus applies to the "victors"; I worry that people in the Old Country often forget this aspect.)
EDIT: also, the point of being either a noncombatant or a recognised combatant (who only followed lawful orders) is that you are then protected at the end of hostilities, so already your "nothing left to lose" has assumed (perhaps correctly!) a world in which the Geneva Conventions no longer have any meaning.
* consider: the US was losing in the Chiến tranh Việt Nam yet left without dropping The Bomb; Great Britain was losing in the US Revolution yet failed to do whatever the XVIII equivalent of glassing the colonies might have been (yes, they were busy globally with France, so they were a tad distracted, but still...)
> why would you pay attention to any "rules" that might limit your murderous psychopathy
The theory is, that as war is just a continuation of peace "by other means", one should not start wars without having an idea of the various ways in which one might end them, and (as the NSDP discovered in 1945) it's a whole lot easier to end them if you haven't been doing war crimes (or "war crimes"; if you intend to end a war short of genocide*, de jure or de facto doesn't really matter) during them.
(yes, I think we both agree that it'd be better to have a period instead of "without" after "one should not start wars", but if one allows for the existence of hawks, is it not better that they have some limits?)
Which part do you consider sheer ego? The distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or the inclusion of medical personnel among the non-combatants?
The sheer ego is in the idea that all wars are started by gentlemen or aristocrats with options and we should have rules to incentivise them away from the risky inhumane options to the plain inhumane ones.
Or that once a war is started the "idea of the various ways in which one might end them" actually holds up in reality after the enemy get their vote.
I honestly tell you that if someone invaded my country in the manner of Russia with indiscriminate killing and bombardment of cities literally threatening the survival of those I care about then I will not give a toss what any convention says - what good does obeying a rule someone made up if I/my-loved-ones am/are dead?
And at that point, bio/nuke/any-weapons become an option - the rules be damned. I very much know that I shouldn't be trusted with such calls.
> I will not give a toss what any convention says - what good does obeying a rule someone made up if I/my-loved-ones am/are dead?
Essentially the sunk cost fallacy.
Making victims drag other down with them is like 101 Keeping The War Machine Going. Furthermore 'war mongerers without borders' cooperate for atrocities to get out of control.
At some point however the victims will blame their elite instead of the elite their elite blame.
Also, you usually don't lose everyone you care for in one blow. Losing half of your children might decrease the wish to lose the other half for some people.
Except where is the fallacy to the individual? As a society/nation you can argue these things but same as corporations, the decision makers are individuals.
And if the individual sees surrender as death (or equivalent, life in miserable prison)- Hamas for example - why would they stop fighting? And if you are outmatched then survival demands using every resource you have - rules be damned.
Hamas hiding in the civilian population is not surprising at all. Israel continuing to bombard them with civilians then harmed is also not surprising. This is war, not a game with rules.
It is terribly sad for the civilians. It is horrifying. And yet predictable.
Ye individuals might value things differently. Some value revenge more than others.
Hamas might be a bad example since Netanyahu supports them. They are manufactured miserables where the point is that they are used as an excuse for ethnic cleansing.
Hamas could be compared to the right wing militias in Ukraine. Like, when they are in the position to pull you down with them, they will, becouse 'traitors'. And I guess both Israel and Russia are easy to "tease" which makes their job easy. And with their absolutist world view there is hard stopping them by talking. The hardline "total victory" types.
In this discussion with you and other threads I have come to realise that my idea of "war" is different to others. Maybe it is an "escalation" thing.
I see war as absolute/total/complete/existential in a sense. Anything less is an exercise in power, military/political/propaganda or otherwise. Not to demean those exercises as being terrible frightful happenings in their own right. Nor to demean their use in deterring what I see as war in the existential sense.
But I think that means I communicate with a crossed purpose.
For example, I see the US in Iraq as a military exercise. Nothing existential about it for the US. Again, to be clear, I'm not trying to demean the efforts or lives involved. There are great heroics and terrible outcomes in any such event. And such an exercise had significant political/social outcomes due to the military statement. For all I know it may have altered outcomes in a manner to avoid a war in the existential sense for the US. What if, per se.
But somewhere I feel that there is a different level, a different meaning, for fighting in the existential sense. World War 2 conveys that level of existentialism to me - many nations and peoples were fighting for continued existence. And it resulted in the age of the atom.
And I think it is this sense of "total war" that I mean when I am deriding the "rules of war". Because to me, the word War is loaded with the idea of there being no rules to begin with because sheer existence is on the line.
And so at this point I cede any debate. And thank you for helping me come to realise a significant point regarding my own views.
It was a war of maneuver from start to finish, which is why it was so much more destructive than WWI.
>Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone
Do not believe Ukrainian numbers any more than you believe Russian numbers.
One thing we have learned from this war is that a core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat. With the current recruitment crisis in the West I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a push from the agencies to make future generations more right wing.
Not WWI-style, but I think there were a number of trenches. For example, Fortress Europe (Germany's efforts to secure Europe), consisted of a number of Maginot Line-style entrenchments and tunnel complexes.
I think that the Eastern Front also had a lot of that stuff.
I believe that the Ukraine War is now featuring trenches, and I know that the Ethiopia/Eritrea War featured classic WWI-style trench warfare.
WWII was real bad, and was one of the first modern wars to claim more civilian lives, than military. I think that's sort of become a standard feature of most wars, these days; even the small ones.
I'm currently trying to figure out how my father[0] got a Silver Star, in Belgium, in WWII. He never told us, and the St. Louis fire destroyed his main records.
It affected him badly. I think he fought in a similar fashion to this story. He was in mechanized artillery, but saw plenty of bad stuff, and was wounded twice.
Re your father; wow, what a life. Thanks for documenting that for us.
My grandfather became a Navy navigator, B25s I think, right as the war ended. Chased hurricanes in the Pacific. I was the only person in the family to ever get much out of him about it in the last years before he passed.
Even in peacetime operations, he watched many colleagues die in storms, fog, and from accidents. I think everyone who served then saw how arbitrary death could be, and how the entire service was designed to operate around the necessary assumption that lives would vanish for nothing - and that everything else had to keep humming along.
Provides a very different perspective than the modern era.
that was a cool life your dad lived! hard, but he saw a lot and i'm sure became a better person because of that hardship. from eagle scout to omaha beach to CIA to idi amin-adjacent; wow!
thank you for sharing. i enjoyed reading a little bit about your dad's exploits. /salute to Mike Marshall.
The Battle of Kursk (for example) would like to have a word:
The Central and Voronezh Fronts each constructed three main defensive belts in their sectors, with each subdivided into several zones of fortification.[148][149][150] The Soviets employed the labour of over 300,000 civilians.[p] Fortifying each belt was an interconnected web of minefields, barbed-wire fences, anti-tank ditches, deep entrenchments for infantry, anti-tank obstacles, dug-in armoured vehicles, and machine-gun bunkers.[151] Behind the three main defensive belts were three more belts prepared as fallback positions; the first was not fully occupied or heavily fortified, and the last two, though sufficiently fortified, were unoccupied with the exception of a small area in the immediate environs of Kursk.[150][152] The combined depth of the three main defensive zones was about 40 kilometres (25 mi). The six defensive belts on either side of Kursk were 130–150 kilometres (81–93 mi) deep.[152] If the Germans managed to break through these defences they would still be confronted by additional defensive belts to the east, manned by the Steppe Front. These brought the total depth of the defences to nearly 300 kilometres (190 mi).
> core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat
The opposite lesson from WW2, where having genocidal right wing nationalists tended to start the wars which you would then lose. The RWNs in Ukraine are even cited in the Russian causus belli (yes, obviously that's BS and it's an unjust invasion).
RWNs in Europe also tend to be pro-Russia. Possibly because Russia is paying them, possibly sheer contrarianism. Either way it's going to be difficult to divert them from divisive, fictional "enemy within" anti-immigrant discourse to the real threat from Russia.
> RWNs in Europe also tend to be pro-Russia. Possibly because Russia is paying them, possibly sheer contrarianism.
Both, but mainly it's because of a common enemy - the liberal-democratic west. Russia has very little in common with conservatives in the west when it comes to lifestyle (divorces, suicides, drugs, hiv, alcoholism, abortion are at record levels there - much higher than in most western countries) - but it promises "conservative values", hates liberals and delivers anti-LGBT legislation and that's enough for far right.
It's not unlike the nazi alliance with communism before WW2. Both wanted "liberal global order" gone.
When are you referring to? Because it was a German/USSR alliance which started the war by invading Poland .. and then switched sides to Allied aid to USSR to fight Germany .. and then back again immediately once Germany was defeated. All very realpolitik. USSR had no interest in a free Eastern Europe either.
> One thing we have learned from this war is that a core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat. With the current recruitment crisis in the West I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a push from the agencies to make future generations more right wing.
Ye see Alternative for Germany. Providing weapons for Azov et al. removed alot of social dogma around supporting those kind of movements that NATO would bomb "becouse nazis" if they were not picking on the right ethnicity.
Dunno why 'people' pretend this is not a thing. There are more or less fascist paramilitaries roaming around and collecting men for the trenches. Men who btw also are barred from fleeing the country.
Perhaps in the narrow definition of "trenches" your first statement is true. However, a ".. war of maneuver from start to finish ..." is certainly not true. I suspect the combatants in the house to house fighting in places like Stalingrad and Leningrad, did not consider that as "maneuver". Nor did the Americans & Japanese soldiers at Okinawa.
Certainly there was much more maneuver in WWII - blitzkreig - but it lasted a long time and armies were not in constant motion all that time.
You're right, The Great War and Modern Memory is not only an amazing history but it's also a remarkable bit of writing in its own right. It's one of those exceptional books on war and the history of warfare and up there with the likes of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and others that comprise the main text corpus about warfare. It's an essential read for anyone who's interested in the subject.
It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it.
Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing.
I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory.
I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.
Having reflected, the general problem with "homeland" vs "patriotism" is that the narrower focus might lead to silliness such as the overseas francophonie getting textbooks speaking about "our ancestors, the celts".
John McCarthy (LISP) wrote on USENET about his emotions as a draftee hearing the A-Bomb had been dropped and he wouldn't have to storm the beaches of Japan.
Interesting article. This reminds me of Peter Cawdrons Sci-fi (sic) book "The Anatomy of Courage" which I finished recently. It related to WW I, not II, but also to the ugly truth about war. To quote from its "Afterword":
"This story is based on the non-fiction book The Anatomy of Courage by Charles McMoran Wilson, 1st Baron Moran (1882-1977), who was also known as Lord Moran. He served as the personal physician to Sir Winston Churchill. As a doctor in World War I, Lord Moran had no knowledge of concepts such as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but he was a keen observer of human nature and captured the heartache of that tragic war. I’ve drawn from the examples he cataloged from the trenches of World War I and expanded on them in this novel, wanting to keep his insights alive."
And, of course, he talks about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" too …
War is horrible, and fought for very stupid reasons - at least on one side, and often both.
That said... this guy joined the ROTC because it got him out of gym class in high school. That put him on the path to being a lieutenant in WWII, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, it's a crazy system that makes a person like that a leader of soldiers in the first place, but I also don't consider him likely to be a clear-eyed observer of it all.
I mean, the horror he experienced is real, and he describes it eloquently. The larger picture... that's where I don't trust him so much.
He talks at the beginning about how people who saw the larger picture with clear eyes escaped the front lines:
> shrewder friends were enrolling in Navy V-1 or signing up for the pacific exercises of the Naval Japanese Language Program or the Air Corps Meteorological Program
The clouds of war are gathering. Germany is making plans for a draft. Poland tried a small-scale test mobilization of civilians. Poland and Latvia are planning to send back Ukrainian males who dodged the draft there. Sweden and Finland never stopped having a draft.
Russia is currently spending over 7% of GDP on its military. The EU averages around 1.5%. US around 2.9%. Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone, although nobody has solid numbers. That's about 4x the losses on the Allied side for D-Day in 1944. Big wars kill large numbers of people.