The Military Mind

A Quaker friend of mine is always trying -- with success -- to point out to me that mainstream society really needs to abandon its hero-worshipping attitude toward the military mind. He is particularly annoyed by the current school of thought promoted by the Bob Woodwards of the world, which insists on seeing the handful of generals and commanders that have periodically been appointed and then ejected by the current presidential administration as the "adults in the room" -- that is, the intellectually and spiritually mature overseers of Trump's puerile tantrums.

My friend's point is that actually, the vast majority of things said and written by ostensible military thinkers in recent years has been "totally nuts," and just nobody pays enough attention to it to notice -- despite the fact that it exerts direct influence over the actions and decisions of the world's largest and most powerful military, as it projects its might into every corner of the globe.

I was inclined to see his point yesterday, when reading in Lawrence Freedman's history of strategy (an always interesting but not always convincing attempt to knit together strategic thought as a single coherent discipline, spanning war, politics, business, and social struggle -- the result is more a hodgepodge of all Western social thought, in which one often forgets which of this is supposed to be "strategy" and which is not).

Late in Freedman's section on military writers, we come to William Lind, who invented the concept of the "Fourth Generation War." The basic idea is obvious enough to us by now -- though an innovation when first conceived. Lind and his followers taught that the future of warfare would no longer involve a contest of states and their militaries against one another, but rather the ideological manipulation of public opinion, terrorist attacks by non-state actors, etc.

So far, so familiar. But then we get to Freedman's paraphrase of Lind's analysis of the particular threats that we must guard against, in this era of "Fourth Generation" conflict. Lind and those who shared his intellectual spawning grounds "focused," in Freedman's telling, "on [the danger of] an eating away of American national identity as a result of unconstrained immigration and multiculturalism. He argued this was less a reflection of social trends and more the result of a deliberate project by 'cultural Marxists.'"

At this stage of the book there is now a bug-eyed "Oh my GOD!!!," inscribed by me, in the comments side-bar on my Kindle edition.

Here we find the tropes and phraseology of the alt-right -- remember the planned "No to Marxism" rally at Berkeley, so soon on the heels of Charlottesville? -- except apparently it was considered mainstream thinking in U.S. military circles for decades before it became the favorite lingo of Neo-Nazi internet trolls.

I looked up some of the referenced Lind articles to make sure Freedman wasn't imagining things. Sure enough, we find a 2004 essay, "Understanding Fourth Generation War," published in Military Review -- an official publication of the U.S. Army. Here, just three years after George W. Bush famously and meritoriously insisted in a speech to the nation that "We are not at war with Islam" (a point -- sadly -- that has needed making), we find Lind declaring the following:

"We now find ourselves facing the Christian West's oldest and most steadfast opponent, Islam."

He goes on to add, "invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army." He also takes a side-swipe at the "poisonous ideology of multiculturalism," which he regards as a sure sign that "home-grown" currents of ideological degeneration might soon undermine us from within.

Lind also describes his ideological enemies as "international elites" who are seeking to build the "Brave New World (BNW)." This is of course a not-so-subtle echo of the "New World Order" conspiracy theory beloved of the far right, and utterly rancid with anti-Semitic tropes.

This, again, was published by the U.S. military. In 2004.

Lind describes how he and a group of like-minded types in the military meet periodically to hash out plans for how to win the "Fourth Generation War." God help us if this is the kind of thing that emerges from their late-night bull sessions.

One can gain a picture of their coterie from Woodward's image of James Mattis (who figures as an ideological nemesis in Lind's brief article -- though not for any of the reasons one might wish) -- who is apparently a life-long bachelor, a "warrior monk," immured in his tower and surrounded by innumerable volumes of military history.

We have here, in short, a collection of oddballs straight out of the pages of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye. Living in a distinctive homosocial subculture, they make up a funhouse-mirror version of American intellectual life -- a wholly parallel all-male intelligentsia, cut off from the rich heritage of modern thought, cut off as well from the insights and perspectives of the slightly more than 50%of humanity that does not have a penis, but able to quote with aplomb any passage of Thucydides.

Which is fine, and all. It takes all kinds. The problem is that these men control the single largest collection of firepower and geopolitical coercive force ever amassed in one set of hands anywhere on the planet. We would hope that they would tread lightly. That they might make an effort to earn some trust.

Apparently instead they spin out quasi-fascist drivel about how the Muslims are coming to get us, and hope no one notices (hopes that generally seem to be rewarded).

So often, we find in the news media the same story: Trump is the bawling child, wildly yanking U.S. troops out of various conflicts around the world and risking geopolitical collapse, while the hawkish military generals in his employ are the "steady hand," encouraging him to "stay the course."

What this leaves out is the unnoticed fact that Trump's worst military decisions have not been those of isolation, but of escalation. And to the best of our knowledge, those have all been encouraged by the military. Trump's removal of safeguards against civilian casualties from drone strikes -- at the request of military commanders -- has had the foreseeable effect of dramatically increasing the number of innocent people killed in these attacks, with this increase in civilian death receiving almost no notice from the public, compared to the criticism directed against the Obama administration (rightly) for its drone program. (Trump benefitting once again here from the magic of low expectations.)

We really do need to abandon the notion that Trump is the only alt-right firebrand around and the military are the grown-ups. Indeed, it appears from reading Lind that it may well be far-right elements within the U.S. military orbit that gave rise to some of the original alt-right tropes.

Lind's articles read like the furnace-brain from which Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon received their warped and fiery summons. We find all the key themes there: immigration seen as an "invasion" (Trump used that one as recently as his last rose garden address to the nation), the idea of drugs as an organized effort by Latin American radicals to undermine the U.S. social fabric (Lind makes this claim outright, without any citation, in his 1989 article that launched the "Fourth Generation War" concept), the idea of a war against Islam tout court (Trump, you will recall, believes that "Islam hates us") -- and so on.

Lind, a military thinker, seems to have invented all the basic elements that go to make up what passes for Donald Trump's mind.

As Lind himself remarks in his article, however,:"Clio, the patron goddess of history, has a sense of humor." It is not generally the case that the terrible ideas created by human beings -- such as Lind's theories -- are confined wholly to the dustbin. More often, they are proved right, but with a savagely ironic twist. The prophecies are fulfilled, but with a kind of cruel whimsy.

What strikes me as darkly amusing in this case is that when you read about the "Fourth Generation War" concept, it still strikes one as broadly persuasive. As Freedman summarizes it, "In the fourth generation [of modern warfare], attacks would be directed" not at military targets, but "at the sources of social cohesion, including shared norms and values[.]"

We now know that in our last presidential election, a hostile foreign power did in fact seek to undermine our national norms and values, not through conventional warfare or violence, but through propaganda, disruption, and misinformation designed to sow social division, polarize political differences, magnify public distrust, and undermine core U.S. liberal and democratic institutions, etc.

The irony of it is that this foreign power did so, not in the name of "multiculturalism" and "unconstrained immigration," but precisely in order to empower anti-immigrant populist authoritarians. It did so not to undermine the so-called "Christian West," but to unravel the pluralistic liberal Constitutional order that Lind derides as the entering wedge of the "Brave New World."

In short, the hostile foreign power intervened in this case in order to ensure that the ideological offspring of Lind gained political power in the United States, rather than the opposite -- wholly fulfilling Lind's darkest predictions, while at the same time bizarrely subverting them.

Putin understood, as Lind and his ilk never will, that the deepest threat to U.S. national character and values is precisely to undermine the ideals of openness, pluralism, Constitutionality, and liberalism that have always stood for the best in our history and our political institutions. Immigration is not a menace to our national values, it is an expression of them. What threatens to sap and deplete our character is the growth of quasi-fascism in our political circles and public discourse -- along with the policies that result from it -- efforts to dismantle the systems of asylum, refugee resettlement, safeguards against civilian casualties in wartime, and other basic programs that signal our country's partial adherence to the ideals of human rights.

In other words, Lind and his ideological offspring, not "multiculturalism," turned out the be the true "home-grown" threat of Fourth Generation warfare. There is a real canker in our moral character, and it is their ideas, along with the president they helped create. The moles have built their palace beneath us, as Edna St. Vincent Millay once warned, in a poem on the theme of the loss of national character. We have not far to fall.