The rhythmic thumpthumpthump of fifty pairs of boots unleashes something deep in males. The unrealistic sense of power is instilled in training by, for example, running in close formation. Sometimes it provides the elan needed to win. This sort of overconfidence has consequences. Years back at Parris Island a sign read, “The Most Dangerous Thing in the World: A Marine and his Rifle.” It was nonsense, the marines then being decent light infantry but no more, yet we were told endlessly that were unique in the annals of war. Military training aims at the inculcation of a sense of invincibility. This visceral, adrenal response to war runs through humanity: The Ride of the Valkyries, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and the Charge of the Light Brigade. The watchers grip the armrests, sway with the turns of the hero’s spaceship. In movie theaters watch the audience, and particularly the male part, when the good space ships swoop in, dodging, maneuvering, firing, just on the edge of defeat, the music coming up, and blow the bad guy away. For example, you do not tell your troops, “You are mediocre infantry and inferior man for man to the enemy but we have better technology and will rely on this.” Thus American troops are always the finest, best trained and best armed the world has ever seen.Īnother and important reason is the Star Wars Effect. One is that morale is important in war and a sober estimation of reality often does not conduce to high morale. Militaries regularly underestimate the enemy and overestimate their own capacities. Nor did it have any notion of what would happen in Iraq and Afghanistan. When America invaded Vietnam, the Pentagon did not foresee ten years of a losing war. At First Manassas in the American Civil War, the armies had no faint idea that they might be embarking on four years of horrendous war, or of the kind of war it would be. This sort of blindness is common, almost normal. Yet the existence of all of these things was well known. ![]() Trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns took them by surprise. Rather it is in the complete incapacity to foresee that the failure would result in four years of inconclusive static war. It failed, but the foolishness does not lie in the failure. In WWI, the German command expected a lightning victory via the Schlieffen Plan. This explains why wars monotonously turn out not to resemble expectations. Neither of these things is true of dentists. Second, the appeal of the military is visceral, emotional, hormonal. First, the military attracts certain kinds of men-authoritarian, hierarchical, conformist-who are not imaginative and do not think independently. ![]() The foregoing sounds both arrogant and improbable, like saying that dentists do not understand teeth. They are fundamental misappreciations of war itself. Their errors are not the sort that inevitably must occur in a contest, as when a quarterback doesn’t pick up a blitz. Yet, oddly, they regularly misjudge practically everything concerning the dismal trade. You would think they would think about it more. It is curious how little military men know about war. ![]() where the title is “Reviving Napoleon’s Army – “Cry havoc, and Let Slip the Frogs of Yore” Fred Reed, courtesy of the unZ Review, 3 March 2016 ….
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |