SECTION 5
The Functions of War
As we have indicated, the preeminence 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 nonmilitary 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 more easily
and fully comprehended.
We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied, and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent they 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 regular "exercise," by whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy. The nonmilitary 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 nonmilitary 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.
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, oversimply, as a device for the control of surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it this way:
The reference here is to shooting war, but it
applies equally to the general war economy as well.
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 the various forms of fiscal 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,
This is not "ironic or
revealing," but essentially a simple statement of fact.
It should also be noted that war production has a dependable stimulation 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:
Actually, the
fundamental nonmilitary 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 the "peace threats" on the stock market, e.g.,
Savings banks
solicit deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g.,
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 (nonmilitary) 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, of 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. [19])
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 unskilled
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 subfunction.
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 antisocial 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 clichés - "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 not 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 nonmilitary 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 are now called the "unemployable."
The typical European standing army (of fifty
years ago) consisted of
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 "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. [21]
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 nonmilitary 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 preeminent 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 nonmilitary killing. It also provides the precedent for 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,
A Rand
analyst puts it in more general terms and less rhetorically:
The point may seem too obvious for iteration, but
is essential to an understanding of the important motivational
function of war as a model for collective sacrifice.
A brief look at some defunct premodern 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 with 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 real 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 [24] 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 effect of war has been often noted [25] and equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological and cultural factors. [26]
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 [27] has pointed out, other institutions that were developed to serve this ecological function have proved even less satisfactory.
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. [28]
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 of
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 postnuclear 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 formally self-liquidating are now medically maintained.
Many
diseases that were once fatal at preprocreational 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-call "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’s 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 afield, 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," an 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
tropical parasitic diseases; it is hard to estimate how long this
work would otherwise have been delayed, despite its enormous
nonmilitary importance to nearly half the world’s population.
Other
We have elected to omit from our discussion of the nonmilitary
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:
We have also foregone 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
subfunction; 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.
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Saturday, October 13, 2018
Report from Iron Mountain Section 5: from Educate Yourself
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