北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
西 New York 2012 - 3
8
In a swank part of town, having desert
New York, New York
2012
“Swank” was what she was looking for when she described what kind of dessert that she wanted. They had had most of the meal at some other place, where she wanted soba noodles with all of the wonderful kinds of pastes and seaweeds that come with them. He knew a place which did this in New York – which was very good, with zaru soba a cold specialty, and with tempura and wakame among the better hot dishes, among the many dizzying styles – but then she wanted dessert, which was nothing like the meal, among the many requirements was that it should be nontraditional, unlike the cold noodle place which somehow in New York was traditional, with many flavors in the buckwheat, such jinenjo, which added Japanese yams to the fragrant mixture. She even mentioned this, which awarded him a gold star, because he knew that that was an unspoken part of what she wanted. So, after finishing the main meal they got up and walked through the nighttime sky of Manhattan. And finally, at one point she has stopped and looked at him, and he could do nothing else but look at her. Everything stopped at this point, because both of them knew that it was time to decide. They had decided a long time ago that they were not the type to have children – or rather he had decided that he was not going to have children with her, which she did not tell him made her cry in the apartment in Beijing – though he of course knew that and tread softly on communications by email, which were far less often. It is the noun epithet form of Beijing.1
But not yet – she turned away and looked down at the sidewalk. At which point, he leaned over and pulled her face up and gestured towards something which was perhaps like a doorway. Then he motioned in front of it, which did not seem to go anyplace. She could see only some dark stairs behind it as people pushed out or in. and they were the sort of people not known for their taste. But she trusted his judgment and walked down. It was not what she expected, but again, either this was a breakup, or he had something planned. He went over to the bar produced 3 notes, which were obviously 20s, and said something which she could not make out. Then be bartender told the bar back to get something – and the bar back immediately went to the other side of a flimsy vinyl door. It was then that she realized, that on the other side of this was a place which was extremely posh. The place they were in was only a faux dive bar – and it was stacked with an extremely posh place right next door. Take shelter from the poison rain.2
She leaned over to him and rest him – and enveloped her face with a kiss that was extremely seductive. She was bending over and hoped he would do whatever he wanted. It has been a long time since he kissed her with a full frontal. A very long time indeed, longer than Amartya San could cause in his description of people dying of disease, forced on them by callous bureaucrats from far away. But here in the prison, they picked up their forks.
Yes, they ate. But that was not the point because he made a pilgrimage to save this human race.3
She turned away. “Do you remember when you used to dance?”4
9
The New York Times Reports:5
An American helicopter crashed north of Baghdad this morning, apparently after being shot down by insurgents. 6
It was the third crash of an American helicopter this month. In a statement, the American military said that it had no information about the fate of the two crew members aboard, and that the cause of the crash was being investigated.
But officials at the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that witnesses reported seeing the helicopter being fired on before the crash.
Vacuum cleaners in the land of sand.
One of my long-term topics has been to compare the American occupation of Iraq with Russian experience in Afghanistan.
A crucial reason for the failure of the Soviet Military in Afghanistan was losing control over the road network and its security. This meant that if there was a need to rapidly move troops, specialists or command personnel, it had to be done by helicopter. This created two important vulnerabilities.
The first is the direct threat of attacking the helicopters, and the attrition of personnel that it creates. Chopper pilots are hard to replace, helicopters are expensive, and carrying high-value personnel makes it difficult to protect battlefield command and control assets - read "brass". Losing conscripts is the nature of the business of running an army - they die in training missions, they die of disease, suicide, accidents and a host of other causes. Losing valuable and hard to replace individuals - whether offensively capable strike troops, specialists or command personnel - increases the drain on the military's manpower several fold. The harder to find individuals with the basic aptitude, the worse this problem is. The more equipment is used, the more it is degraded. And a military helicopter in Iraq is a vacuum cleaner in a land of sand.
The more indirect problem is that it gives anti-occupation forces - the US military is adopting the term "rejectionist" - a tangible means of creating the first vulnerability. Cut off roads, make trouble, and in comes a target rich environment. That is, it gives them a strategy which it is easy to scale across the entire zone under occupation, and to which relatively untrained individuals can be brought to effectiveness.
This may sound abstract, but one of the most important lessons of war over the course of centuries is to move down the chain of skill and training a given military activity. Guns beat bows, not because early guns were better than the bows of their time - in fact, the reverse, bows were faster, more deadly and more accurate to much longer ranges - but because one could churn out musketeers in as many weeks as it took years to train a good bowyer, and out of much lower quality material. Henry V had the whole of the English population to choose only 5000 bowyers for the campaign that culminated at Agincourt. In 1600 armies would be 10 times this size.
Thus, by creating a target that is simple to exploit without exposing the attacker to great levels of hazard or even US counter-strike, the way a mortar barrage does - the dependence on helicopters creates a way to "industrialize" the counter-occupation.
The failure of the heart
The United States military, by doctrine, equipment, and training, is the greatest battlefield superiority force ever created. It is as dominant over its near rivals in this period as any dominant military power has ever been at the point of engagement. It is capable of "a particularly sudden and violent kind" of a military operation that makes a stand-up battle against it a losing proposition. No force has defeated the US military in a direct engagement in a generation.
However, engagement superiority is not all of warfare, and it is, more particularly, not all of the use of the military. The iron irony is that while the United States has a military which is able to deny any other power the ability to mount a credible conventional threat - in no small part because the US military is designed to defeat - not the armed forces of the USSR, but the armed forces we feared the USSR to have - as defenders in a surprise attack through Europe. This has left other functions of military effectiveness at reduced capacities. As 9/11 demonstrated, it left the basic defense of the US mainland at a level so low that even non-state actors could take advantage of it. As the Iraq shown, this has demonstrated, it has left American occupation capacity at an all-time low point. Consider that the United States expanded by a series of occupation-oriented wars against native nations, and won the occupation phase of the Philippines conflict, World War II, and Korea. The United States has lost few occupations historically. We did not, for example, lose the occupation phase of Vietnam - Tet was a disaster for the communist rebellion - we lost the defensive phase of the conflict.7
Iraq, then, is going to be almost unique in that it will be an occupation that the US has failed to achieve more than a minimal level of objectives. This has happened twice. The inability to secure an occupation phase in the first Iraq-American War, is in no small measure the reason for the second one to be fought. Though historians may well decide that this has been one long conflict with a truce and lower intensity conflict - and they probably should.
The failure of the US occupation is, to some extent a failure of training and doctrine, if viewed from the perspective of analyzing the US military. However, neither the military, nor the successive congresses which budgeted for the military, saw the purpose of the Department of Defense as being a tool to occupy foreign nations in order to convert them to an American protectorate. It might do so as a means to a larger end - as we Americanized Japan, Taiwan, Korea - but it has not been the function of the military for almost two generations to do this.
Thus, the failure of the United States should be seen as a failure not of the military, but of the civilian leadership which instructed that military to invade and occupy Iraq, and the leadership cadre of the military, which has overtly supported that mission. To put it more bluntly, the officer corps of the US military, by supporting a particular series of political outcomes, has brought about a failure of military outcome.
This basic contradiction - that the military politically supported expansion of the military, while failing to plan for the inevitable conflicts which those providing that expansion wanted to fight - has the same source as the failure of Iraq specifically. That is, a failure to tie military eventuality with political eventuality.
This failure then is a failure not in military doctrine and training - that is, the US troops do well what they are trained to do, better than any military has ever done it in history - and they have the equipment to accomplish it. But they were trained for the wrong mission. The reason they were trained for the wrong mission is that the officer corps of the US military was blind to the consequences of their own actions and their own ideology.
This is not an unusual occurrence historically. The history of warfare is replete with examples of elites which held contradictory military and political ideologies. Perhaps the first famous example is the Persian Empire, which had an ideology of expansion, coupled with a political doctrine of decentralization. This created a military which was composed of large numbers of under armored and undertrained foot soldiers - which were easily dispatched in large numbers by the heavily armored and highly trained Greeks. The irony is that this lesson was lost on iron Periclean Athens, and on Alexandrian Macedonia - which made similar mistakes in mismatching political ideology with military reality. One could continue with an expansive list.
However, the present problem is one which is serious, because it is the second successive example of it in American history of the post-war period. The first, of course, is the Vietnam War, where an ideology of liberalism - which meant increasing rights, standards of living, equality and civilian expansion of the economy - met with a political doctrine of an optional preventative war of attrition which relied upon using less educated and economically disadvantaged soldiers to fight it. The very people the Great Society was supposed to raise up, were being shoveled into Vietnam.
Our current failure is larger, it is more expensive, has existed for a longer period of time, and runs farther to the core of our military budget process, training decisions, procurement process and political results. The military did not overtly support LBJ the way it supported GWB.
Lessons for the near and far future. 秘密を知りたい.8
It has been difficult to write about Iraq, because the facts on the ground were that we had reached a bloody stalemate. Neither side was losing soldiers beyond its ability to replace them, but neither side was making significant headway in its political goals. Iraq pretended to have a Democracy, and but the insurgency could not make the pretense degenerate into the kind of bloody farce which puts power into play.
The theory that there is a mismatch between political and military ideology suggests that the military will exacerbate the problems by supporting face-saving and engaging in smear attacks of visible opponents. This very process will make it impossible to place the military personnel in Iraq in a posture and positioning which will limit the damage. The more that the officer corps must prove they are winning, the more targets they create for the rebellion.
The more important farther afield lesson is that there must be a change in the methods by which the officer corps is recruited, trained and advanced. One of the most important steps in this reform would be to end the resistance to recruitment on college campuses. The current failure comes precisely because of the ideological nature of military recruitment. If the metropolitan economy desires to have input into military direction, and some measure of interplay with the military planning process, then it must, as a logical consequence, encourage more of its members to enter the military on the officer track, with the intent of shaping an officer corps which lacks a contradictory military and political stance.
In short, there is a mirror contradiction - as the officer corps refuses to plan for the wars that it politically supports, so too do those who are opposed to the kinds of warfare which we train for unwilling to politically engage to direct the military towards ends that they find more palatable. By behaving as consumers - by refusing to "buy" the military product, by "withdrawing consent" rather than altering it, the metropolitan and intellectual social system has contributed to an alienation which is now having tremendous political costs.
The irony is that military personnel have a far easier road in the irony Democratic Party than in the iron Republican Party. The key leadership of the Republican Party avoided military service by and large. This joke has been seen by the "swift boating" of various Democratic candidates or officeholders. The Democratic Party has a far less contradictory view of the military - the US military is a deterrent, its battlefield superiority is a threat which is not supposed to be exercised, and can, therefore, act against many nations at once. Once committed, those nations which were threatened before, are no longer under threat.
Summary
Recent events indicate that the expected acceleration of attacks against US rotary wing aircraft has begun and will be a feature during the winter period where US soldiers can operate in a more heavily armored mode.
This is the culmination of a failure of the US military to control the road system, with the resulting dependency on rotary aircraft.
This failure is rooted in a mismatch in the military officer corps support for aggressively militaristic domestic politics as a way of expanding military funding and planning for a defensive stance for the US military focused on short, sharp and brief incursions to act as a military purgative to a political problem.
This failure is compounded by the isolation of the officer corps from a stream of manpower which, having different political and military preferences, would not fall prey to the same errors.
This isolation derives from the non-participation of the metropolitan economy in the officer corps and needs to be corrected long term by the reintegration of academic and military circles of leadership. I am aware that this is a controversial assertion, with "anti-ROTC" being a core social tenet of left political activism, in hopes of denying the military the manpower needed to fight wars. This theory - similar to the "starve the beast" theory of tax-cutting on the right - has shown to be incorrect, instead, demand will find means of borrowing against infrastructure to satisfy itself, with the result that the same expenditure happens, only with interest and other costs attached. Instead, it is necessary to reintegrate the mainstream of American economic life with the military, in order to rebalance both the expenditures on the military, and the demands made upon it by the civilian leadership.
No this would not make it into his book. But it had some key lines – especially about a helicopter that was in the land of sand - an allusion to Crumb's meditation one another generation's war. In truth, the is Ulysses who as retold by James Joyce is the novel of light. But there is also the novel of darkness, which is Finnegan's Wake. Many great artists, such as the celebrated – and justly so – author of Lolita could not understand Finnegan's Wake, because they do not have the will to die, and therefore they do not know what it is like. So, they drift across the sound, as in the romantic novel – for example, of Hölderlin's Hyperion. Meanwhile, the hoi polloi watched football, even though their team was behind by numbers by numbers of points, and the masses retorted inside the skull the difference that one point for their team had made a joy of the spectacle.
1 Reference to Parry, “The Epithet and Formula”
2 U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”
3 Modern English, “I Melt With You”
4 Asia,”Heat Of The Moment”
5 In the fine script, Ardelle Li reported:
Cross-Channel Trip
report Normandy
wardroom LCIL
bobbing French lee
complement officers watch
resistance miles not Kilo
B.B.C. announcer
impressions artillery
position surprising
smashed occupied approximately
good-tempered face
drinking coffee
impervious mustard gas.
le grand tourisme frankfurters
our fleet of little ships
6 Nirvana, “All Apologies”
7 In the fine script, Ardelle Li dashed off:
Fury at America
defensive worldwide America
inDecency United States
Four Thousand Miles
famed Trafalgar Square
ignited fury anguished Lockdown
Complacent Covid crowded
Mauerpark Berlin Vorderasiatisches
Do you see what you have done to me?
8 Styx, Mr. Roboto.