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There are two parts of "confidence" one of which matters and one does not. Am I confident that I can leave my brother-in-law with my bag of diamonds / daughter

There are two parts of "confidence" one of which matters and one does not. Am I confident that I can leave my brother-in-law with my bag of diamonds / daughters life / keys to my ferrari ? Hell yes. Am I confident I can get my brother in law to organise a pissup in a brewery. Not so much. But that is a teachable skill. And the same goes for armies. Am I confident that I can trust the Marine corps / Swedish tank corps / British Navy with the military equivalent of my daughters life. Hell yes. Because this is about something called honour, duty or service. It's hard to nail down, it takes generations to build and maintain. Can I trust that the Russian army will not rape the citizens of Bakhmut ? unfortunately not. And the difference there is not about number of rounds fired or guns used. It's the twisted politics of a whole nation that is exposed at the point of battle. The important metric is not want your army is capable of, it's what it will never do.

K0balt 3y ago
The other unfortunate metric is how confident you are that it will be “successful” when tasked with nation building or a successful transfer of power, both tasks which are inherently sociopolitical and are ill suited to a highly organized and disciplined organization specifically trained and equipped to kill people and break things. Someday, politicians will understand that the army isn’t for creating peaceful societies. If we (the USA) is going to continue to count military adventurism among its tools, we need to develop a distinct, expeditionary organization whose primary tools are social and political in nature. Sort of a practical adjunct to diplomacy, but capable of functioning in conditions of extreme adversity. Idk how that even looks. Or Maybe we should consider more carefully the end-state of military action. Or ??? I’m not one to say just let the tyrants have a monopoly on military adventurism, we see what that looks like in Ukraine and other places… but there may be situations that out involvement is either unnecessary or even counterproductive, and we need to get better at seeing those situations for what they will become.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
  It sounds like you’re proposing something akin to a hybrid of the Peace Corps with maybe the Foreign Service and perhaps a dash of the Public Health Service Corps.
  - K0balt 3y ago
    Yeah, something like that. Basically a nation building corps of some kind. I mean if you’re going to be empire building you may as well get serious about it. Or maybe just don’t.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Yes. And this is very similar to the (saner parts of) defund the police activism. We need a body of law enforcement that can react to immediate violent threats of course. But much more of our societal ills are around badly managed mental health, where ability to defuse situations, find hospital beds and so on are necessary. The police in most western societies do this, to lesser and greater success in the same way that most firefighters today don't spend their time putting out fires but cutting bodies out of cars. In my limited understanding, the financial and moral corruption of tyranny also corrupts their armies, day by day. Who is officially in charge, and their moral corruption, seeing what is needed for success will wear down even the best. So we must make sure that what it takes to succeed in our armies or police is both moral and aligned to the goals of the organisation. If you are not catching thieves but suppressing black workers you are not really a police force and it will show for generations. If you are an army that "extra judicial executes" mid level street thugs in Afghanistan you might start to think differently. What we ask our services to do in our name must match what we see as moral - not because of some view of morality, but because the corrosive power of the dissonance can infect the whole organisation. There is a scene in "Death of Stalin" where Marshal Zukhov smuggles some guns into the Kremlin to start the coup, and the glee with which the "real" soldiers hunt down the KGB / Internal Security soldiers is ... telling.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Agree 100% but I'd go a bit further. This, BTW is Thomas Barnett's idea of a "Sysadmin force" modeled on the British foreign service. It's totally unreasonable to expect a bunch of 20 year olds with guns who serve a one year tour and don't even speak the local language to entirely transform the culture of another country. It's not at all clear to me that this is even doable in the expected timeframe with some other force. The problem is that the U.S. may go somewhere with one objective "Stop Al-Queda from planning terrorist attacks", but then after the invasion there are all of these other default goals that we just expect to be true when we leave, like "there should be centralized democratic power" and "girls should go to school", and "women should have equal rights", and "boys should not be used as sex slaves for local warlords." Making these sorts of transformations of another society is extremely difficult and impossible when your people don't even speak the language, much less understand all of the nuances of the local culture, and even if we did, it would take decades. The main thing that needs to change in U.S. foreign policy is to have explicit, achievable victory conditions that are better than the current situation. We cannot just say "we have to depose the evil dictator", go in, smash some stuff, and then just wing it from there. If we cannot even describe how we're going to get from the current situation to our desired, stable outcome, we should not get involved, or come up with a more limited goal. We saw the very same things happen in Syria and Libya, except without a U.S. occupation force. In Syria, we didn't like Assad, but the problem was that all of the alternatives were either too weak to hold power (FSA), or even worse than Assad (ISIS, Al Nusra). In Libya, we didn't like Gaddafi, but there was no identifiable alternative, so after he was killed, the country basically just descended into chaos.

K0balt 3y ago

The other unfortunate metric is how confident you are that it will be “successful” when tasked with nation building or a successful transfer of power, both tasks which are inherently sociopolitical and are ill suited to a highly organized and disciplined organization specifically trained and equipped to kill people and break things. Someday, politicians will understand that the army isn’t for creating peaceful societies. If we (the USA) is going to continue to count military adventurism among its tools, we need to develop a distinct, expeditionary organization whose primary tools are social and political in nature. Sort of a practical adjunct to diplomacy, but capable of functioning in conditions of extreme adversity. Idk how that even looks. Or Maybe we should consider more carefully the end-state of military action. Or ??? I’m not one to say just let the tyrants have a monopoly on military adventurism, we see what that looks like in Ukraine and other places… but there may be situations that out involvement is either unnecessary or even counterproductive, and we need to get better at seeing those situations for what they will become.

TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
It sounds like you’re proposing something akin to a hybrid of the Peace Corps with maybe the Foreign Service and perhaps a dash of the Public Health Service Corps.
- K0balt 3y ago
  Yeah, something like that. Basically a nation building corps of some kind. I mean if you’re going to be empire building you may as well get serious about it. Or maybe just don’t.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
Yes. And this is very similar to the (saner parts of) defund the police activism. We need a body of law enforcement that can react to immediate violent threats of course. But much more of our societal ills are around badly managed mental health, where ability to defuse situations, find hospital beds and so on are necessary. The police in most western societies do this, to lesser and greater success in the same way that most firefighters today don't spend their time putting out fires but cutting bodies out of cars. In my limited understanding, the financial and moral corruption of tyranny also corrupts their armies, day by day. Who is officially in charge, and their moral corruption, seeing what is needed for success will wear down even the best. So we must make sure that what it takes to succeed in our armies or police is both moral and aligned to the goals of the organisation. If you are not catching thieves but suppressing black workers you are not really a police force and it will show for generations. If you are an army that "extra judicial executes" mid level street thugs in Afghanistan you might start to think differently. What we ask our services to do in our name must match what we see as moral - not because of some view of morality, but because the corrosive power of the dissonance can infect the whole organisation. There is a scene in "Death of Stalin" where Marshal Zukhov smuggles some guns into the Kremlin to start the coup, and the glee with which the "real" soldiers hunt down the KGB / Internal Security soldiers is ... telling.
cameldrv 3y ago
Agree 100% but I'd go a bit further. This, BTW is Thomas Barnett's idea of a "Sysadmin force" modeled on the British foreign service. It's totally unreasonable to expect a bunch of 20 year olds with guns who serve a one year tour and don't even speak the local language to entirely transform the culture of another country. It's not at all clear to me that this is even doable in the expected timeframe with some other force. The problem is that the U.S. may go somewhere with one objective "Stop Al-Queda from planning terrorist attacks", but then after the invasion there are all of these other default goals that we just expect to be true when we leave, like "there should be centralized democratic power" and "girls should go to school", and "women should have equal rights", and "boys should not be used as sex slaves for local warlords." Making these sorts of transformations of another society is extremely difficult and impossible when your people don't even speak the language, much less understand all of the nuances of the local culture, and even if we did, it would take decades. The main thing that needs to change in U.S. foreign policy is to have explicit, achievable victory conditions that are better than the current situation. We cannot just say "we have to depose the evil dictator", go in, smash some stuff, and then just wing it from there. If we cannot even describe how we're going to get from the current situation to our desired, stable outcome, we should not get involved, or come up with a more limited goal. We saw the very same things happen in Syria and Libya, except without a U.S. occupation force. In Syria, we didn't like Assad, but the problem was that all of the alternatives were either too weak to hold power (FSA), or even worse than Assad (ISIS, Al Nusra). In Libya, we didn't like Gaddafi, but there was no identifiable alternative, so after he was killed, the country basically just descended into chaos.