National parties mediate the differences between their regional bases. The Democrats, for example, must negotiate between the interests of their constituencies in the northeast, the upper midwest, and the west coast. What an autoworker in Detroit sees as a critical political issue from a taxi driver in New York City, and both would likely disagree with a barista in San Francisco, or a farmer in North Dakota. The result is often a mishmash of both policies and politicians: Byron Dorgan, Democratic Senator of North Dakota, holds substantially different views than Barbara Boxer, Democratic Senator of California. This is a good thing in electoral terms, as it enables political parties to contest and win national elections.
Regional parties, by contrast, are usually much more consistent (though not entirely) in their ideology, policies, and politicians. This gives them a stranglehold on their particular region. But it becomes a reinforcing cycle: the politicians that emerge from a regional party are the ones that are successful in that region. Politicians who do not adhere to the ideological template are marginalized or forcibly evicted from the party. And with each success and each eviction, the party regionalizes itself further and begins the cycle all over again. This is a bad thing for political parties, as it makes it difficult for them to contest national elections and weakens them everywhere but their particular region.
This syndrome is currently at play in Pennsylvania, where Republican Senator Arlen Spector is in danger from his own party. Specter’s relative moderation no longer seems to fit within the increasingly conservative and increasingly Southern GOP, and so he will be challenged in the Republican primary by Pat Toomey, who’s social conservatism fits much more closely with the current template. If Toomey wins, and it seems likely that he will, it is extremely difficult to see him winning against any reasonable Democratic candidate in a state that went for Barack Obama in 2008 by over 10 percentage points. Even if Specter wins, it will be by moving to the right, something that will weaken him in the general election. The likely flip of the second Senate seat in Pennsylvania to the Democrats will continue the regionalization of the Republicans, which will in turn make it more unlikely that Specter-like figures can survive in the party. The big tent is a useful electoral tool; diversity helps win elections. If the Republicans’ tent continues to shrink, there will be less and less room for actual voters.
There is always theater in the writing of a defense budget. That is true no more so than this year, when a string of unusual events has made the American military process even more complicated than usual. In 2009-2010, the defense budget is…
- Being made by a Democratic President and Democratic Congress for the first time since 1994,
- Being made in a time of catastrophic economic global meltdown,
- Being made as the United States is moving out of one war (Iraq) and moving more deeply into another war (Afghanistan),
- Being made as some of the services are beginning to shift away from a Cold War mentality,
- Being made as the military struggles to rebuild and enlarge itself after seven years of uninterrupted war,
- Being made as all the services are struggle with procurement difficulties in their next generation weapons systems
- Being made as the wide-open spigot of funding that started in the post 9/11 era is finally being twisted shut.
The Obama administration’s first defense budget is a critical one, both to begin the process for dealing with the factors above, and to set a tone of rationality for the coming years of the administration. Before we turn to that budget, let’s peer back at recent defense budgeting history, to get a sense of context. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in an era of essentially unfettered defense spending, aimed at winning the Cold War. Defense budgets shot up and remained up for most of the 1980s, reaching nearly 6% of GDP ($840 billion in 2008 dollars).
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The end of the Cold War substantially reduced those budgets and the size of the military. What did not change, however, was the essentially unfettered ability of the military to decide its own strategy and purchasing decisions. With the exception of a small period from 1991-1994, the Pentagon essentially on military strategy (”The Powell Doctrine,” for example) and procurement (continued emphasis on Cold War weapons). President Clinton’s difficulties in handling the military essentially led him to abdicate any hard choices about future strategy. There was another brief break from this trend in 2001 as the incoming Bush Administration pushed a self-consciously “transformational” agenda. Donald Rumsfeld tried to break the services from their Cold War mindset, most notably with the cancellation of the Crusader artillery system. All of that stopped with 9/11 and (despite the legendary dislike of Rumsfeld by the military) the military was allowed by American policy makers essentially to run its budgeting ship, with ever increasing funding.
Given this past history, President Obama’s most important responsibility is to enforce realism. Simple sounding in theory, but difficult in practice and notably absent for the last several decades. The two most critical parts of enforcing realism is
- Budget discipline
- Building for Real Wars
First, budget discipline. Perhaps the most pernicious practice of the Bush Administration was the splitting of the defense budget from the budgets for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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| Defense budget & supplemental budgets, 2001-2008 |
The latter were paid for with “supplemental budgets” which were passed by Congress separately. The effect was to enforce spending discipline on neither effort. Billions of dollars have been lost in Iraq, while the defense budget has continued to spiral as the military continues to buy larger and more expensive weapons. President Obama seems well on his way to dealing with this one, having announced not only the unification of defense budget and war budgets, but also putting a cap of $537 billion on non-war related defense spending for the next year. As a method for bringing the defense budget under the control, this is a good start.
Second, the Pentagon needs to plan for real wars. This sounds like an obvious idea, but practice has been to plan for potential wars rather than actual ones: wars that the United States might wage, rather than ones they were actually waging. In the Cold War, when the genuine potential existed for a large-scale ground war in Western Europe existed, this practice was marginally defensible, though even then it left the U.S. badly prepared for Vietnam, among other conflicts. 
But now, when a conventional conflict against China or Russia is all but impossible, and the United States is involved in two counterinsurgencies, the practice is actively dangerous.
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| F-22 Raptor |
The primary goal of the services must be to wage the wars they are actually involved in, not the ones that they believe possible. Doing the former leads to the purchase of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles for the conflict in Iraq and the rewriting of the Army’s Field Manual finally to address counterinsurgency. The latter leads to billions being spent on the F-22, and the use of billion dollar warships to chase pirates off Somalia. The wars that the United States has been involved in in the past few decades have all been asymmetric–against much smaller foes–and a mix of conventional and insurgent campaigns. The defense budget has to focus on preparing for those, not for imaginary conflicts with China. Does that put the U.S. at risk if a massive conventional war comes along? Surely. But no more so than preparing for the large-scale conventional war put us at risk of getting bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this time, America simply does not have the resources to prepare for every contingency no matter how remote. That leaves us only one option: waging the wars we are actually fighting.
The GOP made a big show of not cooperating with President Obama’s passage of the stimulus bill last week. No Republican member of the House voted for the bill and only three GOP Senators did so. There are three major political implications of the way the bill was passed:
- Legislative power in the government rests largely in the hands of three of the remaining Northeastern GOP Senators: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Once Al Franken is seated as Senator from Minnesota (and it seems more than likely that he will be), any one of those GOP Senators can be the decisive vote to invoke cloture and prevent a Republican filibuster of Democratic legislation. The Democratic majority in the House is so large as to make it functionally irrelevant, unless there is a major Blue Dog revolt. Thus any critical legislative action from the White House is likely to be tailored to those Senators.
- The calculations of the Republican leadership are those of politicians in a tight spot. After getting soundly thumped in two straight elections and still saddled with the horrendous legacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration (much to Democratic delight, Vice-President Cheney has refused to go quietly into the night). Voting for the bill, they likely figured, gained them nothing. Any success would be credited to President Obama and the Democrats. Voting against the bill set them up as the voice of opposition in case of failure, and offered them a (however hypocritical) way of reasserting their status as the fiscally conservative party. That much of this required the most stringent short and long-term political amnesia–amnesia bad enough actually to provoke the normally-compliant media into noticing–was simply a burden to bear. The criticism that they thus put party interests above national ones is misplaced, as the GOP leadership knew that there was no way they could prevent the bill’s passage in the House and none of the three GOP Senators who voted for it in the Senate have been punished by their caucus. Essentially, the Republicans were playing political theater and they knew it.
- The regionalization of the Republicans continues. Voting against the auto bailout bill in the last days of the Bush Administration should effectively destroy the GOP brand even further in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. The effective conversion of northeastern GOP Senators into conservative Democrats means that the GOP presence in the northeast is even more reduced, and it is likely that some if not all Senators will lose their next election. Certainly, Arlen Specter is probably doomed in his 2010 campaign in Pennsylvania, if he’s not picked off by a primary challenge. The GOP has become a party of the South and the Great Plains, able to contest states in the West and Midwest, but losing more than they win. The Democrats have now won the popular vote in 4 out of the last 5 Presidential elections, and the GOP’s regionalization means that it will be unlikely to produce a nationally-viable candidate in 2012. Certainly neither Sarah Palin nor Bobby Jindal seem to have country-wide credibility.
What emerges from these three implications are a set of questions. How well will the Specter, Snowe, and Collins work with the Obama administration going forward? Will the GOP’s gamble on being the Party of “No” work? Can the GOP avoid becoming a regional party without the ability effectively to contest national elections?
On this day in history, the United States took actions that came to symbolize the contradictions of the Pacific War, at home and abroad. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered the internment of ethnic Japanese (Issei) and Japanese-Americans (Nisei) living in the western U.S.. In 1945, assault forces of the 4th Assault Corps put two divisions on the black sands of Iwo Jima. In a sense, the linked days symbolized the beginning and the end of the Pacific War in their own particular way. The internments–perhaps the most shameful act of Roosevelt’s Presidency–highlight the confusion, fear, and chaos of the immediate months after Pearl Harbor. Iwo Jima, at the other end, demonstrated the bloody grinding that the war had become by 1945 as overwhelming American power hammered against obdurate Japanese resistance.
Internment
The attack on Pearl Harbor had thrown the United States into war with Japan. It also reinforced suspicions that many Americans had about the Issei and Nisei living in the west. “Fifth column” activity had been a constant worry in the U.S. since the war in Europe started and suspicious individuals in the east had been questioned by the FBI for their connection to Germany or Italy. What was different in the American west, however, was the rapid shift from the suspicion of individuals to the suspicion of the entire group. The panic that overtook the West Coast after Pearl Harbor soon focused–at least in part–on supposed Japanese fifth columnnists active in California, Oregon, and Washington. 
The Attorney General of California, Earl Warren, issued a study claiming that Japanese-Americans lived in greater numbers near sensitive military targets. This, Warren thought, meant that they were concentrating themselves and waiting for an opportunity at sabotage. General John L. DeWitt, the head of the Western Defense Command, echoed Warren’s assessment. The result, in mid-February, was Executive Order 9066, which laid the groundwork for the exclusion of individuals from sensitive “military areas.” General DeWitt quickly issued orders to exclude all ethnic Japanese from “Military Area 1,” essentially the West Coast, and to set up processing centers and internment camps in the inland west to which the Nisei and Issei would be relocated.
The inherent silliness of the military justification for this is revealed most acutely by three things. First, the ethnic Japanese population of Hawaii was not included in the internment, despite their massive numbers and proximity to critical American bases. Second, it was impervious to any counter-argument. When told that there had been no acts of sabotage on the West Coast, General DeWitt responded that such a lack was “disturbing” because it indicated that the Japanese were waiting for the Americans to let their guard down. Third, many of the Nisei volunteered or were drafted for the military and served either in the European theater or (as linguists) in the Pacific.
The relocation of so many thousands of people created horrendous difficulties for the Japanese-Americans. Many were forced to sell their homes and possessions at fire-sale prices. Some destroyed their belongings rather than sell them for insultingly low prices. Nine Nisei soldiers were given furloughs from their units to return home and help their families with the move. In a defiant statement about their patriotic service, some Issei veterans of World War I showed up to the assembly camps in their old uniforms.
The internment was in roughly built camps in Montana and Wyoming and Utah. Treatment of the Nisei and Issei there ranged from malevolent to indifferent to kind, depending on the commander. Executive Order 9066 was revoked in February 1945, and the camp inhabitants were given $25 and a train ticket home by the government. They were not, however, compensated for their confinement or for the property that many had lost.
Iwo Jima
In military terms, Iwo Jima is perhaps most notable not for the style of the American assault, but the method of the Japanese defense. American amphibious landings had become routinized in their execution (though not, obviously, in the experiences of those mounting the assault). The focus was on getting the Marines and soldiers ashore with a minimum of casualties. To that end, massive firepower was rained down on the beach from carrier airplanes, the big guns of American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, and purpose-built ships such as rocket-firing landing craft. Once the beach had been pulverized, assault forces would go ashore in landing craft and tracked vehicles and fight their way inshore.
At Iwo Jima, however, the Japanese took a different tack. 
Rather than concentrating their defenses on the shoreline and thus prey to American firepower, the Japanese commander pulled them back inland and built a series of defensive lines across the island. The American forces would be pincered between looming presence of Mt. Suriabachi in the south and a series of lines in the broken terrain of the north. He conceded the beaches to save his forces and focused on preventing the Americans from breaking out of the beachhead. The result was when American marines of the 4th and 5th Divisions went ashore on 19 February 1945 in Operation Detachment, they found the beaches largely undefended. Only as they began to push inshore did they trip into the intricate networks of tunnels, trenches, foxholes, and bunkers that the Japanese had set up. The fight, which started off slowly, quickly achieved a horrendous intensity. Iwo Jima was technically considered part of the Japanese Home Islands and the defenders fought fiercely. 
The Marines pushed deeper onto the island, using flamethrowers and hand grenades to clear the bunkers and caves of defenders. When these failed, Nisei linguists sometimes managed to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender, but most preferred suicide or death in combat. The island was only finally declared secured on March 25, after five weeks of intensive fighting, and even then several thousand Japanese remained at liberty. The final Japanese holdouts would not surrender until several years after the war was over.
There were 27 Medals of Honor awarded for Iwo Jima (23 Marine and 4 Navy). The 23 Marine awards constituted about 30% of the Medals given to Marines during the entire war. American casualties were roughly 28,000 (with over 6,000 dead). Japanese casualties were over 21,000, almost all of whom were killed. After Iwo Jima, the American staff officers turned planning the invasions of Okinawa and Japan itself.
Memory
The memory of both has lasted, though in different ways. Iwo Jima has become perhaps the iconic land campaign of the Pacific War, symbolized by the famous photo of the the flag-raising on Suriabachi. The Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, DC specifically reproduces the flag-raising and many more movies have been made about Iwo Jima than about Okinawa. The movies themselves have ranged widely, from the uncomplicated patriotic remembrance of John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima to the complex dual projects of Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
The memories of the internment have been more contested. Though never forgotten, the American memory of World War II as “The Good War” tended to slide into the background things that did not fit. The 1955 Hollywood movie “Bad Day at Black Rock”touched on the issue, but from the point of view of Spencer Tracy, not the murdered Japanese farmer or his dead son, neither of whom appear in the film. It was not until the 1980s that Congress, under pressure from the “Redress Movement” acted to apologize and compensate the internees, with a lump sum payment of $20,000 for all those sent to the camps. Even now, however, the history is being fought over. Similar fears of an American “fifth column” post-9/11 have lead to the appearance of an internment-denialist literature, which argues that 9066 was justified.
The United States has focused so closely on conventional warfare in all its forms–land, sea, and air–that it has trouble when forms of warfare that are resolutely unconventional crop up. American weapons, doctrine, and training are unprepared to react quickly to situations that do not fit into the preconceived mindset. Even worse, the American government as whole often uses the military in areas for which it is not prepared and in ways that would be better served by non-military solutions.
This past month has seen two particular examples of this. First, groups of pirates sailing in small craft from the Somali coastline have begun hijacking ships from the busy sea lane that runs along the Indian Ocean side of the African continent. Armed with little more than assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the pirates have proven successful at taking enormously large ships like oil tankers hostage and extracting millions of dollars of ransom from the companies that own them or their cargos. This is insurgent war at sea, aimed not at other warships but at more vulnerable civilian vessels. The pirates’ craft are stealthy by virtue of their smallness, they can dash out from the coastline quickly, and can out run and outmaneuver the civilian ships they are chasing.
The required naval response is–as it always has with pirates–to patrol the sea lanes in which the pirates operate and escort the intended targets through the danger area. But this requires the kind of forces that the United States Navy has avoided building over the last two decades: a plentiful number of small craft armed with the most basic of weaponry. The AEGIS air defense weapon system of the billion dollar Arleigh Burke destroyer class is less effective against a speedboat loaded with pirates than a .50 caliber machine gun on a tiny patrol boat. But, while the Navy has a large number of the former, it has few of the latter. The result has been a largely ineffective response off Somalia.
The second form of warfare is even more unconventional and perhaps should not be considered as warfare at all, but somewhere across the divide into politics on the Clausewitzian-scale that puts war and politics at opposite ends of the same scale. In this case, the US was surprised to hear that the government of Kyrgyzstan was planning on ejecting American forces from their use of the air base at Manas. Manas is the critical link in the American supply line to its forces in Afghanistan. Through here are carried enormous amounts of food, ammunition, and the other logistical requirements that keep the effort in Afghanistan going. There is another supply-line, but it goes through Pakistan and the Khyber Pass and has proven vulnerable to Taliban attacks in recent months. Manas is thus doubly critical.
What was behind the sudden action? Fingers are being pointed at the Russians, who have recently made large loans to Kyrgyzstan. The quid pro quo seems to have been eviction of the Americans. Why would the Russians want to force the Americans out? The answer has less to do with the recent state of relations between the two countries, which has been reasonably good, than it has to do with the continuing effort by the Russians to reestablish themselves as the preeminent power in the countries on their border. The Georgian War was one such effort and it effectively showed not only the Georgians but the Ukrainians and others that the west could not protect those countries if the Russians decided to invade. Evicting the Americans from Manas would start the same process in Central Asia. Even if the Americans manage to hold onto the base by paying the Kyrgyzstanis off, the Russians have made an unmistakeable point about who carries weight in that area of the world.
This is not simply a problem of the military. The neglect of anything other than military (and conventional military at that) solutions to problems is a long-standing problem for the United States. Alternative methods–law enforcement, diplomacy, or aid–have for the most part been mocked and underfunded. The result is often that the only available option is the hammer of the military, and so every problem becomes a nail. This process only accelerated during the Bush Administration, when the marginalization of the State Department under Colin Powell and the increased militarization of law enforcement pushed even more responsibilities onto the back of the Pentagon, some of which it has been capable of dealing with, and some not. One of the most important responsibilities of the Obama administration will be to revitalize American ability to respond across the spectrum of problems, from smallest to largest, from diplomatic to military, from economic to social. If the U.S. uses its military power to the exclusion of all else, it virtually guarantees a continuing imperial overstretch and a strong tendency by the world to respond in the same way.
It is a commonplace of analysis–historical and otherwise–to suggest that militaries fight the last war. So commonplace, that it has trickled into analyses of non-military matters, such as Investment banking. The truism is, unfortunately, not particularly true. Rather, militaries prepare to fight the last war that they want to fight. Generals and Admirals are actually fairly selective in their models, and they usually chose the model that seems to them congenial. In many cases, they simply create an imaginary war to fight, one which fits with their ideas, preconceptions, and prejudices. Sometimes this mythic war resembles an actual war. More often, it resembles an amalgamation of wars, with bits and pieces chosen from different conflicts. In other words, it is not the last war that militaries prepare to fight, it is the preferential war.
Thus, the canonical model for fighting the last war–World War I–did not come about because the militaries of Europe prepared merely to fight the last war, but because the generals chose the war they imagined they would fight. In 1914’s case, the military leadership of Europe looked more to the wars of the past that they found congenial–the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War–than the one that they didn’t–the American Civil War.
The point of this for today’s world is that the Pentagon is not locked into the last war (whether it be the Gulf War, the Cold War, or Vietnam). Instead, each service, to a varying degree, has remained enamored of World War II and the conventional warfare that dominated that conflict. Thus the Navy focuses on buying large aircraft carriers, escort ships, amphibious landing ships, and submarines, an almost perfect mirror of the Navy that fought Japan from 1941-45. The Air Force aims for air superiority fighters, attack planes, and long range bombers, even as the Army Air Force did against Germany in World War II. The Army buys itself heavy main battle tanks, infantry carriers, and the accoutrements of conventional warfare, looking much like a 21st century version of American forces at Normandy in 1944. The Marine Corps buys amphibious landing craft and tilt-rotor aircraft to be ready for amphibious assaults like the ones at Tarawa and Iwo Jima.
There are exceptions within all these services. The Navy and the Air Force have developed and used unmanned vehicles to great purpose in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has adopted some of the hard-won lessons of counterinsurgency and begun equipping itself to match.
There are obvious problems with this pattern. One problem is that the military has to justify these new systems in the 21st century, not in WWII. The U.S. is no longer at war with Japan and Germany. As a result, the services look for potential threats that will account for the need to spend billions of dollars. There is no country in the world that can match the Air Force’s current fleet of air superiority fighters, so the Air Force points to China and Russia as impending threats. There is no fleet that can match the ships of the Navy, so the the service points to a potential threat from China. This leads to the next problem which is, in the process of preparing for potential wars, the Pentagon neglects the wars that America is actually fighting. Thus, during the war in Iraq, the Army was funding the Future Combat System, an expensive array of technologies for the soldier of the 21st century, while unarmored Humvees were being sent to a combat zone. Finally, when the technologies are sent to the actual conflicts, they often prove not to be optimized for that kind of war. The Stryker armored vehicle had to have steel cages attached to detonate the warheads of insurgent anti-tank weapons in Iraq.
The new administration can best deal with this focus on preferential wars is to force the Pentagon and each service to think long and hard about the wars that the U.S. is currently fighting. The last administration did not do this. In fact, President Bush’s policies actively militated against such a way of thinking by separating the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the “normal” military budget and putting them in supplementals. The signal was hard to miss. President Obama should ensure that the same thing does not happen in this administration, lest we discover that our problems in Iraq and Afghanistan become a long-term incapacity.
Suicide rates in the military have jumped over the past few years. The Army has seen the highest rates of suicide in the last 30 years, according to an Associated Press article:
Suicides among U.S. Army troops rose again last year and are at a nearly three-decade high, senior defense officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data has not been formally released.
Such a jump in the rate reveals the stress of a military now entering the sixth year of war in Iraq, the eighth year of war in Afghanistan, and the eight year post-9/11. Those years have witnessed a intense operational tempo with units going out of country for multiple tours of a year or more. Combine that with the strain of combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan where the front line is a fluid and changing place, and the recipe for stress is complete. The suicide rate has been trending up for awhile. Historically, the rate has hovered between 10-12 suicides per 100,000 service members, but that number has been going up since 9/11:
| Year | Suicides per 100K |
| 2002 | 9.8 |
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2006 | 17.3 |
| 2007 | 18.8 |
| 2008 | 20.2 |
Unfortunately, there is no similar tracking system for Americans who have left the service, and thus it is unclear if they too are killing themselves in larger numbers.
Other signs of this stress abound. The divorce rate in the military is up, especially among female service members:
Divorce rates for its personnel have been on the rise since 2003, the first year of war, when they were 2.9 percent. In 2004, divorce rates in the Army soared to 3.9 percent, propelled by a sharp rise in divorce among the usually much more stable officers corps.
A final signal of the stress has been the difficulties that the Army has had in retaining its officers. Mid-career officers, the backbone of the officer corps, are leaving at much higher rates from the Army than from other services, leaving the force with shortfalls. As a 1997 General Accounting Office (GAO) report (warning: PDF file) put it:
The Army, which continues to be heavily involved in
combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, faces many retention challenges….It projects a shortage of 3,000 or more
officers annually through FY 2013. While the Army is implementing and
considering initiatives to improve officer retention, the initiatives are not
integrated and will not affect officer retention until at least 2009 or are
unfunded. As with its accession shortfalls, the Army does not have an
integrated strategic plan to address its retention shortfalls.
Army officers and potential Army officers are voting with their feet. The latter are not attending the United States Military Academy or joining Reserve Officer Training Corps at college, and the former are leaving the service early in their career.
All of these factors show a military–and particularly an Army–under stress. The services have begun programs to deal with these signs of stress, but these are treating the symptoms rather than the problem. Until the commitments of the military are reduced, the systemic stress will remain and lead to severe and multiple problems.
Also posted at Edge of the American West
First off, let me thank the proprietors of this fine sea vessel for welcoming me aboard. Eric’s insistence that my turn at the tiller can only lead the ship straight onto the rocks of post-Cliopatria decline is heartwarming. And with that, I will drop the nautical metaphor before I really do go aground.
Though I’ve been something of a regular presence already, let me introduce myself further. I’m a military historian focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, and the mass industrial warfare of the first half of the 20th century. I’ve taken a particular interest in World War I, and imperial insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. I’m currently working on a project on the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1900 in China (warning: wikipedia link) and the western intervention that destroyed it.
Military history as a specialty has evolved substantially over the last two generations. The traditional school (”drums and trumpets” as it is known) gained a rival and complement in the 1970s with the New Military History, which brought the insights of social history to warfare. Succeeding historians have started to integrate later methodological innovations, including the linguistic turn and cultural studies. A good recent analysis of the field is here (subscription required, sorry). If there is a guiding force behind my work, it is the attempt to tease out how societies and cultures create their militaries and their wars.* But I don’t think that there should be a divide between the traditional and cutting edge forms of military history. Strategy, operations, and tactics are just as important to understanding the history of war as are language, race, class, gender, and culture.
Which brings me back to my current project and my initial string of posts here at Edge. The outbreak in 1900 was one of the first media crises. By this, I mean it was one of the first to be reported by the newspapers almost immediately, as it developed. In that way, it resembles the modern world of CNN and the Internet rather more than we might think. I’m reading the newspaper coverage for the project anyway, and I thought it might be interesting to do it in chronological order and write about it as I read it: insert myself back into the flow of the crisis, as it were. I’ve chosen to use the New York Times for this as they have (kindly enough) opened their archives back to 1851. So, over the next few months, I’ll be trundling through the Boxer Rebellion*** day by day and trying to treat it as if it were an ongoing moment, details murky and end unknown. I have no idea how this will turn out, but I hope it will be both useful and interesting.
Update: Brett Holman’s work liveblogging the Sudeten Crisis is the inspiration and model for this.
*For example, should we be surprised that the one of the most industrialized and technologically advanced countries in the world is not particularly good at counterinsurgency, the least technological of strategies?**
**A strategy that was developed in the first place in its various forms (Spain, Mao, Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh) to prevent conquest or domination by superior military powers?
***There are arguments about its name. The traditional name has been Boxer Rebellion. Historians of Asia prefer Boxer Uprising, as the consensus has been that this was not a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty but an uprising in support of it against the foreigners. At the moment, I don’t really have a dog in the fight, though I’m coming to the sense that the Boxers were supporting the Chinese Dowager Empress in the sense of pushing her to live up to her responsibilities. They probably had–to steal a idea–bumper stickers announcing how disappointed they were in her.
Also posted at Edge of the American West
For an explanation of the following, see this.
In the New York Times in early January 1900, China appeared several times, in a number of roles. There was China, the state, much fought over by the imperial powers of the world, ancient, decayed, helpless to resist, and ripe for exploitation. There was China, the nation, a subject of fascination and dismay, whose people lived lives of squalor amid the elegant splendor of thousands of years of history. There was the actual China, in some ways the least interesting of all from the Times’ perspective, where real things happened to real people.
The Chinese state emerged as a helpless pawn which the western powers moved back and forth to suit. China itself became a stage in which plays not of its writing were acted out. Thus on January 13, 1900, an article appeared talking of war between Russia and Japan over Russian influence in northern China and Korea. Japan, the Times confidently asserted, have “recently given an order in England for 100,000 suits of warm Winter clothing for Japanese soldiers in preparation for a campaign” to prevent “Russian ascendancy in Northern China.” China’s wishes were simply irrelevant and beyond consideration or mention.[1]
And yet China was of great interest as a nation. The same paper that ignored China altogether in its consideration of international actors had published a week earlier a laudatory review of a book about Chinese society, Village Life in China.
“That wonderful people…this great race” was how the Times referred to the Chinese, with their “numerous admirable qualities.” China as a nation was portrayed not only as worthy of study but simply too big and complex to be comprehensible. There are several interesting tensions in the article. China’s complexity and history was held in explicit counterpoise to its current degraded condition. China, the article made clear, may have had a deeper history (deeper implicitly than America’s) but its people lived in poverty. Chinese society had “many disabilities” which “retard [its] advancement in modern civilization.” The book suggested that only “Christianity in its best form is the only agency which will cure the defects which exist,” though the review article, interestingly, is quick to disavow (at least partially) that conclusion by saying that “the reader must not imagine that this volume is a missionary report.”[2]
The only article with specific people was the shortest. “Missionary Murdered in China,” announced a Times story of January 5th. “The Rev. Mr. Brooks of the Church Missionary Society…was captured…and murdered Dec. 3 by members of a seditious society called ‘Boxers,’ who have been active lately, destroying many villages and killing native Christians. The Governor of the province had dispatched a force of cavalry to the scene of the disturbances, but the soldiers arrived too late to save Mr. Brooks’s life.”[3]
The article was spare, with no details about the killing except the date. It assumed that the reader would have no idea who the Boxers were, introducing them in quick detail and positioning them as anti-Christian. The Chinese government was portrayed as friendly, if ineffectual, and there was little in the way of positioning the situation, with no real emphasis even on the obvious storyline of a “seditious” group moving from attacking “native” Christians to a western one. Someone had been murdered in a far-off place: important enough to mention in the paper, but not important enough for much elaboration or emphasis.
The Jamestown Project- Small Tent April 16, 2009 dsilbey
- Votes Have Consequences, or Regionalization (continued) April 14, 2009 dsilbey
- What A Regional Party Looks Like April 7, 2009 dsilbey
- What Defeat Looks Like March 31, 2009 dsilbey
- The Wrong Question March 30, 2009 dsilbey
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