Friends are Electric

I consider myself to be a pacifist by nature. I do not consider violence to be an acceptable way to respond to problems. I think that it should be our goal to be able to abolish the apparatus of state violence. However, we do not live in a world where this is an acceptable course of action. So, given that we must have a military for the foreseeable future, we should seek to use it in the most effective way possible.

It goes without saying that the primary use of a military force is self defence. Here I mean true self defence of a reactionary nature. The value of preventative war is a very interesting and important question but not within the scope I intend to present here. However, everything that follows would apply to the notion of preventive war as well as other forms of violence. Beyond pure self defence, the use of our military should be in serving important values, for example those guaranteed in the universal declaration of human rights. While this is not always the outcome, I would argue that it is the intention of peacekeeping missions. We are, however, not currently engaging in peace keeping. We are engaging in an occupation. Again, I am not going to get into the ethics of our participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, I’m just going to take it as a given that we are there for some reason.

So the use of military force aught to have stated purpose. If there is a purpose then there can be a `win’ condition. Put simply, the purpose of the armed forces is to win wars. Everything said until now is elaboration on this point. By logical extension, if the armed forces are not winning wars then they are not surviving their purpose to society. If they are winning wars in an ineffective way then they are also failing their purpose.

The First World War provides an excellent example of winning a war in an extremely ineffective way. It was a very blunt strategy, very brutish and simple. Send waves and waves of men until either we or the opponent could send no more. The first side to run out of troops would be defeated, although the cost to the winning side would be huge as well. Since we were on the side with a larger population, we were victorious. Every general, every strategist of the day aught to have been banished for such behaviour. They forgot that their purpose was to win wars as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead their ineptitude lead to a four year bloodbath. They failed at their jobs utterly.

The Second World War was hardly better, however it does provide some examples of war being fought properly. The German invasion of France is an example of war being fought properly, it was quick and decisive. The rest of the war, however, was largely fought with the same blunt stupidity as the First World War. For example, despite outnumbering the Germans, out-gunning them and enjoying air superiority, the march from Normandy to Berlin took nearly a whole year, and even then we never made it because the USSR beat us to it.

To mention Vietnam here beyond name is unnecessary. The most advanced and heavily armed force in the world was defeated by a small third world country because the Americans lacked strategy. Their military failed in their most basic purpose, to win wars.

Iraq was the same story, although they have managed to pull off some concession victory after nearly a decade. Even if victory was eventually achieved, it was not effective and was still a failure. Afghanistan is no better.

The Americans did pull off something in Iraq. We won the world wars. These are all cases of extremely blunt strategy pulling through. This is, however, not an endorsement of this bluntness. Bluntness, which is really stupidity, is a luxury that the huge can rely on. The Allies of the world wars were on the larger side so they could survive a pyrrhic victory. The Americans in Iraq, or indeed Vietnam, could provide enough bodies to make the opponent give up under the crushing weight of their numbers. A case can be made that every empire has won its hegemony through these blunt tactics.

We in Canada are not a superpower. We are a middle power. We are fortunate enough to lack the luxury of hugeness. However, this poses a major problem when we get caught up in superpower wars of attrition. We lack the manpower, the equipment and the financial resources to utilize this strategy. To be completely politically incorrect about the situation (and please ignore the initial kneejerk reaction you will have at the next sentence) we should be mimicking the tactics of the Taleban rather than the Americans in Afghanistan. This is not to say we should have our troops commit suicide attacks, which is unethical and ineffective. Nor is it suggesting that we should plant IEDs, the removal of landmines from most of the armies of the world was a positive step not to be repealed. But the Taleban, and indeed most people fighting in resistance movements across the world, are the ones actually capable of winning wars, although sometimes superpowers can bleed them into submission.

With all this in mind, how do we react when the Conservative government decides to spend billions of dollars on stealth fighters? Who are we going to use such fighters against? The justification is to defend our Arctic sovereignty. If the interest is in protecting the Canadian Arctic then perhaps a few fighters are appropriate. I’d favour a solution involving expanding the Ranger program, essentially spending some of the money on snowmobiles, which are much cheaper than fighter aircraft, and hiring otherwise unemployed residents of the territories. This would provide a Canadian presence in the Arctic at the same time as building the idea of Canada and goodwill towards the country with the residents of the region.

So who are we to use these aircraft against? I have no evidence for it in any way, but I am reminded of something John Ralston Saul wrote on a similar topic. His argument was that we are not capable of winning the wars we actually fight because we are too busy planning to fight the Soviet Union in Europe. I think that the government is purchasing these aircraft to fight the Soviet threat.

Soviet threat? How can that be, there has been no USSR for two decades? But that is the point. Although they might not realize it, and I would hardly blame someone who grew up and came of age at the height of the cold war for having the cold war mindset as second nature even now, I think that our leaders, both civilian and military, are still preparing for the ground war of World War Three, perhaps out of some intellectual equivalent of muscle memory.

Fighter aircraft are tremendously blunt. They are excellent for targeting conventional armies with conventional supply lines and conventional defences. They fail utterly when the enemy, their equipment and their resources are just not there. They are not useful for the wars we find ourselves in. A telling example of their uselessness in these types of wars is how frequently wedding parties are mistaken for enemy fighters. I’m sure that from the air its a reasonable mistake to make, but few things are going to sour relations with the people we are attempting to help more quickly than killing people on their wedding day.

So what, then, should we do? Its a lot easier to criticize than it is to work to improve a situation. In that regard I fail at the follow through. I know that the type of armed forces we have had for a century is incapable of fighting and winning the wars we will find ourselves in. I know that this either means we get used to failure, we refuse to participate or we adapt. We will not get used to failure as quickly enough political parties will realize that becoming involved in a losing situation will result in their loss at the poles. I cannot accept refusal to participate in the defence of human rights, although this is itself a topic for another day. This leaves adaptation.

Adoption will result in much less certainty. It will result in a decrease in top-down command, in command from the home front. To fight effectively we must be ready and able to take advantage of slight changes in the situation quickly and effectively. This requires training in recognizing these situations and in what reaction is most appropriate. It requires risk taking, which is by definition risking lives. An air war is a low body count war (for the air superiority side) but it is a lost war, victory does not come without risk and loss of life. By the book training cannot cover these topics, only exercises and war games, as well as front line experience, can create the intuition required to be victorious in this type of conflict.

As I said at the opening, I do not wish to have a military. But to achieve such an idealistic goal, if it is possible to achieve, the world must be made ready. Violence is a poor substitute for diplomacy, but sometimes it seems that it is needed to make diplomacy work. Being realistic about the existence of the Canadian armed forces means that it must be an effective force, not a clumsy one. To serve Canadians, which is their purpose, they must be prepared to win the conflicts which they are placed in. Since every conflict since the Second World War has been a guerilla war to an extend, perhaps it is time that we accepted this reality, stopped calling our adversaries cowardly for refusing to engage us on our terms, and put a real effort into achieving victory.