Chapter 15
World Peace
Alternative solutions to the dilemmas of war the world confronts today must be implemented before world peace can be secure. These dilemmas are of a moral nature that threaten international security. They are (1) the dilemma of the cold war which divides the world into armed camps and threatens to plunge the whole world into holocaust in an indefinite future. (2) The dilemma of nuclear deterrence and the balance of terror which hangs over the world. (3) The dilemma of modern conventional warfare which threatens escalation beyond the nuclear threshold and the peacetime proliferation of balances of offensive conventional weaponry which threaten the political sovereignty of many nations. (4) The dilemma of fundamental human rights in regard to the justice of war and in war and in regard to a nation-state privileges. Solutions to these problems are interdependent and go hand in hand in securing world peace. Offered here are two alternative general strategies: an intermediate ten year unilateral initiative and subsequent twenty five year multilateral establishment which if achieved would eventuate in a secure world government and the permanent reign of world peace. Both together are alternatives to those policies which are being pursued today by many nations and are in many respects directly contradictory to the strategic courses being followed by some of the contemporary major world powers. Of course the initial precondition to the eventual success if these strategies is the courage to take the first step in overcoming the mutual distrust and fear derived from ignorance. Without this courage, and without a world wide initiative based on full understanding of the problems at hand, there can be no hope of success. The success of these strategies rest ultimately on the individual's recognition of the responsibility of leadership.
This is a gradualist strategy of peace founded primarily on the maximization of alternative value strategies: economic, social, ideological and especially of the strategy of scientific creativity. It is also founded on the concurrent minimization of the force strategies and the elimination of the strategy of terrorism. It is a comprehensive elemental grand strategy based on a modified form of the strategy of nationalism in the guise of a final supranational government transcending the problems resulting from rampant nationalism and incorporating the strategy of revolutionary change in the transcendent form over political revolution. This strategy is above all a revolutionary strategy of peace founded on the concepts of radical pacifism and radical humanism.
"Is there any out of this impasse created by man himself? All of us and particularly those who are responsible for the attitude of the USA and USSR should realize that we may have vanquished an external enemy, but have been incapable of getting rid of the mentality created by war. It is impossible to achieve peace as long as every single action is taken with a possible future conflict in view. The leading point of view of all political actions should therefore be: what can we do to bring about a peaceful coexistence and even loyal cooperation of the nations? The first problem is to do away with mutual fear and distrust. Solemn renunciation of violence (not only with respect to means of mass destruction) is undoubtedly necessary. Such renunciation, however, can be effective only if at the same time a supranational judicial and executive body is set up empowered to decide questions of immediate concern to the security of the nation. Even a declaration of the nations to collaborate loyally in the realization of such a 'restricted world government' would considerably reduce the imminent danger of war.
"In the last analysis, every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondly on institutions such as courts of justice and police. This holds for nations as well as for individuals. And the basis of trust is loyal give and take…" ("National Security" by Albert Einstein.)
What are the fundamental human rights in regard to justice of war and in war? What is the descriptive nature of justice of war? It is very well summarized in the book Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer. In spite the underlying variety of moral justice in the sphere of war, it has been common to slight the argument to marginal importance. The realist argument predominates in which the reality of war precludes justice. This has helped facilitate and make an exception to many recurrent criminal injustices in warfare.
Even though the language describing war is replete with tacit notions of right and wrong, many people maintain that the reality of war precludes the application of moral justice because the more basic laws of human survival and necessity predominate. War as human activity is considered by these people to be the exception to the rule of legal justice. And yet the morality reality of war transcends this realist argument. The problem of morality in war is similar to the problem of strategy. Both are used for justification of human behavior.
"Similarly, we can make moral judgments: moral concepts and strategic concepts reflect the real world in the same way. They are not merely normative terms, telling soldiers (who often don't listen) what to do. They are descriptive terms and without them we would have no coherent way of talking about war."
The problem with both strategy and morality is that war has been particularly and extremely difficult to predict and control from a theoretical standpoint. The strategist's problem is to apply theory inspite of the general unpredictability, human resistance and resultant confusion which the fog of war entails. It is his task to learn the lessons arising from the failure of such theoretical application. The moralist's problem is similar--morality is often violated in war--and yet this recurrent and frequent failure of the application of theoretical justice does not preclude his notion that human behavior is self determining even in the extreme conditions of warfare and does not therefore lie beyond the concept of personal and social responsibility. This is the moral reality of war--a conceptual reality which has taken form over time through argument, discussion and judgment of many people. The moral reality of war as not been determined by the actions of combatants but by the opinions of humanity. The moral reality of war lies beyond the ideas of historical of cultural influences. There is enough relationship of common fundamental human nature and rights between all contemporary and historical cultures. There is enough of a common sense of morality and justice in regard to war that has been shared by most human cultures as to make the moral reality of war the rule instead of the exception: a continuity and integrity of cultural thought which transcends the idea of relativism and gives proof and vitality to the concept of the moral reality of war.
"In moral life, ignorance isn't all that common, dishonesty is far more so. Even those soldiers and statesmen who don't feel the agony of a problematic decision generally know that they should feel it…if they don't they lie about it. The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy we also find moral knowledge…The case is the same in moral life: there really is a story to tell, a way of talking about wars and battles that the rest of us recognize as morally appropriate. I don't mean that particular decisions are necessarily wrong or right, or simply right or wrong, only that there is a way of seeing the world so that moral decision making makes sense. The hypocrite knows that this is true, though he may actually see the world differently.
Hypocrisy is rife in wartime discourse, because it is especially important at such a time to appear to be in the right. It is not only that the moral stakes are high, the hypocrite may not understand that, more crucially his actions will be judged by other people, who are not hypocrites and whose judgments will affect their policies toward him. There would be no point to hypocrisy if this were not so, just as there would be no point in lying in a world where no one told the truth. The hypocrite presumes on the moral understanding of the rest of us and we have no choice…except to take his assertions seriously and put them to the test of moral realism. He pretends to think and act as the rest of us expect him to. These claims are true or false, and though it is not easy to judge them (nor is the war plan really so simple), it is important to make the effort. Indeed if we call ourselves moral men and women, we must make the effort, and the evidence is that we regularly do so. If we had all become realists…in a state of war, there would be an end alike to both morality and hypocrisy…but the truth is the one of the things most of us want, even in war, is to act or to seem to act morally. And we want that, most simply, because we know what morality means (at least, we know what is generally thought to mean).
There is an underlying duality in the moral reality of war--the justice of war (the ends) and the justice in war (the means). These two conditions of moral judgment are at once logically independent and interdependent. An unjust war may be fought justly and a just war may be fought unjustly. This dichotomization of the moral reality of war is the crux of the dilemma of human rights in relation to war and to state privileges.
"Why is it wrong to begin a war? We know the answer all to well. People get killed and often in large numbers. War is hell. But it is necessary to say more than that, for our ideas about war in general and about the conduct of soldiers depend very much on how people get killed and on who those people are. Then, perhaps, the best way to describe the crime of war is simply to say that there are no limits at either of these points people are killed with every conceivable brutality and all sorts of people, without distinction of ages or sex or moral condition are killed."
The philosophical dichotomization of morality is similar to the philosophical duality found in strategy. In part both areas of understanding have a common source and may be traced to the general influence of Clausewitz in military philosophy---whose "logic" deemed that war is a reality without theoretical limitations, it is a "natural" process of reciprocation and escalation of destructive force. But there is no such thing as '"absolute war". While escalation of violence is common, relatively limited and continuously steady levels of violence have been just as common. War is not governed by abstract tendencies buy by human choice. The reciprocation of force and escalation of violence or the limitation of war are not absolute processes but are relatively governed by human decision making.
"War is not usefully described as an act of force without some specification of the context in which the act takes place and from which it derives its meaning. Here the case is the same as with other human activities…it's not what people do, the physical motions they go through that are crucial, but the institutions, practices, conventions that they make. Hence the social and historical conditions that 'modify' war are not to be considered as accidental or external to war itself, for war is a social creation. At particular points in time, it takes shape in particular ways and sometimes at least in ways that resist the 'utmost exertion of forces'. What is war and what is not war is in fact something that people decide…As both anthropological and historical accounts suggest, they can decide, and in a considerable variety of cultural settings they have decided, that war is limited war--that is, they have built certain notions about who can fight, what tactics are acceptable, when battle has to be broken off and what prerogatives go with victory into the idea of war itself. Limited war is always specific to a time and place, but so is every escalation including the escalation beyond which war is hell."
There exists a scale of intensity in the warfare spectrum which can be demarcated by the moral reality of war--beyond which warfare becomes self evidently unjust. Before this the intensity of warfare and the escalation of violence is limited and justified by the mutual consent of the participants. This is creative warfare which occurs whenever it is voluntary and when battle is freely a matter of choice. Even though marked by occasional extreme brutality, this form of limited warfare is more often characterized by mutual "humanitarian" tendencies of respect and observance for the moral and strategical reality of war. When battle practitioners can no longer moderate their own activities but are governed by higher political authorities from above, then warfare most often passes the limits of mutual consent and become particularly characterized by the escalation of bloodshed from a general failure to observe both moral and strategical principles. This is a hideous tendency--a symptom of gross military incompetency--that is most peculiarly evident in modern "conventional" warfare between conscription armies. This breach of constraint makes for totality in warfare. National military conscription a byproduct of both nationalism and militarism is the central vehicle for such inhumanity.
"War is hell wherever men are forced to fight, whenever the limit of consent is breached. That means of course, that it is hell most of the time, throughout most of recorded history, there have been political organizations capable of marshaling armies and driving soldiers into battle. It is the absence of political discipline or its ineffectiveness in detail that opens the way for 'creative war'…
"…In any case it is when individual consent fails that 'acts of force' lose whatever appeal they previously had and become the constant object of moral condemnation. And after that war also tends to escalate in its means, not necessarily beyond those limits that ordinary humanity, as free of political loyalty as of political constraint, would establish if it could."
The nature of warfare is tyrannical--the participants who suffer it have no other choice than to suffer, they would surely be "innocent" noncombatants protected by the conventions of war if they could choose to be. Yet this tyranny is not the inherent nature of warfare itself, rather it is defined by the relationships between people--when such relationships can be distinguished in the fog of war. The responsibility of the tyranny of war lies depends upon the crime of initiation, formally known as aggression.
"Wars are not self starting. They may 'break out' like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims…
"…The conviction that victory is morally critical plays an important part in the so called 'logic of war'. We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny, those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor."
This then is the underlying problem which concerns the dilemma between individual human rights and the moral reality of war and the privileges of nation-state. If the fundamental concepts of human rights are accepted, then the conclusions that military aggression and conscription are a violation of these rights must eventually be realized and the notion of a nation-state's inherent right or privilege to initiate either aggression or conscription must be rejected. Indeed, the underlying notion of nationalism must also be rejected. The logical conclusion must be reached that conscientious objection to either the crime of war or the violation of human rights is not only the political right of the individual but more importantly it is his moral responsibility. The individual is obligated by such considerations to exercise his rights to their fullest context of understanding and degree of justification.
For all involved in war, for the participants, the military leaders, the politicians, the combatants and the civilian supporters, all lie within a relationship of closed end responsibility for the tyranny of war. The tyranny of war is precisely that it is inherently inhumane. The personal and social relationships between these various participants defines a circular two way feedback process with polar extremes of degrees and types of responsibility which lie between the moral justice in ends of war and the just means of execution of warfare. For the soldiers it is primarily a responsibility of fighting war well or not at all. For the leaders, both military and civilian, it is primarily a matter of responsibility to begin and fight a just war and for securing justice in its execution. For the civilians, as supporters, noncombatants, or non-supporters and as potential agents and victims of war, as citizens of nation-state, it is primarily a responsibility of allowing leaders to fight a just war and allowing the combatants to justly fight the war. All share comprehensive responsibility to the whole moral reality of war. While some share in this responsibility more than others, no one is exempt except perhaps the children and the disabled. This social relationship of responsibility describes the power balancing between the four extremes of the feed back loop between the civilian and military leadership end of maintaining primarily justice of war and the noncombatant and combatant end of primarily justice in war.
Acceptance of the moral reality of war means accepting also the established conventions of war and especially the principle of noncombatant immunity. This principle automatically precludes the justification or the injustice of the counter value deployment of strategic nuclear weaponry, upon which the strategy of nuclear deterrence is fundamentally based. The bomb, in this context of deterrence is an inherently unjust weapon. Yet this is the extent that the prevailing strategy of terrorism has influenced national, political, and military leadership to adopt the strategy of nuclear deterrence in violation of fundamental human rights and without widespread public recrimination, misgiving or united reaction. The world public generally accepts this critical and massive violation meekly and only weakly voicing any responses at all. General ignorance of the problem, an illusive escape from responsibility, has become the primary pattern of behavior.
The only just war is a defense against aggression. Only an international police force can justifiably be allowed to engage in wars of intervention or of anticipatory prevention to maintain international law and order. Only an all volunteer defensive force is justifiably allowable to nation-states in which the limit of consent is not breached by any form of national conscription. A widespread and general understanding of the issues involved in the moral reality of war and fundamental human rights must be cultivated through education among cultural subsystems of humanity. These are ultimate value foundations of world peace.
"Nonviolence defense depends upon noncombatant immunity. For this reason, it is no service to the cause to ridicule the rules of war or to insist (as Tolstoy did) that violence is always and necessarily unrestrained. When one wages a 'war without weapons' one appeals for restraint from men with weapons. It is not likely that these men, soldiers subject to military discipline are going to be converted to the creed of nonviolence. Nor is it critical to the success of the war they be converted, but only that they be held to their own putative standards. The appeal that is made to them takes this form: "You cannot shoot at me, because I am not shooting at you, nor am I going to shoot at you. I am your enemy and will remain so as long as you occupy my country. But I am a noncombatant enemy and you must coerce and control me, if you can, without violence." The appeal simply restates the argument about civilian rights and soldierly duties that underlies the war convention and provides it substance. And this suggests that transformation of war into political struggle has as its priori condition the restraint of war as a military struggle. If we are to aim at the transformation, as we should, we must begin by insisting upon the rules of war and by holding soldiers rigidly to the norms they set. The restraint of war is the beginning of peace."
International aggression is a crime because it interrupts the peace and forces humans to die for their rights. It is the only crime that one state may commit against another state. Aggression involves violation of territorial integrity or political--the rights of states: there is no differentiation between relative degrees of aggression. Aggression justifies resistance because it is the violation of extremely important value judgments derived from the moral concept of human rights.
"Aggression is a singular and undifferentiated crime because in all its forms, it challenges rights that are worth dying for."
The rights of states-political sovereignty and territorial integrity--ultimately derive power from fundamental human rights. It is because individuals are justified to choose and form their political institution that aggression which challenges the rights of this institution must be resisted.
"Individual rights (to life and liberty) underlie the most important judgments that we make about war…it is enough to say that they are somehow entitled by our sense of what it means to be a human being. If they are not natural then we have invented them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world. State's rights are simply their collective form…"
"The rights of states rest on the consent of their members. But this is consent of a special sort. State rights are not constituted through a series of transfers from individual men and women to the sovereign or through a series of exchanges among individuals. What actually happens is harder to describe. Over a long period of time, shared experiences and cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a common life. 'Contract' is a metaphor for a process of association and mutuality, the ongoing character of which the state claims to protect against external encroachment. The protection extends not only to the lives and liberties of individuals but also to their shared life and liberty, the independent community they have made, for which individuals are sometimes sacrificed. The moral standing of any particular state depends upon the sacrifices required by that protection are willingly accepted and thought worthwhile. If no common life exists, or if a state doesn't defend the common life that does exist, its own defense may have no moral justification. But most states do stand guard over the community of their citizens at least to some degree: that is why we assume the justice of their defensive wars. A give a genuine 'contract' it makes sense to say that territorial integrity and political sovereignty can be defended in exactly the same way as individual life and property."
Resistance is necessarily important for the defense of rights and the deterrence of future aggression--aggression defines the just war. The victim of aggression not only defends its own violated rights but resists aggression of behalf of the whole world community--any and all states are not only entitled to but the legal obligation in the name of law enforcement to assist the defense of and to resist such aggression. This is the basis of international law and order and establishes the need for the enforcement of such law. This need underlies the obligatory legitimacy and authority of a supranational government. In the crime of aggression there is always a guilty perpetrator--some state against which international law must be enforced. "No war is just on both sides."
"The theory of aggression first takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy. I am going to call that primary form of the theory the legalist paradigm since it consistently reflects the conventions of law and order…the theory of aggression can then be summed up in six propositions:
1. There exists an international society of dependent states…
2. This international society has a law that establishes the rights of its members--above all, the rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty…
3. Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state against the political sovereignty or territorial integrity of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act…
4. Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response: a war of self defense by the victim and a war of law enforcement by the victim and any other member of international society.
5. Nothing but aggression can justify war.
6. Once the aggressor state has been militarily repulsed, it can also be punished…But the implication of the paradigm is clear, if states are members of international society, the subject of rights, they must also be (somehow) the objects of punishment.
"The defense of rights is a reason for fighting. I want to stress again, and finally, that it is the only reason. The legalist paradigm rules out every other sort of war…"
These then are the basic value foundation of justice for the purpose and function of world government in maintaining law and order in international society--primarily by deterring and intervening in wars of aggression and resistance. They derive justice ultimately from fundamental human rights. It is the responsibility of every individual of world society to acknowledge their importance--the mutual understanding of which must be cultivated through education and open communication. But how to develop a feasible and practical strategy to achieve such reinforcement of international law and order? One strategy exists which is not only operationally feasible but is also economically more efficient than any similar strategy being pursued in contemporary international society. It rests with the resolution of the crucial dilemmas which undermine the security of world society.
The key to such a resolution is by planning both decisively for peace and for decisive warfare. The United States propaganda machine has created of the Soviet Union a menace threatening its very back door. By pursing a "defense" strategy of attempting to counter communist expansion at every possibility--of worst case military preparation for all possible situations of encounter--the United States has made of itself a veritable monster in the Soviet imagination and a target of its official political and military policy. US policy has helped to promote and forward the communist cause as much as it has actually stemmed its expansion. The primary concern of Soviet policy is not world domination but rather the defensive security of its borders and homeland from the possible invasion by foreign aggressors--the US especially. Most of its military forces are actually more defensively postured and oriented than those of the US. The extreme Russian paranoia about its territorial integrity is a reasonable byproduct of a long history of costly invasions by foreign aggressors. It seeks security in the arms race through a continuous military escalation to achieve a parity and to offset apparent military disadvantages in some aspects overcompensating in other areas when compared with the forces of its opponents especially the US. The extreme Russian paranoia about its territorial integrity is a reasonable byproduct of a long history of costly invasions by foreign aggressors. It seeks security in the arms race through a continuous military escalation to achieve a parity and to offset apparent military disadvantages in some aspects by overcompensating in other areas when compared with the forces of its opponents--especially the United States. It is thus striving to maintain what it deems as a balance of power by which deterrence of general war and foreign aggression is creditable by its own standards. It seeks the security of its borders by bringing all contiguous nations under her influence either forcibly or by subversive coercion and persuasion. It deems a homogeneous communist bloc of nations with the Soviet Union at its center as a necessary insulating buffer from direct access to its homeland by foreign invaders. Its communist undertakings and imperialist tendencies, projections of its own rampant nationalism and militarism, and as a security policy of adequate "defense" by its own standards, are not to dissimilar to the tendencies and orientation of policy of the United States. Many correlation and parallels policies may be found among all the proclaimed differences between the two superpowers. The US is not is a dissimilar situation. It takes its domestic security for granted because of inaccessible reaches of vast oceans and economic dominion over a few neighbors with which it shares vast border expanses and common cultural heritages. Foreign, imperialist expansion is only a third and subsequent item of the Soviet foreign policy list of priorities. It is fostered as much by its perceived need for security against its perceived enemies as it is fostered by any purely selfish communist and nationalist intentions of world dominion. While it may not be possible to bring the Soviet Union into a world alliance directly without compromising and radically undermining the authority of a supranational government. It is possible to demonstrate to her the efficacy and verity of world government and to eventually persuade her over time to come into mutual collaboration and make crucial readjustments of its foreign policy. This can be accomplished by making it simultaneously and rationally seem apparent to be very advantageous to her in the long run to join and very disadvantageous for her to remain isolated and competitive. Opening up communication and pursuing a mutually symbiotic pacifist relationship over a period of years can only dispel the atmosphere of mutual mistrust and release the enormous collective tensions of the continuing cold war. The trust implied in world unity cannot be achieved in a simultaneously complete disarmament by all nations of the world--it can only be accomplished very gradually over a period of prolonged and uninterrupted peacetime cooperation.
"The Russians may be partly right about the difficulty of retaining their present social structure in a supranational regime, though in time they may be brought to see this in a far lesser loss than remaining isolated from a world of law. But at present they appear to be guided by their fears, and one must admit that the United States has made ample contributions to these fears, not only as to atomic energy but in many other respects. Instead this country has conducted its Russian policy as though it were convinced that fear is the greatest of all diplomatic instruments."
"What the Russians are striving to prevent the formation of a supranational security system is no reason why the rest of the world should not work to create one. It has been pointed out that the Russians have a way of resisting with all their arts what they do not wish to have happen, but once it happens, they can be flexible and accommodate themselves to it. So it would be well for the United States and other powers not to permit the Russians to veto an attempt to create supranational security. They can proceed with some hope that once the Russians see they cannot prevent such a regime they may join it."
"So far the United States has shown no interest in preserving the security of the Soviet Union. It has been interested in its own security which is characteristic of the competition which marks the conflict for power between sovereign states. But one cannot know in advance what would be the effect on Russian fears if the American people forced their leaders to pursue a policy of substituting a world of law, Russian security would be equal to our own, and for the American people to espouse this whole heartedly, something that would be possible under the workings of democracy, might work a kind of miracle in Russian thinking."
"At present the Russians have no evidence to convince them that the American people are not contentedly supporting a policy of military preparedness which they regard as a policy of deliberate intimidation. If they had evidence of a passionate desire by Americans to preserve peace in the one way it can be maintained, by a supranational regime of law, this would upset Russian calculations about the peril to Russian security in current trends of American thought. Not until a genuine convincing offer is made to the Soviet Union, backed by an aroused American public, will be entitled to say what the Russian response would be."
"It may be that the first response would be to reject the world of law. But if from that moment it began to be clear to the Russians that such a world was coming into existence without them, and that their own security was being increased, their ideas necessarily would change.
I am in favor of inviting the Russians to join a world government authorized to provide security, and if they are willing to join, to proceed to establish supranational security without them. Let me admit quickly that I see great peril in such a course. If it is adopted it must be done in a way to make it utterly clear that the new regime is not a combination of power against Russia. It must be a combination that by its composite nature will greatly reduce the chances of war. It will be more diverse in its interests than any single state, thus less likely to resort to aggressive or preventive war. It will be larger, hence stronger than any single nation. It will be geographically much more extensive and thus more difficult to defeat by military means. It will be dedicated to supranational security, and thus escape the emphasis on national supremacy which is so strong a factor in war.
If a supranational regime is set up without Russia, its service to peace will depend on the skill and sincerity with which it is done. Emphasis should always be apparent on the desire to have Russian take part. It must be clear to Russia and no less so to the nations comprising the organization that no penalty is incurred or implied because a nation declines to join. If the Russians do not join at the outset, they must be sure of a welcome when they do decide to join. Those who create the organization must understand that they are building with the final objective of obtaining Russian adherence…"
"Atomic War or Peace" by Albert Einstein.
The resolution of the cold war is the first but not the only step. It is dependent upon the proper resolution of the other dilemmas which undermine world peace: the dilemma of nuclear deterrence and the dilemma of the balance of conventional forces and the arms race. These dilemmas must not be neglected. They are interdependent and inseparable in solution. They must be integrated into a composite comprehensive strategy. All the dilemmas rest ultimately upon the efficacy that by planning both decisively for peace and for decisive warfare all nations must be persuaded by the advantages of union and the disadvantages of war--that world government is the best and the most profitable course of action. Overcoming the barrier created by the cold war can only lead to common integration which will prove economically profitable to all involved.
The heart of the dilemma of nuclear deterrence is that it is founded on an unjust and irrational counter value strategy which has been the direct extension of the strategy of terror bombing in World War 11. The problem is that more than one side has the bomb while the capabilities to employ it do not confine its use to only enemy territory but ultimately to the whole world. The menace is gradually proliferating to the extent of destabilizing all old conventional balances of power. The ultimate strategic irrationality and moral injustice of the issues involved in nuclear deterrence were of less definable obscurity in the conventional warfare of yesterday but have become glaringly obvious in the instantaneity of tomorrow's push button holocaust. The cataclysmic release of cosmic amounts of deadly radiation has become the idolatries end of humanities subservience to war, instead of the means to his freedom and future survival. It is the ultimate universal tyranny of war imposed on the collective world mind by the propagators of authoritarian power structures. It is a manifestation of the same philosophical and humanly pathological elementary grand strategy of terrorism, which is neither strategically, tactically, economically or morally justifiable. This dilemma is the warning harbinger of humanity's extinction.
It is the same nationalist military propaganda machine which sustains the cold war atmosphere in an illusion of "defense" that obscures the central issues of the nuclear dilemma, thus, facilitating nuclear proliferation and augmenting support of the nationalist policy of maximum deterrence. The world has long passed any practical limits of destructive potential by nuclear weaponry--all further overkill capacities adds unnecessarily duplicate redundancy to the agony of humanity's burden. The military machines are in full production. The course of inevitable destruction is obvious. The central foundations of nuclear deterrence--the sacrificing of an enemy and our homeland, population and economic means of survival for purely political ends--are strategically self defeating and such an occurrence of massive bloodletting will have been the most morally despicable crime committed in the history of civilization. It will be a crime to which no one will claim responsibility for, but one which every person shares responsibility. The reality of nuclear weaponry is here to stay, nuclear proliferation, by both vertical intensification and horizontal extensification will continue. Nuclear war is bound to occur sooner or later. The chances of its occurrence are great and increasing. It will be unpredictable and spasmodic. It is the problem of humanity to learn to live with the reality of nuclear destruction, to learn how to live in spite of these facts and to devise ways to prevent it and to minimize its ill side effects when it does occur. The foundations of the balance of terror underlying nuclear deterrence is a grand illusion to the security of the future of humanity.
"Nuclear war is and will remain morally unacceptable and there is no case for its rehabilitation. Because it is unacceptable we must seek out ways to prevent it, and because deterrence is a bad way, we must seek out others. It is not my purpose here to suggest what the alternatives might look like. I have been more concerned to acknowledge that deterrence itself, for all its criminality, falls or may fall for the moment under the standard of necessity. But as with terror bombing, so here with the threat of terrorism: supreme emergency is never a stable position. The realm of necessity is subject to historical change. And, what is more important, we are under an obligation to seize upon opportunities of escape, even to take risks for the sake of such opportunities. So the readiness to murder is balanced, or should be, by the readiness not to murder, not to threaten murder, as soon as alternative ways to peace can be found."
Counter force strategy is a saner, strategically more rational and morally preferable orientation of nuclear capabilities than is the strategy of counter value nuclear deterrence, but the effectiveness of counter force strategy is undermined by being founded on a prerequisite doctrine of counter vale massive retaliation. Its effectiveness is therefore confined to a first preemptive strike stance which seeks to render most if not all of the opponent's strategic arsenal ineffective, in order to gain an early decisive imbalance. To be able to accomplish this objective leads to the extreme buildup of overkill capabilities of ever increasing lethality. Here is the illusion of offering as the primary mode of "defense" against nuclear attack more nuclear weapons which are even deadlier in an increasingly offensive strike mode.
How many people are capable of diving beneath all the rhetorical and statistical superficially engendered by the propaganda machine, labeled as "defense", that most fundamental assumption which is so irrational and yet so decisive as influence--that a bomb can guarantee defense? How many people are faced with compromising the truth by limiting their fundamental premises in order to work within socially acceptable standards. On fundamentally erroneous foundations, the delicate balance of terror is becoming ever more precariously top heavy. It is not right to wish away the nuclear dilemma to the ignorance of the past and future, nor to repress it in a dark but foreboding corner of the collective world mind, it is right only to openly and honestly understand and express ourselves about the dilemma and then to actively seek its resolution.
Let us begin with a new alternative foundation for nuclear deterrence based on the value of life instead of on the terror of death. Offensive warfare, whatever the mode of weaponry is morally unacceptable. For any nation to prepare in peacetime for an offensive first strike is deliberately intending to upset an already achieved balance. Only real defensive preparations by individual nations is just and strategically more desirable. This does not mean an illusion of national "defense" fostered by propaganda from the "defense" department, but a truly defensive posture. In terms of nuclear warfare, this means beginning on a basis of counter force instead of counter value, of second strike limited retaliation instead of preemptive first strike and massive retaliation, of improving the capability of the whole world to survive a nuclear holocaust and to function afterwards, and of relinquishing the initiative to the enemy and retaining only a force level of optimum deterrence value. It is a strategy founded on mutual trust of the opponent's valuations of life and not on reciprocating and escalating fears of his lethality.
Before any other act is made in this general reorientation of "defense" toward real defense the use by any nation of nuclear weaponry and of all chemical and biological agents as well must be made illegal. All such weapons should become the property of world government. All member nations should, as a price of membership, deliver up all sorts of these weapons to the disposal of world government and officially and formally renounce all intentions to manufacture, posses, or use such weapons in the future. Only then can offensive warfare by such means be openly recognized as what it truly is--illegal--and its inherent injustice formally and universally established.
Not all nations, whether claiming affiliation to world government or not, will renounce the possession of such weapons. Not all nations will agree to such a defensive posturing of their military forces. Nuclear weaponry will persist illegally. Therefore the world police organization should retain an amount of these weapons to guarantee optimum deterrence value. This optimum amount must be achieved by improving the survivability of such weapons to an offensive first strike and improving international active defense measures and national passive defense measures. In a push button nuclear war the self acclaimed victor will be the one that comes out ahead on paper but not in reality. Collateral damage is only incidental. If world nuclear forces can effectively survive a surprise massive first strike by an aggressor, minimizing collateral damage, and can then counter attack on a planned limited retaliatory strike against the aggressors remaining nuclear weapons, it will be able to come out ahead in a superior bargaining position and can force the aggressor through punishment from collateral counter value damage and through future deterrence to resign its aggressive policies. If they can be survived, the weapons expended in the first nuclear strike by the aggressor will have meant an insufferable and decisive loss to the aggressor's remaining nuclear bargaining power. There is the true defense--to allow the enemy to quickly disarm itself through useless first strike expenditure of his arsenal. Here is the basis of future counter force defensive deterrence. The minimized collateral damage to the aggressor's homeland resulting from the retaliatory counter force strike, a limited and controlled response against the remaining nuclear arsenal and means of production of these weapons instead of a spasmodic and uncontrolled massive retaliation against its cities and economy, would be more than ample to persuade desistance from any further nuclear aggression.
The beauty of this solution is its inherent simplicity--the elegance of its execution. It is the illusion of nuclear "defense" that nuclear weaponry must be situated in the security of a nations homeland to afford the utmost protection. The future efficacy of unquestioningly continuing and further augmenting the predominantly land based strategic triad system of deployment as the best means of nuclear "defense" through enhanced survivability is dubious. Alternative possibilities of a sea based triad, of an aerospace quadrad or of a simple outer space monad must be considered. The same means of surviving any preemptive first strike is also the best means of minimizing collateral damage to the nation's homeland. This is to remove all nuclear weaponry and their facilities from the proximity of any human population center and to re-deploy them in the least accessible and remotest regions available. Hopefully and ultimately this would mean the eventual removal of all nuclear weaponry from the biosphere of the earth and place them in the far out and remotest but strategically the most defensible and survivable regions of outer space. In the interim of this strategic finality all nuclear weapons could and should be removed from all land bases to the high seas and polar regions where collateral and attendant damage can be minimized and where the greatest dispersion and mobility and the greatest survivability through inaccessibility. A satellite reconnaissance and laser defense system might eventually be developed to augment a coastal and polar early warning system and anti-ballistic missile system. These regions, the polar ice caps, the high seas and outer space are also the natural domain of control by a world government. International security and control over such weaponry can thereby be increased in all modes.
Finally it must be recognized that the basis of this strategy of nuclear deterrence is dependent on the mutual trust of the opponent's fundamental moral valuations about human life. It is based on relinquishing all initiative subsumed and tacitly implied in a first strike counter force offensive orientation, and thereby dissolving all elements of mistrust and fear. It is possible to rationally guarantee a defense against an immoral and irrational enemy by any means. There can be no real deterrence against an irrational counter value first strike. It is only possible to withstand the assault with the least amount of devastation and to bring the criminal swiftly to justice. A counter value first strike on the homeland of a nation is the most despicable, immoral and insane act imaginable. Yet there is no certain way to absolutely avoid the possibility of such an occurrence except through absolute international control of such weapons and the complete abolition of warfare in general. The potential aggressor can only be dissuaded from his crime before hand by guaranteeing and making credible the punitive consequence of retaliation and the damages of such an aggressive attack can only be minimized by improving passive defense measures as much as possible. This is the only justifiable and human type of defense against nuclear weaponry any national sovereignty can legitimately maintain against the possibility of such extreme forms of aggression. Nuclear proliferation in no defense. All nations should spend less developing bigger and better bombs and spend more on improving passive civilian defense measures aimed at allowing the innocent noncombatant the chance of surviving the consequence of their nuclear policies. The commonly expressed official policy of complete neglect of such passive defense measures in view of the gruesome nuclear reality of total destruction and complete devastation is not a justifiable excuse. If even one more human life can be spared by such passive measures, much less millions of lives, then it is the moral and legitimate obligation of the government in question to attempt whole heartedly to improve such defensive measures. The onus of responsibility is especially applicable to those national politicians with the means for maintaining nuclear deterrence as the primary form of "defense" of the people. Expediency can never replace justice in such considerations. All nations should initiate national passive defense programs immediately: going "underground", coordinating civil defense networks, educating and equipping the public for the eventuality of nuclear holocaust, organizing for the aftermath. While solutions to the problem of passive defense might seem today to be unrealistic and of little value, tomorrow many more ideas about the means for survival will be forthcoming. The effort must begin now. Prefabricated and inexpensive fallout shelters, blast shelters, public building regulations, displacement planning, evacuation procedures, underground transmission, redevelopment planning, rationing and civilian preparation can be economically and efficiently and profitably integrated within the day to day operational functioning of all parts of society.
It is becoming more and more evident that such a drastic reorientation from the official nuclear policies being pursued today on the criterion of stability through deterrence and balance of terror is perhaps the only solution available to the dilemma of nuclear deterrence. The very untenable strategic and moral premises of nuclear deterrence must inevitably be the very cause and catalyst of nuclear holocaust. This nuclear solution to the nuclear dilemma is paradoxical in that it achieves resolution in the same manner as with the cold war dilemma--by the proper integration of ends and means, through international world government control. The efficacy of this solution is reinforced by the neatness by which it fits into the overall general strategy of peace, with the idea of a supranational world government, by its simplicity of execution, by its obvious logic. By its economy and most importantly by its moral reality. The importance and immediacy of the problem presented by the dilemma of nuclear deterrence must be recognized and acknowledged by the collective world mind. It must become the foremost concern of all people's conscious planning instead of the usual most neglected corner of all but a few people's subconscious. Yet before any complete solution to the nuclear dilemma is possible the dilemma presented by the balance of conventional offensive forces and the escalation and proliferation of the international arms race, which will eventually pass the nuclear threshold, must be resolved.
Aggression is illegal by international law. Only defensive warfare by a transgressed nation is legitimate. How to overcome the tensional relationships of the dynamic balances of power increasing within the international community and to avoid the reciprocal escalation of forces motivated by the mutual fear of possible aggression? It is only when aggressive actions by any nation or group of nations can be legally prohibited by a world government and effectively deterred by an international police force strong enough to intervene in conflicts and to anticipatively prevent aggression. Finally aggression can be effectively deterred by effective national defense forces which when truly oriented along defensive lines of operation and organization can effectively contain any aggression by a foreign nation. Contrary to popular opinion it is completely within the potential of modern military technology to provide for both military contingencies of an international police force and adequate true national defense forces more economically and with greater assurance of creditable deterrence than is now possible with the current orientation of multilateral proliferation of conventional offensive armed forces. Such a policy pursued by an organized majority of the international community can provide maximum security for all nations of the world and eventually pacify aggressive nations to the acceptance of international law and order and peaceful coexistence. Only in such a manner can the possibility of escalation and extension of conflict to total nuclear proportions be minimized and the atmosphere of mutual trust be cultivated to overcome the cold war barrier to permanent peace.
There exists a spectrum of anticipation, at one extreme an instantaneous reflex of necessary self defense, in which states can rightfully defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not actual, and at the other extreme is preventive war in response to a distant danger, a matter more of foresight and unconstrained judgment rather than survival.
"Preventive war presupposes some standard against which danger is to be measured. That standard does not exist, as it were, on the ground, it has nothing to do with the immediate security of boundaries. It exists in the mind's eye, in the idea of a balance of power, probably the dominant idea in international politics from the seventeenth century to the present day. A preventive war is a war fought to maintain balance, to stop what is thought to be an even distribution of power from shifting into a relation of dominance and inferiority. The balance is often talked about as if it were the key to peace among states. But it cannot be that, else it would not need to be defended so often by force of arms…"
"Imminence here is not a matter of hours or days. The sentinels stare into temporal as well as geographic distance as they watch the growth of their neighbor's power. They will fear that growth as soon as it tips or seems likely to tip the balance. War is justified…by fear alone and not by anything other states actually do or any signs they give of their malign intentions. Prudent rulers assume malign intentions…"
"It isn't really prudent to assume the malign intent of one's neighbors, it is merely cynical, an example of the worldly wisdom which no one lives by or could live by. We need to make judgments about our neighbor's intentions, and if such judgments are to be possible we must stipulate certain acts or sets of acts that will count as evidence of malignity. These stipulations are not arbitrary, they are generated, I think, when we reflect upon what it means to be threatened. Not merely to be afraid though rational men and women may well respond fearfully to a genuine threat, and their subjective experience is not an unimportant part of the argument for anticipation. But we also need an objective standard, as Bacon's phrase 'just fear' suggests. That standard must refer to the threatening acts of some neighboring state, for (leaving side the dangers of natural disaster) I can only be threatened by someone who is threatening me, where 'threaten' means what the dictionary says it means: 'to hold out or to offer (some injury) by way of a threat, to declare one's intention of inflicting injury." It is with some such notion as this that we must judge the wars fought for the sake of the balance of power…"
"But there is a deeper issue here. When we stipulate threatening acts, we are looking not only for indications of intent, but also for rights of response. To characterize certain acts as threats is to characterize them in a moral way and in a way that makes a military response morally comprehensible. The utilitarian arguments for prevention don't do that, not because the wars they generate are too frequent, but because they are too common in another sense: too ordinary. Like Clausewitz's description of war as the continuation of policy by other means, they radically underestimate the importance of the shift from diplomacy to force. They don't recognize the problem that killing and being killed poses…"
"…The line between legitimate and illegitimate first strikes is not going to be drawn at the point of imminent attack but at the point of sufficient threat. That phrase is necessarily vague. I mean it to cover three things: a manifest intent to injure, a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a positive danger and a general situation in which waiting or doing anything other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk…"
"…To say that, however, is to suggest a major revision of the legalist paradigm…The general formula must go something like this: states may use military force in the face of threats of war, whenever the failure to do so would seriously risk their territorial integrity or political independence…"
"The formula is permissive, but it implies restrictions that can usefully be unpacked only with reference to particular cases. It is obvious for example, that measures short of war are preferable to war itself whenever they hold out the hope of similar or nearly similar effectiveness. But what those measures might be, or how long they must be tried, cannot be a matter of a-priori stipulation."
Now imagine an international police force powerful enough to legitimately strike in anticipation of threatened aggression, to invade the aggressor state and effectively disarm it before its crime is committed. Here is at once a justification for the need of such an international security organization, a criteria for its proper functioning and insurmountable deterrence to the future possibility of aggression. Here is one set of criteria in which such an international police force may be justified to take military offensive action in order to defend and preserve the security of nations. This is one purpose for the existence of such an organization, but there is another more important criteria.
"The principle that states should never intervene in the domestic affairs of other states follows readily from the legalist paradigm and less readily and more ambiguously, from these conceptions of life and liberty that underlie the paradigm and make it plausible. But these same conceptions seem also to require that we sometimes disregard the principle , and what might be called the rules of disregard, rather than the principle itself, have been the focus of moral interest and argument. No state can admit to fighting an aggressive war and then defend its actions. But intervention is differently understood. The world is not defined as a criminal activity and though the practice of intervening often threatens the territorial integrity and political independence of invaded states, it can sometimes be justified. It is more important to stress at the outset, however, that it always has to be justified. The burden of proof falls on any political leader who tries to shape the domestic arrangements or alter the conditions of life in a foreign country. And when the attempt is made with armed force, the burden is especially heavy--not only because of the coercions and ravages that military intervention inevitably brings, but also because it is thought that the citizens of a sovereign state have a right, in so far as they ate to be coerced and ravaged at all, to suffer only at one another's hands."
"…We are to treat states as self determining communities, he argues whether or not their internal political arrangements are free, whether or not the citizens choose their government and openly debate the policies carried out in their name. For self determination and political freedom are not equivalent terms. The first is the more inclusive idea, it describes not only a particular institutional arrangement but also the process by which a community arrives at that arrangement or does not. A state is self determining even if its citizens struggle and fail to establish free institutions , but it has been deprived of self determination if such institutions are established by an intrusive neighbor. The members of a political community must seek their own freedom, just as the individual must cultivate his own virtue. They cannot be set free, as he cannot be made virtuous, by any external force. Indeed, political freedom depends upon the existence of individual virtue and this the armies of another state are most unlikely to produce--unless, perhaps, they inspire an active resistance and set in motion a self determining politics. Self determination is the school in which virtue is learned (or not) and liberty is won (or not)…"
"Self determination, then, is the right of a people "to become free by their own efforts" if they can, and nonintervention is the principle guaranteeing that their success will not be impeded or their failure prevented by the intrusion of an alien power. It has to be stressed that there is no right to be protected against the consequences of domestic failure, even against a bloody repression…"
"…It is not true then that intervention is justified whenever revolution is: for revolutionary activity is an exercise in self determination, while foreign interference denies to a people those political capabilities that only such exercise can bring."
"And yet the ban on boundary crossings is not obsolete--in part because of the arbitrary and accidental character of state boundaries, in part because of the ambiguous relation of the political community or communities within those boundaries to the government that defends them…Hence, the ban on boundary crossings is subject to unilateral suspension, specifically with reference to three sorts of cases where it does not seem to serve the purposes for which it was established:
When a particular set of boundaries clearly contains two or more political communities, one of which is already engaged in a large scale military struggle for independence, that is, when what is at issue is secession or "national liberation".
When the boundaries have already been crossed by the armies of a foreign power, even if the crossing has been called for by one of the parties in a civil war, that is when what is at issue is counter intervention and
When the violation of human rights within a set of boundaries is so terrible that it makes talk of community or self determination or "arduous struggle" seem cynical and irrelevant, that is, in cases of enslavement or massacre.
The arguments that are made on behalf of intervention in each of these cases constitute the second, third and fourth revisions of the legalist paradigm…"
"The second, third and fourth revisions of the paradigm have this form: states can only be invaded and wars justly begun to assist secessionist movements (once they have demonstrated their representative character). To balance the prior interventions of other powers, and to rescue peoples threatened with massacre. In each of these cases we permit or after the fact, we praise or don't condemn these violations of the formal rules of sovereignty because they uphold the values of individual life and communal liberty of which sovereignty itself is merely an expression…"
The concept of counter intervention in internal struggles is not the legitimate response for an international school organization. While being applicable to the international society as it exists today where final authoritative verdict is nonexistent and all intervention is unilateral, when such a verdict can be applied it is just to enforce only the obligatory neutrality of nonintervention. Unilateral intervention in a domestic struggle is only aggression disguised. Counter intervention means only the escalation of the violence and conflict beyond the morally acceptable levels of nonintervention and self determination to inhumane proportions of bloodshed. It is the legitimate duty of a supranational police organization to restrict all intervening nations free from interference, allowing domestic disorder and violence to resolve itself and attempting to formulate a peaceful solution of the conflict through negotiation and compromise by bringing the issue before an international court of arbitration.
At what point does a state which represents the collective will of its citizens, if ever, forfeit the right to political sovereignty and independence: somewhere before that degree of domestic bloodshed and massive violation of human rights which morally justifies humanitarian intervention. This is the last form of intervention applicable only in context of the collective representation of international law and order. In a unilateral sense it takes the form of an invaded nation seeking to punish its aggressor after it has been repulsed by occupying its homeland with the aim of reconstruction and tutelage. Such unilateral application is justified only in the extreme cases such as Nazism in which the continued existence of such a regime is a complete insult and crime to the moral integrity of humanity--in which the domestic citizens are either unable or unwilling to adjust the practices of its sovereigns. Any state guilty of aggression within the international community automatically forfeits its right of political independence and territorial integrity during the act of the crime in which its military forces are actively invading another nation. Such a forfeiture is temporary and not permanent. Only an international police organization has the right to take advantage of this forfeiture of territorial integrity. By rapidly invading the aggressors homeland while its forces are overextended into the territory of another state, a world police organization can effectively stem aggression and deter future aggression. The degree of legal and moral authority commanded by the aggressor state determines its right to retain or forfeit its sovereignty and independence. Once aggression has ceased and peace is resumed the intervening forces must depart or remain to enforce the decision of an international court of arbitration. An aggressor state will be incapable of striking deeply behind a nation's front while simultaneously being forced to defend its own borders and homeland from an international police force. The rule of unilateral nonintervention under the aegis of a world police organization, must be upheld steadfastly while only purely defensive actions by the transgressed nation are morally allowable and preferable. It is the function and criteria of a world police organization to initiate what is deemed as offensive and aggressive actions on moral grounds: in anticipatory strikes, in cases of secession in which clear representation has been well established, in counter intervention in domestic disorders to prevent further intervention, in humanitarian intervention in which people are threatened with massacre, and finally in intervention to counter and stem further aggression in order to decisively stop the aggression at its source and to deter future prospects for similar aggression. Rights of offensive necessity held unilaterally by all nations must be relinquished to the higher authority of a world police organization in return for enhanced collective security. Only purely defensive wars to repel an aggressor should be permissible to any sovereign nation within the authority of supranational government. Under the authority of an international police force, all unilateral acts of anticipation, intervention, counter intervention, aggression and counter aggression and punishment must be outlawed.
"What does it mean not to have died in vain? There must be purposes that are worth dying for, outcomes for which soldiers lives are not too high a price. The idea of a just war requires the same assumption. A just war is one that it morally urgent to win and a soldier who dies in a just war does not die in vain. Critical values are at stake, political independence, communal liberty, human life. Other means failing (an important qualification), wars to defend these values are justified…"
"…But they do suggest the outer limit of what can legitimately be sought in war. The outer limit is the conquest and political reconstruction of the enemy state, and only against an enemy like Nazism can it possibly be right to reach that far…We can understand the right of conquest and reconstruction only with such an example. The right does not arise in every war…It exists only in cases where the criminality of the aggressor state threatens those deep values that political independence and territorial integrity merely stands for in international order, and when the threat is in no sense accidental or transitory but is inherent in the very natures of the regime."
"I can not restate the fifth revision of the legalist paradigm. Because of the collective character of states, the domestic conventions of capture and punishment do not readily fit the requirements of international society. They are unlikely to have significant deterrent effects, they are very likely to extend rather than restrict the number of people exposed to coercion and risk, and they require acts of conquests that can only be aimed at entire political communities. Except when they are directed against Nazi like states, just wars are conservative in character, it cannot be their purpose, as it is the purpose of domestic police work, to stamp out illegal violence, but only to cope with particular violent acts. Hence the rights and limits fixed by the argument for justice: resistance, restoration, reasonable prevention. I am afraid that these are not as constraining as they may sound. It will often require a fairly decisive military defeat to persuade aggressor states that they cannot succeed in their conquests. They would not have begun the fighting, obviously, unless their leaders had high hopes. And further military action may be necessary before a peace settlement can be worked out that provides even minimal security for the victim: disengagement, demilitarization, arms control, external arbitration and so on. Some combination of these, appropriate to the circumstances of a particular case, constitutes a legitimate war aim. If these falls short of the 'punishment of aggression' it has to be said that military defeat s always punishing and that the preventive measures I have listed are also penalties, indeed, collective penalties, in so far as they involve a certain derogation of state sovereignty."
"The object in war is a better state of peace. And better within the confines of the argument for justice, means more secure than the status quo ante bellum, less vulnerable to territorial expansion, safer for ordinary men and women and for their domestic self determination. The key words are all relative in character: not invulnerable but less vulnerable, not safe but safer. Just wars are limited wars, there are moral reasons for the statesman and soldiers who fight them to be prudent and realistic…"
Beyond the implications of the original propositions of the legalist paradigm, the resemblance of moral revision applicable within a modern society of independent sovereign nations differs somewhat from those which would be applicable under the authoritative framework of a world government and an international police organization. Some revisions such as legal anticipation and intervention in secession may be applicable in a more moderate form. The revisions of counter intervention and of punishment of aggressors may take a somewhat more altered form. For humanitarian intervention there must be only guaranteed response in a very much more decisive and moral manner. It remains to be seen after the fact of establishment of a world government whether the special collective character of nations and sovereign states which limit the legalist paradigm and entail the realist revisions will remain distinctive from the domestic analogy, or that concepts of territorial integrity, political independence and collective sovereignty will gradually dissolve in to obsolete anachronisms in a universal world society more closely resembling the peaceful domestic society of most nation states--into a single world state in which domestic law and order is the only form of legal structure occurring. A moderating integration must occur in which the concepts of boundaries will be present but the theory of aggression will be absent. Nevertheless, this summary offers a powerful foundation for a clear understanding that the moral reality and legality of warfare is applicable to every nation and is a prescriptive formula for just limitation of war that is applicable to any combatant--especially to a world police organization. It is important to recognize the limitations of justice in the planning of such a powerful world institution.
It was implied in the foregoing summarization of the fifth revision to the legalist paradigm that to push victory in war to strictly enforce punishment as an effective deterrent to future aggression is unfeasible and unjust given the nature of the international community and the special collective character of a national homeland and people. There is a deterrent value if it were feasible to persecute aggression in a relatively harmless and efficient manner such that the costs of the pursuit of justice would be compromised by the price paid by humanity. Deterrence, by being manipulated for a gradual cumulative effect, cold play a decisive role in non-aggression in the future. Over an extended period of time, aggressive nations under such conditions of deterrence would find their policies nonfunctional and unprofitable and could thus be persuaded to disregard such practices and policies in pursuit of more conservative means of growth. In recognizing the value criteria applicable to an international police force serving the cause of justice, certain functional prerequisites to its achieving such a success as a deterrent force come into focus. Its primary influence would be deterrent, or of a preventive nature, to forestall future aggression. Yet to achieve such success it would have to realistically demonstrate its effectiveness as a cure all to all of forms of aggression likely to occur. It must be highly effective as a cure to aggression once it has been initiated. Its principle orientation must therefore be of an offensive character, capable of intervening decisively within a functional response time into any and every form of international aggression anywhere on earth. The proper policing of a city seems impossible, much less the complete police of the whole world. Yet it may not be such a difficult task if pursued in the right manner, and it may prove someday an easier task to accomplish than policing of a city. It must be founded on feasible deterrence through effective and rapid punishment of aggression. It must proceed to conduct its business only toward just ends in a controlled manner following a pre-established code of conduct and war convention to the letter. If it fails in this initial prerequisite such failure would be the seed of its eventual undoing and corruption.
But how is such an efficient police force possible? At first glance it would seem to require an enormous number of constituents operating at horrendous costs. But it need not be any more expensive but can be even less costly and smaller in size in terms of each state than compared to the military forces that are being presently supported unilaterally instead of collectively. It is possible today because of the same applied technology and human creativity that has caused the increase of human wealth in every aspect of living. A higher level of modernization is possible today in the military than has been achieved so far by any military organization existing in the world. It would entail major alterations in the social organization, weaponry, equipment and people which are considered the standard norms of military today. Its cost would be a relatively inexpensive contribution. It is possible and economically feasible today if all the world nations work together for its collective organization and support, instead of separately constructing distinct military organization each with different and non-interchangeable weaponry and duplicative organizational costs. Its potential strength is derived from the advantages of international organization--collective security. Its strength is in numbers. If proportionately divided in an equitable manner among all member nations the burden of each individual contributing state would be minimized and it would be way below the costs today of raising and supporting adequate modern unilateral national military organization.
The fundamental principle of its organization would be to continually substitute through modernization process quality, a valuation arising from the creative ephemeralization process, for quantity, throughout every aspect of military. By using the most modern military forces today as models and through a process of integrating the good and discarding the obsolete and nonfunctional, a military force of high operational efficiency and economy can be created at less cost than the comparative standard contemporary national military model. Despite the fact that they receive more than any other single governmentally subsidized institution, the military organizations throughout the world today remain the slowest most highly inefficient and most socially backward looking institutions to modernization. They tend to operate in terms of past conflicts and to inhibit any potential developments arising from the valuation of its constituent human elements, while they have the human resources for becoming virtually the most progressive influence to social reform.
The leadership of such contemporary "modern" military organizations see strength primarily in terms of quantitative superiority--"on paper only" statistics--while they are so insulated by the backward nature of military social organization as to be almost completely ignorant of the actual functional reality of operating qualitative strengths and potentialities. Military organization, being insulated from the mainstream of larger social change and dynamic organization, has failed to adequately modernize through social reform to contemporary modern levels, resulting in operational inefficiency in the employment of modern military technology and manpower. Military structural and social organization remains predominantly and universally archaic and primitive--too obsolete to meet the real functional demands of modern conflict efficiently enough to insure a high probability of success at a low cost and risk of human bloodshed. It is to the detriment and part of the nature of such "modern" military organizations to seek to expand on the horizontal "field" level, quantitatively augmenting its "on paper only" strength, while the manpower requirements remain continually unmet. The net result is an overall cumulative stagnation and drain of any real qualitative superiority--a de-ephemeralization process of less efficiency at greater cost to the taxpayer--tied to a failure in the fundamental valuation of human potential. Modernization remains over encumbered by archaic and nonfunctional traditions and erroneous unquestioned notions of "human" superiority, of the real nature of conflict, and illusions of honor, nobility and human superiority fostered by the insulation of the social system. War is a universal tyranny. The key to success in war is the minimization of this tyranny, in tactical conflict and in military organization. Clausewitzian mentality of traditional Prussian military organization is inept and unprofessional to modern military ethics. The result is a backlash on the public of growing demands of "manpower" to compensate for shortages due to "failure" on the part of the host society to adequately meet the "on paper only" growth initiated by the self proclaimed deities of military leadership. Inflation of military requirements is a tendency which needs ever increasing levels of human "cannon fodder" to feed its parasitic war making death machine. The result is the necessitation of national conscription to satisfy power hungry and greedy complaining staff officers and their subordinates who are left to cope with the problem, in a peacetime mobilization process of escalation to maintain perceived "on paper only" security and credibility requirements in the "balancing of power" on behalf of defense in the continuing cold war. It leads to the unbalancing of any previous levels to peacefully settle the cold war. Peacetime military leadership is a mockery of human dignity. It is well known that the military is a poorly run organization. It is the public taxpayer and the too young sons and daughters who pay for the ineptitude of a few self styled selfish leaders of the traditional human meat grinder military organization. An alternative military organizational model exists--generally in the direction of development of reoriented improvement through comprehensive increase of the fundamental and operational valuation of the human element, resulting in more efficiency at less cost, minimizing the quantitative "real" strength. The net result would be a smaller organization of optimum operational proficiency in a status of permanent no growth stability and qualitative improvement. This is a hitherto unrealized model of highly professionalized individual volunteer military organizations not necessitating conscription.
Modern military organizations especially of the post industrialized societies, have the human resources for becoming the most progressive influence to social reform. It is the process of substituting past standards of short term benefits for a new forward looking program and long term profits, of a new type of military organization that has never been implemented before. There are no secret laser weapons nor new destructive bombs by which this new organizational model achieves tactical success by technological surprise and numerical superiority over an opponent. It is rather an overall ephemeralization and integration process affecting every aspect of the military organization proportionately and geometrically enlarging the comprehensive scope for improvement. It is the grand strategy of scientific creativity applied to the military itself. It is a force strategy predicated on a value strategy in the orientation of minimizing the negativistic and unnecessary cost of the military to humanity. A very small, highly professional and technologically well equipped organization of all volunteers is capable of achieving in conflict and strategy unlimited success against much larger seemingly overwhelming conscript armies. The model is based on the success of military elite forces which have fired the public imagination. The general characteristics of such elite organizations is that they are small groups usually operating relatively independent of larger bureaucratically organized traditional organizations, specialized into a mode of strategic application which is generally offensive in nature, seeking not to have tactical conflict but to minimize bloodshed in the accomplishment of their special strategic mission. They rely on secrecy, surprise, initiative, stealth, and human qualitative creative superiority rather than on firepower and security of strength that is quantified. Borrowing from the concept of military elite organization, the new model is a military organization whose specialized purpose is to keep world peace. It is borrowed from the human imagination that enables a small handful of individual specialists and professionals to accomplish what thousands of regular "GI's" prove unable to do without much bloodshed and expenditure of force. It is the application of the elite concept of hitherto unrealized and much more comprehensive scale. It is of necessity an elitist military force strategy. This model for a world police organization is named the universal elite.
The fundamental organizational unit of this type of military model is the force services group. In describing the nature of an alternative police force, standard military organizational designations are deliberately discarded and new terms are given to help reorient the military mind away from prejudice and to emphasize the differences of the new model from the conventional one. Its organizational structure is designed around the purpose of facilitating unit breakdown to enable the tactical defeat of any opponent unit at the next higher level of comparable conventional organization: a fire team can easily defeat an enemy squad; a squad that can easily defeat an enemy platoon, a platoon can defeat a company, a company can easily defeat a battalion, a battalion can easily defeat a regiment, a regiment division, a division an army and so on up the ladder of organization and across the board to include land, air, and sea forces. It represents a comprehensive increase in unit capabilities, an increase of human qualitative valuation and leadership, resulting in greater comprehensive coordination and operational flexibility at less cost and less quantity. The force services group is a comprehensive incorporation of land, air, seal logistic and command capabilities of about the size equivalency to a conventional land division with all supporting naval and air elements both horizontally and vertically. Total manpower requirements for each force service group is about forty five thousand. Each group is broken down in to for corps approximately equivalent in size to a regiment or a brigade. Yet it is the intention of such corps t be equivalent in qualitative strength and force capacity across the board to a division, fleet, or air corps of any enemy of the most modern conventional military organization. A force service group is capable of defeating a whole military force of an aggressor nation.
It would be the requirement of membership to the international community to finance and support in service a designated number of these force service groups or corps in return for the guaranteed collective security that would become available. The size of the contribution is apportioned to the financial capabilities and resources of the individual nation. Some nations that are rich and powerful would be obligated to field and equip more than poor and weaker nations. A rough estimate of such an international organization is approximately 20 force service groups operating throughout the world. The United States would be required to field for groups: Japan, Great Britain, West Germany and France two each; Canada, Australia, New Zealand one each; Southeast Asian countries, the Indian nations, the Arab nations, the Mid-east nations, the African nations, the Mediterranean nations, the Scandinavian and Dutch nations, the Central American nations and the South American might contribute each the equivalency of several corps or groups collectively. Hopefully the communist nations can be persuaded to contribute also. The USSR, the Eastern European nations, China and the Far East communist nations might feasibly contribute independently a substantial proportion of the total. The kinds of contributions and the amounts of each would vary with the resources of every nation. The more nations who contribute the lesser will be the individual burden for each contributing nation and the stronger will be the universal elite, the greater will be international peace and the more enhanced will be the collective security. The greater the resultant stability of the world from threats of aggression and the greater the prospects for future international peace the smaller will the force potential of the universal elite have to be. Eventually it may be able to dismantled to some minimal size, entailing minimum cost to humanity. The weapons industries to support the universal elite should be deliberately financed in each and every nation to increase economic interdependence and structural independence of the police force from any single nation or group of nations which might attempt to influence control or weaken the international police force or attempt secession or aggression or try to pursue some aggressive imperialist military policy of world power control. No nation should have any authority over the forces it contributes or that are operating in its sphere of influence. In such manners the universal elite might effectively manipulate and control the unfair and illegal practices of international arms businesses which cultivate militarism and benefit from the immoral results of war.
The weapons and organizational structure of all force services groups will be standardized completely to facilitate interchange and simplicity of logistics, flexibility of tactics and the size will be fixed to facilitate strategic planning and reinforcement. It might be feasible and necessary to eventually field world wide an international universal elite police force of up to 30 force service groups which would be capable of decisively defeating of up to 120 modernized conventional divisions, fleets and air forces of any military anywhere in the world, serving as an effective deterrent to aggression by any nation state, requiring only minimal amounts of support by each contributing nation at levels well below what it has been costing these nations to provide only themselves with what they feel to be adequate offensive security. The paradox of offensive security and the balance of power is that it leads inevitably to the outbreak of war.
The universal elite must be universal--capable of successfully and decisively fighting any type of war in any type of terrain or environment in any part of the world. It must be capable of responding instantaneously in an offensive manner to any act of aggression and decisively limiting it to a minimal degree. It must operate on a grand strategy of flexible response that has been formulated by the American super power as necessary in its national efforts to establish a world hegemony and impose an indefinite future Pax Americana. The universal elite must be capable of fighting within any and every area of the warfare spectrum, deterring credibility and resolving any level and condition of conflict. It must operate beneath a world controlled, world wide nuclear umbrella of a triad system based on the high seas and eventually on a quadrad or a monad with the main nuclear deterrent force deployed in far off outer space to prevent and limit any lesser degree of warfare from escalating beyond the nuclear threshold. The strategy of counter balance, of flexible response, nuclear deterrence and weaponry, biological and chemical weaponry, offensive warfare and conventional offensive weaponry, international arms market and businesses, the entire warfare spectrum, the high seas, the polar regions, the upper atmospheres and outer space are most justly, strategically and economically within the supranational realm of control of world government. No single nation can claim preclusive privileges and exclusive sovereignty over any of these things and all that they imply for humanity. Just as fundamental human rights are naturally inherent to human nature and cannot be healthily or justly denied or violated, so there are by extension also certain powers which are naturally and justly supranational in character and are within the sphere of control of world government. These include today protection of universal human rights by the abolition of warfare and a limitation of its uncontrolled outbreak, which means control of all offensive weaponry and means of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical or biological and sole exercise of absolute dominion of international arenas.
The organization of the universal elite and the military strategy of flexible response are founded on an elementary comprehensive grand strategy integrating the military strategies--maritime, continental, aerial, and nuclear--together with the power strategy of revolutionary pacifism founded on the maximization of human valuation, the strategy of world organization transcending the strategy of nationalism and minimizing the strategy of terrorism, with the maximization of the value strategies of scientific creativity, ideology, economy and sociological racism in an evolved integrated more human form. This comprehensive grand strategy takes the form of a continuously evolving, revolutionary pacifistic world organization. The world police force falls primarily within the sphere of a comprehensive force strategy.
Each force service group has five distinct vertically integrated functional chains of command--an air force, a sea force, a land force, a service support force, a single integrated comprehensively centralized logistics force and a command control force which is integrated into the command hierarchy to maintain civil control over military decisions, to facilitate the decentralization of decision making to lower field command levels, to comprehensively control and coordinate all activities and to provide absolute control over all nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry. Each fore service group is stationed permanently on the high seas, each corps being based on floating, nuclear propelled, man made islands which can travel, concentrate and disperse at random all over the world. Issuing from each of these island bases will be planes, ships, and land forces of a complete corps. Each island will be capable of launching into outer space rocket ships and space shuttles, satellites and other equipment for maintaining strategic nuclear force potential in outer space. The manpower potential of a force service group will be equivalent to six corps, to be stationed at sea and retired to the homelands on a rotational every other month basis. The equipment level will be equivalent to five corps with the one extra serving as immediate replacement and repair spare parts. The fielded corps, the operational strength of the force service group at any one time, will be 4/6 of the total manpower potential and 4/5 of the total equipment potential. 1/3 of the total manpower and 1/5 of the total equipment will be kept in reserve status. The sea lift capacity of the force service group will be the same as the field strength. The airlift capacity will be 1/4 its sea lift capacity at any given moment. In event of general war the size of the universal elite will not be increased in the number and size of its units, rather the unit losses will be efficiently and quickly replaced by continuous re-supply and reinforcement in order to maintain the optimum field strength of four corps to a force service group. In the case of defeat or annihilation of any single unit it can be officially dissolved and instantaneously re-instituted at another place. The groups fielded from each nation and the component sub-units will be itemized and interchangeable in the field and at sea to attain any force that may be desirable. Command will be instituted on a temporary ad hoc basis in requirements of perceived needs. The universal elite will have world wide satellite reconnaissance potential and inter-linked command control and communications, provide a multifaceted nuclear deterrence umbrella based on the doctrine of defense, second strike counter force deterrence, will maintain maximum control of the high seas at all times will be capable of aerial superiority at any time and at any place, and will be able to initiate instantaneously air borne vertical and sea borne amphibious envelopment against any aggressor nation. In the accomplishment of its special "universal" mission the universal elite will operate on the principles of the strategy of the indirect approach in order to minimize tactical conflict and accomplish strategic success with the fewest possible deaths. It will be under the supervisory direction of the parliamentary executive branch of world government and its officially elected representatives and under the authority of judiciary decrees by supranational courts of arbitration.
The method of operation of the universal elite will be to follow a size phase force strategy. While the forces of the aggressor nation have become over extended into another nation's homeland, its own territory will become temporarily open to offensive attack, forfeiting temporarily its right to territorial sovereignty and independence, and will become subject to the occupation by the world police force. The universal elite will invade decisively, through the back door, by air borne and sea borne envelopment to decisively block the armed forces and cut them off from both their logistical umbilical cord. The first phase of operation is one of reconnaissance and intelligence, to be as omnisciently sensitive to the signs of possible aggression as possible. The second phase is to manipulate if possible, the extenuating circumstances so that the potential aggressors are placed into a preconditioned shock of defeat, left open, unprepared and crippled so that they might be easily overcome. The third phase is petrifaction, to offensively initiate a first decisive blow aimed at destroying the opponent's lines of communication and transportation. The fourth phase is penetration, a second, in force punch aiming along all lines of least resistance and least expectation, to divide and separate the enemy forces and to put up an impenetrable strategic barricade between the aggressor forces and their homeland. The fifth phase is exploitation, surrounding and isolating enemy forces in a strangle hold in pockets of resistance to take full advantage of all vulnerabilities thus exposed as immediately as possible and to disarm the enemy. The final stage is that of consolidation in which the enemy forces are completely immobilized and the homeland is secured from further acts of aggression. It may be noted that the mission and method of operation of the universal elite is primarily offensive and only secondarily defensive. The organization, its people and equipment must reflect this offensive orientation in every way in which it can be made manifest. There must be taken and enveloped along their own revolutionary lines of increased offensive utility.
It is the peacetime task of the universal elite to maximize and dominate offensive capabilities in the research and development of new weaponry and methods of operation. Beyond the minimum standard equipment it will be the peacetime mission of all constituents and commands to creatively apply their human potentialities to military gaming, training and development of new equipment and techniques of operation. This human creativity is the spice on top of the meat of the organization, aimed at maximizing its human resources, not at the minimization of their qualitative value. Beyond all national sovereignties, the right, crime, and guilt of offensive warfare must be the sole realm of a supranational police force. It is the mission of the universal elite to capitalize on offensive capabilities in order to enforce law and order within the international community.
There is another complementary direction in military development which should be taken in order to improve international security. It is the alternative direction towards deterrence by minimizing the gain likely to be achieved through aggression and by maximizing the costs of such aggression. This is the direction toward improving the defensive capability of each and every nation, which is the only legitimate military means available to an independent sovereign state as a member of an international community. It is the right and duty of each nation to equip its people with adequate non-aggressive defense by which it can defend its territorial integrity.
It is often believed that the age of modern warfare is that of offensive blitzkrieg in which static lines of defense and fortresses are the anachronistic relics of chivalry. Since the advent of the armored vehicle and the airplane, modern technology is popularly held to be un-conducive to static positional defensive warfare. It is commonly unquestioned that the best defense is a good offense. Such weapons as the guided anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, towed artillery, mortars, heavy machine guns, are all primarily defensive. New electronic surveillance systems, new engineering and mechanical technologies would enable every nation to secure itself behind very encouraging defense systems. Defensive orientation is un-conducive to aggression. Technology is inevitably capable of enhancing the defensive if applied in that direction. The very nature of technology, the concept of a human at the central control of many levers of industry, is conducive to the simplification inherent in defensive orientation. Defensive weapons and defensive trends of development should be encouraged in international arms exchange. These should be the only legitimate type of armament exchanges allowed in international business affairs. Cutbacks and reorientation to defense spending should be encouraged unilaterally by setting the example and multilaterally through arms limitations agreements. This must be a condition of membership to world government. Defensive orientation can be achieved more economically, with more operational facility and with more strategic success than the ill fated attempts of nations singly striving beyond their means to arm themselves to the teeth for aggressive blitzkrieg type warfare. Defense, including nuclear defense, is the only just posture for national military forces. Relinquishing military initiative by a purely defensive posture would increase the inherent stability of world peace, discouraging fear initiated preemption. It is a sound alternative to the balance of conventional offensive forces which inevitably leads to the evolution of militarism.
Another illusion fostered by nationalism is the generally expressed and popularly supported concept that military conscription is not only the states privilege over its citizenry but is also the citizen's and the states duty to main conscription as necessary to national "defense". Conscription encourages escalation and peacetime mobilization which only heightens international tension and increases the probability of war. It encourages a preclusive offensive posture and a readiness for nations to opt for war as a "continuation" of policy by other means" under the public disguise of threatened security or insecurity. Conscription is part of a peacetime mobilization process which once set in motion and instituted achieves an unstoppable and uncontrollable momentum of its own, favoring aggressive policies and escalating the chances of warfare. It is part of the bureaucratic organization process that becomes institutionalized and contributes not only to the militarization of the citizenry but to the "civilization" of the military. The military is inherently a profession in which a member operates more naturally as a comprehensive professional under a code of ethics as in any other profession. Over an extended period of time the professional acquires not only wide experience and wisdom of his trade but an indefinable human "feel" for the profession which distinguishes the professional from the novice. The establishment of short term conscription not only mitigates against this necessary professionalization process of the military, but overall is harmful to the military profession itself. Because of the extreme differentiation of specialized functions entailed by such a massive, quantitatively oriented, dehumanizing institutions such as military conscription, the natural integration process of human development and professionalization which is a negative influence to tactical operational efficiency. This has become more strikingly apparent in the high technology equipment intensive modern industrialized military organizations which still maintain the traditional bureaucratic hierarchy and the structure of conscription. The concepts of mobilization and conscription have become antiquated by modern military technology which requires another fundamental basis of organization for operational efficiency. Conscription, in which the individual is dehumanized into being a simple cog of an abstract meat grinder cannon fodder, human material which is quire expendable on paper--might have seemed necessary in the antiquated warfare of yesterday in which the human was only a herd animal subject to the authority and dictates of slave driving aristocracy and self styled "nobility". It is no longer applicable in the modern military technology of today. It contributes to the disproportionate over swelling of the military which only seeks the outlet of war.
Conscription exaggerates and expands warfare into an unlimited disproportionate monster which scars the beauty of civilization, encouraging brutality and inhumanity and justifying itself by the irrational grand strategy of terrorism. Conscription is not only not conducive to defensive orientation, it is also truly an unjust exercise of power by depriving the citizen of his inherent right of consent and dissent. It is legalized slavery by the universal tyranny of the authoritarian power structures which so control the affairs of the world. There exists an alternative solution which solves the problem of conscription and reinforces the defensive orientation of national military organization.
This alternative rests in the cultivation of a highly professionalized all volunteer elite military defense forces of "regulars" which is reinforced by the voluntary participation of trained reserves. Such is force is not only the only legitimate type of military organization allowable to a sovereign nation, it is also necessary for achieving a high degree of professionalism required by the modern military technology of today and is most conducive to battlefield success and the minimization of terrorism in warfare. It will also encourage a primarily defensive orientation of military forces and only secondary offensive tendencies. There is never any need for a military of a nation to resort to conscription except in instances of imperial conquests and aggressive policies. The military forces of a nation would automatically swell with voluntary enlistment in response to threatened danger. If a nation's population does not of its own volition rise to the occasion of threatened or real danger it is extremely dubious whether that nation has any right to wage warfare in the first place or even deserves to defend itself. Maintaining peacetime conscription is like excess fat that is unnecessary and should be trimmed to healthy military proportions. Unpopular wars have a tendency of also becoming unnecessary and wasteful military exercises. The scope of war is best when limited by the right of consent and dissent and not by the policies of "leadership" and when it is supported by voluntary participation and not by involuntary conscription.
Increased enlistment can be achieved more profitably in the long run by foregoing many useless, harmful, self defeating, dehumanizing and anachronistic practices of traditional Prussian military behavior and by enhancing the benefits to the self such a profession might have to offer. It lies in the re-humanizing of the military profession. It another part of the overall strategy based primarily on the values of the volunteers rather than on the power to force by authorities. But in the face of death what is to keep people from running away? What is a real hero? Is it a famous general in some bunker behind the front line or the dead combatant whose life was sacrificed? What is more useful, a live combatant or a dead hero? Sometimes it is better to run away than to stand and die. Bravery is inspired from within the individual's conscience and not enforced from without. Positive behavior modification is much more successful than negative reinforcement. People will fight to the death for something respected and useful, in defense not only of national sovereignty and common self determination, but more importantly in defense of their own homes. They will not only fight more fiercely but also more tactfully with a greater acquired "feel" for the land and problems encountered in defense of their native soil.
A small elite force can be economically and more profitably maintained on a contractual voluntary basis reinforced by a larger active reserve system. Such a system can be maintained on a ration of active to reserve of 1 to 4. A five year contract can be filled obligating the individual to one year of active duty, in which basic and special training is accomplished to allow the individual to acquire the minimum career skill of the military profession. Afterward, he may have the option of remaining active or of becoming reserve to the completion of his contract. The active duty contract can be renewed on a yearly basis to allow the cultivation of high performance standards and the elimination of sub-minimal performers, with the individual volunteer retaining the option of becoming active or reserve after the initial year. Because the military system is contractual, legal suit for breaking contract can be initiated on behalf of the state, but the system, being based on consent, must also allow dissent, with volunteers being allowed to quit their occupations once they have become disillusioned without fearing the permanent forfeiture of their fundamental rights and privileges as citizens. By such means it will enable the state to maintain control over the military system and to minimize the development of counter productive authoritarian sub-structures within the military organization. The reserve can go on a reduced pay scale and serve monthly on a rotational weekend basis close to their homes. There is another common military practice which should be reformed. Just as the privilege to vote has been gradually extended to every legal citizen of the state, so too must the privilege to volunteer for military service be extended to all voting citizens, not barring adequate minimal intellectual and physical standards.
Working within such an alternative organizational structure, which is highly conducive to defensive orientation, there is another alternative defensive strategy of force deployment which might be successfully and in the long run profitably taken by any modernized nation of the world. It is the super imposition and incorporation over a nation's homeland in a day to day functional manner of five alternative defensive "systems" or networks, which if taken together would guarantee any nation a maximum reliability of self defense. These five networks consist of a territorial border sheath or outer protective skin which provides minimal security and clearly defines territorial boundaries, reinforced internally by a primary underground network of communication, transportation and transmission interconnecting primary nodal points which serve as interdependent command centers and fortresses harboring long range artillery and defensive missiles which in turn are reinforced by a secondary grid pattern of interconnected smaller fortresses which divide up the larger grids like the subdivisions of grid squares on a map. Issuing from each of these primary nodal points is the fourth defensive system consisting of highly professionalized active duty reactionary forces and issuing from each of the secondary nodal fortresses are reserve defensive infantry units forming the fifth and final defensive system, equipped with a large supply of machine guns, anti-vehicular missiles, mines and mortars. If all five systems can be economically incorporated into the everyday functioning of domestic society, maximum defensive deterrence of aggression can be achieved at minimal cost. This general strategy of defensive deployment seeks to maximize the principles of interior lines of defense, of defense in depth, of optimum defensive dispersion, of defensive simplicity and intensification of defense of native territory and of optimized mobility through inter-linked lines of communication.
The first network consists of a thin border skin which surrounds the entire territory of a nation--on land and on the coast--a few kilometers in width. It is not a single wall or line to serve as a barrier to trespassers but rather an interconnected electronic surveillance network which can be constantly monitored and reinforced with minimal manpower requirements. All types of electronic detection and monitoring devices can monitor not only the location but the size, direction, and type of intruder or aggressor force. If massed produced these devices may be cheaply utilized by all nations. In times of threatened danger this thin border skin can be reinforced by pre-planned anticipatory installation of anti-vehicular and anti-personnel mines, barbed wires entanglements and prefabricated barricades along lines of communication.
It is an illusion common to the defense to place all hope of security behind a static front line, or in a single protective system such as a wall or barricade. To put all faith up front into a single means of defense is a common human fallacy. Up to a minimum extent such a defense can stem the tide, but it is likely to rupture under intense strain and to collapse suddenly and completely to become totally ineffectual as a defense system. It is the concept of defense in depth and of inverted defensive deployment to allow the gradual erosion of offensive momentum of invading forces, demobilizing aggression far inland in an unstrategic, distended and vulnerable position, before stopping it completely and delivering an official counter stroke which cuts off the enemy from its lines of communication or drives it back in retreat. It is with these fundamental defensive concepts that the other four systems are required to reinforce the border barricades and stop the tide.
The primary fortress system consists of a network of evenly distanced fortresses of approximately fifty miles which form a rough grid pattern throughout the homeland of a nation. Each of these fortresses consists long range anti-aircraft and surface missiles, long range gun batteries housed in rotating turrets which can be elevated from subsurface shelters and shuttled by rail to alternative firing ports. Protecting these long range weapons are shorter range anti-aircraft and anti-vehicular weapon systems, rockets and gun batteries. Housed underground each primary fortress are command centers which are capable of independent comprehensive command. Main underground transport, communication and energy transmission lines interconnect these primary fortresses.
The secondary fortress system consists of evenly spaced smaller fortresses distanced about 15 miles from each other, making a total of three between each primary fortress and nine in a four fortress grid square. Each of these smaller fortresses consist of short range anti-aircraft and anti-vehicle missile batteries, a battery of medium filed cannon also contained in rotating turrets which can be elevated and transported by rail to alternative protected firing ports. Each of these fortresses are also interconnected by smaller underground lines of transportation and communication.
Operating these primary and secondary fortress facilities are the function of active service personnel. Issuing from the secondary fortresses which serve as reservist weapons arsenals and training centers, the reserves recruited from the local region serve on a weekend a month rotational basis. They can serve in training, firing practice missiles and their individual weapons for marksmanship training and serve in local emergency situations. A battalion size unit can issue from each fortress consisting of three infantry companies and a heavy mortar company and a heavy machine gun company. The primary weapons of these battalions do not extend beyond the basic infantry weapons. Each individual is equipped with a supply of anti-vehicular guided missiles or anti-aircraft missiles. Each company will be defensively oriented by being equipped with machine guns and mortars. An infantry company can consist of three twelve man squads with each organized in three fire teams plus a headquarters section. Each fire team can be equipped with a light air cooled machine gun and a 60mm. Mortar and two riflemen who assist the weapons. The headquarters section can consist of squad leaders, platoon leaders and radiomen who are all active duty personnel. The machine gun company can consist of three twelve man squads manning 3 heavy machine guns each…the mortar company can consist of three twelve man squads manning 3 heavy 82mm. mortars each. each battalion can adequately cover a 7.5 mile radius, each company covering an area of 7.5 miles, each platoon an area of 3 miles and each squad covering a 1 mile perimeter. The tactical formations of each subgroup is triangular in deployment facing the general direction of threat. Each mortar and machine gun company can dole out individual platoons to each company sector in support of the overall defensive plan. Routes of rapid escape and re-deployment in other sectors would facilitate buildup in needful areas of penetration. Deployment can be totally within local context of various positions with marching distance of a day. It would be the mission of this active reserve force to quite literally defend their homeland. Within one primary 50 mile grid square a total of nine heavily defensive oriented infantry battalions can be deployed completely within a day.
Superimposed on this network are active reactionary forces composed of regular volunteer professionals which are permanently deployed in a wheel type of defensive network covering the entire territory of the state. These active forces are concentrated with their main counter offensive forces in the center of the homeland, with smaller and more dispersed units radiating out toward the borderlands. The central hub of this wheel system might consist of a "heavy" division composed of a regiment heavy assault main battle tanks, a regiment of long range self propelled artillery and shorter range howitzer batteries, and a regiment of air mobile shock troops. Each regiment would be composed of 4 battalions of 4 field companies supported by a headquarters company. A second intermediate defense line of thinned out and more dispersed forces around the central hub consisting of a tank regiment of heavy tanks deployed at the company level supported by an infantry regiment of armored personnel carriers and a regiment of 155 and 105 self propelled and towed artillery also deployed at the company level. The third front line force might be spread out to a platoon sized quick alert status level closes to the borders. This forces would consist of a regiment of tanks similar to the Swedish s-tank, a motor cycle equipped infantry regiment with guided missiles and various type assault weapons and an anti-tank and anti-aircraft regiment equipped with gun batteries and missiles. These reactionary forces do not need to be deployed directly on the front but up to a hundred miles behind the border within the second fortress line. These forces might be stationed more or less permanently within the primary fortresses. Each nation can modify this fundamental defensive model into a highly specialized form consistent with the terrain of its homeland. Such a general defensive orientation contains the advantage of being able to simplify military strategic preparation. The reserve and active forces would be capable of operating locally within a region of complete familiarity, maximizing utilization of terrain features and the formulation of defensive tactics to maximize firepower and operating efficiency and the minimize risk through localized camouflage, cover, concealment and counter intelligence operations.
Such an underground defensive infrastructure and reserve organization would serve as a basis for civil defense in case of war--especially in the advent of nuclear exchange. Each nation can manufacture its own defensive weapons in total context to its distinctive terrain environment. High technology weapons such as guided missiles and fighter aircraft can be supplied under the control of the world police organization. Nationalized armament industries, different ammunition, non-interchangeability of parts different weapons and limited range attack weapons will all encourage orientation and discourage allied efforts of aggression.
It is with the hope of deterring future aggression by minimizing the prospects for its success against formidable defensive networks that this model of defensive reorientation has been proffered. By simplifying the mission to a purely defensive and counter offensive mode the requirements of a military of a nation can be substantially reduced to a minimum level with enhanced security. The money consumed by contemporary military machines might be saved to be channeled toward other more constructive ends, than the preparation for aggressive war. The reserve would be a means of inculcating a minimal social discipline throughout the nation, serve as an outlet for personal aggression and provide a positive source of income and economic re-distribution of wealth into domestic society. Furthermore it would mean harnessing the more negativistic tendencies that accompany military behavior and life to meet the standards of the larger host society.
Upon gaining membership to the world government, every nation should establish official declaration of human rights, of non-aggression, of mutual cooperation, of non-military proliferation and make predetermined contributions to the support of the world police organization and the world fire department. But before any such multilateral cooperation can be achieved among the majority of the world nations, a gradual process of unilateral initiation by the United States and any other willing nation must set the general process of international reorientation in motion. Such an achievement of gaining the participation by a majority of the nations of the world in a supranational government can be achieved in a ten year period. This is the objective of the ten year intermediate strategy.
It is the responsibility of the government and the people of the United States to initiate this intermediate strategy. The United States remains the most powerfully armed nation in the world, supporting an over abundance of military forces not directly needed for the actual defense of its soil or the territory of its allies but designed especially for wars of intervention and aggression in the third world nations in support of US interests. The whole strategy of US military policy falls abruptly under the illusory title of "defense." In actuality very little is spent for real defense. The US remains the leader in the technological arms race, providing the research and development impetus for foreign escalation of military armaments. It supports indirectly through arms sales the needless buildup of weaponry in many third world nations. The ill effects if weaponry build up and militarization have already been described. It is the responsibility of the US as the chief perpetrator and contributor to the evolution of contemporary militarism to reserve many of its current "defense" policies and to reorient its economic powers instead to the future freedom, peace and unification of world humanity. It can influence allied strategy and eventually de-escalate the cold war through a unilateral reduction of its conventional forces bar below its current level, to a level in which adequate defense of its homeland and its allies is ensured and by shifting its remaining light divisions, its strategic and tactical nuclear weaponry, its aircraft carrier forces into a model of reorganization providing for four force service groups and reorienting the research and development of military technology to the future equipping of the world police force. By such unilateral initiatives and with multilateral agreement, the United Kingdom, Japan and West Germany, Canada, Australia, etc. would be encouraged along similar unilateral lines of reorientation.
By far the most drastic and convincing course that can be taken by the United State would be to relinquish its dominating nuclear forces in a tailored package to the authority of world government. It would be by far the most vital and influential unilateral initiative that can be taken. The main objective along nuclear lines is to reduce the excessive stockpiles of nuclear warheads to levels of optimum deterrence and to reorient the deployment of these warheads along the lines of defensive counter force second strike. All warheads dependent upon land bases, silos and underground dumps should be dismantled and removed to the relative isolation of the high seas. Eventually all strategic and tactical nuclear weaponry possessed by the United States and its NATO allies must be removed from the respective homelands to be stationed primarily in aircraft carriers, submarines, missile silos and stockpiles of TNW in a variety of surface vessels completely under the authority and at the disposal of supranational world government.
The types of necessary cutbacks in the US defense budget are outlines distinctly in the book "The Price of Defense" by the Boston Study Group. It is along similar lines that this proposed intermediate strategy supports the unilateral reduction in military spending by the United States. It is along the lines proposed within this book that the reorientation of military development and of the remaining forces be accomplished within the next ten years. The reduction in non-nuclear forces proposed by this book should serve as general guidelines to the actual reductions initiated.
Our Recommendations
Briefly put, we recommend that the half of the present military establishment aimed mainly at responding to aggression by the Soviet Union should be left unchanged or improved, while most of the other half, not useful for countering Soviet military threats or accomplishing other acceptable goals, should be eliminated.
The three major items which we cut back are: The vast excess in the quantity of nuclear weapons, over and above the number needed to deter a nuclear attack; most of the aircraft carriers, amphibious landing ships and lightly equipped land equipped land combat forces, which are primarily useful not against the USSR but against the lesser military powers in the poorer half of the world, like Vietnam; and the unnecessary investment in development of new weaponry, which has long made the United States the driving force behind the rapid, destabilizing and costly advances in world military technology.
The forces we propose to retain are: a relatively small but invulnerable nuclear weapon force to deter Soviet nuclear attacks by threatening retaliation; the heavily equipped land combat forces presently assigned to help defend Western Europe against possible Soviet aggression together with most of the current tactical combat aircraft, which are intended to provide air cover in the event of a war in Europe and to provide the ocean approaches to Japan; and a largely unchanged force of surface ships and attack submarines, to protect the freedom of the seas.
The changes we propose are meant to be introduced over a period of 5 to 10 years. This gradual transition is intended to preserve international stability and to permit a smooth conversion to civilian employment…
Much of the forces cutbacks and some of the remaining forces can be remodeled and re-equipped to fit the structure of the proposed force services groups and command authority relinquished to the control of a world police organization under a supranational government.
An Overview Of Present American Forces and Their Rationale
As the speeches often go, the US military forces are demonstrably "second to none" all across the board. Only in military manpower could that proposition be questioned, for countries of larger population can and do arm more men. In conventional land forces, the USSR and its allies meet the US forces and US allies on somewhat even terms in Europe. In the air over the battlefield the US Air Force leads all other and the US Navy with its carriers has no rival. Indeed only the Soviet Navy can be said to have a naval strength in the wide oceans which is anywhere similar to the US naval capabilities. In the nuclear domain the United States has no superior again: The USSR has strategic forces which are broadly comparable but no other countries can so claim.
But of all these US forces a sober view must conclude that well less than one tenth, perhaps only a few percent are forces actually in direct defense of the United States. This fraction includes fighter (and some missile) air defense, some garrison troops, some elements of the surface navy and not much else. The chief physical threat to the people and territory of the United States, enemy nuclear missiles, find us without any direct defense at all. Do not think that one is talking here about a perfect defense being lacking! Many people assume that in nuclear war as in all others there is a kind of standoff with a small margin of error in which the few weapons which hit from one side or another might swing the tight balance. Not so, there is no missile defense at all. Most of those nuclear warheads which are in fact launched against the United States will hit their targets. Our defense is wholly based on an indirect effect, the threat of swift and terrible retaliation or, in fact, the possibility of the United States striking first with nuclear weapons against a war measure of another kind begun by others).
In a nuclear case, the US capability for actual defense is no different from that of other powers. Nobody can be said to have any defense against nuclear war save the indirect sort, by retaliation, by being allied, and so on. In non-nuclear war the case is quite different. The long borders of other states often find antagonists on the other side, for example, in Central Europe or along the Amur River or the plains of the Indus. Not so for the United States. Our possible enemies lie across great oceans. We therefore need not mount powerful border forces and heavy inner garrisons hardy against Canada, Mexico, Cuba or the Bahamas. We have conventional military power by land, sea, and air which is inferior to none. Those forces are intended to engage others far away from US shores in defense of the United States only indirectly, by the defense of our allies, especially NATO and Japan.
This strongly affects the physical nature of the US forces. The US Navy is alone among navies in the ability to fight in powerful air combat almost anywhere without land bases, using giant aircraft carriers. US troops are provided with a very powerful airlift capability for ocean spanning no less than motion about any theater of war. The Navy and Marines possess amphibious forces capable of landing on shore lines, whole oceans away from the bases at Norfolk or San Diego. The United States is really the only world military power in that sense, the USSR is still a distant second…
Is a forward stance the best and safest defense? Is the preparation of a full scale mobilized, ever ready, active force always the best way to defend one's interests in peace and wisdom? This book tries to put the case that those easy axons are wrong. Even football teams recognize that a strong offense is not the only part of the game, war is more complex still, and war today is in fact itself risked by the very preparation which we are told are made in the interests of defense. The steady rise in the power of war machines and the equally steady increase in the anxiety of the world over the full scale war which all have until now avoided are intimately connected. So are the innumerable smaller but locally devastating wars the world has not avoided. The "worst case" assumptions and the "prudent" increase in power can become themselves dangerous, we argue that they in fact, have…
What the Changes We Recommend Would Do
We believe the forces we outline in the book would carry out with reliability the following aims, which we see as attracting a large consensus of American opinion, within the bounds of what is fully feasible.
The new forces would defend directly and indirectly as at present, all US territory and the territory of the US chief allies: that is, the NATO powers and Japan, against any plausible dangers of the next decade.
The new forces are safer forces, for they would not impel in others who may misread American purposes, so great a self preparation. They do not retain the forward projection, the overkill, the swift world wide intervention abilities of the present forces. It is long past time to try this needed gain in safety, the uniform increase in means and in tensions that the past generation has watched has continued too long.
In a word, the new forces represent a decrease in the militarization of the United States and of the world, because the US contributes such a major, dominating share to world militarization.
The new force limits the capacity of the United States to intervene in remote parts of the world, where interests not vital, but nevertheless, influential have used national forces often for private ends.
The new forces are fully effective, though they represent a decreased threat of mortal injury and enduring harm to civil populations and to indirectly involved states.
The new forces would be visible and understandable, to a degree more susceptible to eventual agreements of international arms control.
The new forces would release powerful economic energies in or own country because they demand so much less support. This can be seen as a large dollar saving to the federal budget--50 billion or more yearly or as a way to reorganize to provide more jobs, by directing effort to less capital--intensive activities than the remarkably complex technologies of modern war.
The new forces would serve as an example to others, a morally and more nearly defensible stance for our country, a sign of hope for a new world not under the shadow of destruction. World response is beyond our control, but the United States can safely take the first steps, the steps which the leader and the driver of the incessant race for more and better arms--or great country--should make.
If this intermediate strategy of disarmament is vigorously pursued unilaterally by the United States and multilaterally by its allies and many other cooperative nations, then it is entirely feasible that within ten years of initiation of the process of demilitarization of the world the general trending toward a lasting peace will gain an unstoppable momentum. It is a peace gained not through provocation, but through avoidance of conflict. Warfare cannot be merely wished away. A vigorous policy of de-escalation, demobilization, of non-aggression and demilitarization must be pursued multilaterally by every nation. It is proposed that within ten years a world government can exist which is composed of the majority of the world nations, enforced by an optimum of 16 force service groups evenly contributed to by each member nation, operating under a nuclear umbrella of optimum defensive deterrence of 2000 strategic warheads and 10,000 tactical nuclear warheads in a triad delivery system based on the high seas, insuring deterrence of nuclear war through limited defensive counter force retaliation. Within ten years it is possible to have a permanent world peace. At the same point in time the member nations could have operationally reoriented their national forces toward perfecting their defensive postures similar to the alternative model that has been proffered, considerably reducing the size of their military budgets and forces, while considerably enhancing security. At the same time they would provide the beginning underground infrastructure of passive civil defense against the inevitably of nuclear exchange. Future aggression can on only be deterred by minimizing its potential success. These are the objectives of the intermediate 10 year strategy.
Twenty five years from now, the length of the cold war from yesterday, seems to be an important potential period to the attainment of world peace and world unity beneath the authority of world government of tomorrow. No one can definitely predict what the world will be like in twenty five years. It will be an extremely crucial period of time. Many latent potentialities both negative and positive will be realized. Yet if we strike out today on a different course for tomorrow several desirable possibilities with respect to the reorientation of the military are definitely achievable. These possibilities are the objectives of the twenty five year long term strategy of peace--of attaining a condition of a permanent world peace continuum. The first is a world government composed of a peaceful coexistence of all nations of the earth. This means the complete dissolution of the cold war barriers of the past which so isolates every nation and inhibits the possibility of mutual cooperation and cultivation of mutual respect. The second is the active minimal contribution by every nation to a highly elite world police organization such as the universal elite made up of an optimum of sixteen force service groups. The third is the permanent deployment of all nuclear weaponry in the remote regions of outer space providing an optimum, safe and accurate deterrence to the possibility of future nuclear war. The fourth is the complete removal of nuclear weaponry from surface and subsurface of the earth, except in the form of an internationally controlled anti-ballistic missile system surrounding every coastline of the earth beyond territorial limitations, and in the internationally controlled territories of the polar ice caps. The fifth is the complete underground industrial infrastructure: transmission, transportation, communication and habitation, in every nation of the earth to ensure the survivability of the human race and of technological civilization from nuclear holocaust. The sixth is the complete demilitarization of every sovereign state to a level of small elite all volunteer defense networks with no greater ration of active to reserve of 1 to 2. The process of demilitarization is the process of war. Winding down human endeavors in making war and in surviving self destruction go hand in hand in a cyclical feedback relationship. When the whole world is united under one peaceful government, as if it were one nation, then there will be no longer any need of weapons, war, military organization or of means of defense from the effects of these negativistic destructive tendencies. All orientation of human effort both quantitative in material and energy, and qualitative in human resources of intellect and creativity, must be redirected away from militarism toward a more constructive ends of peace and life. It is within the potential application of design science, industrial technology, human creativity and social revolution that an unimaginable level of growth can be attained--that militarism can be devolved and terrorism minimized. This is achievable in 25 years. It will be when our parents are dead and we are grand parents that our grandchildren may have hope for a future without war and peaceful more fulfilled life.
"…Speculating about the future, we have some hope that a major US cutback would not merely be a one shot reduction, to be eroded by some inexorable global increase in armaments. Since World War 2, the United States, more than any other country, has led the world towards increased militarization. It has continually advanced the frontier of military technology. It has aided the expansion of foreign military forces and foreign defense industries. Most important it has constantly upgraded its own military forces to maintain the image and reality of military superiority over the USSR (an edge which the Soviet Union in turn constantly tries to narrow) rather than allow the USSR to achieve something widely perceived as an even balance of forces. The United States has permitted its efforts to keep the advantage to displace trends toward a more stable situation from which natural force reductions might be worked out.
Relying too heavily and indiscriminately on the usefulness of military force in the conduct of foreign policy the United States has set a standard which encourages militarization in other countries. In doing so, it has not only ignored the difficult consequences of widespread increases in non-nuclear weapons but also invited the profound dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to many other countries.
If we are to leave our children a safer and freer world rather than a more dangerous and restrictive one, we must change the steady trend in world armaments. As the leader in the world arms race, and pacesetter for the military and foreign policies of the western world the United States has both the responsibility and the opportunity to take the initiative in attempting to shift the fundamental course of global military policies."
The strategy for resolving the dilemma of nuclear deterrence and the dilemma of the balance of conventional forces and the continuing escalation of the arms race protects the moral reality of fundamental human rights. The resolution of the dilemma of state privileges over human rights and the attainment of these rights for all of humanity must await the gradual dissolution of the cold war barriers which are the main obstacles that are faced today. All these solutions rest ultimately on the establishment of a single united world state. Human rights cannot today be enforced by a world government without seriously compromising the solution of this cold war dilemma. Membership of nations to participation in world government and cooperation with its dictates are of primary importance. Political and economic differences of individual nation states must be tolerated without striving to reform from without. Only after the twenty five year period, when a guaranteed peace continuum is established and the cold war dilemma is resolved completely, will the people of all nations begin to seek from within the world state the justification of their inherent natural rights above the authority of nation states. Until then, another strategy can and must be implemented which will reinforce and complement the strategies already outlined and which is the only means of insuring that humanity will not relapse in the future into its past militarism. It is an alternative means of re-channeling the material and human resources and the energies spinning off from the complex process of devolution of militarism, into a new peaceful, mutually integrating, life regenerating and enhancing directions and of supplying new world objectives against which world unity can be reinforced and world peace sustained. When the twenty five year period is past, this alternative strategy will endure that not only are the cold war and other dilemmas solved in the process of gradual demilitarization but that a whole new world and utopic civilization will have arisen in which the means to human rights have become the commonwealth of all humanity. It is the positive potential profit which complement the negative sacrifice; the lower portion of the strategic iceberg.
The resource which today are locked up in the machines and processes of death and destruction in the wars of tomorrow can be released and reprocessed to serve humanity in the process of constructive living and of industrial ephemeralization. The nuclear potential in nuclear warheads can become the fissionable materials of tomorrow's safe nuclear reactors which might supply higher levels of energy output to world society than today. The money, time, and human effort consumed in counter productive militarism can be reoriented to the growth of technological civilization. The potential for serving the fundamental human rights of all humanity accruing from this process of pacification and civilization in virtually unlimited.
"No proposals have been made in this chapter concerning what alternatives exist for the man tens of billions of dollars in savings from the preceding budget recommendations. The point to be emphasized is that the savings are major: 47 billion in 1978 dollars. The savings represent over 10 percent of the annual federal budget and more than the gross national product of many countries in the world. It is more than is spent annually by the US government on social investment and services. To place such an enormous sum in cleared perspective, one can picture it in terms of the average taxpayer: if the money were rebated to the American public it would save the typical four person family in the United States one third of their federal income taxes--or over $1,000. Whether these savings are returned to taxpayers in the form of reduced taxes or reinvested in other federal programs the possibilities for alleviating pressing domestic problems in the United States are infinite…on a worldwide scale , it has been estimated that a minimum investment of one third of such an amount would considerably lessen, infant mortality, illiteracy, lack of housing, diseased water supply and would ultimately improve population planning and economic distribution."
"Even if peace meant only the absence of war, of hate, of slaughter, of madness its accomplishment would be among the highest aims man can set for himself. But if one wants to understand the specific prophetic concept of peace, one has to go several steps further and recognize that the prophetic concept of peace cannot be defined as merely the absence of war, but that it is a spiritual and philosophical concept. It is based on the prophetic idea of man, of history, and of salvation; it has its roots in the story of man's creation and his disobedience to God as related in the Book of Genesis and it culminates in the concept of the messianic time…"
"Man has to experience himself as a stranger in the world as estranged from himself and from nature in order to be able to become one again with himself, with his fellow men and with nature. He has to experience the split between himself and subject and the world as object as the condition for overcoming this very split. His first sin, disobedience, is the first act of freedom, it is the beginning of human history. It is in history that man develops, evolves, emerges. He develops his reason and his capacity to love. He creates himself in the historical process which began with his first act of freedom, which was the freedom to disobey, to say 'No"…"
"…Man's first act of freedom is an act of disobedience, by his act he transcends his original oneness with nature, he becomes aware of himself and of his neighbor and of their estrangement. In the historical process, man creates himself. He grows in self awareness, in love, in justice, and when he has reached his full aim of full grasp of the world by his own power of reason and love, he has become one again, he has undone the original 'sin', he has returned to Paradise, but on the new level of human individualization and independence. Although man has 'sinned' in the act of disobedience his sinning becomes justified in the historical process. He does not suffer form a corruption of his substance but his very sin is the beginning of a dialectical process which ends in his self creation and self salvation.
This completion of his self creation and self salvation and conflict and the beginning of a new history of harmony and union, is called 'messianic time'. The end of days etc. The Messiah is not the savior. He is not sent by God in order to save the people or to change their corrupt substance. The Messiah is not the son of God, any more than every man is God's child: he is the anointed king who represents the new epoch of history.
The prophetic view of the messianic time is that of harmony between man and man, man and woman, man and nature. The new harmony is different from that of paradise. It can be obtained only if man develops fully in order to become truly human, if he is capable of loving, if he knows truth and does justice, if he develops his power of reason to a point which frees him from the bondage of man and from the bondage of irrational passions…
Peace, in the prophetic vision, is one aspect of the messianic time when man has overcome the split that separated him from his fellow men and from nature, then he is indeed at peace with those from whom he was separated. In order to have peace, man must find 'atonement', peace is the result of a transformation of man in which union has replaced alienation. Thus the idea of peace, in the prophetic view, cannot be separated from the idea of man's realization of his humanity. Peace is more than a condition of no war, it is harmony and union between men, it is the overcoming of separation and alienation.
The prophetic concept of peace transcends the realm of human relations: the new harmony is also one between man and nature. Peace between man and nature is harmony between man and nature. Man and nature are no longer split, man is not threatened by nature and determined to dominate it, he becomes natural and nature becomes human. He and nature cease to be opponents and become one. Man is at home in the natural world and nature becomes part of the human world. This is peace in the prophetic sense (the Hebrew word for peace, shalom which could be best translated as "completeness" points in the same direction)…
…But in the messianic concept, man will not only cease to destroy man, he will have overcome the experience of separateness between one nation and another. Once he has achieved being fully human, stranger ceases to be a stranger and man will cease to be a stranger to himself. The illusion of the difference between nation and nation disappears: there are no longer any chosen people…
…To sum p, the prophetic ideal of peace is part of the prophet's whole historical and religious concept which culminates in their idea of the messianic time, peace between man and man and between man and nature is more than the absence of strife, it is the accomplishment of true harmony and union, it is the experience of "at-onement" with the world and with oneself; it is the end of alienation, the return of man to himself.
"The Prophetic Concept of Peace" in The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays by Erich Fromm.
Building such a society means taking the next step; it means the end of 'humanoid' history, the phase in which man has not yet become fully human. It does not mean, 'the end of days', the 'completion', the state of harmony in which no conflicts or problems confront man. On the contrary, it is man's fate that his existence is beset by contradictions which he is called on to deal with without ever solving them. When he has overcome the primitive state of human sacrifice, be it in the ritualistic form of human sacrifices of the Aztecs or in the secular form of war, when he has been able to regulate his relationship with nature reasonably instead of blindly, when things have truly become his servants rather than his idols, he will be confronted with the truly human conflicts and problems, he will have to be adventuresome, courageous, imaginative, capable of suffering and of joy, but his powers will be in the service of life, not in the service of death. The new phase of human history, if it comes to pass, will be a new beginning, not an end."
"The Present Human Condition" by Erich Fromm.
The possibility is recognized that the next twenty five years, enough time for the complete physical regeneration of humanity, might very well be the most critical period of human history. The strategy of peace has been proffered as a prophetic alternative to the current trends and policies of nations that are being pursued inspite of the evolutionary development of technological civilization of world humanity. It is a pacifist power strategy of individual revolution in the realization of humanism and human rights, the evolution of the present elementary strategy of nationalism into an alternative world state form and of the minimization of the strategy of terrorism. It is a power strategy founded on the minimization of reliance on destructive force, the devolution of aggression and demilitarization of world society, seeking strategic success, economy and justice in the execution of warfare and the maximization on the reliance of value strategy, the evolution of technological civilization through the strategy of scientific creativity, offering alternative evolved value foundations for world unity, in philosophy, science, ideology, society, economics and political fields of human behavior. It aims at the maximization of the value of justice in warfare in such a way as to feasibly overcome the moral dilemmas created by the present condition of militarism: the dilemma of the cold war, of nuclear deterrence, of conventional balances of power and escalation of the arms race, and of human rights in relation to state privileges. It aims to create a peace continuum interrupted by diminishing conflict instead of the present warfare continuum interrupted by diminishing peace. It is a comprehensive grand strategy, integrating the efficacy of all the elementary grand strategies in such a way as to achieve success through individual leadership. It attempts to cultivate world unity as a means of attaining world peace and to cultivate world peace as a means of attaining world unity. It looks to the future for success, not the past. Its operational efficacy is yet to be verified.
Yet this comprehensive grand strategy of peace is not yet complete. It is not yet wholly prophetic. It must yet offer an alternative set of world objectives which will redirect humanity's future strategic attention and efforts, by which the efficacy of the strategy will have a positive means of fulfillment and not just a negative means of cancellation of war. Ultimately all these alternative objectives are founded on the vindication of human rights. Only when these human rights can be realized by all humanity will the efficacy of this strategy be demonstrably prophetic. Both the means and the ends of this strategy of peace are ultimately founded on the natural valuation of the human creative spirit.
1. "Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations" by Michael
Walzer, 1977, Basic Books Inc.
2. "Ideas and Opinions" by Albert Einstein, edited by Carl Seelig, 1973, Dell Pub. Co.
3. "The Price of Defense: A New Strategy for Military Spending" by Boston Study
Group, 1979, The New York Times Book Company Inc.
4. "The Dogma of Christ: And Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture"
by Erich Fromm, 1955, Fawcett Publications Inc.
Military Dimensions
1979-80
Hugh M. Lewis
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 09/03/11