Thanks to a friend, I have been able to read the entire Boston Globe article linked in Zero Ponsdorf's Mercenaries? Now I am even more disturbed. I see this development as an intersection of our military problem and also of the illegal immigration threat, the confluence of two threats to our national identity and existence.

I should not have been surprised that this is being advocated by Thomas Donnelly of the (supposedly) Conservative, American Enterprise Institute, Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, and Max Boot of the CFR. ( I find that none of them has any real military experience. Donnelly was a civilian editor of Armed Forces Journal, Boot a Wall Street Journal reporter, and O’Hanlon a Peace Corps member.) Though I have not taken any polls, I suspect that the idea is also wildly popular with the other self-styled "National Greatness Conservatives", such as Bill Kristol, Vin Weber, Jack Kemp, and perhaps even George Will. These are the same people who want an army which they can use to impose at bayonet-point their vision of Democracy across the globe, and their vision of the Globe on America. They also seem to be enthusiasts for the so-called SPP initiative, the North American Union and the abolition of border controls or limits on immigration.

To these folks America is not a country; it is an idea. A very abstract idea. And if the actual people are hesitant to swallow this idea, then, in the words of the Stalinist playwright Berthod Brecht, maybe we should elect a different people. We are a "credal nation", defined not by our language, our culture, our history, holidays, or any thing else save an "idea". And they wish to proceed credal to the metal. Their idea is based on a fragment of the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, lifted out of context, though not an actual part of out Constitution or laws, cemented to the words of an immigrant poet Emma Lazarus, which were not given any official status either. For them America is a global boarding house, with as few social rules as possible, where the actions of the tenants are not to be judged, so long as they bend their knee to global equality, and personal interchangeability, and do not interfere with production. The people are valued not as individuals, or even as distinct groups - Vietnamese-Americans, or Hillbillies, or Scandie farmers, or Black Jazz singers, Cowboys, or anything else; just as economic production-consumption units. This is ominous. When Jack Kemp described the United States as the world’s first credal nation, he was dead wrong, as evidenced by the recurring fundamental disagreements culminating in a civil war, and the many years of reconstruction and continued disagreement afterward. We became (if at all) a credal nation only during the 1920s-1930s, under the influence of Carl Sandburg’s mythologized Lincoln, and FDR’s politicking. The first nation created explicitly on the basis of an abstract idea, a creed, was the Soviet Union, created at the beginning of the 1920s as the world’s First Proletarian Nation.

And this suggests the fundamental problem with credal nations. A Frenchman or Italian may be a Communist or a Social Democrat, or a Conservative, a Christian or Atheist, and still remain a Frenchman or Italian. An individual may immigrate, and become a citizen of France, but to become a Frenchman requires maybe a generation or two of acculturation and assimilation. The same for other nations defined by ethnicity or culture. But in a credal nation, if you disavow the creed, you disavow the nation. Lenin solved this problem in Russia by eliminating all those who would not, or could not, be proletarian Marxists. Though American dissenters are not yet shot (except Vickie Weaver and David Koresh), they are often harassed. A major reason is that the US Armed Forces still retain a tie to the American people, even if it is becoming attenuated. American soldiers may feel alienated from the assorted anti-military protesters and the civilians who do not serve, but they still recognize their brothers and cousins and neighbors. At the very least they can exchange understandable curses. They do not shoot fellow Americans; the brief exception at Kent State in 1970 occurred under exceptional circumstances where semi-trained National Guardsmen felt themselves threatened by a mob.

Here is where the utility of a foreign-based military comes into play. Their loyalty is not to the people, or the flag, or to anybody but the officer who commands and feeds them, and to their fellow mercenary comrades. The old Soviet Union used to use ethnic minorities in the internal troops units of the MVD and KGB, always assigned to some other distant and not very congenial region. Resentful Uzbek boys from Central Asia would have no hesitation if ordered to crack some Russian heads in Moscow or Bryansk. Georgians might not mind shooting Latvians or Estonians, who might in turn be willing to suppress Central Asians and Far Easterners, etc.. What would happen if, some time in the future, President Obama were to order a battalion of Mexicans to search and disarm a Korean neighborhood in southern California using whatever force was necessary? Or maybe if he sent in a battalion of troops recruited from Pakistan to restore order in Chicago or St. Paul? There is no doubt the troops would perform enthusiastically, probably with all the vigor they would exercise back home. No fear of them restraining themselves out of community ties.

At the same time, large numbers of linguistically diverse troops formed a different problem for the Soviet Army, and would for us as well. There were about a hundred different languages in the draft pool of the old Soviet Union, and even though many of these draftees ended up in the labor battalions, still many more found their way to the Ground Forces. I heard an American colonel once comment "I would not, as a company commander, be encouraged to learn that two thirds of my company could understand the language of command." This led to problems even during World War II, which became increasingly worse throughout the rest of Soviet postwar experience.

Anyone who thinks this would be no problem for the United States is clearly beyond responsible thought. A language requirement to enlist? Don’t make me laugh. Certainly not if we’re going to raise the sort of large numbers these "experts" are talking about, nor if we’re going to raise them overseas. Do you really think you’re going to enlist a battalion’s worth of West European English-speakers to fight our wars? Get Serious. The overseas enlistees will come from Somalia, from Yemen, from Pakistan and Algeria, and many other hellholes of the Fourth World. And they will not be the healthy, educated, and intelligent recruits the Army thinks it will be getting. The educated elites from these countries will get to America on Student Visas and vanish into the unpoliced crowds of American cities; no need for them to enlist. The semi-literate campesinos from Central America will seem the pick of the catch. And why should many more of them volunteer to enlist in order to gain citizenship the hard way when they will be allowed to cross an open border and fade into the urban landscape. So long as there is no credible control on our borders or our immigration enforcement, there will be no motivation for foreigners to enlist.

And just think what the ACLU will say once it discovers that the overseas recruiting offices are rejecting Somalis disproportionately for poor health and literacy. That will be discrimination. We will find ourselves enlisting the dregs of the Fourth World, healing them and educating them, maybe even teaching them to wear shoes, all on the time of their army contract, and giving them citizenship after discharging them, probably just about the time they complete their modernization training. Very quickly, we will find it necessary to attenuate the process, probably by abandoning attempts at language training, in favor of ethnic units. We will have Urdu battalions and Kikuyu battalions, and Arabic and Hmoob units, and God knows what else. And these units will not conform to American disciplinary and performance standards either. The Army will be transformed into a global social uplift program.

Trying to recruit enlistees from other major powers runs a serious risk of causing diplomatic incidents or worse. After all countries such as Germany, Denmark, Poland and Russia probably would resent our syphoning off their potential military strength. Some countries, such as Russia might construe it as a "hostile act", and in other countries, such as Poland or Czechia, or South Korea, it would only diminish the strength of countries we are committed to defending. Further, what will happen if, and when we find ourselves engaged in a war against a country which has become a major source of our troops? Might that not test the loyalties of our mercenaries? Might it not impede the further supply of such mercenaries? Britain never sent its Gurkhas to invade Nepal.

And in the case of some countries, significant numbers, or even any of their nationals in our armed forces could prove a deadly security risk. Do we want a battalion of Pasdaran in our army? Or maybe North Koreans?

One of the most frequent arguments I have heard against reinstituting the draft is that our professional NCOs and officers do not have the time or desire to nurse and train reluctant American conscripts. The time spent on training and acculturating these foreign volunteers will be far, far worse. And they will be capable of only the meanest cannon-fodder sorts of assignment. Even (or especially) contemporary infantry duties may be beyond them.

If and when these totally alien ethnic units are finally committed to action, the American public is likely to prove totally indifferent to whatever casualties they suffer. "The Kikuyu Battalion lost 90% strength last week? So what." This may be attractive to short-sighted policy makers, able to wage war on the political cheap. But it will have consequences. The mercenary units will prove totally indifferent to our interests in return. The survivors who eventually gain US citizenship are likely to be cynical and ungrateful. and hardly acculturated into American society, or able to adjust.

But then, that is not really an issue is it? Not if you consider homo sapiens to be only fungible consumption-production units. And that seems to give away much of this game. It is not really about strengthening the US military, but about commandeering the US military as another way to end-run our own national sovereignty. Though the flag may be American, the Army will no longer be American in any meaningful sense. For a while the professional officers may be drawn from an elite class of Americans, though before long, we will find that these non-American American soldiers have risen through the ranks and are holding command positions.

Milton Friedman commented on the incompatibility of open immigration with a modern welfare state. When the German immigrants evoked by Max Boot left the Union Armies after 1865, they either got productive civilian jobs, returned to Germany, or fell into failure. They did not swell a welfare empire. (We may also ponder whether the experience of being invaded and suppressed by foreign-speaking mercenaries may have added to the Southern embitterment of the post-civil war era. Mr. Boot may also want to consider the Irish troops in the context of the New York City draft riots and anti-Negro pogrom; I hope that is not among the precedents he would have us emulate because they are precedents.)  Under the mercenary plan, any minimally trained survivor could go directly from the military to the dole, but with a knowledge of brute force and a sense of entitlement. Can anyone else see a problem?

Mr. O’Hanlon invokes the ethnic participation of Germans and British fighting side-by-side with the colonists. Sorry, but those Germans were colonists, particularly from Pennsylvania, and maybe some Hessian mercenaries who deserted; and doesn't that raise questions about mercenaries? And the British?...well up to July 4, 1776, most of the other colonists were British, by definition. Except for the leaders like von Steuben, Kosciusko, Pulaski and such, the common soldiers were not brought over as Colonist mercenaries. Those leaders, particularly the Poles, and Hungarians, were professional soldiers who had ended on the losing side of rebellions against Russia or Austro-Hungary, and had to find employment far beyond the reach of retribution. And on occasion Washington is quoted has having given the order on several important occasions "Let none but Americans be placed on sentry duty tonight..."

Nor were the many European immigrants who served in the American Army during the Indian Wars, were not brought over specifically for the purpose of enlisting, nor did they enlist in groups. Likewise, today’s Americans of Ukrainian or Honduran origin are not at issue either. Such people are the glory of our country and our military, serving out of pride and devotion to their new homeland, and a reproach to those native-born Americans too self-precious to serve. But they were not recruited as foreigners or overseas, nor do they serve as foreigners. The recruitment of foreign mercenaries overseas is something entirely different, and that is what alarms me. An ethnic battalion of Ukrainians is entirely different from 600 individual Ukrainians, all conversant in English, and dispersed throughout a 700,000 man army.

The Filipino Scouts recruited by the United States were recruited only for service in the Philippines. At the time the Philippines was in a colonial relationship. None were sent to fight in Europe, or even anywhere else in the Pacific Theater. The Filipino mess staff serving with the US Navy are a special and traditional case. Likewise, the Swiss Guard, who may arrive from all over Europe, but also are armed with halberds and have not gone to war in memory.

While we are on the subject of invoking prior experience of mercenary recruitment, we ought not forget the sad experience of the Western Roman Empire, who suffered greatly from their mistake in ceding their legionary duties to Germanic barbarians who opened the way for invading Goths. Nor should we forget the advice of Machiavelli who warned so strongly on the unreliability and risk of mercenary troops. They will flee in battle, or desert to an enemy who buys them with higher pay. or they may turn upon their supposed employer and wreak havoc on the employing state.

If there is a problem with our military being overcommitted, and I agree this seems likely, there would be other, saner responses. First of all, we might reduce our commitments to less critical areas. Certainly ten years after Bill Clinton said we would be in Bosnia for only a single year, it is time to go home. Likewise, in both Germany and South Korea, our continuing presence is of debatable importance, seemingly of most importance to the local merchants who still despise us. Much more importantly, we might choose to discontinue all "peace-keeping" and "nation-building" operations and to affirm the doctrine that the US military is not for nation building but for nation destroying, and will be deployed accordingly. In conjunction with this latter perspective, we might reconsider our doctrine to include fighting with less concern for collateral enemy casualties, and more with concern for US operational effectiveness. If we replace the kid gloves with knuckle dusters, we might find we have enough troops to service our revised task list.

-Rurik

Contributed by George Mellinger on December 28, 2006 at 01:35 PM in Caring about our troops, Current Affairs, George Mellinger, Remember the Alamo, The American Warrior, Zero Ponsdorf | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: ponsdorf

yep! Well said, as usual.

Posted by: ponsdorf | Dec 28, 2006 3:24:27 PM

Posted by: Decurion

OK, I admit not having read the article.

Does the article:

1)Serious suggest recruiting seperate formations of foreigners?

OR

2)Serious suggest recruiting non-English speakers who cannot pass the ASVAB, which is ONLY given in English (plus Puerto Rican Spanish, and then only in Puerto Rico)?

And why do you assume that they would go from the Army to welfare? I suggest that native-born Americans make up 99%+ of welfare rolls and will continue to do so. Veterans generally don't have a hard time transitioning to civil employment, if only because employers value people who show up to work on time, something the US Army teaches far better than does high school.

You are, it seems, arguing against the idea with a sort of reductio ad absurdum, postulating an intent to recruits hundreds of thousands of illiterate non-English-speaking Third-Worlders (to do what, drive M-1 tanks and fix helicopters? Bullshit) to entirely replace our native-born Army, and then attacking the concept of recruiting foreigners based on this specious idea.

Might I suggest that this is a gross exaggeration of anything the United States would ever actually do? Recruiting a couple thousand more foreigners, spread over the more than a million servicemen on active duty, would not substantially affect the military's culture.

Keep in mind that these non-US citizens would be, by virtue of their inability to get a security clearance, incapable of becoming officers. They would also have a difficult time becoming senior NCOs. And they would be entirely prevented from entering a number of fields (MI, Aviation, Communications, etc) which require clearances even for privates.

Please, when conjuring visions of doom and destruction, clarify whether you are speaking of the United States Army's actual intent, or the pipe dreams of some suited idealists building castles in the air. And your bogeyman of the ACLU "forcing" the Army to accept recruits of outlandish origin and nonexistent qualifications is absurd. Antidiscrimination legislation does not affect the Army in that manner.

Posted by: Decurion | Dec 29, 2006 3:58:39 AM

Posted by: Cao

First, have leftists complaining that members of the armed forces are murderers, just like their former counterparts of the anti-war movement who called Vietnam Vets 'baby killers'.

Secondly, you have the fact that our military is a lot smaller (thanks Bill Clinton for the closing of the military bases, etc.) and ill-equipped to carry on the mission in front of us.

Third, you have the military itself, which has reinvented itself into a nicer, kinder, gentler army of social workers instead of warriors.

All three of these together do not bode well for a strong fighting force. And this is why a niche has opened up for the private contractor. Plus, the fact that a private contractor looks to me as though he's going to be better protected legally than a soldier for killing a terrorist.

There is a book that I'm waiting for on the mercenary contractor, which is not from the leftist point of view, but rather, someone who understands the military and has an understanding and not a disdain for the merc contractor.

The book is called WAR DOG: Fighting Other People's Wars -The Modern Mercenary in Combat

War Dogs is about the same exact subject as Pelton's book, The Modern Mercenary in Combat. But one thing that is different about Al Venter's portrayal of these men: he has respect for the professional soldier and isn't condescending about WAR.

Book Description from Amazon (emphasis mine):

Mercenaries have been with us since the dawn of civilization, yet in the modern world they are little understood. While many of today's freelance fighters provide support for larger military establishments, others wage war where the great powers refuse to tread. In War Dog, Al Venter examines the latter world of mercenary fighters effecting decisions by themselves. In the process he unveils a remarkable array of close-quarters combat action.

Having personally visited every locale he describes throughout Africa and the Middle East, Venter is the rare correspondent who had to carry an AK-47 in his research along with his notebook and camera. To him, covering mercenary actions meant accompanying the men into the thick of combat. During Sierra Leone's civil war, he flew in the front bubble of the government's lone Hind gunship-piloted by the heroic chopper ace "Nellis"-as it flew daily missions to blast apart rebel positions. In this book the author not only describes the battles of the legendary South African mercenary company Executive Outcomes, he knew the founders personally and joined them on a number of actions. After stemming the tide of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA army in Angola (an outfit many of the SA operators had previously trained), Executive Outcomes headed north to hold back vicious rebels in West Africa.

This book is not only about triumph against adversity but also losses, as Venter relates the death and subsequent cannibalistic fate of his American friend, Bob MacKenzie, in Sierra Leone. Here we see the plight of thousands of civilians fleeing from homicidal jungle warriors, as well as the professionalism of the mercenaries who fought back with one hand and attempted to train government troops with the other, in hopes that they would someday be able to stand on their own.

The American public, as well as its military, largely sidestepped the horrific conflicts that embroiled Africa during the past two decades. But as Venter informs us, there were indeed small numbers of professional fighters on the ground, defending civilians and attempting to conjure order from chaos. In the process their heroism went unrecorded and their combat skill became known only to each other.

In this book we gain an intimate glimpse of this modern breed of warrior in combat. Not laden with medals, ribbons, civic parades, or even guaranteed income, they have nevertheless fought some of the toughest battles in the post- Cold War era. They simply are, and perhaps always will be, "War Dogs."

AL J. VENTER has been an international war correspondent for nearly thirty years, primarily for the Jane's Information Group. He has also produced documentary television films on subjects from the wars in Africa and Afghanistan to sharkhunting off the Cape of Good Hope. Among his previous works are The Iraqi War Debrief: Why Saddam Hussein Was Toppled and Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest for the Atomic Bomb. A native of South Africa, he is currently resident in the United Kingdom.

Posted by: Cao | Dec 29, 2006 9:28:49 AM

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