SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
In the future, Militia
training will be universal. Small harms
will be locked up at home in healthy communities; they’ll be guarded in
neighborhood armories wherever recent hostilities have flared.
Every healthy teenager
will receive some military training.
It’ll be field medicine and man-pack logistics for conscientious
objectors. These apprentice warriors
will be called Ephebes (EFEEBS,
from the Greek for a youngster approaching manhood). Equivalents in local dialect are
acceptable, as will be the expression ‘apprentice warrior’ or its local
equivalent. This training will take two or three months during a few high school
summer camps, a week every few months for the following two or three years, and
as long and frequently thereafter as local elections and voluntary
membership permit.
I doubt that the
right to vote should be tied to any military obligation. This is the Swiss model: you can’t vote
unless you’ve served in the military.
This is an idea Learners should debate. Voluntary
social work – like Vista and the Peace Corps – should remain completely
separate from any military obligation.
PeaceWorld will rely on much more volunteer service.
It is not so much
a question of keeping Church and State separate—or School and State
separate, for that matter. Religion is
and has always been an integral part of government. Weapon functions and institutions should
become vestigial, while peace functions take the fore once again. We
should separate killing from life-support functions, and the functions of
Government from those of Administration.
Under these separations of power, local Administrations will retain
control over peace preservation functions including local Militias.
The World Militia
will require small cadres of full-time military instructors, combat
specialists and tactical leaders: Militia Condottieri (mercenaries).
Unlike the Swiss
Militia whose officer corps militarized the Swiss upper class, and unlike
Israeli officer candidates, a majority of who hail from certain schools
and kibbutzim, this professional soldiery should have no
clustered source of recruitment, no significant political affiliations and no
other job ties.
Condottieri force levels should remain dangerously low. Retention will be merit-based on a
strictly competitive basis. Condottieri will carry out their duties under intense
political scrutiny. It shall be
customary for them to accept worldwide reassignment at random intervals and for
no apparent reason. Their military
honor will be directly tied to their loyalty to judicial decisions rendered by
the World Court. They will consider any
deviation from those decisions by their professional peers as high treason and
punish them accordingly.
Coast Guards, customs and border guard units will be recruited from local Militias. Defense and law enforcement responsibilities will only devolve to World Court troops if local Militias and Constabularies become too corrupt to enforce the peace and global regulations. For example: crooked law enforcement and over-quota fishing.
If local Militias become too polarized to perform their assigned duties, World Court military police will relieve them, backed by as many World Court commandos and mechanized units as necessary. Once peace is reestablished, the training of native Militias will be recycled to enforce an even-handed peace. They will gradually replace these confederate military police. Wherever possible, local World Militias will recruit local militants.
This will work fine, as long as two rules remain in
force:
·
Local Militia and its militants must not polarize along ethnic,
religious and other Prism
lines without immediate intervention; and
·
The 1-800-MY-RIGHTS telephone number doesn’t ring incessantly from that
region without immediate intervention.
World Court units
will only intervene in local affairs with tremendous reluctance. Such interventions will cost local
Administrations exorbitant tax levies after the fact. Proceeds will finance future World Court
interventions. The World Court will defer these levies if they threaten to induce
‘Weimar Germany’ outcomes: if they increase popular resentment instead of
reducing it. Instead, a Marshall
Plan will be drawn up and honored according to local needs—the way we execute
environmental protection plans these days.
Incurably warlike
regions will be isolated and ‘frozen out’ of global commerce until most locals
change their minds. Many new ways will
have to be found to attack a warlike leadership directly without harming the mass
of people they hold hostage. Neighboring
Militias will see to on-the-ground defense.
World Court strike forces will see to strategic deterrence.
These Prism organizations should shrink over
time. The United States is rich because
its state borders are kept permeable, because its career military are
compartmentalized away from politics and because government regulations are
kept to a minimum under strong courts.
At least that’s the theory.
During the first
decades of Learner apprenticeship, elite mobile strike forces will be
maintained for strategic deployment worldwide.
Units of this World Court
Foreign Legion might incorporate a mixed vertical assault/mechanized corps with
organic air support per continent, a naval task force for each of the
seven seas, plus command, transport and logistics assets. World
Court troops will make up a peace-making Foreign Legion.
Its tough
Regulars will train full-time to apply selective violence and endure brutal casualties
required to separate contenders in civil wars. Since
they will consist of international expatriates mixed randomly together, very
little political influence will be devoted to keeping them out of trouble or
withdrawing them once casualties escalate.
Unlike national troops whose families and supporters might vote
down excessive casualties, no aggressor will be able to count on attrition
losses to assure that these Legionnaires would be withdrawn by popular global
opinion. On the contrary, the more casualties, the more tenacious the Legion’s
hold and the greater its reinforcement—by tradition. A little like the Gypsies and Masai. You would never dare harm a few of them,
because if you did so, a hundred times more would come looking for you and to
retrieve their dead.
Shielded by this
Legion from more powerful neighbors, minorities will set their own
political agendas and establish local Militias to enforce moderation against
all comers. Militia recruitment will reach across every prismatic barrier. Whenever possible, local leaders will join
the Militia, both to uphold Learner ideals and to defend their own interests
and those of their people.
After intense
local fighting ends with a cease-fire, its fiercest combatants will be granted
provisional amnesty. This,
providing they agree to join the Foreign Legion for long postings to the other
side of the planet. They may not return to their homeland until
they’ve become grizzled retirees. Once
they begin returning home, enjoying their pensions and horrific war
stories that would stand rapt ephebes’ hairs on end, once this happens
dependably, this system will become as self-perpetuating as that of Nepalese
Gurkha villages, but planetwide.
·
Velites : local militia
·
Hastati : Legion
·
Triari : on pension or condottieri
Short home leaves
may be permitted earlier – no longer than a few days and carefully watched – to
go home to see the family, and then extending longer and more freely for senior
legionaries. Perhaps as rewards for
valor and conspicuous merit at new postings? Perhaps.
The World
Government will limit its other interventions to disaster relief through
dedicated nongovernmental agencies.
Reconstruction and disaster relief functions will be independent of the
military chain of command and superior to it. The military will only serve as bodyguards
and security advisors, not governors. Otherwise, local Administrations and local
citizens will handle every local matter.
World Court military intervention will entail massive tax levies
once the affected region recovers, going to pay for future interventions and
disaster relief elsewhere.
The World Court
Foreign Legion will rely on voluntary international recruitment. Normally, these Legionnaires will not serve
as occupation troops. When not
deployed or on maneuvers, they’ll occupy small, isolated barracks. Foreign Legion garrisons will remain as small
as possible, so small they can only augment local militias. Without reinforcement, they’ll be too weak to
contradict local Law.
Government and
Administrative objectives will be thoroughly negotiated before each new
operation. Periodically, local light
infantry Militias and mechanized Foreign Legion ‘stiffeners’ will coordinate
their training during combined-arms maneuvers.
These full-scale maneuvers may serve as not-too-subtle warnings of
impending regional interventions in earnest.
No Foreign
Legion unit should contain too many personnel from the same region. Paul Lackman mentions that Russia mixes troops of diverse
origins so its units can’t cohere along ethnic lines (with the exception of
Russian Slavs who remain dominant). The
U.S. Regular Army does the same thing.
Gracelessly, it jumbles troops together without regard to their
geographic origin. On the other hand, the American National
Guard and other foreign armies recruit entire units from geographic hubs. Local recruitment promotes high unit
integrity and morale, since participants must answer to their home communities.
Only Foreign Legion troops will suffer from these restrictions. Militia units will recruit, train and deploy locally if necessary. Without World Court support, they will lack sufficient logistics assets to deploy far field and enough heavy weaponry to prevail against light infantry of similar quality.
It’s amazing to civilians, how many elite commandos can be killed or pinned indefinitely by a few well-emplaced machine guns – even manned by relative amateurs – in the absence of pin-point targeting by heavy weapons supporting the attack. Such assaults never work out as well as in Hollywood fantasies.
Also, heavy
casualties will be unmistakable among these units, since they originate from
the same locality. Local families will
soon determine that many of their sons and husbands had fallen at the
same time. Fine. Learners do not need to hide the horror of
heavy military casualties.
No nation-state
will maintain strategic military units beyond a squadron of mobile SWAT
police, local human rights investigators and a ceremonial guard unit: the
Continental Police.
There will be no
international or inter-service military rivalry between members of this Foreign
Legion, beyond the adolescent posturing common among warriors. The
World Court will administer the Foreign Legion as its unified enforcement
branch. A World Court Inspectorate will
administer the World Militia globally.
Recruitment to the Foreign Legion will be based on basic training
by Militia units planet-wide and selection from them. Militia Condottieri will be drawn from the pick of Foreign Legionnaires.
The World Court will regulate all weapons manufacture. No one continent will retain a balanced weapons industry or a complete weapons inventory. Weapon components will be manufactured separately and then assembled on delivery to units. Weapon factories will be established in the poorest regions of the Earth.
All remaining
nuclear forces, Air and Naval Fleets, and surplus air/land battle
equipment should be mothballed under World Court supervision and then
scrapped. Under a reasonable planetary
government, they would serve no useful purpose—just as radioactive arsenals
have served nothing but mythic purposes.
Stop poisoning
the anthrosphere with war toxins; stop lobotomizing scientific research by
restricting it to military research—then notice how much more productive we
will become, once those poisons and limitations have been withdrawn or
significantly reduced. That would do the
trick; that will make us wiser.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under
development)