Military culture showing signs of a slow retreat

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): There's been too many generals and admirals who have put a telescope to their blind eye and shut out both moral and political objections and just got on with their vocation of pursuing war.

It is understandable. Woe betide a general who steps outside his military culture--to win at all cost and to serve unflinchingly those in command over him, right or wrong.

Two weeks ago the retired Peruvian general, Rodolfo Robles, formerly the country's third ranking officer, paid a heavy price for breaking ranks. He had accused the army high command of giving human rights short shrift and being behind a notorious death squad. He was kidnapped on the street and incarcerated in a military jail. Only the president of Peru's direct intervention got him out.

Then hard on his heels, last week, Gen. George Lee Butler, along with 60 other generals and admirals from around the world, including Russian general Alexander Lebed, issued a call for rapid nuclear disarmament. Gen. Butler in a speech in Washington declared how, from his former position as the commander of America's nuclear forces, he learnt that it was all too easy for a simple mistake to start a nuclear war.

The military culture has deep roots in most societies. But there are increasing signs that it is in retreat, not just in Japan, Germany, Scandinavia, Costa Rica, New Zealand and Canada, which is common knowledge, but in the present day epicenters of military power, in particular Western Europe and the United States.

It has been a slow process of learning and reflection, mind over brawn, feminine values triumphing over machismo, sense and sensibility over pride and prejudice, all now being crystallized by men whose responsibility it was to look into the abyss and, if given the order, to take us all there.

This slow sea-change should probably be traced back to Erasmus who believed that wars occurred because they were a way of life among a militarized aristocratic class. Writing in the 16th century Erasmus considered war unnatural, "Animals do not make war on one another. Who ever heard of 100,000 animals rushing together to butcher each other as men do everywhere?"

In the 18th century liberal thinkers gave a new burst of life to Erasmus' teaching and suggested that the birth of democracy would remove the need for war. Thomas Paine in his pamphlet, The Rights of Man argued that republican government and free trade "would extirpate the system of war".

War there has continued to be right through the 19th and 20th century. Nevertheless, although there is a vigorous academic debate around the subject, it does appear that the lesson of these two centuries is that democracies do not go to war with each other. Moreover, World War I was the last major war in which leaders on all sides were eager for combat. Industrialization and with it the capacity of war to inflict mass destruction drove home the real cost of war. The Great War hastened the demise of hereditary elites that saw war as romantic, idealistic and noble.

We are, step by slow step, witnessing a significant cultural change, none too late given the Promethean bargain mankind has made with the atom. It is no longer youthful marchers on the street who are raising the questions but the likes of the former U.S. Chief of Staff, Colin Powell who argued in his autobiography last year for large cuts in military expenditure and Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, who has argued for missile arsenals coming down from the thousands, to 10s even zero. Now they are joined by Gen. Butler who calls nuclear weapons "inherently dangerous, hugely expensive, militarily inefficient and morally indefensible".

Even in the days of the U.S. nuclear monopoly the moral sanction against use was such as to render them diplomatically useless, often counterproductive. This is why Stalin knew he could act with impunity when seizing control of Eastern Europe. Likewise Beijing and Hanoi went to war with American armies in Korea and Vietnam without fear of being halted by nuclear weapons.

This is why the heart of Gen. Butler's critique, that U.S. nuclear policy is "fundamentally irrational", is totally right. I suspect his intervention, together with that of his fellow officers, is going to reverberate for years to come.

In one way the time is ripe. In another it is perhaps premature. The man who should lead the debate, President Bill Clinton, although a one time youthful war-protester, is so evidently lacking private convictions that he is perhaps functionally unable to take the high ground. But the softening of militaristic culture appears to have its own momentum and the tide is stronger than any single political leader.

In the 19th century western society moved successfully to abolish dueling; men now take their slighted honor or burning grievance to the courtroom or the newspaper. In the 21st century it will be the job of the coming generation to rid the world of war, substituting the World Court, international law and arbitration for the clash of the sword and the threat of Armageddon.