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