Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 18, 2021
Thinking about the next big war
James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman: "What we need most is an active imagination; we should enlist insights not only from security professionals, but also historians, writers, foreign policy experts and representatives from the arts. If any hesitation existed before, the pandemic should demonstrate to our leaders the importance of unconventional thinking when it comes to anticipating future threats to our country and taking steps to avert a crisis before it arrives on our doorstep." ■ They're absolutely right. But also: Ordinary citizens need to invest at least as much interest and energy in our changing national defense as we put into, say, arguing about Dr. Seuss books. You don't have to read Clausewitz, but maybe glance at the Texas National Security Review or Defense One occasionally. ■ The extremely lazy thinking that has contaminated most of the American discussion about military power has reduced us to the empty polarities of "Support the troops" and "No more foreign wars". That just isn't enough. The battlefield is no longer guaranteed to be "over there", nor is it guaranteed to be any place we put on a map. China hacked Equifax. Russia treats cyberwarfare as a primary tool. North Korea attacked Sony. It's nonsense to think that we can just withdraw to our own little corner of the world and ignore everything else. That doesn't mean we have to be overzealous expeditionaries. It does mean we (as citizens) have to become critical thinkers about battlefields and threats that don't fit neatly into a context that suits our historical memory. But if civilians are going to have political control of the military (as we should), then civilians need to engage in the training required to be responsible operators. ■ The rush to create a Space Force bypassed the bigger step we should have taken, which is to spin up a Cyber Force with its own dedicated rules of engagement, understanding of threats, command structure, and even a standalone service academy. And we need to examine how other asymmetric and unconventional threats are going to come at us, so that we can figure out the best ways to deploy force (whether kinetic or otherwise), commit resources (of people, money, time, and whatever else we have), and cooperate with allies while engaging with adversaries. And we should be doing it while considering a whole-picture context, particularly in light of the risk that this pandemic will persist and the next could be right around the corner. Not everything that threatens us will happen at gunpoint.
The stupidest argument is that we're running out of space
To think there is no vacancy left in America (an unreality one pundit is trying to insert into the nation's dialogue) is to be utterly without knowledge about our geography. Many states are less dense than the country as a whole, which is near the bottom of the list for population density worldwide. Even our cities aren't especially dense, but there's a serious problem of depopulation taking place across much of the Midwest and elsewhere. As communities shrink, it becomes harder to sustain a private-sector economy and harder to pay for basic infrastructure and essential services. There's well more than enough room for many, many, many more people in America -- and don't worry about growing food: Aside from some marginal effects in places immediately adjacent to growing metropolitan areas, population growth really has nothing to do with the price of rural land.
Foreign Policy reports: "Last year, researcher Adrian Zenz found the region poured $37 million into programs -- featuring forced sterilizations and IUD implantations -- meant to slash birth rates, which dropped 24% in 2019 in Xinjiang compared with 4.2% nationwide."
"How to be a better parent during the pandemic"
"The Economist Asks" is one of the ten best podcasts in circulation generally, and this episode is particularly good.
