SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
The only thing that will prevent them from wrecking the sum total is their military honor, which must be underscored by peace mythology above and beyond every other consideration. Learners must appeal foremost to warrior honor: the honor of my father, of every good warrior, which cleanses him of his filth. Good warriors will recognize honor automatically. They will defend it against any crazy deviant deprived of it, lethal as he may be. That honor will help create PeaceWorld and guard it fiercely from then on. Honor and Learning should become one.
It may
surprise you to stumble across the blueprint for a World Militia in LEARNERS,
a treatise on PeaceWorld. 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
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 in our streets, busses, political and
celebratory rallies—and even hallowed school hallways.
Learners,
this is a disgrace! Americans, Westerners and the whole world may
have accepted this travesty, but we should have known better and done better.
Some people confuse a world without war with a 100% nonviolent world. Perhaps they are correct. Then again, they may be mistaking a tool (non-violence: the most powerful one and therefore the most difficult one to handle properly) 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 tacked on to this chapter which is already too long.
Non-violence has just been rediscovered by mankind; it may take centuries to perfect it 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 religiously obeyed 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, the proposal 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 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 prolonged waiting periods could allow warfare to swallow us whole in the meantime.
LEARNERS assumes 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 it 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 the good now, and for 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.
I doubt that we could eliminate 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 would 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 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 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, avoid it preemptively
or buy our way out of it wherever it flares up.
Ideally, such
defensive dispositions would deter local Aggressor forces at their
inception stage, when their preliminary preparations would attract
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
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
leaders tend 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 number of innocent civilians, recruit their outraged
survivors into the next wave of enemies, get many of one’s own people killed
and then lose one’s case in the court of world opinion.
This lesson
was as much a tribute to the heroism of the Vietnamese and Chechen
people (and countless others) as to their tactics. The
Serbians used similar tactics to baffle Allied air power during the 1999 Kosovo
Campaign. They ejected local inhabitants
from their homes and occupied them with their own military hardware. Short of blowing up every empty house, Nato Allies could find nothing to shoot at. Likewise, Saddam Hussein’s shadistic
partisans adopted the same tactics in
It doesn’t
matter how ‘decadent’ we become in the future; military heroism will remain
constant among humans, regardless of their provenance, riches, religion and
ideology. Common warrior valor is innate
to humans in large numbers. Defeats in
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; therefore, 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 who are being supported by a distant authority (whether a tyrant 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,
because many civilians can flee from battles that rage locally and then shift
elsewhere or dally and spare other areas; whereas
guerilla warfare is so widespread that it is inescapable by most civilians. In addition, in typical situations, neither
side of a regular combat wishes to burden its troops’ discipline and morale by
encumbering them with civilians; it is easier for them 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 between these elite
units is rarely described in standard military histories whose authors are more
interested in better-documented, larger-scale maneuvers of regular Army
units. Even though the success or
failure of this skirmishing usually induces corresponding success or failure by
regular armies, regardless of other factors such as raw numbers or relative
superiority in equipment and training.
After all, it is only by maintaining contact that vital information may
be 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 sooner or later lose the conventional war.
World War I,
a few wars before and most since, differ from those prior in that regular
forces on both sides were responsible for conventional battle as well as
low-intensity warfare. For
example, conventional battles are evident in major offensives during World War
I, when tens of thousands of casualties and kilotons of munitions were expended
in a few days. Meanwhile, “low-level”
warfare 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 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 have an obvious disadvantage,
with their long history of abuse of local populations. 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 Clausewitzian 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, 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 ones. Insofar as possible, economic transactions
between his side’s combatants and the civilian population must be voluntary and
fully compensated, his combatants must be punished for every crime against
local civilians, and more of his resources must be spent on civilian
reconstruction and civil affairs than on military destruction. The sooner during the fight that he enforces
these requirements, the more likely he will be to succeed.
The U.S. Army
ignored this requirement during the Second Iraq War. It spent much more effort defeating the Iraqi
Army than rebuilding
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.
This rule applies just as much to a hungry trooper
who steals a peasant family’s only chicken as to a general who is running out
of good targets for his inexhaustible firepower, (indeed, much more so to the
latter.)
The military
discipline required to succeed at guerilla war is much more ferocious and difficult
to enforce than that required for conventional war. 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 them. They were 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; yet 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 the opponent be maximized, whatever the cost. Adherence to this standard formula guarantees failure and defeat in guerilla war. Adherence to its opposite – though paradoxical and extremely difficult – forecasts success. Whichever side, guerilla or conventional, kills, rips off and terrorizes more of the civilian population: that side will lose a guerilla war in the long run. The other side, no matter how much weaker militarily and unsuccessful in the near term, will win by default.
There is also 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 give up in 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 doctrinairy
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 absorb from scratch.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under
development)