Part One - Part Two - Part Four - Part Five
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Part Three: Report From Iron Mountain
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It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's
war-making potential over its other characteristics is not the result of the
"threat" presumed to exist at any one time from other societies. This is the
reverse of the basic situation; "threat" against the "national interest" are
usually created or accelerated to meet the changing needs of the war system.
Only in comparatively recent times has it been considered politically expedient
to euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements. The necessity for
governments to distinguish between "aggression" (bad) and "defense" (good) has
been a by-product of rising literacy and rapid communication. The distinction is
tactical only, a concession to the growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing
political rationales.
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SECTION 3 - DISARMAMENT SCENARIOS
SCENARIOS, as they have come to be called, are hypothetical constructions of
future events.
Inevitably, they are composed of varying proportions of established fact,
reasonable inference, and more or less inspired guesswork. Those which have been
suggested as model procedures for effectuating international arms control and
eventual disarmament are necessarily imaginative, although closely reasoned; in
this respect they resemble the "war games" analyses of the Rand Corporation,
with which they share a common conceptual origin.
All such scenarios that have been seriously put
forth imply a dependence on bilateral or multilateral agreement between the
great powers. In general, they call for a progressive phasing out of gross
armaments, military forces, weapons, and weapons technology, coordinated with
elaborate matching procedures of verification, inspection, and machinery for the
settlement of international disputes. It should be noted that even proponents of
unilateral disarmament qualify their proposals with an implied requirement of
reciprocity, very much in the manner of a scenario of graduated response in
nuclear war. The advantage of unilateral initiative lies in its political value
as an expression of good faith, as well as in its diplomatic function as a
catalyst for formal disarmament negotiations.
The READ model for disarmament (developed by the Research Program on Economic
Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of these scenarios. It is a twelve-year
program, divided into three-year stages. Each stage includes a separate phase
of: reduction of armed forces; cutbacks of weapons production, inventories, and
foreign military bases; development of international inspection procedures and
control conventions; and the building up of a sovereign international
disarmament organization. It anticipates a net matching decline in U.S. defense
expenditures of only somewhat more than half the 1965 level, but a necessary
redeployment of some five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor force.
The economic implications assigned by their authors to various disarmament
scenarios diverge widely. The more conservative models, like that cited above,
emphasize economic as well as military prudence in postulating elaborate
fail-safe disarmament agencies, which themselves require expenditures
substantially substituting for those of the displaced war industries. Such
programs stress the advantages of the smaller economic adjustment entailed.
Others emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude (and the opposite advantages)
of the savings to be achieved from disarmament. One widely read analysis
estimates the annual cost of the inspection function of general disarmament
throughout the world as only between two and three percent of current military
expenditures. Both types of plan tend to deal with the anticipated problem of
economic reinvestment only in the aggregate. We have seen no proposed
disarmament sequence that correlates the phasing out of specific kinds of
military spending with specific new forms of substitute spending.
Without examining disarmament scenarios in greater detail, we may characterize
them with these general comments:
1. Given genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the scheduling of
arms control and elimination presents no inherently insurmountable procedural
problems. Any of several proposed sequences might serve as the basis for
multilateral agreement or for the first step in unilateral arms reduction.
2. No major power can proceed with such a program, however, until it has
developed an economic conversion plan fully integrated with each phase of
disarmament. No such plan has yet been developed in the United States.
3. Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic conversion,
make no allowance for the non-military functions of war in modern societies, and
offer no surrogate for these necessary functions. One partial exception is a
proposal for the "unarmed forces of the United States," which we will consider
in section 6.
SECTION 4 - WAR AND PEACE AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS
We have dealt only sketchily with proposed disarmament scenarios and economic
analyses, but the reason for our seemingly casual dismissal of so much serious
and sophisticated work lies in no disrespect for its competence. It is rather a
question of relevance. To put it plainly, all these programs, however detailed
and well developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned disarmament
sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a game or a classroom exercise
in logic than like a prognosis of real events in the real world. This is as true
of today's complex proposals as it was of the Abbe de St. Pierre's "Plan for
Perpetual Peace in Europe" 250 years ago.
Some essential element has clearly been lacking in all these schemes. One of our
first tasks was to try to bring this missing quality into definable focus, and
we believe we have succeeded in doing so. We find that at the heart of every
peace study we have examined--from the modest technological proposal (e.g., to
convert a poison gas plant to the production of "socially useful" equivalents)
to the most elaborate scenario for universal peace in out time--lies one common
fundamental misconception. It is the source of the miasma of unreality
surrounding such plans. It is the incorrect assumption that war, as an
institution, is subordinate to the social systems it is believed to serve.
This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is entirely
comprehensible. Few social clichés are so unquestioningly accepted as the notion
that war is an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of
economic objectives). If this were true, it would be wholly appropriate for
economists and political theorists to look on the problems of transition to
peace as essentially mechanical or procedural---as indeed they do, treating them
as logistic corollaries of the settlement of national conflicts of interest. If
this were true, there would be no real substance to the difficulties of
transition. For it is evident that even in today's world there exist no
conceivable conflict of interest, real or imaginary, between nations or between
social forces within nations, that cannot be resolved without recourse to
war--if such resolution were assigned a priority of social value. And if this
were true, the economic analyses and disarmament proposals we have referred to,
plausible and well conceived as they may be, would not inspire, as they do, an
inescapable sense of indirection.
The point is that the cliché is not true, and the problems of transition are
indeed substantive rather than merely procedural. Although war is "used" as an
instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized
for any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic
structure. War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary
modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has
governed most human societies of record, as it is today.
Once this is correctly understood, the true magnitude of the problems entailed
in a transition to peace---itself a social system, but without precedent except
in a few simple pre-industrial societies---becomes apparent. At the same time,
some of the puzzling superficial contradictions of modern societies can then be
readily rationalized. The "unnecessary" size and power of the world war
industry; the pre-eminence of the military establishment in every society,
whether open or concealed; the exemption of military or paramilitary
institutions from the accepted social and legal standards of behavior required
elsewhere in the society; the successful operation of the armed forces and the
armaments producers entirely outside the framework of each nation's economic
ground rules: these and other ambiguities closely associated with the
relationship of war to society are easily clarified, once the priority of
war-making potential as the principal structuring force in society is accepted.
Economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora jures serve and extend the
war system, not vice versa.
It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's war-making potential
over its other characteristics is not the result of the "threat" presumed to
exist at any one time from other societies. This is the reverse of the basic
situation; "threat" against the "national interest" are usually created or
accelerated to meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in comparatively
recent times has it been considered politically expedient to euphemize war
budgets as "defense" requirements. The necessity for governments to distinguish
between "aggression" (bad) and "defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising
literacy and rapid communication. The distinction is tactical only, a concession
to the growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing political rationales.
Wars are not "caused" by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical
sequence would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies
require---and thus bring about---such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to
make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active
or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to
social control. It should therefore hardly be surprising that the military
institutions in each society claim its highest priorities.
We find further that most of the confusion surrounding the myth that war-making
is a tool of state policy stems from a general misapprehension of the functions
of war. In general, these are conceived as: to defend a nation from military
attack by another, or to deter such an attack; to defend or advance a "national
interest"--economic, political, ideological; to maintain or increase a nation's
military power for its own sake. These are the visible, or ostensible, functions
of war. If there were no others, the importance of the war establishment in each
society might in fact decline to the subordinate level it is believed to occupy.
And the elimination of war would indeed be the procedural matter that the
disarmament scenarios suggest.
But there are other, broader, more profoundly felt functions of war in modern
societies. It is these invisible, or implied, functions that maintain
war-readiness as the dominant force in our societies. And it is the
unwillingness or inability of the writers of disarmament scenarios and
re-conversion plans to take them into account that has so reduced the usefulness
of their work, and that has made it seem unrelated to the world we know.
SECTION 5 - THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR
As we have indicated, the pre-eminence of the concept of war as the principal
organizing force in most societies has been insufficiently appreciated. This is
also true of its extensive effects throughout the many non-military activities
of society. These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies like
our own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more easily
and fully comprehended.
We propose in this section to examine these non-military, implied, and usually
invisible functions of war, to the extent that they bear on the problems of
transition to peace for our society. The military, or ostensible, function of
the war system requires no elaboration; it serves simply to defend or advance
the "national interest" by means of organized violence. It is often necessary
for a national military establishment to create a need for its unique powers--to
maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a healthy military apparatus requires
"exercise," by whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy.
The non-military functions of the war system are more basic. They exist not
merely to justify themselves but to serve broader social purposes. If and when
war is eliminated, the military functions it has served will end with it. But
its non-military functions will not. It is essential, therefore, that we
understand their significance before we can reasonably expect to evaluate
whatever institutions may be proposed to replace them.
ECONOMIC
The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with
economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it implies a failure of
function. But no human activity can properly be considered wasteful if it
achieves its contextual objective. The phrase "wasteful but necessary," applied
not only to war expenditures but to most of the "unproductive" commercial
activities of our society, is a contradiction in terms. "...The attacks that
have since the time of Samuel's criticism of King Saul been leveled against
military expenditures as waste may well have concealed or misunderstood the
point that some kinds of waste may have a larger social utility."
In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social utility. It
derives from the fact that the "wastefulness" of war production is exercised
entirely outside the framework of the economy of supply and demand. As such, it
provides the only critically large segment of the total economy that is subject
to complete and arbitrary central control. If modern industrial societies can be
defined as those which have developed the capacity to produce more than is
required for their economic survival (regardless of the equities of distribution
of goods within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only balance
wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of their economies. The
fact that war is "wasteful" is what enables it to serve this function. And the
faster the economy advances, the heavier this balance wheel must be.
This function is often viewed, over-simply, as a device for the control of
surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it this way: "Why is war so wonderful?
Because it creates artificial demand...the only kind of artificial demand,
moreover, that does not raise any political issues: war, and only war, solves
the problem of inventory." The reference here is to shooting war, but it applies
equally to the general war economy as well. "It is generally agreed," concludes,
more cautiously, the report of a panel set up by the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, "that the greatly expanded public sector since World War II,
resulting from heavy defense expenditures, has provided additional protection
against depressions, since this sector is not responsive to contraction in the
private sector and has provided a sort of buffer or balance wheel in the
economy."
The principal economic function of war, in our view, is that it provides just
such a flywheel. It is not to be confused in function with the various forms of
fiscal control, none of which directly engages vast numbers of control, none of
which directly engages vast numbers of men and units of production. It is not to
be confused with massive government expenditures in social welfare programs;
once initiated, such programs normally become integral parts of the general
economy and are no longer subject to arbitrary control.
But even in the context of the general civilian economy war cannot be considered
wholly "wasteful."
Without a long-established war economy, and without its frequent eruption into
large-scale shooting war, most of the major industrial advances known to
history, beginning with the development of iron, could never have taken place.
Weapons technology structures the economy. According to the writer cited above,
"Nothing is more ironic or revealing about our society than the fact that hugely
destructive war is a very progressive force in it. ... War production is
progressive because it is production that would not otherwise have taken place.
(It is not so widely appreciated, for example, that the civilian standard of
living rose during World War II.)" This is not "ironic or revealing," but
essentially a simple statement of fact.
It should also be noted that the war production has a dependably stimulating
effect outside itself. Far from constituting a "wasteful" drain on the economy,
war spending, considered pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor
in the rise of gross national product and of individual productivity. A former
Secretary of the Army has carefully phrased it for public consumption thus: "If
there is, as I suspect there is, a direct relation between the stimulus of large
defense spending and a substantially increased rate of growth of gross national
product, it quite simply follows that defense spending per se might be
countenanced on economic grounds alone as a stimulator of the national
metabolism." Actually, the fundamental non-military utility of war in the
economy is far more widely acknowledged than the scarcity of such affirmations
as that quoted above would suggest.
But negatively phrased public recognitions of the importance of war to the
general economy abound. The most familiar example is the effect of "peace
threats" on the stock market, e.g., "Wall Street was shaken yesterday by news of
an apparent peace feeler from North Vietnam, but swiftly recovered its composure
after about an hour of sometimes indiscriminate selling." Savings banks solicit
deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g., "If peace breaks out, will you
be ready for it?"
A more subtle case in point was the recent refusal of the Department of Defense
to permit the West German government to substitute nonmilitary goods for
unwanted armaments in its purchase commitments from the United States; the
decisive consideration was that the German purchases should not affect the
general (non-military) economy. Other incidental examples are to be found in the
pressures brought to bear on the Department when it announces plans to close down
an obsolete facility (as a "wasteful" form of "waste"). and in the usual
coordination of stepped-up military activities (as in Vietnam in 1965) with
dangerously rising unemployment rates.
Although we do not imply that a substitute for war in the economy cannot be
devised, no combination of techniques for controlling employment, production,
and consumption has yet been tested that can remotely compare to it in
effectiveness. It is, and has been, the essential economic stabilizer of modern
societies.
POLITICAL
The political functions of war have been up to now even more critical to social
stability. It is not surprising, nevertheless, that discussions of economic
conversion for peace tend to fall silent on the matter of political
implementation, and that disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their
weighing of international political factors, tend to disregard the political
functions of the war system within individual societies.
These functions are essentially organizational. First of all, the existence of a
society as a political "nation" requires as part of its definition an attitude
of relationship toward other "nations." This is what we usually call a foreign
policy. But a nation's foreign policy can have no substance if it lacks the
means of enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a
credible manner only if it implies the threat of maximum political organization
for this purpose--which is to say that it is organized to some degree for war.
War, then, as we have defined it to include all national activities that
recognize the possibility of armed conflict, is itself the defining element of
any nation's existence vis-a-vis any other nation. Since it is historically
axiomatic that the existence of any form of weaponry insures its use, we have
used the word "peace" as virtually synonymous with disarmament. By the same
token, "war" is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war
implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional
nation-state.
The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as
independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their
stable internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been
able to obtain acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society.
The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no
government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance
after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war
threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, or reactions
to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements. The organization of a
society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. It is
ironic that this primary function of war has been generally recognized by
historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged--in the pirate
societies of the great conquerors.
The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers.
(There is, in fact, good reason to believe that codified law had its origins in
the rules of conduct established by military victors for dealing with the
defeated enemy, which were later adapted to apply to all subject populations.)
On a day-to-day basis, it is represented by the institution of police, armed
organizations charged expressly with dealing with "internal enemies" in a
military manner. Like the conventional "external" military, the police are also
substantially exempt from many civilian legal restraints on their social
behavior. In some countries, the artificial distinction between police and other
military forces does not exist. On the long-term basis, a government's emergency
war powers -- inherent in the structure of even the most libertarian of nations
-- define the most significant aspect of the relation between state and citizen.
In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has provided political
leaders with another political-economic function of increasing importance: it
has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary
social classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and
further above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult
for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of
"hewers of wood and drawers of water". The further progress of automation can be
expected to differentiate still more sharply between "superior" workers and what
Ricardo called "menials," while simultaneously aggravating the problem of
maintaining an un-skilled labor supply.
The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military activities make
them ideally suited to control these essential class relationships. Obviously,
if the war system were to be discarded, new political machinery would be needed
at once to serve this vital sub-function. Until it is developed, the continuance
of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to
preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an
incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of
power.
SOCIOLOGICAL
Under this heading, we will examine a nexus of functions served by the war
system that affect human behavior in society. In general, they are broader in
application and less susceptible to direct observation than the economic and
political factors previously considered.
The most obvious of these functions is the time-honored use of military
institutions to provide anti-social elements with an acceptable role in the
social structure. The disintegrative, unstable social movements loosely
described as "fascist" have traditionally taken root in societies that have
lacked adequate military or paramilitary outlets to meet the needs of these
elements. This function has been critical in periods of rapid change. The danger
signals are easy to recognize, even though the stigmata bear different names at
different times. The current euphemistic cliches--"juvenile delinquency" and
"alienation" -- have had their counterparts in every age.
In earlier days these conditions were dealt with directly by the military
without the complications of due process, usually through press gangs or
outright enslavement. But it is not hard to visualize, for example, the degree
of social disruption that might have taken place in the United States during the
last two decades if the problem of the socially disaffected of the post-World
War II period had been foreseen and effectively met. The younger, and more
dangerous, of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the
Selective Service System.
This system and its analogues elsewhere furnish remarkably clear examples of
disguised military utility. Informed persons in this country have never accepted
the official rationale for a peacetime draft--military necessity, preparedness,
etc. --as worthy of serious consideration. But what has gained credence among
thoughtful men is the rarely voiced, less easily refuted, proposition that the
institution of military service has a "patriotic" priority in our society that
must be maintained for its own sake. Ironically, the simplistic official
justification for selective service comes closer to the mark, once the
non-military functions of military institutions are understood. As a control
device over the hostile, nihilistic, and potentially unsettling elements of a
society in transition, the draft can again be defended, and quite convincingly,
as a "military" necessity.
Nor can it be considered a coincidence that overt military activity, and thus
the level of draft calls, tend to follow the major fluctuations in the
unemployment rate in the lower age groups. This rate, in turn, is a time-tested
herald of social discontent. It must be noted also that the armed forces in
every civilization have provided the principal state-supported haven for what we
now call the "unemployable." The typical European standing army (of fifty years
ago) consisted of "...troops unfit for employment in commerce, industry, or
agriculture, led by officers unfit to practice any legitimate profession or to
conduct a business enterprise." This is still largely true, if less apparent. In
a sense, this function of the military as the custodian of the economically or
culturally deprived was the forerunner of most contemporary civilian
social-welfare programs, from the W. P. A. to various forms of "socialized"
medicine and social security. It is interesting that liberal sociologists
currently proposing to use the Selective Service System as a medium of cultural
upgrading of the poor consider this a novel application of military practice.
Although it cannot be said absolutely that such critical measures of social
control as the draft require a military rationale, no modern society has yet
been willing to risk experimentation with any other kind. Even during such
periods of comparatively simple social crisis as the so-called Great Depression
of the 1930s, it was deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work
projects, like the "Civilian" Conservation Corps, with a military character, and
to place the more ambitious National Recovery Administration under the direction
of a professional army officer at its inception. Today, at least one small
Northern European country, plagued with uncontrollable unrest among its
"alienated youth," is considering the expansion of its armed forces, despite the
problem of making credible the expansion of a non-existent external threat.
Sporadic efforts have been made to promote general recognition of broad national
values free of military connotation, but they have been ineffective. For
example, to enlist public support of even such modest programs of social
adjustment as "fighting inflation" or "maintaining physical fitness" it has been
necessary for the government to utilize a patriotic (i.e. military) incentive.
It sells "defense" bonds and it equates health with military preparedness. This
is not surprising; since the concept of "nationhood" implies readiness for war,
a "national" program must do likewise.
In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for primary social
organization. In so doing, it reflects on the societal level the incentives of
individual human behavior. The most important of these, for social purposes, is
the individual psychological rationale for allegiance to a society and its
values. Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is
obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem
genuinely formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy"
sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be
proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that
power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness.
It follows, from the patterns of human behavior, that the credibility of a
social "enemy" demands similarly a readiness of response in proportion to its
menace. In a broad social context, "an eye for an eye" still characterizes the
only acceptable attitude toward a presumed threat of aggression, despite
contrary religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct. The remoteness
of personal decision from social consequence in a modern society makes it easy
for its members to maintain this attitude without being aware of it. A recent
example is the war in Vietnam; a less recent one was the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. In each case, the extent and gratuitousness of the slaughter were
abstracted into political formulae by most Americans, once the proposition that
the victims were "enemies" was established. The war system makes such an
abstracted response possible in non-military contexts as well. A conventional
example of this mechanism is the inability of most people to connect, let us
say, the starvation of millions in India with their own past conscious political
decision-making. Yet the sequential logic linking a decision to restrict grain
production in America with an eventual famine in Asia is obvious, unambiguous,
and unconcealed.
What gives the war system its pre-eminent role in social organization, as
elsewhere, is its unmatched authority over life and death. It must be emphasized
again that the war system is not a mere social extension of the presumed need
for individual human violence, but itself in turn serves to rationalize most
non-military killing. It also provides the precedent for the collective
willingness of members of a society to pay a blood price for institutions far
less central to social organization than war. To take a handy example..."rather
than accept speed limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let automobiles
kill forty thousand people a year." A Rand analyst puts it in more general terms
and less rhetorically: "I am sure that there is, in effect, a desirable level of
automobile accidents---desirable, that is, from a broad point of view; in the
sense that it is a necessary concomitant of things of greater value to society."
The point may seem too obvious for iteration, but it is essential to an
understanding of the important motivational function of war as a model for
collective sacrifice.
A brief look at some defunct pre-modern societies is instructive. One of the
most noteworthy features common to the larger, more complex, and more successful
of ancient civilizations was their widespread use of the blood sacrifice. If one
were to limit consideration to those cultures whose regional hegemony was so
complete that the prospect of "war" had become virtually inconceivable ---as was
the case with several of the great pre-Columbian societies of the Western
Hemisphere---it would be found that some form of ritual killing occupied a
position of paramount social importance in each. Invariably, the ritual was
invested with mythic or religious significance; as will all religious and
totemic practice, however, the ritual masked a broader and more important social
function.
In these societies, the blood sacrifice served the purpose of maintaining a
vestigial "earnest" of the society's capability and willingness to make war--
i.e., kill and be killed---in the event that some mystical--i.e., unforeseen
--circumstance were to give rise to the possibility. That the "earnest" was not
an adequate substitute for genuine military organization when the unthinkable
enemy, such as the Spanish conquistadores, actually appeared on the scene in no
way negates the function of the ritual. It was primarily, if not exclusively, a
symbolic reminder that war had once been the central organizing force of the
society, and that this condition might recur.
It does not follow that a transition to total peace in modern societies would
require the use of this model, even in less "barbaric" guise. But the historical
analogy serves as a reminder that a viable substitute for war as a social system
cannot be a mere symbolic charade. It must involve risk of real personal
destruction, and on a scale consistent with the size and complexity of modern
social systems. Credibility is the key. Whether the substitute is ritual in
nature or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable life-
and-death threat it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.
The existence of an accepted external menace, then, is essential to social
cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace
must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with the complexity of
the society threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the entire
society.
ECOLOGICAL
Man, like all other animals, is subject to the continuing process of adapting to
the limitations of his environment. But the principal mechanism he has utilized
for this purpose is unique among living creatures. To forestall the inevitable
historical cycles of inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys surplus
members of his own species by organized warfare.
Ethologists have often observed that the organized slaughter of members of their
own species is virtually unknown among other animals. Man's special propensity
to kill his own kind (shared to a limited degree with rats) may be attributed to
his inability to adapt anachronistic patterns of survival (like primitive
hunting) to his development of "civilizations" in which these patterns cannot be
effectively sublimated. It may be attributed to other causes that have been
suggested, such as a maladapted "territorial instinct," etc. Nevertheless, it
exists and its social expression in war constitutes a biological control of his
relationship to his natural environment that is peculiar to man alone.
War has served to help assure the survival of the human species. But as an
evolutionary device to improve it, war is almost unbelievably inefficient. With
few exceptions, the selective processes of other living creatures promote both
specific survival and genetic improvement. When a conventionally adaptive animal
faces one of its periodic crises of insufficiency, it is the "inferior" members
of the species that normally disappear. An animal's social response to such a
crisis may take the form of a mass migration, during which the weak fall by the
wayside. Or it may follow the dramatic and more efficient pattern of lemming
societies, in which the weaker members voluntarily disperse, leaving available
food supplies for the stronger. In either case, the strong survive and the weak
fall. In human societies, those who fight and die in wars for survival are in
general its biologically stronger members. This is natural selection in reverse.
The regressive genetic effort of war has been often noted and equally often
deplored, even when it confuses biological and cultural factors. The
disproportionate loss of the biologically stronger remains inherent in
traditional warfare. It serves to underscore the fact that survival of the
species, rather than its improvement, is the fundamental purpose of natural
selection, if it can be said to have a purpose, just as it is the basic premise
of this study.
But as the polemologist Gaston Bouthoul has pointed out, other institutions that
were developed to serve this ecological function have proved even less
satisfactory. (They include such established forms as these: infanticide,
practiced chiefly in ancient and primitive societies; sexual mutilation;
monasticism; forced emigration; extensive capital punishment, as in old China
and eighteenth-century England; and other similar, usually localized,
practices.)
Man's ability to increase his productivity of the essentials of physical life
suggests that the need for protection against cyclical famine may be nearly
obsolete. It has thus tended to reduce the apparent importance of the basic
ecological function of war, which is generally disregarded by peace theorists.
Two aspects of it remain especially relevant, however. The first is obvious:
current rates of population growth, compounded by environmental threat to
chemical and other contaminants, may well bring about a new crisis of
insufficiency. If so, it is likely to be one of unprecedented global magnitude,
not merely regional or temporary. Conventional methods of warfare would almost
surely prove inadequate, in this event, to reduce the consuming population to a
level consistent with survival of the species.
The second relevant factor is the efficiency of modern methods of mass
destruction. Even if their use is not required to meet a world population
crisis, they offer, perhaps paradoxically, the first opportunity in the history
of man to halt the regressive genetic effects of natural selection by war.
Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate. Their application would bring to an end the
disproportionate destruction of the physically stronger members of the species
(the "warriors") in periods of war. Whether this prospect of genetic gain would
offset the unfavorable mutations anticipated from post-nuclear radioactivity we
have not yet determined. What gives the question a bearing on our study is the
possibility that the determination may yet have to be made.
Another secondary ecological trend bearing on projected population growth is the
regressive effect of certain medical advances. Pestilence, for example, is no
longer an important factor in population control. The problem of increased life
expectancy has been aggravated. These advances also pose a potentially more
sinister problem, in that undesirable genetic traits that were formerly
self-liquidating are now medically maintained. Many diseases that were once
fatal at pre-procreational ages are now cured; the effect of this development is
to perpetuate undesirable susceptibilities and mutations. It seems clear that a
new quasi-eugenic function of war is now in process of formation that will have
to be taken into account in any transition plan. For the time being, the
Department of Defense appears to have recognized such factors, as has been
demonstrated by the planning under way by the Rand Corporation to cope with the
breakdown in the ecological balance anticipated after a thermonuclear war. The
Department has also begun to stockpile birds, for example, against the expected
proliferation of radiation-resistant insects, etc.
CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC
The declared order of values in modern societies gives a high place to the
so-called "creative" activities, and an even higher one to those associated with
the advance of scientific knowledge. Widely held social values can be translated
into political equivalents, which in turn may bear on the nature of a transition
to peace. The attitudes of those who hold these values must be taken into
account in the planning of the transition. The dependence, therefore, of
cultural and scientific achievement on the war system would be an important
consideration in a transition plan even if such achievement had no inherently
necessary social function.
Of all the countless dichotomies invented by scholars to account for the major
differences in art styles and cycles, only one has been consistently unambiguous
in its application to a variety of forms and cultures. However it may be
verbalized, the basic distinction is this: Is the work war-oriented or is it
not? Among primitive peoples, the war dance is the most important art form.
Elsewhere, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture that has won
lasting acceptance has invariably dealt with a theme of war, expressly or
implicitly, and has expressed the centricity of war to society. The war in
question may be national conflict, as in Shakespeare plays, Beethoven's music,
or Goya's paintings, or it may be reflected in the form of religious, social, or
moral struggle, as in the work of Dante, Rembrandt, and Bach. Art that cannot be
classified as war-oriented is usually described as "sterile," "decadent," and so
on. Application of the "war standard" to works of art may often leave room for
debate in individual cases, but there is no question of its role as the
fundamental determinant of cultural values. Aesthetic and moral standards have a
common anthropological origin, in the exaltation of bravery, the willingness to
kill and risk death in tribal warfare.
It is also instructive to note that the character of a society's culture has
borne a close relationship to its war-making potential, in the context of its
times. It is no accident that the current "cultural explosion" in the United
States is taking place during an era marked by an unusually rapid advance in
weaponry. This relationship is more generally recognized than the literature on
the subject would suggest. For example, many artists and writers are now
beginning to express concern over the limited creative options they envisage in
the warless world they think, or hope, may be soon upon us. They are currently
preparing for this possibility by unprecedented experimentation with meaningless
forms; their interest in recent years has been increasingly engaged by the
abstract pattern, the gratuitous emotion, the random happening, and the
unrelated sequence.
The relationship of war to scientific research and discovery is more explicit.
War is the principal motivational force for the development of science at every
level, from the abstractly conceptual to the narrowly technological. Modern
society places a high value on "pure" science, but it is historically
inescapable that all the significant discoveries that have been made about the
natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities
of their epochs. The consequences of the discoveries have indeed gone far a-field,
but war has always provided the basic incentive.
Beginning with the development of iron and steel, and proceeding through the
discoveries of the laws of motion and thermodynamics to the age of the atomic
particle, the synthetic polymer, and the space capsule, no important scientific
advance has not been at least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of
weaponry. More prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth of
military communications requirements), the assembly line (from Civil War
firearms needs), the steel-frame building (from the steel battleship), the canal
lock, and so on. A typical adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as the
common lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by Leonardo da
Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy ranks.
The most direct relationship can be found in medical technology. For example, a
giant "walking machine," and amplifier of body motions invented for military use
in difficult terrain, is now making it possible for many previously confined to
wheelchairs to walk. The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular improvements
in amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and surgical logistics. It
has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria and other typical parasite
diseases; it is hard to estimate how long this t' Amo would otherwise have been
delayed, despite its enormous non-military importance to nearly half the world's
population.
OTHER
We have elected to omit from our discussion of the non-military functions of war
those we do not consider critical to a transition program. This is not to say
they are unimportant, however, but only that they appear to present no special
problems for the organization of a peace-oriented social system. They include
the following:
War as a general social release. This is a psycho-social function, serving the
same purpose for a society as do the holiday, the celebration, and the orgy for
the individual---the release and redistribution of undifferentiated tensions.
War provides for the periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social
behavior (the "moral climate") and for the dissipation of general boredom, one
of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of social phenomena.
War as a generational stabilizer. This psychological function, served by other
behavior patterns in other animals, enables the physically deteriorating older
generation to maintain its control of the younger, destroying it if necessary.
War as an ideological clarifier. The dualism that characterized the traditional dialectic of all branches of philosophy and of stable political relationships stems from war as the prototype of conflict. Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.
War as the basis for the international understanding. Before the development of
modern communications, the strategic requirements of war provided the only
substantial incentive for the enrichment of one national culture with the
achievements of another. Although this is still the case in many international
relationships, the function is obsolescent.
We have also forgone extended characterization of those functions we assume to
be widely and explicitly recognized. An obvious example is the role of war as
controller of the quality and degree of unemployment. This is more than an
economic and political sub-function; its sociological, cultural, and ecological
aspects are also important, although often teleonomic. But none affect the
general problem of substitution. The same is true of certain other functions;
those we have included are sufficient to define the scope of the problem.
(end part three)
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Part One - Part Two - Part Four - Part Five
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