Military

Americans Don’t Commit War Crimes

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Murder, rape, torture, assault and robbery are crimes. They are crimes all of the time, everywhere and regardless of circumstances. No person can pretend that any authority has granted them the power to do any of these things. They are wrong, as such – and anyone who does these things should be seriously punished, up to and including death in certain circumstances.

Why point this out? Because there is no justification for crime. But we have a bit of a debate going on right now – an accusation that Secretary of Defense committed a war crime. The accusation, of itself, appears to me to be false: that is, he didn’t do what he’s accused of doing. That is, order a second hit on a drug boat with the intent of killing survivors of the first hit. What has got me going here, however, is the assertion that if he gave such order, it amounts to a crime. It doesn’t. Not a crime, as such and, so, not a war crime.

In war, you fire until the enemy is destroyed. That’s it. Failure to do this means that the enemy may be able to fire on you, destroying you. Sure, in bizarre circumstances you’ll be able to take an enemy alive but in combat it goes on until one side runs up the white flag – that is, the leadership of the defeated side surrenders not himself, but the whole force under his command. The drug runners are invading the United States to sell poison to our people. They are enemies. They are armed. They are upon the high seas. We don’t have to give a warning. We don’t have to give a break. Indeed, the more ruthlessly we apply force the more likely it is that the enemy runs out of the means to invade.

And, of course, this whole thing will end the moment the druggies surrender. That is, stop trying to smuggle poison into the USA. This is not a big ask. We’re not asking them to give up anything on their side. They can remain free, alive and able to pursue whatever honest trade appeals to them. All we’re saying is that if you’re trying to invade us with poison, you’re going to die whenever we can get you.

The real problem here is that many of us – including many on the Right – have internalized a Leftwing lie about the United States: that is, we commit war crimes. That we are even capable of committing war crimes. That American soldiers would lend themselves to such a monstrosity. It all started to brew early in the Cold War, specifically during the Korean War when the Communist world started to accuse our soldiers of all manner of war crimes. To this day, Leftwing voices around the world assert these crimes happened even though they didn’t. It was, of course, just a means to an end – to make the American military odious and so cover up the crimes of the Communists. “Look at that American bastard!” was the shout…by a Soviet Red Army which massacred Poles at Katyn and pretty much raped every German woman they could get their hands on in 1945. “See the American crimes!” shouted the Chinese Communists who were at the start of 70 million political murders.

The real gift to the Left here was My Lai – the quite horrible massacre by US troops of hundreds of Vietnamese. Of course, a bit of context is good here: this was in the immediate aftermath of Tet and our Army had suffered a lot of losses including from supposed civilians who revealed themselves as enemies only by the act of killing Americans. Also should be pointed out that it took place just a couple weeks after the Battle of Hue where the Communists had murdered more than ten times the number killed at My Lai…without anyone winning a Pulitizer Prize for covering it. Because it was hardly covered at all in the Western press. Didn’t fit the Narrative. My Lai did – savage Americans!

The reality of My Lai is that a unit of the American army, under gigantic stress from severe combat, went off its head and murdered hundreds. But this wasn’t US policy. A company commander gave harsh yet vague orders to his troops which some of them – not all – interpreted as a license to do evil. The policy of the US government was to go soft on Vietnamese civilians in an effort to win them over to our side. That the carrying out of this policy was, at times, downright stupid is neither here nor there – the crucial aspect is that our Army wasn’t in Vietnam to conquer, murder, rape, loot and torture. The desired goal was an independent and free Vietnam. In this is the crucial difference and what makes My Lai – a horrid crime – not a war crime.

Meanwhile, as noted, over in Hue – just 75 miles away from My Lai (you could drive it in a couple hours) – the Communists murdered as many as 6,000 people (the most commonly stated death toll is just around 4,000 but strong evidence indicates it goes to 6,000). The victims were anyone perceived as being favorable to the South Vietnamese government and/or the USA. They were rounded up, bound, tortured and murdered. Some were beaten to death. Some were buried alive. This was not done by a small section of the Communist force in defiance of policy – it was done as a carefully crafted policy. The Communists had developed lists of people to murder prior to taking over Hue. Had they remained in control of Hue for a longer time, more would have been murdered. What happened at Hue was a war crime. There’s no other way to interpret it.

But it is we Americans are the bad guys! Our whole Army was evil because of one company commander….but the NVA was just peachy even though they murdered vastly more. Keep in mind that what happened in Hue was just Communist policy writ large…all throughout the war the Communists were murdering noncombatants (as well as looting and raping women) as a matter of policy. And after the war they just put that practice on steroids. The Boat People didn’t happen for no reason. A million people fled Vietnam for their lives. 200,000 of them died trying. You don’t get into a leaky, wooden boat and set out into the high seas over mild policy disagreements…you do that because you’ll be dead if you don’t.

In my view – and I defy anyone to refute me on this – a war crime can only be the systematic application of criminal means for national policy ends. That is, it has to be policy. Now, this policy can be overt (written orders and such) or implied – but it has to be a policy. A pattern of behavior. A clear desire for a certain outcome. A soldier who murders a man is a murderer. A unit that massacres one village and then proceeds on to the next for a massacre is a war crime. This is not a difficult distinction to make but it seems impossible for many. I can only say this is because they don’t think it through and, also, they’re afraid that if they don’t mindlessly repeat the Narrative then people will get mad at them (lies always require a massive amount of cowardice to succeed).

The reason it must be my definition is because if you say that any crime committed by any military personnel during war is a war crime then you are indicting the entire military organization. To say My Lai was a war crime is to accuse the United States Army of being no different than the Waffen-SS. It is simply unjust to do that unless you have proof that the military organism is a criminal organization…as we found regarding the Waffen-SS. Our people doing evil isn’t inherent to our military system. And keep in mind that My Lai came to public notice because American soldiers made sure it did. And while the punishments meted out for My Lai do not fit the scale of the crimes, there was punishment and acknowledgement that it happened and it was wrong…and orders were issued to work against any possibility of a repeat. The NVA commander at Hue was given a medal.

The main point for us to make here is that we have to stop following the Leftist Narrative here – it isn’t designed to stop crime, but to hamstring the USA. The reason we have JAG lawyers second-guessing our combat troops is because we listened to Leftists when they accused our boys of being war criminals. Really gotta stop that.

War is cruelty and you can’t refine it. The purpose is to kill. To do this, you have to take men – and these days, women – who are not by nature violent and turn them into killers. Not murderers, but killers. People who will fire on a panicked and routed enemy, gunning them down as they flee in terror until the order to ceasefire is given or the enemy commander runs up the white flag. It has to be this way because that is how you win battles.

War is also a thing of massive stress. Those who encounter combat are forever changed. And it is no surprise that especially after long and arduous combat duty, some people break. And that breakdown can be permanent or temporary and it could cause suicide, or murder. The real lesson here is to avoid war – but if it is considered a necessity and we send our people out to kill, then we have a duty to care for them, to be merciful to them, to try and bind up their wounds physical and mental. You don’t go calling them war criminals because they went off their heads. You might have to punish them. You might even have to punish them quite severely. But you still try to understand what they went through – because you told them to go through it. You, too, bear moral responsibility…you weren’t down in the mud and blood and you didn’t pull the trigger of that soldier who murdered that civilian, but you still played your part in making it happen. You aren’t innocent. So, have a little care here before you cast judgement. Don’t award yourself a Morality Medal because you condemned a poor slob who went wrong under the stress of war.

Like any people, Americans can do wrong things. It is part of human nature. But it has never been the policy of any American government to be criminal. That is, to use criminal means to obtain national policy ends – and especially criminal national policy ends. This is why I say Americans don’t commit war crimes. It isn’t in us. We’re not like that. We might be wrong – and even at times quite fabulously wrong – but we do wish for the good of everyone. Peace for all. Prosperity for all. Freedom for all. We raise armies to defend these things and we at times send those armies to war. And, at times, some of our soldiers fall short of the standards we set for them. That is tragic – but it isn’t a war crime.

War: it Really is Kinda Hell

Mark Noonan15 Comments

There is a video out there showing a Ukrainian drone slamming into a Russian high rise – and it does evoke memories of 9/11…and everyone is jumping on the Ukrainians for doing it, whether deliberately or accidentally. I am very much “meh” about it. Russia started this war without any justifiable cause. And this incident has been tossed into the War Crimes pile…that is where everyone involved in a conflict accuses the other of being war criminals.

And that is why I have dispensed with the whole concept of war crimes: there is just no point in it.

To this day, there is still argument going on about what the Germans did in Belgium during World War One – both in the immediate invasion of August, 1914 and throughout the war. That Germans did rape, murder and loot from Day One on is not in dispute…but there are still people trying to argue that this or that particular incident didn’t happen or was itself justified. It is all such a drivel argument – the war crime, if such exists, was the German invasion. The Germans had no cause to attack Belgium – a small, weak and entirely inoffensive nation which would never have dreamed of challenging German power. If not a single Belgian had been killed, it still would have been a crime. So, people trying to twist themselves into knots saying, “well, when this village was burned and inhabitants massacred, it might well have been in response to a Belgian taking a pot-shot with the farm’s shotgun”. As if that mattered – there wasn’t supposed to be a German to take a pot-shot at.

This is why I’m only interested in who fires the first shot or who sets conditions upon which firing must commence. That is, who started it? After that, all wrong is the fault of the person who started it – nothing the aggressor does can possibly make it better or worse, and nothing the victim does in response is wrong. You open fire, you take your chances…and as far as I’m concerned, if you’re the aggressor and end up losing, count yourself lucky if every last one of you isn’t killed by the victor. What any nation should do in war – and especially my nation – is based entirely upon expediency…what will bring us victory the quickest and at least cost? This is moral because the faster you end a war the less costly it is going to be – and the force used to end a war is always morally proportionate to need, proof being that it ended the war (lots of theological people try to tie themselves in knots over this as part of the Just War Doctrine…mostly so they can hate on the USA for using atomic bombs…but the bottom line is that as long as the force is proportionate to needs, it is legitimate…and that means whatever force you can bring is legitimate).

Sure, I’d prefer a world where there were fully established rules for war and everyone tried to adhere to them. But it isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen when, in modern times, the combatants don’t even agree on what is right and wrong. That’s the real failure of all the peace and arms-control treaties…they have words on them and the contracting parties don’t even agree on the meanings of words. Back when it was two deeply Christian powers in conflict you could make rules…because both sides were working off the same ultimate rule book. But between, say, Catholic me and Communist enemy, where is there any meeting of mind? When I say “justice” is means just about the opposite of what the Communist means. I can’t make a deal with him – can’t have agreed upon rules of conflict. I can only, when pressed to it, fight him with every available means lest he kill me and all I hold dear.

Just my two cents on that particular modern debate. Fight if you want. You’d better win if you decide to fight. If you decide to fight and lose, I don’t care what happens to you.

War and Pride

Mark Noonan25 Comments

Got into a little debate about the Ukraine War on X – it ended up with me, apparently, being placed on someone’s list of Stupid People. Meh. Not the first time. Won’t be the last. But the crux of the debate is this:

I suggest that it is time for Ukraine to seek a peace deal with Russia, even at the price of lost territory.

The other side suggests I’m an idiot and that this would be to reward a cruel and evil aggressor.

Now, to be fair, I agree that a peace deal which leaves Russia in possession of the Donbas would be to reward the aggressor – this whether or not Putin is cruel and evil (that’s a debate for some other time). But that wasn’t exactly what got me on the Stupid List. We went on and my opponents are quite certain that such an abomination cannot be tolerated – that Ukraine must continue the fight! On and on. Fight! Fight! FIGHT!

To which I responded: well, yeah, they can fight on but to what purpose? The Ukrainians simply lack the physical power to expel the Russians. At this point, all further bloodshed is pointless because it cannot alter the result. Everyone on both sides is now dying for nothing. Presto: I’m on the Stupid List.

After it was over it occurred to me that what is really lacking in the modern world is any knowledge of history, especially of military history. I mean, seriously: the normal course of war throughout human history has been an aggressor attacking and the defender either prevailing or not against this aggression. I will use the closest example to what we have in the Russia-Ukraine War – the War of the Austrian Succession/Seven Years war.

This two part war started because Prussia in 1740, perceiving a weak Hapsburg government under a newly enthroned female Monarch (Maria Theresa) would be easy pickings…so they occupied the Hapsburg province of Silesia. Turns out, Prussia (under Frederick the very-much-so-called Great) got a lot more than they bargained for. Maria Theresa was made of much sterner stuff than expected. She didn’t just roll over – she fought. First round went on until 1748 when mutual exhaustion compelled peace – but a peace where Maria Theresa ceded Silesia to Prussia. She wasn’t about to lie down for that for long and so as soon as peace was concluded she started reforming her realm, rebuilding her armies and forging new alliances for a second round, which started in 1756 – called The Seven Years War in Europe, in America it is our French and Indian War (which, of course, led very directly to our Revolutionary War twenty years later). Unfortunately for the cause of the Just, Maria Theresa was not able to prevail – after seven years of fighting and pushing Frederick and his Prussia to the verge of destruction, luck went against her and she was forced to once again make peace with Prussia still in possession of Silesia. Why did she quit? Because she found that she simply lacked the physical power to compel Prussian withdrawal. She could have kept fighting. She still had soldiers. She could have kept going on and on and on…but it was done. She couldn’t win. It was time to quit. And so she did.

That is what I’m talking about. As long as you have a hope of prevailing, fight. But as soon as you see the end beyond reasonable doubt, it is time to call it quits.

To be sure, history is also filled with wars that went on long after the decision was reached. Most famously was, of course, Hitler’s war where he was ordering his shattered armies to attack when the Russians were a hundred yards away from his bunker. That war was definitely over the moment the Allies got ashore at Normandy – which is why von Rundstedt, asked what to do about it, said, “make peace, you fools”. World War One – the Germans got their peace with Russia in March of 1918. At that point, no longer burdened by an Eastern Front (and having access to Russia’s vast raw materials) their choice was simple – sue for peace with the western Allies. They had no chance – the British/French/American armies and economies were vastly superior to anything the Germans could bring to the field. It was time to quit. Instead, they attacked. Had they quit in April of 1918 they would have got vastly better terms than they got in November 1918. Also, the Confederacy. The Civil War was effectively over with the surrender of Vicksburg and Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg…but it was absolutely finished when Sherman took Atlanta. At that point, it was time to throw in the towel…no possible outcome later would be better than running up the white flag in July of 1864. The loss of lives and property resulting from these wars going on past their decisive moments is astonishing…and the world is a worse and poorer place today because of stubborn pride keeping up a lost fight.

And that is what I’m on about regarding Ukraine. The only ghost of a chance Ukraine has is if an American and/or European army comes to redress the balance. That is simply not possible as the European and American populations don’t want to fight. Ukraine had her chance for victory – had she built up a mobile strike force to attack the lumbering and incompetent Russian army of 2022. She had a second chance once that first Russian invasion was checked – before Russia got her act together. But now it is too late…Russia’s power just grows and grows while Ukraine’s fades away. The Russians don’t even have to be in any way clever…they so vastly outnumber the Ukrainians that they can fix the Ukrainian army in place and just grind it down with artillery. If Ukraine throws up the sponge right now then they’ll get far better terms than if they fight pointlessly until total collapse, at which time Russia gets to dictate terms. And this is without considering the loss to Ukraine’s future in the number of brave, fit young men who are dying day by day. It is just time for peace. There’s been a war. Ukraine has lost this war. End it. Pay the price of defeat. Maybe Ukraine can try again later – that would be up to Ukraine. But for this moment, it is over. Pay the price for peace.

But I think we, being a very sinful people these days, just can’t grasp that concept. Our pride is involved – that is, those who have been boosters of Ukraine just can’t contemplate a future where Ukraine isn’t triumphant. Pride combined with a callous disregard for human life is what has brought us here – and it is very sad, especially as it is expressed by people who not only have never seen death in war, but who don’t even really think about it. That is, the young man who is on the front line…he’s got all the same hopes and dreams that any young man may have and then in an instant, all gone. Never to come back. Lost forever. The people pushing for war don’t seem to think about that – can’t even comprehend it. How precious the blood expended is…how irretrievable the loss. I am starting to think they are very much monsters…and no less monsters than Hitler raving about massive counterattacks from the bunker.

We had that quite moving anti-war song of the 1960’s, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? but I think we need an update to it…the flowers have all turned into stone faced freaks who think of human beings as so many blocks of wood. Not themselves, of course. Oh, no: you’ll won’t find the war boosters in the trenches – but for everyone not them, off you go…grind away. Die. Just don’t make me confront my own failure…

Terminate the Military-Industrial Complex

Mark Noonan57 Comments

The real problem with the Military-Industrial Complex is that we have one. Having a large, standing Army is a mistake. If you read military history of the United States, the universal refrain is how deplorable it was that we relied on a small Army and large Militia. You’ll read of the many military disasters created when poorly trained Militia was sent into battle – and there were some pretty major catastrophes. But, using the small Army/large Militia model did win us every single war to World War II. Since World War Two? Well, we’ve had a large, standing military force and the Militia doesn’t even exist any more…and we’ve lost every war.

There are a host of reasons for the defeats, of course: but what benefit have we accrued by maintaining at very high expense this large Army organism?

Naturally, I’m bringing this up because of Trump’s feud with the brass. The Democrats, now leaving off calling them War Criminals, is rising to the defense of the brass, thinking that this will some how get us rank-and-file veterans to abandon Trump. This, more than anything, proves that Democrats are very unfamiliar with military service.

We have nuclear weapons so it is highly unlikely that anyone would dare nuke us. We have a massively armed population, so foreign invasion is simply impractical (it would take many millions just for the occupation forces). We don’t need this monstrosity where officers are placed on a path to promotion (and a juicy Defense Contractor career post-service) by their ability to please their political masters. A smaller and genuinely professional military force – where the officers are dedicated to the service, not their careers – seems to me to be the better way to go. A revived Militia would provide the means of rapidly expanding the Army in case of a major war…as well as providing a leaven of trained people in the civilian population who can act against enemies, foreign and domestic, at need.

Think of it: a voluntary, civilian militia (which can be used for a host of functions) would probably be some millions strong. It would mostly arm itself (though some weapons would be provided by the government; mostly crew-served weapons). Sure, it wouldn’t be nearly as good as a professional military force: but say there were five million Militia members organized into five thousand regiments scattered here and there around the country? No one is going to mess with that; not foreign enemies, not domestic enemies. Invasion and revolution would both be permanently impossible (unless the Militia was the revolutionary force…but that means that the people are conducting a revolution for themselves). And we wouldn’t have this large, bloated military force which tempts politicians into foreign adventure while also being institutionally incapable of winning a war because the price of victory is too high for politicians to contemplate.

The Anti-War Poison

Mark Noonan3 Comments

I had never seen Journey’s End before last night, when I watched the most recent version of it. It is considered the archetype of the anti-war play – the way it is supposed to be presented. And I have to say, what I saw was excellent movie making; it is well worth your time to watch it. But it also left me cold.

The movie is set in the last few days before the German’s Spring Offensive in 1918 and centers around the officers of a British infantry company manning the front lines. Key to the plot is Captain Denis Stanhope, a war hero who has been in the trenches for three years and is presented as a man clearly crushed by what he had endured over the years. The action is strictly small scale – no grand war scenes. Just life in the trenches and the terrible anticipation of what everyone knows is coming: a major German offensive which will have a devastating impact on precisely the men manning the front line. The point is to make you sympathetic to the men caught up in the awful trauma of World War One and it drives home, especially at the end, the pointlessness of war.

But, war isn’t pointless, and I think that is what left me cold.

We are not permitted to gainsay the views of the play’s author: Robert Cedric Sherriff. He was an infantry officer in World War One who fought at Vimy Ridge, Loos and Passchendaele; among the hardest fought battles of the war. What he describes about the soldiers life is true. Just as true is that his play reveals he was gravely embittered by what he had suffered. And, who can blame him? Like so many of Britain’s youth, he was swept up into war and then placed into the meat grinder which was the Western Front. He did what he did, suffered what he suffered, and then wrote about it as he thought best.

Still, there are relevant facts which are not even mentioned in the play – notably that the British did win the war, and winning the war was good for Britain and the world. What should also be noted in any discussion of the particular battle the play describes is the incredible courage of the British soldiers in the battle. The British were heavily outnumbered in the sector attacked and the Germans were staking all they had on the offensive – they hit the British with the strongest forces made up of the cream of the German army; and the sector they hit, primarily the British 5th Army, was the least prepared part of the British line. The men performed prodigies of valor blunting the German attack and extracted a huge blood price for the advance. Because they fought so well – units often fighting until exterminated – the British were able to hold the overall line and eventually stop the German offensive well short of success. The Germans would keep battering away through the Spring, but they never came closer to actual victory than that first attack on March 21st and all the while the number and quality of the German attackers deteriorated – and so quickly that not five months later, the British Army launched their counter-attack at the Battle of Amiens, which spelled final defeat for Germany. All of this – all of the context which would make a person fully understand why Captain Stanhope’s company was there and what they would do before destruction – is left out of Journey’s End, and thus gravely distorts the picture of World War One.

And after watching it, I realized just how terrible was this poison that the play injected into all considerations of war and patriotism. Even the really great war movies of late (Saving Private Ryan, eg) are infected with this basic idea that war is just nothing but bad and that the men who fight in war are lambs led to slaughter by unfeeling commanders. It isn’t really like that; lambs led to slaughter don’t stand and fight when cut off and running low on ammunition. That is what lions do. They could have quit, after all; and, in all war, men do quit. The British had a fairly good idea when the attack would come because, among other things, German deserters had told them it was coming – and as these men were part of the assault force, this means that even in the very best units of a good army, there are men who take the measure of the situation and decide that living is the most important thing. I’m sure there were British soldiers who took off to the rear or went hands up at the first sign of the Germans – but they were few and far between. Most gritted their teeth and fought until destroyed or taken because all means of resistance were exhausted.

A play like Journey’s End robs the men who did stand and fight of the glory they had earned at the highest possible price – and it robs their fellow citizens of the heroes which are needed to sustain the sacrifices necessary for national survival. And, yes, it is heart breaking to think especially of the youngest men who are killed in war – so much of what could have been is lost and that is a terrible human tragedy which must never be downplayed. But to make it the only thing you talk about is wrong; just as it is wrong to merely dwell on the errors of the high command without assessing whether or not, at the end of the day, they secured victory.

One may think that a world without war can be made. That by some mechanism of talk, fight can be prevented. If you believe that, then I’ve nothing to say to you other than the whole course of human history is against you – and the number of wars currently going on indicates that if there is some way to bring about peace on Earth (absent the action of God) then it certainly isn’t going to happen any time soon. In short, there will be wars – and while war is bad, losing a war is the very worst thing that can happen to your nation. If people would not be slaves to a foreign conqueror, then they need to study the arts of war…and this includes understanding the value of bravery and sacrifice. And you can’t value what you think is garbage – which is what Journey’s End, and it’s long line of successors, says war is: nothing but garbage.

We need, I think, some correctives to this, and it needs to be done where the damage was done: in popular culture. Plays, movies and books need to be created which celebrate bravery and sacrifice…that after the war, the men who stood to it did, indeed, lead long lives and useful ones. That what they fought for endured, because they fought for it. That the pitiful young man killed shortly after arriving on the line did provide, in his numbers, the sinews for victory; that his death wasn’t pointless.

Nuke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em

Mark Noonan10 Comments

There’s been some talk of war with Iran of late – personally, I don’t think it will come to that. The Iranians don’t really want a stand up fight with us, and Trump is just not a war guy. Oh, I’m sure he’d hammer an enemy hard if they attack us, but it seems pretty clear to me that, given his ‘druthers, Trump doesn’t want to have a war, and so will do all he can to avoid one. Iran will continue to use proxies against us, maintaining plausible deniability among their bribed politicians and pundits in the US and Europe, but I can’t see them directly opposing US forces with regular Iranian forces. But, still, things like this do have a way of getting out of hand: both sides might not want to fight, but they might find themselves landed in one.

I keep rolling this around in my head – this risk of war with Iran – and that article about MacArthur and Korea I linked the other day. First, lets run over some facts and figures:

Iran Population: 82.5 million
US Population: 327 million

Iran GDP: $1.5 trillion
US GDP: $20.9 trillion

Iran Available for Military Service: 47.3 million
US Available for Military Service: 144.9 million

Active Iran Military: 523,000
Active US Military: 1.4 million

Iran Reserve Personnel: 350,000
US Reserve Personnel: 811,000

Iran Nuclear Weapons: working on it
US Nuclear Weapons: 4,018

So, the United States is not just stronger than Iran – we are overwhelmingly stronger. Short term and long term, Iran has zero chance of successfully fighting the United States. This is unlike Germany and Japan at the start of WWII who at least had more forces in-being when war began and could hope for victory before we were able to fully mobilize. This is also not like, say, Serbia challenging Austria-Hungary at the start of WWI because they knew they had Great Power backing in Russia. Iran is alone, poor and weak. And yet they still talk tough and commit serial acts of war against us – via proxies – and don’t seem to have the slightest fear of us. Why?

Because all experience since WWII has shown the Iranians – and the world – that the United States simply will not apply its full might against an armed enemy. As that article I linked to the other day points out, we started tying our hands in Korea. After a short while where we were permitted to go to town on the North Koreans, the political leadership of the United States started putting the brakes on American power…essentially surrendering our overwhelming advantage vis a vis the enemy and so turning what would have been a quick and overwhelming defeat of the Chinese into a long slugging match which cost far more lives than we lost utterly destroying the North Korean military.

We refused to let Chiang make a try at invading China – placing our fleet between his army on Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, thus assuring Mao that he could send all this best troops to fight and kill Americans in Korea. We didn’t bomb the Chinese supply and concentration areas…thus allowing the Chinese to build up forces to move into Korea. And it went on and on like that, through all the fights we’ve had since WWII. Don’t hit too hard! Be nice! Maybe they’ll be nice to us if we don’t destroy them! Hey, let’s pretend that if we go all out, other Powers will fight us to the death…as if. 100,000 or so dead in America’s wars since WWII and all we’ve done is be defeated.

Iran shouldn’t be bragging and insulting us. They should live in deathly fear of offending us in the slightest. They should have whole teams of staffers editing official speeches and documents to ensure that nothing but kind words are said about the United States. On the world stage, they should from time to time be backing a US foreign policy initiative to build a bit of good will with us – for fear that if we perceive them as an enemy, we’ll destroy them. The power relationship between the two nations can’t be interpreted any other way – absent a firm alliance with another Great Power willing to go to war with us on their behalf, Iran should be quiet and respectful of us. But it isn’t that way – because they know what will happen. We’ll attack, devastate them and then quit after a while. Its all we’ve done since WWII.

This must end – and those in our military and foreign policy Establishment who still want us to hold back have to be removed. If we go to war, we go all the way to war. Nothing is off the table. Yes, not even nukes. Why in heck, for instance, should we allow a non-nuclear power to concentrate, say, a 100,000 man army against us if we’ve got a nuke handy to wipe it out? No, you wouldn’t use nukes to clear out a town infested with terrorists…but an army is a legitimate target. Why not destroy it, easy? And getting back to that town – if it is infested with terrorists, we can’t be too finicky about how we clear them out. Anyone blood shed in such a situation is the moral responsibility of those who placed terrorists in a town…and its stupid to send our guys house to house to be clay pigeons for a couple guys with AK’s hiding in the building when a bit of artillery takes care of the building and the terrorists.

War is a serious, deadly business. It is cruelty and it cannot be refined. The American way of war is to hammer the enemy mercilessly until he quits, and then offer him a hand up. We don’t seek conquest. We aren’t in this for glory. But if we have to fight, we don’t propose to drag it out, nor to have a re-match. It is one and done and we do whatever it takes to finish it as fast as possible. And here’s the thing: we’d only have to do it once. Make an object lesson of the next country to attack us, and all of a sudden those who are thinking these days that you can fight America risk-free will reconsider.

Withdrawing from Syria: Why is War Not the Answer?

Mark Noonan8 Comments

President Trump announced today that we will be pulling our ground forces (from what I understand, about 2,000 troops) out of Syria. His stated reason is that ISIS is wrecked and that was the only reason we were there.

This announcement set off a great deal of fury from both the left and the right. Some, in keeping with their Trump-Russia delusions, claimed this was Trump selling out Syria to the Russians as part of Trump’s stooge requirements. Others left off that notion, but still claimed our withdrawal would be a foreign policy disaster for the United States…Iran and Russia will prevail in Syria; Turkey will be strengthened against the Kurds; allies around the world will mistrust our commitment. So on and so on. As for me, I agree with the President’s decision.

First and foremost, President Trump did only go into Syria to get rid of ISIS. That’s what he said in 2016 and that’s what he’s done as President. To be sure, you can still find ISIS groups floating around the maelstrom of Syria, but the bottom line is that the fierce, ISIS regime of 2016 is no more. They are now just another set of rag-tag Islamist rabble running around Syria, killing for Lord only knows what real reason. Unless we wanted to start going village to village and simply killing everyone we think is ISIS-related, we were never going to get entirely rid of every last bit of ISIS. And Trump never said we were there to settle the Syrian civil war, nor to rebuild Syria. The job Trump set, as far as we can do it, is done. Time to come home.

But beyond that there is something we must understand and it should govern our choice on whether or not to engage in war: we, the United States of America, are not allowed to win a war. Not under the current global and national political reality. Both at home and abroad, the people who set the pace for military affairs have decreed, perhaps without really knowing it (but maybe they do?), that when the United States engages in military action, final victory may not be achieved. We are not allowed to compel an enemy surrender. We are not allowed to kill them without remorse to compel their surrender. We are not allowed to punish them, post-conflict, for putting us through the trouble. We are allowed to fight, and to die, and to have our bravest hauled up on war crimes charges…but we are not allowed to win.

And if you can’t win a war, you best not fight it.

I’m probably starting to bore most of you with this movie, but I just keep coming back to this clip from Breaker Morant about the problem we find ourselves in:

That is our problem in a nutshell: for a long while, now, we’ve been operating our warfare under the theory that some rules, first cooked up in the 19th century, govern the conduct of war while everyone we have fought in the past century has routinely ignored those rules. The rules were an attempt to humanize war – which is akin to an attempt to humanize hell. To be sure, there are rules to war and anyone familiar with military history knows that the greatest captains (Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon) all found clemency to be a mighty engine of war. But the bottom line is that even the most wise, kindly and far-seeing military commander knows that what he’s trying to do is compel people to do what they don’t wish to do. They also knew that while no good commander seeks to win via blood, a commander must still be willing to pour out blood in whatever amount proves necessary for victory.

Part of our problem is that we’re colored with our experiences of the Nazis. But, to me, there is a bit of a mistake in our perception. What the Nazis did to make themselves purely evil had nothing to do with war – we call them war crimes, but they were really just crimes, as such. In fact, the crimes they committed during the war directly harmed their own war effort. The actual war crimes committed by the Nazis were when they did things like shoot American POWs. What they did to the Jews, though, was only incidentally connected to the war. The Nazis did that because they adhered to evil and wanted to do bad things – whether or no there was a war, the Nazis still would have been inhuman garbage. Another aspect of this is that we put the Nazis on trial rather than just shooting them like the mad dogs they were. And we compounded that error by allowing Communist Russians to join us in trying the Nazis, as if a Communist had the least understanding of what law and justice entail. Since then, we’ve had lots of people refer to the rules and seek ever for another Nuremburg Trial…and as they can’t well put on trial Jihadist who would die rather than surrender themselves to a court, they just keep putting on trial our troops…accusing them of war crimes for what any historian knows are just the routine actions of a battlefield.

And, so, our inability to win – we are prevented from it. We could easily win in Syria – and by that I mean kill or disarm everyone there and dictate a settlement as we think best. It would take some years to do it. It would require an army of at least 100,000. And it would require, in the beginning, lots and lots of killing. What you might even consider massacres because if we really applied the full force of American might, then you would have battles where several thousand of the enemy die and only a few, perhaps no, American casualties. Think of it like this: suppose there was identified a town of 10,000 in Syria as a place where enemy forces are hiding/recruiting/training/what have you. Under the way we do things, today, we’d send in groups of men to root out the enemy house by house, always taking care to do as little physical damage as possible and only shooting when we have high confidence that there is an enemy. The way war is actually fought, we’d just surround the place and, depending on how much a hurry we were in, starve them into surrender or blow the place to pieces until the shell-shocked survivors came out with their hands in the air.

There would be children there who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be non-combatants who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be objects of cultural significance destroyed: not a war crime.

As I said, a war crime is something you done wrong in the conduct of the war. You know: shooting unarmed prisoners. A crime against humanity would be something along the lines of massacring the population of a town after it surrendered. But starving people into surrendering or blowing them to pieces if they don’t surrender quickly enough: that is just how war is fought. And if you capture a guy you suspect to be an irregular combatant – well, if getting him to talk requires some rather brutal treatment, then he should feel grateful if that’s all he suffers: an irregular combatant’s life is forfeit upon capture. That is a rule of war.

Now, you take all that and then add into the mix the fact that we have those in the United States who will seek to use any distasteful action, any failure, against their own country in order to advance their political fortunes, and you’ve got, well, what we have now…troops being sent to fight; getting them stuck in shooting galleries…and then having them hauled up on murder charges if they survive. No, thanks. If that is how war is to be, then count me a peace activist. Unless and until we get to a place where we can fight a war how it is supposed to be fought and have at least some reliance that no one back home will try to make partisan hay out of the blood of the dead, then I want no part of war. I don’t want our young men and women shoved into that. It isn’t worth their blood.

So, hats off to President Trump for just doing what he said he’d do.

And, now, it is high time we got out of Afghanistan, as well.

Winning and Losing Wars

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. – Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Got into a little bit of a Twitter scrape with Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom). I’m afraid he took exception to a comment I made. The start of it was Nichols condemning Trump for his “we’ve lost our wars” comment. I put in that as a matter of fact, we haven’t won a war since World War Two.

I know, I know; I probably took that too far. I must repeat to myself again and again: never get into a Twitter argument as it is impossible to have an argument when you’re limited to 140 characters. And it can get a bit sticky if you say anything which can be construed as other than critical of Trump. Trump = bad. I dig that – and am in favor of that sentiment. I feel bad that I apparently angered Mr. Nichols as I hold him in high regard for his knowledge. But, still, a busted clock is right twice a day. To be fair to those who took exception to my comment, Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War and Kosovo were victories. And the Iraq campaign until 2009 was also a victory. But Grenada, Panama and Kosovo are not the same scale of actions as, say, a Spanish-American War – even though that war was quite short and the loss of life was mercifully low. The First Gulf War was, in my view, an unfinished war – we did eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait (a worthwhile activity), but as long as Saddam was in power in Baghdad, a resumption of the war either in Kuwait or elsewhere was always in prospect. We could have compelled a complete surrender by Saddam, and we didn’t – we didn’t impose our political will on his regime in a permanent manner. As for the Iraq campaign – well, it was won, but then it was lost…it doesn’t matter that it was Obama who lost what Bush had won, it was still the United States losing.

Continue reading →

War Crimes

Mark Noonan28 Comments

It has been brought up lately, and I’ve been pondering it for quire a while. Here are some thoughts I have on the subject:

Back in ancient days, those who were defeated in war were at the mercy of the conqueror – it was felt that merely enslaving them was to cut them some slack. But putting an entire city to the sword down to the last man, woman and child was not uncommon. Over time, this was modified a bit as some great conquerors (most notably Alexander and Caesar) discovered that clemency was itself a mighty engine of war – letting the defeated off relatively easy tended to make conquests more lasting; and you could get more out of the defeated in continuing tribute than you could in a one-off sacking. But, still, for the longest time it was thought that an enemy who refused terms and was then defeated was without recourse to mercy.

Mostly through the agency of the Catholic Church as it rose to prominence, this idea of mercilessness to the conquered was modified. And the waging of war, itself, was held to require a strict set of rules. That these rules were often ignored is beside the point – there were rules and people would refer to them in judging the wartime actions of a nation. Time went on and war became to be seen as a thing between professional armies, alone, and the non-combatants were to be spared the ravages of war as far as possible. Napoleonic France diverged from this general trend (essentially, Napoleon looted Europe in order to fund his regime and his continuing wars) but the post-Napoleonic reaction was just that much more strong – until, by treaty, nations in the late 19th century started to codify the rules of war.

But it was still held that if one side violated the rules, the other side was justified in following suit. A good example of this was poison gas – banned by treaty prior to World War One, once the Germans started using it then all sides used it to the best of their ability. And then World War Two happened – a war was started by a nation with absolutely no justification and that nation then ran amok murdering and looting on a scale never seen before in war. After the war, trials were held and those judged most guilty of carrying out the crimes were hung or imprisoned for long terms. And it became rather set in stone: there were some things you just couldn’t do in war, ever.

But it still remains a fact that some people depart from the laws of war – most notably the terrorist. Remember, what was most terrible about the Nazi crimes was the way they brutalized people who couldn’t fight back…civilians and disarmed prisoners of war. We look far more in horror at the massacre of Babi Yar where more than 33,000 defenseless Jews were murdered than we do the bombing of Hamburg where more than 42,000 Germans died…this is because the Jews were completely harmless and completely helpless, while the Germans were at least working to support the German war machine and in the Luftwaffe and the Flak units, the Germans at least had a chance at self defense. We feel sadness when, say, an American or Israeli soldier is killed by an enemy but we know that soldiers voluntarily face such risks – and they have a chance to defend themselves. But when a bomb goes off in a shopping mall, it is defenseless, harmless people being murdered. The laws of war require that those shooting and being shot at be clearly identified as people who can do that – anyone who is not so identifiable must not be shot at and must not shoot. But the terrorist is violating both sides of that – they are not identifiable as shooters and they seek to kill people who are most definitely not in a position to shoot back.

What do we do about such a thing? That is the crucial thing we need to be clear in our minds about. The enemy diligently hides his identity. He desperately does not want to be known as a combatant before he starts shooting. He hides among his like, blending in to the best of his ability to confound those who would prevent him from attacking. He browbeats and threatens non-combatants into keeping silence, and supporting his efforts. He then steers clear of any place where he’s likely to be met with armed resistance, and then attacks. Is such a person, if captured, to then he held as if he were a regular soldier, honorably seeking to engage his like in battle? Or is he to be treated as a common criminal and be provided with a defense attorney? Or is he to be fought as he fights? Here is a clip from the movie Breaker Morant – it tells the story of three Australian officers being charged with murder for shooting out of hand what amounted to captured terrorists during the Boer War:

Most of the laws of war we use today were in effect at the time – but there is a difference: the defense the officers used was that they were obeying orders. Here’s the scene where the defense sums up:

And, of course, the standard was created in the post-WWII trials of the Nazis that obeying orders is no defense. Soldiers are to refuse to obey any order of a criminal nature – and, indeed, this has been written into American law and into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But, still, what to do with an enemy who has departed entirely from the rules of war?

If a terrorist is planning on setting bombs in a series of shopping malls, what rule are we to use in stopping him from doing it? To be sure, if we can just arrest him and send him to jail, that is fine. But suppose we can’t? And even if we can arrest the particular terrorists planning the bomb-setting, what of their masters in a foreign land? And what of the government which allows them to operate in their territory? A further example – a terrorist group is using an active hospital as a base for their operations, what rule of war are we to use in getting after them? Kindly ask them to leave? Bomb the hospital? Suppose we decide in such cases that it is legitimate to bomb a hospital but we, being human, bomb the wrong hospital and kill hundreds of civilians – is that a war crime? Bring up the pilots on charges of murder?

We all know we must not become just like the enemy – but it seems to be that to become like the enemy would be to start hiding our military forces behind civilians and to eschew entirely attacking the enemy but, instead, go in search of family and friends and killing them out of hand. That would be acting like the enemy – but fighting the enemy without let or hindrance even though he is hiding behind civilians would not, in my view, be a crime…and if in the heat and pressure of battle where our troops are in a shooting gallery where who is the enemy and who the noncombatant is unclear, then it still would not be a crime if some of our troops did some things which in cool hindsight were wrong.

We are faced with a ruthless enemy and we have our choice – fight or quit. I don’t think that quitting is an actual option because they are determined to get after us regardless of what we do. But, still, if one wants to believe that if we stop, they’ll stop then that can be tried. On the other hand, however, if we decide to fight then while obeying all the rules of war, we still have to understand that an enemy departing from the rules will have to pay a high price for his actions…and those shielding the enemy while he violates the rules have to know that cooperating, even involuntarily, with the enemy is the worse option than resisting enemy pressure (in other words, the guy allowing his house to be used as a staging area for terrorists must become convinced that it is better to risk the wrath of the terrorists than to risk our wrath should we find out his house is a staging area).

War is a nasty, dirty business and no one comes out of it with completely clean hands. To take a human life is always a terrible thing and we should do our best to find ways to solve our problems without the spilling of blood. But the nature of humanity dictates that there will always come people who desire to obtain things by killing. It doesn’t really matter what particular thing it is they are trying for – the fact that they are willing to kill to get it is all that matters. And each enemy who arises has to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible. If someone wants to raise a conventional army to fight us and is willing to spare, as far as possible, all civilians then that, indeed, is how we should fight them…but if someone is taking to the hidden bomb in a school or the gunmen in an airport, then other means will be necessary to convince such an enemy that fighting is a losing proposition.

Turns Out We Can’t Beat the Russians

Mark Noonan51 Comments

Anyone thinking that Obama might find his backbone and actually stand up to Putin’s imperialism better think again:

“Our question was: Would NATO be able to defend those countries {the Baltic states}?” Ochmanek recalls.

The results were dispiriting. Given the recent reductions in the defense budgets of NATO member countries and American pullback from the region, Ochmanek says the blue team was outnumbered 2-to-1 in terms of manpower, even if all the U.S. and NATO troops stationed in Europe were dispatched to the Baltics — including the 82nd Airborne, which is supposed to be ready to go on 24 hours’ notice and is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

“We just don’t have those forces in Europe,” Ochmanek explains. Then there’s the fact that the Russians have the world’s best surface-to-air missiles and are not afraid to use heavy artillery.

After eight hours of gaming out various scenarios, the blue team went home depressed. “The conclusion,” Ochmanek says, “was that we are unable to defend the Baltics.”

The active Russian Army is stated at 395,000 – Poland, the closest nation with a large military force has 120,000 troops. Germany, next closest, has just under 61,000. The French army, a little further off, has 115,000. That works out to 99,000 less than the Russian army, when you combine them all together. Small wonder that even with the US Army in Europe augmented by the 82nd Airborne that we can’t get the job done – and this probably supposes that we could get the French and Germans to go along (getting the Poles to go along wouldn’t be difficult).

The thing about an army is that you just never know when you’re going to need one – which is why you’re supposed to keep a top-notch one in being at all times, even when it doesn’t seem particularly necessary. For decades now the Europeans have continually reduced the size of their military force – they got it into their heads that there would never be another major European war. Now we’ve got the Russian bear trying to rebuild the Russian Empire and no one has an army in being capable of stopping the Russians. The only way to actually stop Putin if, say, he decided to occupy Estonia is to declare war on Russia, build up a massive army, and then invade. This is not something which is going to recommend itself to European and American politicians.

Welcome back to the real world, folks. We’re in quite a pickle, right now. Not only does no one respect of fear us, but we simply do not have the military power to make anyone respect or fear us. On the other hand, our military is now almost perfectly politically correct – with only a few Marines still to be forced into line. Great, huh?