Friday Mad Science

I don’t want to get too much into the details of what looks like a tragic incident in Afghanistan this week, but I will say that I feel bad for the guy involved.  He’s been in the Army for about ten years, and this is his fourth combat tour.  He’d been wounded twice, including once when it required partial amputation of one of his feet.  He didn’t want o go back, but they sent him back—again.  And that sucks. 

All of that sucks.

If you don’t know—and considering that less than one percent of Americans actually serve, you probably don’t—four combat tours in ten years is virtually unprecedented as a requirement for service in this country’s history.  By comparison, Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell each only did THREE combat tours in Vietnam when they were junior and field grade officers.  Hell, today’s soldiers are seeing more combat under worse conditions than practically any soldiers in American history, probably since the Revolution.  I mean, yeah, the Revolution lasted fifteen years, and I dare say that those years sucked.  But since then, we’ve had very few wars go longer than four years, and of those, many have involved either widely separated combat tours or sporadic camp-like conditions between periods of what were, admittedly, very intense fighting.  Still, back in the day, you could at least get away from it without worrying about getting mortared in your own cantonment area.

The crazy thing is that this is the kind of soldier
we have to use to measure the experiences of
those serving in the modern U.S. Army.

In fact, the comparison between then and now is striking.  Let’s take Robert E. Lee for comparison.  We’ll use him because he is perhaps the most talented, most successful soldier in American military history.  No one’s gonna argue he was a panty-waist who didn’t do anything during his time in uniform. 

As a junior officer, Lee saw maybe eighteen months of on-again, off-again warfare during the Mexican American War, punctuated by two or three large engagements.  He was an Engineer, which at the time meant he served as a scout of terrain and was trained to make maps.  He was very good, went WAY forward, and saw real Mexicans who tried to kill him several times.  Based on the accounts that I’ve read, in eighteen months of campaigning we’ll be generous and say his life was in danger… maybe eight times.

Thirteen years later, Lee again sees prolonged action as the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the principle combat command of the short-lived Confederate States of America.  That command lasted four years, from 1861 to 1865, and according to Wikipedia’s informal count, there were about a dozen major engagements, among them the bloodiest day in American history (Antietam) and the bloodiest battle (Gettysburg).  And yeah, that was bad.  Real horror.  Lee’s probably in real, personal danger  at least twenty times in four years, and in general, anyone serving during that war would have seen some legitimately awful stuff.  No argument.

Say what you want about the Battle of Veracruz.  At least there we knew
who the enemy was and why we were fighting.

On the other hand, Lee’s serving in an Army he understands, with men he trusts—at least not to shoot him in the back—and the guys he’s fighting against are all wearing uniforms that he can easily identify from a distance.  He sort of knows who he’s fighting and why.  This is decidedly not the case today.

Also: this is Robert E. Lee we’re talking about.  One of the greatest soldiers in American history.

Contrast that with today’s soldiers, today’s officer corps.  Many joined for college money.  Maybe they found a home in the military, maybe they stuck around because the job market sucks.  Regardless, they’re on their third, fourth, fifth deployment in at most eleven years, and the danger they face is—or at least appears to be—near constant.  There’s no camp.  No rest in the combat zone.  And lately even their supposed allies have been murdering them in cold blood.

And yes, today’s soldiers are not deployed for the extremely prolonged periods that yesteryear’s soldiers saw, but on the other hand, today’s soldiers have no real hope of peace, either.  A hundred years ago, wars ended.  Soldiers went home.  Life returned to normal.  Today… not so much. 

Moreover, a hundred years ago, war was an event for society as a whole.  Soldiers fought as an extension of the people for whom they fought.  Today, however, soldiers are providing something that has almost become a niche service.  One piece of a theoretical “security portfolio”.  I mean, I don’t want to get negative here, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and the leaders of today’s America understand ALL of the other options more intimately than they understand the use of direct military intervention with ground troops.  That gives them—and the people that they represent—a certain remove from the guys who’re actually trying to execute policy on the ground. 

It’s that, I think, has caused a real loss of understanding of the true long-term costs of war.  Without that understanding of the costs, we’re making bad decisions.  Looked at via the “security portfolio” model, we’re not investing wisely because we’re not asking enough return in exchange for the size of the risks we’re running.  Or, to put it another way, there’s a real risk of making things worse here, long-term.  Given that, you have to ask yourself what the potential upside is—and be realistic about it—before deciding whether or not something’s worth doing.

That’s another point that’s worth bringing up: something’s not worth doing if it’s impossible.  I mean, I get it.  The situation in Sudan is terrible, and if you’re George Clooney, you want to use your fame to try to change the world.  But.  Before we can even consider what actions we should be taking, we have to first ask ourselves what our real chances of success might be.  What the risks are in the event of failure.  And if the answers are that we probably can’t succeed no matter how hard we try because it’s just too much, and it’s too far away… well, don’t get pissed because the answers given were honest answers. 

Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do.

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Depending on your thoughts on the purpose of the strategic oil reserve, the fact that President Obama is considering releasing some of the strategic reserves is either good for the economy or entirely self-serving for a politician running for re-election.  I personally think that the reserve is meant to keep tin-pot Mid-East dictators from dictating the direction of the U.S. economy via their control of a precious internationally traded commodity, but… I also think the whole debate serves to illustrate the difficulty in unseating an incumbent president.

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3.5 stars (out of 4) for 21 Jump Street?  I find that amazing.  First off, because the 21 Jump Street that I remember wasn’t even all that popular.  Along with the Simpsons and Married with Children, it was pretty much the only thing on back when Fox was a new network. 

And then, too, I don’t remember it being funny.  At all.  I remember it staring a super-emo Johnny Depp, Dom Delouise’s kid, and a girl who looked like one of the original MTV VJs.  The fact that somebody took thatand turned it into a comedy is mind-boggling, and the idea that the resulting comedy is actually good is just beyond belief. 

In fact, I don’t believe that.  Somebody go see this movie and tell me what you think.

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I'm not doing Rush next week, so we gotta get it all in now.