The Vietnam War

Diatribes? I've got your diatribes! Here's a good one: The Vietnam War as a part of The Big Picture.

Strategic Forecasting, Inc., commonly known as Stratfor, puts out a free email "Geopolitical Intelligence Report" (which you should definitely sign up for). The report for March 20, 2007, Geopolitics and the U.S. Spoiling Attack, is particularly good:

• Sometimes the U.S. military needs to crush its enemies (á la Mexico in 1845, or Germany/Japan a century later) in order to defend the nation.
• At other times, however, a military "victory" is unnecessary -- and it's not even cost-effective! It is sufficient if the military spoils a planned attack by the enemy's military, by:
  • responding to a minor provocation with much more force than seems to be rationally called for;
    • that is, with a spoiling attack;
    • thus forcing the enemy into a counter-response, rather than allowing him to continue with the originally planned attack; but
  • selecting (see Selective Service System) only some military-age men for service, since drafting every young man (as in World War Two) would produce an Army that is both far too big -- and far too expensive -- for such spoiling attacks.

• It is of little consequence to the U.S. that the enemy military's counter-response results in a stalemate with -- or even in a defeat of -- the U.S. military. The enemy's originally planned attack will have gotten called off -- and at a relatively minor cost to the U.S. (both in blood and in treasure).
• The cost to the U.S. is "minor" in the sense that it is substantially less than what the expended blood and treasure would have been if the U.S. had:
  • waited for the originally planned attack, and
  • only then responded directly to it -- even if the response had resulted in a U.S. "victory".
• This is pretty much what U.S. policy has been from the Korean War to the present.
• This policy has been a huge success. The U.S. is far more wealthy and powerful than it was in 1950, both absolutely and relatively. Yes, it's "relatively more wealthy" even after making adjustments for the fact that most of Europe and East Asia of 1950 had been heavily bombed during World War Two, and the U.S. hadn't.

This is still probably not a good idea. There is an additional and oft-overlooked cost to the U.S. in adopting a long-term foreign policy of:

• fighting and losing
• a series of small "spoiling attack" wars
• with a relatively small Army.

This overlooked cost is over and above the mere and obvious cost of expended blood and treasure.

The overlooked cost is this:

• The many defeats in the fighting will be imputed to the fighters, and especially to the low-ranking fighters.

  • These fighters will have been selected disproportionately from the margins -- from the poor, the uneducated, the unmarried, and the non-fathers.

  • This imputation will be wrong -- the defeats should be imputed to the top leadership group, which planned them -- but it will happen anyway.

  • Moreover, this imputation will be made by pretty much all of those (less marginalized) people who didn't serve -- and there will be plenty of them.

  • The large size of this non-serving citizenry will further marginalize those who did serve. We're not talking 1946, here.

• There will be plenty of these (further marginalized) veterans:

  • The army will be only relatively small:

    • That is, in comparison with a mass army fighting an all-out war, like World War Two.

    • An army that trains for Major Regional Conflicts on the far side of the globe -- and that actually fights them with some regularity -- is still going to be a lot larger than an army whose mission is simply to deter aggression from its neighbors.

    • Compare the U.S. Army of 1995 with the U.S. Army of 1895.

  • The average soldier serves for only a few years. Career soldiers must be leaders, and there necessarily are a lot more followers than there are leaders. There is thus a large and steady stream of recruits flowing into the army, and of low-ranking veterans flowing out.

  • Those few years of service take place in late adolescence, and not in late middle age. Suppose that -- each year and for many years -- the number of people discharged from the U.S. Army equals the number of people leaving the ten largest companies in Corporate America, combined. The populace will still contain many more veterans of the Army than of the Corporate Top Ten.

  • In 1957, these further-marginalized folks were confined to the Twenty-Somethings who had fought in Korea. Fifty years later, they're a significant part of every age bracket.

It's not good for the body politick to have that many people who are that severely marginalized.

• During the week of November 20-25, 2006, Garry Trudeau ran a series of Doonesbury strips on the topic.
• By sheer coincidence, Stratfor's Geopolitical Intelligence Report for Tuesday of that week was A Fresh Look at the Draft:
  • It made (and makes!) a surprisingly practical proposal: given the high-tech nature of modern warfare, the U.S. should draft the rich.
  • No, don't draft the sons of the rich; draft the middle-aged rich themselves.
  • And watch how that affects war-and-peace decisions!

I was fortunate:

• I only served twenty-one months, but I had the "old" GI Bill.
  • I was entitled to thirty-six months (four years, counting vacations) of post-secondary education. I used all thirty-six.
  • The kids these days get one month of education for every two months served.
• I happened to live in a state (Texas) whose law school was both:
  • nationally recognized; and
  • a strong believer in Entrance Index = LSAT score + (X times undergraduate college GPA), where X varied college by college.
    • Other factors (including, among other things, affirmative-action for race) were considered, but only slightly.
    • Whatever preference factor there was for the (obviously more-civilized) non-veteran was also only slight.
• It was easy for me to conceal my military service after I became a lawyer. I served between my junior and senior years of college.
• I had the sense to omit my military service from my resume until Gulf War I again made it politically correct to be a veteran.
• But please note this disclaimer.

So, as a result of my complicity with this rather bizarre foreign policy (and equally bizarre personal good fortune), I returned to an economy:

• which was far better than it would have been if all of those ill-fate spoiling-attack wars had never been fought; and
• that I could actually take advantage of.

But the U.S. is sure going to have to do better by the kids coming out of the service now.

Even back in 1971, there was a large proportion of kids who made a poor readjustment to civilian life. Keep in mind that:

•  this proportion was -- and is -- dictated by:

  • the provisions of the then-current Servicemen's Readjustment Act; and
  • not by the kids themselves; and
• the "old" Act, which was in effect in 1971, was not nearly as nice as the "really old" Act of 1944.

The "new" Act, in effect in the 21st Century, is far worse even than that. This is to be expected. The legislative branch rewards victors, and not merely those who have been doing their executive-branch-imposed (losing) patriotic duty. This is an attitude that inevitably leads to a Portuguese-style Carnation Revolution.

The Portuguese were fortunate. Their revolution cost "only" four lives. The revolution in the U.S. that the national legislature seems to be inciting will likely not be as blood-less. Nor as treasure-less.

The Congress is thus put to an election:

• restore the Servicemen's Readjustment Act to what it was in 1944 -- and inflation adjusted!; or
• reduce military capabilities -- and operations! -- to a scope comparable to that of the other Great Powers (and permanent Security Council members): France, Britain, Russia, and China.

Philosophically, I'm leaning heavily toward the latter.