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> The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mi

> The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.

arethuza 6y ago
The Cuban Missile Crisis is another example where if things had been left purely to the militaries of both sides things would probably have escalated very badly.
- smokey_circles 6y ago
  I don't think that's true, but I'll also admit that the history of the cold war is very muddled and I am no historian. The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too. TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows). Some facts we do know though: 1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office 2. The US moved missiles first 3. The military was following orders from the top [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg -------- EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I can strongly recommend "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" by Michael Dobbs: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi... For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday-machine https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday... The latter book literally gave me nightmares.
    - wolfd 6y ago
      Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        I need to watch that again - saw it years ago when it first came out. I'm currently reading Ellsberg's Secrets A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - which is pretty shocking - they knew all along they could never win in Vietnam but continued for "reasons".
    - arethuza 6y ago
      A quote from the latter: "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to." https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html "A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      Any similar books that are not written by either born US persons or people heavily influenced by US either via politics or education? Not saying the information in the books are not true, but would love an opinion and summation on the matter from someone not so deep into US politics.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba immediately... One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges. Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    President Johnson in '67: "I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
  - N1H1L 6y ago
    Thanks for that name. I went down a rabbit hole, and found out that the double agent who blew his handler's cover - George Blake died less than a month back!
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      I didn't realize he'd died. Good riddance, but still.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  Well, at least one anecdote to illustrate things are always more complex: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...
- Bakary 6y ago
  The story of the CMC is absolutely bonkers. There were so many close calls and possible disasters that I am surprised we even ended up in this non-nuked timeline, even with the anthropic principle!
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  The US would have won the Cuban Missile War if it had escalated. The USSR would have been obliterated, Europe would have been severely damaged, and the US would have been relatively unscathed.
mechEpleb 6y ago
Just because you wear a uniform doesn't mean you hold the same incentives as the grunts you're sending to die in some far off place.
clairity 6y ago
note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested. distance fosters dispassion, so the leader not being part of the military specifically, rather than simply being a civilian, is what makes decisions more rational (also, as others have noted, that dispassion can also foster war because the civilian leader has no real skin in the game).
- SllX 6y ago
  Yes, but when the leader is a politician, he has skin in a different game: getting re-elected. It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.
  - clairity 6y ago
    that's a different game from putting your life at risk.
    - SllX 6y ago
      I agree. It is however a strong motivation that has an effect on the choices of the civilian leadership of the military.
  - ygjb 6y ago
    That is straight up at odds with American (or Canadian, or for the most part, UK) history. In the United States Trump is the first "war-time" president to blow re-election during an active war, and his term was punctuated by attempts at troop draw down, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric towards Iran when he was low in polls. Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      I'm not sure I'd count Trump as a wartime President, though perhaps that's a result of appallingly low standards for what counts as peace.

arethuza 6y ago

The Cuban Missile Crisis is another example where if things had been left purely to the militaries of both sides things would probably have escalated very badly.

smokey_circles 6y ago
I don't think that's true, but I'll also admit that the history of the cold war is very muddled and I am no historian. The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too. TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows). Some facts we do know though: 1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office 2. The US moved missiles first 3. The military was following orders from the top [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg -------- EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed
- arethuza 6y ago
  I can strongly recommend "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" by Michael Dobbs: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi... For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday-machine https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday... The latter book literally gave me nightmares.
  - wolfd 6y ago
    Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I need to watch that again - saw it years ago when it first came out. I'm currently reading Ellsberg's Secrets A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - which is pretty shocking - they knew all along they could never win in Vietnam but continued for "reasons".
  - arethuza 6y ago
    A quote from the latter: "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to." https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html "A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Any similar books that are not written by either born US persons or people heavily influenced by US either via politics or education? Not saying the information in the books are not true, but would love an opinion and summation on the matter from someone not so deep into US politics.
mhh__ 6y ago
LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba immediately... One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges. Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
- arethuza 6y ago
  President Johnson in '67: "I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
- N1H1L 6y ago
  Thanks for that name. I went down a rabbit hole, and found out that the double agent who blew his handler's cover - George Blake died less than a month back!
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I didn't realize he'd died. Good riddance, but still.
goodcanadian 6y ago
Well, at least one anecdote to illustrate things are always more complex: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...
Bakary 6y ago
The story of the CMC is absolutely bonkers. There were so many close calls and possible disasters that I am surprised we even ended up in this non-nuked timeline, even with the anthropic principle!
AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
The US would have won the Cuban Missile War if it had escalated. The USSR would have been obliterated, Europe would have been severely damaged, and the US would have been relatively unscathed.

mechEpleb 6y ago

Just because you wear a uniform doesn't mean you hold the same incentives as the grunts you're sending to die in some far off place.

clairity 6y ago

note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested. distance fosters dispassion, so the leader not being part of the military specifically, rather than simply being a civilian, is what makes decisions more rational (also, as others have noted, that dispassion can also foster war because the civilian leader has no real skin in the game).

SllX 6y ago
Yes, but when the leader is a politician, he has skin in a different game: getting re-elected. It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.
- clairity 6y ago
  that's a different game from putting your life at risk.
  - SllX 6y ago
    I agree. It is however a strong motivation that has an effect on the choices of the civilian leadership of the military.
- ygjb 6y ago
  That is straight up at odds with American (or Canadian, or for the most part, UK) history. In the United States Trump is the first "war-time" president to blow re-election during an active war, and his term was punctuated by attempts at troop draw down, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric towards Iran when he was low in polls. Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    I'm not sure I'd count Trump as a wartime President, though perhaps that's a result of appallingly low standards for what counts as peace.