"
From Parameters, Summer 1994, pp. 16-26.
The soldiers of the United States Army are brilliantly
prepared to defeat other soldiers.
(Isn't that the soldiers' job? To be prepared to fight other soldiers?)
Unfortunately, the enemies we are likely
to face through the rest of this decade and beyond will not be "soldiers,"
with the disciplined modernity (like Waco? like My Lai? official army approved massacres) that term conveys in Euro-America, but "warriors"--erratic
primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake
in civil order. Unlike soldiers, warriors do not play by our rules, do
not respect treaties, (and the United States government does? Just ask any American Indian Nation about treaties) and do not obey orders they do not like.
If they are NOT soldiers, whose orders should they obey? The Army's Orders? or is it the same as the President of the United States and Congress do not obey the laws of the United States?
Warriors
have always been around, but with the rise of professional soldieries their
importance was eclipsed. Now, thanks to a unique confluence of breaking
empire, overcultivated Western consciences, and a worldwide cultural crisis,[1]
the warrior is back, as brutal as ever and distinctly better-armed.
An overcultivated Western conscience... Western society.. the mainstay in the peoples' rights to defend their human rights and freedoms.. one which has a strong belief in rights and personal freedoms..one who fails to accept a slave mentality
The primary function of any civilization is to restrain human excess,
(And just what is human excess? babies? or freedoms? The next Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army wants to 'limit freedoms'{G.W.Bush Jr.})
and even Slavic socialism served a civilizing mission in this regard.
Slavic Socialism.. isn't that the same as Soviet Communism! The U.S. Army is on record as supporting socialism in the Slavic (Stalinic) form
But
as the restraints of contemporary civilization recede and noncompetitive
cultures fracture, victim-states often do not have the forces, and the
self-emasculated West does not possess the will, to control the new warrior
class arising in so many disparate parts of the world.
Self-emasculated West? ... the truth of the matter is that the idiots in the White House and Congress have over 130 years continually emasculated the U.S. citizen from his human rights, through endless regulations, destroying the nation with corporate powers, and finally attempting to disarm the citizens.
We have entered
an age in which entire nations are subject to dispossession, starvation,
rape, and murder on a scale approaching genocide--not at the hands of a
conquering foreign power but under the guns of their neighbors.
This is what we have been saying about the likes of Clinton and Bush. But the U.S. Army ignores these criminals. They would prefer to assist the ATF & FBI in genociding over a hundred men, women, and children at Waco, Texas
Paramilitary
warriors--thugs whose talent for violence blossoms in civil war--defy legitimate
governments and increasingly end up leading governments they have overturned.
Read what he is saying here. They are going after what they have defined as paramilitary... i.e. the citizen militias that were guaranteed in the United States Constitution
This is a new age of warlords, from Somalia to Myanmar/Burma, from Afghanistan
to Yugoslavia. In Georgia an ex-convict has become a kingmaker, and in
Azerbaijan a warlord who marched on the capitol with a handful of wheezing
armored vehicles became prime minister. In Chechnya, on the northern slopes
of the Caucasus, a renegade general carved out the world's first state
run entirely by gangsters--not the figurative gangsters of high Stalinism,
but genuine black marketeers, murderers, drug dealers, and pimps.[2] Their
warriors are the source of power for these chieftains, and the will of
the populace, enervated and fickle, matters little when it matters at all.
The U.S. Army is NOT paying attention.... They have just described the United States government for the past 140 years. This nation, the United States is run by gangsters, criminals, bribe-takers, embezzlers, drug pushers (like Bush), liars, rapists, adulterers, perjurers, murderers, and pimps (Clinton). What is the difference between a figurative gangster and a genuine one? You have a genuine one in the White House! Pay attention Army.. the will of the populace of the United States matters little if it matters at all.
This article will briefly consider who these new warriors are in terms
of their social and psychological origins, and will examine the environment
in which they operate. The objective is to provide an intellectual passport
into the warrior's sullen world for US military officers and defense analysts,
who, given their cultural and professional conditioning, would much rather
deal with more conventional threats. This is an alert message from a very
dark place.
Yes and the dark place is Army headquarters and the Pentagon. It would appear that the U.S. Army wants to be the kingmakers of the world and determine who will sit upon the thrones.
Most warriors emerge from four social pools which
exist in some form in all significant cultures. These pools produce warriors
who differ in their individual implacability and redeemability. This differentiation
is key to understanding warriors--who outwardly may appear identical to
one another--and helps identify human centers of gravity within warrior
bands or movements.
By what right and by whose authority does the United States Army have any business in these non-soldier, non-military problems? The U.S. Army is only supposed to be active in a 'real' state of war... you know a lawfully declared one, where an enemy has threatened the lands and peoples of the United States. No constitution or law or doctrine has appointed the U.S. Army these responsibilities.
|
THE SOLDIER |
THE WARRIOR |
| Sacrifice | Spoils |
| Disciplined | Semi or undisciplined |
| Organizational orientation | Individualist |
| Skills focus on defeating other soldiers | Skills focus directly on violence |
| Allegiance to state | Allegiance to charismatic figure, cause, or paymaster |
| Recognized legal status | Outside the law |
| "Restorer of order" | "Destroyer of order" |
First-pool warriors come, as they always have, from the underclass (although
their leaders often have fallen from the upper registers of society).
Now the U.S. Army is the determiner of a caste system. Don't fall into the wrong class!
The
archetype of the new warrior class is a male who has no stake in peace,
a loser with little education, no legal earning power, no abiding attractiveness
to women,[3] and no future.
Well the first two describe Bush Jr. and the rest describe Clinton. Okay Army -- go get em! Bush has a degree but no education. This author (Army brat?) better realize that most of the Army during WW1 and WW2 would be considered today as having little education, with the average male only attaining, with difficulty the eighth grade level, when they entered the wars.
With gun in hand and the spittle of nationalist
ideology dripping from his mouth, today's warrior murders those who once
slighted him, seizes the women who avoided him, and plunders that which
he would never otherwise have possessed.
Yep.. the Army has described their own Commander in Chief!
Initially, the totemic effect
of a uniform, however shabby and incomplete,[4] and the half-understood
rhetoric of a cause lend him a notion of personal dignity he never sensed
before, but his dedication to the cause is rarely as enduring as his taste
for spoils. He will, however, cling to his empowering military garb. For
the new warrior class, many of whose members possess no skills marketable
in peace, the end of fighting means the end of the good times.
And what is a soldier without his uniform and weaponry? ... a citizen? The United States Army still clings to their empowering garb. We're sure that butchering innocent people at My Lai, is a marketable skill in a time of peace
The longer the fighting continues, the more irredeemable this warrior
becomes. And as society's preparatory structures such as schools, formal
worship systems, communities, and families are disrupted, young males who
might otherwise have led productive lives are drawn into the warrior milieu.
These form a second pool. For these boys and young men, deprived of education
and orientation, the company of warriors provides a powerful behavioral
framework.
Like the soldiers of Vietnam, yanked out of their peaceful lives, studying for productive futures, to be marred and ruined for life by a war that did not exist on the law books? simply at the whim of the corporations and bankers?
Although some second-pool warriors can ultimately be gathered
back into society, the average warrior who takes up a Kalashnikov at age
13 is probably not going to settle down to finish out his secondary school
education ten years later without a powerful incentive.
The third pool of warriordom consists of the patriots.
Patriots... You have now been declared warriors... i.e. enemies of the state, hence arch-enemies of the U.S. Army...
These may be
men who fight out of strong belief, either in ethnic, religious, or national
superiority or endangerment, or those who have suffered a personal loss
in the course of a conflict that motivates them to take up arms.
Again an excellent definition of the militiamen that took up arms to free America from Britain. (circa 1776)
Although
these warriors are the easiest to reintegrate into civil structures--especially
if their experience of violence is relatively brief--some of these men,
too, will develop a taste for blood and war's profits.
Part of this statement could be true. Haven't you noticed the soldiers of World War 2, being involved in building weapons of war, transporting them, selling them, and going to the pork barrel for funds. They have run MacDonald-Douglass, Lockheed, etc. President Bush has made countless millions in arms trafficking.
These warriors are
the most individualized psychologically, and their redeemability will depend
on character, cultural context, and the depth of any personal loss, as
well as on standard characteristics such as goal achievement in their conflict
and perceived postwar opportunities for jobs and other societal rewards.
The Vietnam vets returning home, facing unemployment was a perceived lack of opportunity? Vietnam vets personal losses such as arms, legs, eyes, .... And what was the Vietnam War's goal achievement? to lose, to die for a lost cause, an extended war only designed to bolster the U.S. econonmy and make the war barons richer.
Dispossessed, cashiered, or otherwise failed military men form the fourth
and most dangerous pool of warriors. Officers, NCOs, or just charismatic
privates who could not function in a traditional military environment,
these men bring other warriors the rudiments of the military art--just
enough to inspire faith and encourage folly in many cases, although the
fittest of these men become the warrior chieftains or warlords with whom
we must finally cope.
And perhaps they simply saw through the lies and hypocrisy, or the military mind brainwashing didn't "stick", or just couldn't put up with the bullshit, like this article
The greatest, although not the only, contemporary
source of military men who have degenerated into warriors is the former
Soviet Union. Whether veterans of Afghanistan or simply officers who lost
their positions in post-collapse cutbacks, Russian and other former-Soviet
military men currently serve as mercenaries or volunteers (often one and
the same thing) in the moral wasteland of Yugoslavia and on multiple sides
in conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union.
The U.S. Army is determing, militarily legislating morality? By what right or authority would this responsibility belong to the Army?
These warriors are especially
dangerous not only because their skills heighten the level of bloodshed,
but also because they provide a nucleus of internationally available mercenaries
for future conflicts.
Why doesn;t the U.S. Army put a stop to the mercenaries in the United States, who have proven 'heightened levels of bloodshed,' known as the ATF, FBI, CIA? These are government approved murdering mercenaries!
Given that most civil wars begin with the actions
of a small fraction of the population (as little as one percent might actively
participate in or support the initial violence),[5] (or possibly as a result of a tyrannical 'established-legitimate' government which is out of control and running amuk, ruining their own nation and people?) any rabid assembly
of militants with cash will be able to recruit mercenary forces with ease
and spark "tribal" strife that will make the brutality of Africa
in the 1960s seem like some sort of Quaker peaceable kingdom.
I thought those 'rabid assemblies' were wanting to end racism, apartheid, white masterhood, and control their own destiny without the interference of the United States, Britain, the U.N. etc.
Paradoxically, while the warrior seeks to hold society out of equilibrium
for his own profit, he thus prevents society from offering him any alternative
to the warrior life.
( isn't this the result of corporate power and takeover of all the planet's resources, leaving the humans with little to work with?)
In our century of massive postwar demobilizations,
most receiving governments retained sufficient structure to absorb and
assist their ex-soldiers. Helpfully, the soldiers of the great armies of
the West rarely tasted war's spoils as does the warrior; rather, soldiers
experienced war's sacrificial side.
That's what they thought at My Lai-- -the military sacrificed them all! -- and again at Waco...
But the broken states in which warriors
currently control the balance of power do not have the infrastructure to
receive veterans and help them rebuild their lives. In many cases, the
warrior's roots have been torn up and, since he is talented only at violence,
his loyalty has focused on his warlord, his band of fellow warriors, or,
simply, on himself.[6] Even should the miracle of peace descend on the
ruins of Yugoslavia, the survivor states will be unable to constructively
absorb all of the warriors who have fallen away from civilized norms--and
the warriors themselves often will have no real interest in being absorbed.
In the Caucasus and Afghanistan, in Nicaragua and Haiti, warriors without
wars will create problems for a generation.
Miracle of peace?.. They had no war until the U.S. ordered the U.N. to order NATO to send the U.S. troops in! Perhaps if the United States would quit meddling in the affairs of other nations, and let those nations work out their own differences, there might be peace. But with a Big Brother entity pointing the gun at them, there can be no peace... especially peace forced on them by a US military... that is not peace or freedom... that is oppression and control
In the centuries before the rise of modern professional armies, the European world often faced the problem of the warrior deprived of war. In the 16th century--another age of shattered belief systems--disbanded imperial armies spread syphilis and banditry across the continent, and the next century's Thirty Years War--waged largely by warriors and not by soldiers as we know them--saw the constant disbanding and reformation of armies, with the Soldateska growing ever more vicious, unruly, and merciless.[7] Arguably modern Europe's greatest trauma, the Thirty Years War formally ended in 1648, but its warriors continued to disrupt the continent until they found other wars in which to die, were hacked to death by vengeful peasants, or were hunted down like beasts by authorities who finally had caught their breath. Today's warriors have a tremendous advantage over their antique brethren in the struggle for survival, however: the West's pathetic, if endearing, concern for human life, even when that life belongs to a murderer of epic achievement.
For the US soldier, vaccinated with moral and behavioral
codes, the warrior is a formidable enemy.
Simple brainwashing was not enough, now the Army manipulates the moral and behavioral (DNA?) codes through vaccination of its soldiers -- to be what the Army wants and not what the soldier may have been thinking on his own.
Euro-American soldiers in general
learn a highly stylized, ritualized form of warfare, with both written
and customary rules.
Yes, this is the Lieber Code. It should also be remembered that the British were believers in the "ritual form of war" and they lost that war because the militiamen had been trained by great Indian warriors in 'non-ritual' fighitng... like sniping at red targets...
We are at our best fighting organized soldieries who
attempt a symmetrical response. But warriors respond asymmetrically, leaving
us in the role of redcoats marching into an Indian-dominated wilderness.
Despite the valiant and skilled performance of the US Army Rangers, our
most significant combat encounter in Mogadishu looks just like Braddock's
defeat--and Russian regulars were recently "Little Big Horned"
in Tajikistan by tribesmen who slipped across the Afghan border.
In other words, the US Army, in all its' ritual bravado', lost this 'illegal' battle to a few straggly warriors fightng for a cause... the cause the U.S. Army, being brainwashed, can never understand.
While the US Army could rapidly devastate any band of warriors on a battlefield, few warlords will be foolish enough to accept such a challenge. Warriors usually stand and fight only when they know or believe they have an overwhelming advantage. Instead, they snipe, ambush, mislead, and betray, attempting to fool the constrained soldiers confronting them into alienating the local population or allies, while otherwise simply hunkering down and trying to outlast the organized military forces pitted against them. US soldiers are unprepared for the absolute mercilessness of which modern warriors are capable, and are discouraged or forbidden by their civilian masters and their own customs from taking the kind of measures that might be effective against members of the warrior class.
The Army objects to being under 'civilian control'... They consider the Army as slaves to the civilian masters? Perhaps if there has been no threat to U.S. soils or people, the Army gurus should bring the soldiers back home, rather than risk their lives in battles of undeclared wars, under the politically correct term of 'hostilities.'The US experience with warriors in Somalia has not been a happy one, but the disastrous UN experience in Yugoslavia has been worse.[8] Imagining they can negotiate with governments to control warrior excesses, the United Nations and other well-intentioned organizations plead with the men-in-suits in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo to come to terms with one another. But the war in Bosnia and adjacent regions already has degenerated to a point where many local commanders obey only orders which flatter them. Should a peace treaty ever come to signature, the only way to make it work will be for those forces loyal to the central authorities to hunt down, disarm, and if necessary kill their former comrades-in-arms who refuse to comply with the peace terms. Even then, "freedom fighters," bandits, and terrorists will haunt the mountain passes and the urban alleys for years to come.
Now there is true freedom in action! Hunt down your comrades and kill them, because they refuse to bow down to foriegn power and foreign authority over their homeland and lives.On the West Bank of the Jordan and in Gaza, the newly legitimized Palestinian
authorities face formidable problems with two lost generations, unskilled
or de-skilled, whose heroes answer offers of dialog with terror and for
whom compromise appears equivalent to prostitution. Without the Intifada,
many Palestinians, from teenagers to the chronologically mature, have no
core rationale for their lives. At a virtually immeasurable cultural remove,
Irish Republican Army terrorists are heroes only until the counties of
Northern Ireland find peace. In Sri Lanka, many Tamil rebels will never
be able to return to productive lives in a settled society--nor will many
of the Khmer Rouge, Philippine communists, Angola's UNITA rebels, or any
of Africa's other clan-based warriors masquerading behind the rank and
trappings of true soldiers.[9]
Even in the United States, urban gang members
exhibit warrior traits and may be equally impossible to reconcile to civilized
order as it is generally valued in Euro-America.
He is telling you here folks.. this is his Army plan for the United States. These are not lawfully Army problems, but police problems. Why would the Army be discussing this if they were not planning their own attack against these people? Because these people disagree with the 'norm', the oppressive U.S. caste system, the fraudulent U.S. codes and regulations against the citizens of the U.S. under the Lieber Code, they are enemies of the state. Perhaps these warriors, like myself, see no redeeming value in a Federal system, so far removed from it orginal ideals.
For the warrior, peace
is the least-desirable state of affairs, and he is inclined to fight on
in the absence of a direct, credible threat to his life. As long as the
warrior believes he can survive on the outside of any new peace, he will
view a continuation of warfare through criminal means as the most attractive
alternative. And there is good reason for the warrior to decline to lay
down his arms--the most persistent and ruthless warriors ultimately receive
the best terms from struggling governments. Indeed, they sometimes manage
to overthrow those governments and seize power when the governments tumble
into crisis after failing to deliver fundamental welfare and security to
the population.[10]
In addition to those warriors whose educations--however rudimentary--were
interrupted, men who fall into the warrior class in adulthood often find
their new situation far more pleasant than the manual labor for subsistence
wages or chronic unemployment to which peace had condemned them. The warrior
milieu allows pathetic misfits to lead lives of waking fantasy and remarkable
liberties.
Remarkable liberties, --- like? liberty, peace, and justice for all sort of stuff? The Army's creation of a caste society based on education, is getting tiresome, when the education system in the United States is an experiment in failure and mind contol.
Unlike organized militaries, paramilitary bands do not adhere
to rigorous training schedules, and when they need privies, they simply
roust out the locals at gunpoint and tell them where to dig.
Like the U.S. Army and its confederates in criminal warfare, the ATF and FBI attempted to rout out the church at Waco
In the Yugoslav
ruins, for instance, many of the patriotic volunteers (identical, whether
Serb, Croat, or Bosnian Muslim) find that war gives them leisure, choice,
and recognition, as well as a camaraderie they never knew in the past.
The unemployed Lumpenproletarier from Mostar or Belgrade can suddenly
identify with the action-video heroes he and his comrades admire between
raids on villages where only women, children, and old men remain.
Just like Colin Powell, Oliver North, Dwight Eisenhower, Norman Schwartzkof, Alexander Haig, Theodore Roosevelt?
In Armenia, during a period of crisis for Nagorno-Karabakh, I encountered
a local volunteer who had dyed his uniform black and who proudly wore a
large homemade swastika on his breast pocket, even though his people had
suffered this century's first genocide.[11] The Russian mercenaries who
rent out their resentment over failed lives almost invariably seek to pattern
themselves after Hollywood heroes, and even Somalia's warlords adorn themselves
with Anglo nicknames such as "Jess" or "Morgan."[12]
And perhaps that is exactly what the U.S. has taught them through mind-manipulating television/movies .. with endless hours of violence in one form or another.
This transfer of misunderstood totems between cultures has a vastly more
powerful negative effect on our world than the accepted logic of human
behavior allows.
And who pray tell determines the 'accepted logic of human behavior'? The reptilian overlords who prey on societys' weaknesses? Who made the U.S. Army -- god over these determinations? -- thier civilian masters?
But, then, we have entered an age of passion and illogic,
an era of the rejection of "scientific" order. That is exactly
what the pandemic of nationalism and fundamentalism is about. We are in
an instinctive, intuitive phase of history, and such times demand common
symbols that lend identity and reduce the need for more intellectualized
forms of communication.
This is globalization under the New World Order, an order and government of the entire planet, by the elite.... where humans have no voice or say in the laws and or choice of rulers. Is this statement right out of Mein Kamp or the Protocols of the learned Elders of Zion? Which symbols would the Army determine best for us, since they object to civilian masters?
Once, warriors wore runic marks or crosses on their
tunics--today, they wear T-shirts with Madonna's image (it is almost too
obvious to observe that one madonna seems to be as good as another for
humanity).
And soldiers wear eagles and dragons and swatikas and sickles.... What's the point? It sounds like one and the same thing to me.
If there are two cultural artifacts in any given bunker in the
Bosnian hills, they are likely to be a blond nude tear-out and a picture
of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo.[13]
Also check the footlockers of every soldier in the Army for this offending literature. You may want to look under Commander in Chief Clinton's bed too. You better bust out the 'fresco' paintings in the Temple of Congress. The Army is to be the dictator of morals.... what a bunch of hypocrites.
Many warriors, guilty of unspeakable
crimes, develop such a histrionic self-image that they will drop just about
any task to pose for a journalist's camera--the photograph is a totem of
immortality in the warrior's belief system, which is why warriors will
sometimes take the apparently illogical step of allowing snapshots of their
atrocities. In Renaissance Europe (and Europe may soon find itself in need
of another renaissance), the typical Landsknecht wanted money, loot,
women, and drink. His modern counterpart also wants to be a star.[14]
And the U.S. Army will be there to enforce it.. bow down Europe to your new masters
Worldwide, the new warrior class already numbers in the millions.[15]
If the current trend toward national dissolution continues, by the end
of the century there may be more of these warriors than soldiers in armies
worthy of the name.
What trend? There is no trend in this world to remove the fences of cultures and nations, except in the demented minds of the elite power base, designing, and attempting to force, by force, a New World Order which they control. What they are really saying is that they want mindless, sheeple humans to be crippled from free thought and expression, without any hope of dissent against a totalitarian NWO!
While exact figures will never be available, and statistics-junkies
can quibble endlessly as to how many warriors are really out there, the
forest looks dark and ominous enough without counting each last tree. And
perhaps the worst news comes right out of Macbeth: the trees are
moving.
And perhaps these same 'warriors' simply want the US government and all governments out of their lives. The control being enforced is causing these 'warriors' to rise to the occasion. You know.. cream comes to the top.
Warrior-mercenaries always moved. Irishmen fought for France, Scots
for Sweden, and the Germans sold their unwashed swordarms to everyone from
Palermo to Poland. But today's improved travel means allow warriors deprived
of "their" war to fly or drive to the next promising misfortune.
Mujahedeen from Afghanistan, recently adored by Americans, have turned
up in Azerbaijan,[16] and Russian brawlers with military educations are
fighting in Bosnia, Croatia, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tajikistan, and
as enforcers for the internationalizing Russian mafia.
And U.S. Army mercenaries have moved from Korea, to Vietnam, to Grenada, to Somalia, to Panama, to Bosnia, to Iraq, to Columbia, to Nicaragua, to Yugoslavia, to Hawaii, to Rwanda, .. always on the move with one of the 'best paid' fighting forces in the world
One of the most
intriguing characters I've met in the Caucasus was an ethnic-Armenian citizen
of Lebanon who had been trained by the PLO in the Bekaa Valley to fight
Turkic Azeris in Karabagh. The Azeri warriors he faced have been trained
by entrepreneurial Russians, exasperated Turks, and reportedly by Iranians
and Israelis.[17]
(How does this differ from the U.S. Reagon/North, Army, CIA, assistance to the Sandinista overthrow of the government of Nicaragua?.. or the U.S. Army and CIA assisting Castro's overthrow of the Batista government of Cuba? or the outright overthrow of the Noreiga government of Panama, with the only reason to protect George Bush properties and interests?)
In Bosnia, mustered out Warsaw Pact soldiers serve in
the same loosely organized units as adventure-seeking Germans and Frenchmen.[18]
In this regard, it might be in the interests of surrounding countries to
let the fighting in Bosnia stew on: when that pot cools there is going
to be a lot of unattractive spillage. Yugoslavia and the wars on Russia's
crumpled frontiers are vast training grounds for the warriors who will
not be content without a conflict somewhere.
Wake up: It is the international bankers and the United States government that are not content without a conflict somewhere, along with the U.S. Army! The U.S. has been in a perpetual war and physical wars since 1861. If there is peace.. there is no need for soldiers. The Army has the self-sufficient reason of power and survival of existence based upon a 'conflict somewhere.'
While most warriors will attempt
to maintain their privileges of violence on their own territory, within
their own linguistic groups, the overall number of warriors is growing
so quickly that even a small percentage migrating from trouble spot to
trouble spot could present a destabilizing factor with which we have yet
to reckon.
The US Army will fight warriors far more often
than it fights soldiers in the future.
Remember now, warriors in their own definition are Patriots, Militias (para-militaries), nationalists, free thinkers...
This does not mean the Army should
not train to fight other organized militaries--they remain the most lethal,
although not the most frequent, threat.
Fighting soldier war, in DEFENCE, is the Army's only constitutional responsibility-- any thing else would be tyranny or treason against that constitution-- powers not expressly designated to the federal government
But it would be foolish not to
recognize and study the nasty little men who will haunt the brutal little
wars we will be called upon to fight within the career spans of virtually
every officer reading this text.[19]
Like David Koresh...
There are quite a few realistic steps we might take to gain a better
grasp on these inevitable, if unwanted, opponents. First, we should begin
to build an aggregate data base that is not rigidly compartmented by country
and region.
Globalism - under the auspices of a military contolled New World Order!
We may deploy to the country where Warlord X has carved out
his fief, or we may meet him or his warriors on the soil of a third-party
state.[20] The future may create allegiances and alliances which will confound
us, but if we start now to identify likely players, that drab, laborious,
critical labor may pay significant dividends one day. As a minimum, if
we start files on warrior chieftains now, we will have richer background
files on a number of eventual heads of state.
Like the chieftans of our illustrious past? Geronimo, who only wanted the lands promised, under the Indian Nation government that had sucessfully operated in peace for hundreds of years, until the U.S. Army started forcing them from their homes, destroying their lives, and breaking every treaty and promise ever made to them. Or the removal of the Cherokee from their ancient homelands to a virtual wasteland, until oil was discovered, and then the U.S. Federales, stole the lands back. And giving the white man the privilege to vote Kansas into statehood, when the Indian nations held the majority on their own homelands and were not allowed a voice, much less a vote.
Such a data base will be
a tough sell in a time of shrinking staffs and disappearing budgets, and
analysts, accustomed to the luxury of intellectual routine, will rebel
against its challenge and uncertainty.
The Officer's club is normally not considered 'intellectual routine.' Military torture or brainwashing may be
But in practical terms, studying
potential opponents of this nature now will pay off on two counts: first,
when we fight we will be more likely to know whom we're fighting; second,
the process of compiling such a data base will build human expertise in
this largely neglected field.[21]
We also need to struggle against our American tendency to focus on hardware
and bean-counting to attack the more difficult and subtle problems posed
by human behavior and regional history.
Human behavior is a problem to the U.S. Army.. if so then these goons of the Army are not humans
For instance, to begin to identify
the many fuses under the Caucasus powderkeg, you have to understand that
Christian Armenians, Muslim (and other) Kurds, and Arabs ally together
because of their mutual legacy of hatred toward Turks. The Israelis support
Turkic peoples because Arabs support the Christians (and because the Israelis
are drawn to Caspian oil). The Iranians see the Armenians as allies against
the Turks, but are torn because Azeri Turks are Shi'a Muslims.[22] And
the Russians want everybody out who doesn't "belong." Many of
these alignments surprise US planners and leaders because we don't study
the hard stuff. If electronic collection means can't acquire it, we pretend
we don't need it--until we find ourselves in downtown Mogadishu with everybody
shooting at us.
We need to commit more of our training time to warrior threats. But
first we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions. Do we have the
strength of will, as a military and as a nation, to defeat an enemy who
has nothing to lose? When we face warriors, we will often face men who
have acquired a taste for killing, who do not behave rationally according
to our definition of rationality, who are capable of atrocities that challenge
the descriptive powers of language, and who will sacrifice their own kind
in order to survive.
Is it not a U.S. military slogan that says it's men are "lean, mean, killing machines"?
We will face opponents for whom treachery is routine,
and they will not be impressed by tepid shows of force with restrictive
rules of engagement. Are we able to engage in and sustain the level of
sheer violence it can take to eradicate this kind of threat? To date, the
Somalia experience says "No."
Although there are nearly infinite variations, this type of threat generally
requires a two-track approach--an active campaign to win over the populace
coupled with irresistible violence directed against the warlord(s) and
the warriors.
It's called the 'yellow brick road' or road to the White House.. an active campaign to win over the populace, coupled with violence (see The Clinton Chronicles)
You cannot bargain or compromise with warriors. You cannot
"teach them a lesson" (unless you believe that Saddam Hussein
or General Aideed have learned anything worthwhile from our fecklessness
in the clinch). You either win or you lose. This kind of warfare is
a zero-sum game. And it takes guts to play.
Wait just a minute... Sadam Hussein is the President of one of those 'legitimate-established' governments and not a warrior under your own definitions.. and if anything he is a soldier or at minimum the commander in chief of the Iraqi military. The twisted words and concepts are propaganda, with the intent to deceive the readers. Why can't you bargain, compromise, reason, use common sense, and human logic? Is it because you do not want to see the other's ones side of the issue?-- rather to continue believing in the daily dribble from the overlords controlling the media, Pentagon, and White House....or is it simply because you are not human and cannot deal with humans on their advanced level?
Combatting warriors will force us to ask fundamental questions about
ourselves as well as about our national and individual identities and values.
I.e. -- globalism.. New World Order at the end of a soldiers gun
But the kind of warfare we are witnessing now and will see increasingly
in the future raises even more basic issues, challenging many of the assumptions
in which liberal Western culture indulges.
Those assumptions are called FREEDOM in the West
Yugoslavia alone raises issues
that have challenged philosophers and college freshmen since the first
professor faced a student. What is man's nature? Are we really the children
of Rousseau and of Benetton ads, waiting only for evil governments to collapse
so that our peaceable, cotton-candy natures can reveal themselves? Or are
we killing animals self-organized into the disciplinary structures of civilization
because the alternative is mutual, anarchic annihilation?
Perhaps if the United States was not fermenting and fertilizing all conflicts in the world today.. and since there has been no threat or danger to the United States people and lands.. there would be no need of the organized 'killing animals' we call the Army.... What happens if we 'give peace a chance?"
What of all that
self-hobbling rhetoric about the moral equivalency of all cultures?
Racist mentality.. not all men are created equal per the U.S. Army..
Isn't
it possible that a culture (or religion or form of government) that provides
a functional combination of individual and collective security with personal
liberties really does deserve to be taken more seriously than and emulated
above a culture that glorifies corruption, persecutes nonbelievers, lets
gunmen rule, and enslaves its women? Is all human life truly sacred, no
matter what crimes the individual or his collective may commit?
While this is nice rhetoric, the real question lies in WHO determines these things... The United States Federal Government? or the U.S. Army?... and who is to say that the Moslem/Islamic cultures, religions, and governments, which are closely bound together, and do not have the same personal liberties we have in America, which the U.S. Government is trying to take away, is any worse or better than the fraud based, corporatism in the United States. Why is it that one Arab, threatening to poison a water supply is a terrorist, but where actually poisoning entire rivers and cities by corporations, to make a buck, is not considered a terrorist act? (Love Canal, Eric Brockovich) If you think the United States does not persecute non-believers, then ask the dead and the survivors at Waco, and Ruby Ridge, citizens in the Republic of Texas movement and Lyndon LaRouche, or the people of Justice Township.... They simply believed in something other than what is 'government approved.' They were non-believers. And YES, you reptilian, human life is sacred...even against the tyranny you propose in this propaganda-like, socialist, fascist, U.S. Army doctrine.
It is incredible that the era of McCarthyism, let this one slip through the cracks. What you have read is pure tyranny against citizens who disagree with the established, 'approved' governments of the United Nations, and United States. You should be able to see through the incidious, dictatorial rhetoric and note the hypocrisy of the Army and the 'government'. It was the U.S. government and Army that assisted the 'warriors' against the established governments of Yugoslavia, Panama, Nicaragua, etc. You see you also have to have an approved US established government. The Iranians overthrew their 'monarchy,' who was in bed with the United States, and set up a popular Islamic government... the culture and government of the people. They did this against all odds, because of a cause. The cause was to get the United States out of their lands, their lives, their culture, and so on. They were tired of the Amercan Corporate RAPE of their nation, bringing with it, in their religious view, a culture of immorality.
This piece of literature was paid for by the taxpayer in the United States. The taxpayer, paying for his protection of freedoms, is actually paying for this fascist mentality, in favor of disposing of the freedoms, to establish order, militarily for the entire world.
While the author might be quick to rebut and say this was not intended to be against American Patriots. Who has given the U.S. Army that right to determine 'proper' and 'approved' patriotism. The U.S. Army is currently involved, with the U.S. Marines, in Urban War Training in the United States, and their exercises have been on U.S. cities. The title of their training is 'Urban Warrior Exploitation.' With this Army definition of warrior, the title starts to make sense. They intend to exploit those who they define as warriors.
{see article on the Marine Dragon Logo - Millennium Dragon 2000}
Tyranny is tyranny whether it is tyranny imposed militarily by the U.S. Army in nations around the world or whether it is imposed militarily by the U.S. Army, FBI, ATF, against the people of the United States. This literature is racist, setting up a caste system, in favor of the elite, (of which the Army seems to determine) It is Nazi-facism and Stalin-communism at the roots. It is propaganda, designed to sway other military leaders, into thinking that the Patriot is the war criminal.
This article was written by a career military officer. Career military officers have no real concept of life under freedom, since they have accepted the role of 'drones' and wake up expecting to do exactly what they are ordered to do by persons higher up in their internal military caste system. Their training is military, their education is military, their entertainment is military, their lives are military, and so on. Their lives are ordered and controlled entirely by an echelon higher in the caste. Many ex-military officers cannot relate, at first, to life in the real world. They have had no real world experiences in personal freedom on a daily level for many years. They do not always understand why people don't jump when their military type orders are barked out. They are taught (brainwashed) into believing the Army is always right in all its decisions.. and all it's decisions for their lives. These officers live in a totally controlled atmosphere, and it seems logical and normal to them, and they cannot understand why the rest of the world does not want the level of order and control experienced in the military. In their military ritualed lives, there is no room or allowance for acting on free thought. Such actions might get the officer demoted and pushed further down in the caste. They enjoy the pompous ritual and dress which the military affords them.
Until we are able to answer such questions confidently, the members of the new warrior class will simply laugh at us and keep on killing.
NOTES
1. See Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, 72 (Summer 1993), 22-49, for a brilliant, courageous analysis of this metastasizing cultural crisis. Huntington was subsequently attacked in print by whole tribes of pygmies, none of whom made a dent in his thesis. See also my article, "Vanity and the Bonfires of the 'isms," Parameters, 23 (Autumn 1993), 39-50.
2. For background on the Chechens, see Marie Bennigsen Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier (London: Hurst and Company, 1992), or, for a fascinating historical perspective, Sh. V. Megrelidze, Zakavkaze v Russko-Turetskoy Voine (Tbilisi: Metsniyereba, 1972). In fairness, it must be noted that the peoples of the North Caucasus generally view Djokar Dudayev's Grosny government in a markedly positive light, crediting him as a patriot and capable organizer, as was brought home to me by Dr. Zaur Dydymov, the energetic and talented Head of the Juridical Department of the Daghestan Republic Council of Ministers.
3. As a draft of this article circulated, nothing excited so much comment as this phrase. In general, the otherwise positive puritanism of the US officer corps and Foreign Service cripples our ability to understand some starkly fundamental human motivations. We fear the hurricane of biology nearly as much as we distrust intuition, barricade ourselves behind the quantifiable, and practice Jomini even as we quote poor translations of Clausewitz (US officers have no sense of Clausewitz's Promethean Romanticism but sense that there's nonetheless some sort of uncomfortable darkness about the guy). Confronted with "rape cultures," such as those of Slavic Orthodoxy or Sub-Saharan Africa, we recoil to concentrate on the local traits that bear a reassuring resemblance to our own behavioral structures--not on the crucial differences.
4. The government of Croatia chose the US Battle Dress Uniform for its military, not least for its evocative associations. A visit to the provisional military museum in downtown Zagreb provides a wealth of stimulating images, among them the World War II Croatian military's aping of Wehrmacht uniforms (Bundeswehr dress uniforms are still in vogue), and the 1990s look for front line and COMMZ, the all-American BDU. The reasons for such choices and tendential shifts are worth another article, at least.
5. For a classic study of how the bold, ruthless few drive the many,
see Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Volume One, Der Aufsteig (Frankfurt/M:
Verlag Ullstein, 1973). (see also the United States Federal Government) Also, the various writings of Sebastian Haffner
on the rise and appeal of National Socialism; Elias Canetti, Masse und
Macht; any serious work on the 1917 Bolshevik coup. (see also the United States Executive Orders)
Sociopolitical
earthquakes, from the Reformation to the American Revolution, rarely have
the active support of even one percent of the population in their
germinal phases. The majority of military coups in the non-competitive
world also involve far less than one percent of the population in their
mechanisms. For nonpolitical, nonmilitary examples of the tyranny of tiny,
self-absorbed minorities over the mass, consider the impoundment of own
cultural upper register by various activist groups. Intriguingly, current
research in the field of complexity offers a scientific demonstration of
how the activity of seemingly inconsequential variables can spark immeasurably
disproportionate reactions.
6. Especially for US Army officers and diplomats, this century's great forgotten revolution and civil war--the Mexican experience--merits study. An entry-level work is Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, The Great Rebellion, Mexico, 1905-1924 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). For a superb group portrait of "warriors," read Mariano Azuela's out-of-print novel, The Underdogs, which provides remarkable insights into how Mexico's revolutionary warriors degenerated.
7. Ricarda Huch, Der Dreissigjaehrige Krieg (Frankfurt/M: Insel Verlag, 1912, 1914). Although Huch--the only major German historian to defy Hitler--is stylistically out of fashion, this monumental work presents the richest picture ever encountered by this author of how extended wars infected with a religious (read also "nationalist or ethnic") bias can annihilate moral and social orders. No one who has read this work could fail to be haunted by its images. Also, Golo Mann, Wallenstein (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1971), or, for English-only readers, the classic, and classically restrained, study by C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London: Johnathan Cape, 1938). A study of the Thirty Years War is essential to understanding modern continental Europe, why Euro-Americans make war in such a stylized fashion, and why we are so nonplussed by events in former Yugoslavia.
8. Personal conversations with UNPROFOR and UNHCR officers in Croatia, January-February 1994.
9. For a striking, highly readable, and provocative account, see Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. Kaplan is willing to take physical and intellectual risks most American journalists shun. His book, Balkan Ghosts, offers a fine, quick introduction to a region we will still fail to understand after US troops have been there for a decade or two.
10. This happened in 1993, in Azerbaijan, with the Huseinov coup, although the primary coupmaker has been marginalized for now.
11. Many Armenian Fidayeen militiamen wear black uniforms with white Armenian crosses--a very different matter.
12. For the best reporting that came out of the US intervention in Somalia, see the series of articles by Sean Naylor, then by Katherine McIntire, in Army Times, between January and March 1993. These two reporters avoided the Mogadishu trap and went down-country to get the story the remainder of the media missed. Their work represents remarkable journalism from an often-overlooked source.
13. See the extensive 1992 and 1993 reporting by Der Spiegel, with its frequent character studies of the participants in the latest Balkan War.
14. Again, this is the sort of motivational issue with which US officers and analysts are ill-prepared to cope. Prisoners of rationalism at its most pedestrian, we are simply not alert to the "irrational" cultures and individuals covering most of this planet.
15. A country-by-country assessment of extant and potential warriors yields round numbers well into the millions--at the most conservative count. Not only are many African military establishments filled with warriors and not soldiers as we know them (see Kaplan again), but the pools of potential warriors in the former Soviet empire and in China reach into the tens of millions.
16. See Hurriyet, Istanbul, 23 December 1993, "Turkey to lift the arms embargo against Azerbaijan." Also, from the Armenian side, SNARK reports of 16 December 1993; Radio Yerevan (Azeri broadcast), 31 January 1994; Aragil Electronic News Bulletin, 10 February 1994, all Yerevan.
17. Multiple reports, Russian, Azeri, Armenian, and Turkish press.
18. Der Spiegel, as above.
19. For an incisive survey of the historical dimensions of the problem, see Great Powers And Little Wars, ed. A. Hamish Ion and E. J. Errington (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993).
20. A daintily ignored aspect of this is that ethnic cleansing works as a solution to ethno-national competition. For all the attendant misery, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and Czechoslovakia after 1945 brought regional stability, as did the post-World War I expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia. From the dispersion of the Jewish people by Roman legionnaires to the near-extermination of the Plains Indians, history is swollen with examples of brutal ethnic cleansing that ultimately accomplished its purpose--making the world safe for ethnocracy. Just because something is loathsome doesn't mean it isn't effective.
21. Given the fluid nature of the warrior problem, this may appear to be an impossible mission--yet, there is no practical alternative.
22. Magda Neiman, Armyanye (St. Petersburg: 1898); S. T. Zolyan and G. K. Mirzoyan, Nagorney Karabakh i Vokryg Nyevo (Yerevan: 1991); Artem Ohandjanian, Armenien (Wien: Boehlau, 1989); the classic Deutschland und Armenien, 1914-1918, Samlung Diplomatischer Aktenstuecke, assembled by Dr. Johannes Lepsius (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919); W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953); Christopher J. Walker, Armenia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980); Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993); Christopher J. Walker, ed., Armenia and Karabagh (London: Minority Rights Publications, 1991); Audrey L. Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks, (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Press, 1992). After all of the scholarly studies, this aspect of the Trans-Caucasian problem was best brought home to me by an Iranian diplomat who gave me a lift into Yerevan from the airport at one in the morning in the summer of 1992. He needed help carrying his diplomatic pouches. Delighted to speak with a US citizen, he repeatedly stressed the importance of "telling the Armenian story" in the West. In so much of the world, the political situation is vastly more complex than the vanity of the Department of State allows.
Major Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for evaluating emerging threats. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey, as well as various West European countries. He has published five books, as well as dozens of articles and essays on military and international concerns. This is his third article for Parameters.
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