Posted on 07/01/2005 7:24:55 PM PDT by Sandreckoner
" Might be why they pay English Lit grads 40K a year to teach English over there (with rent paid). "
40 grand , huh ? That's at the university level , yes ?
Yeah, but that's only because they got so many more capitas.......
I suggest you read "A HIstory of Warfare" by John Keegan to get a really good understanding of just what I'm talking about.
In a nutshell however, Clauswitz was writing "On War" from a very limited perspective, i.e. as a 19th century European, influenced by the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the German state. His theories do not take into account the fact that people fight for reasons other than politics and economics.
Clauswitz could not even make a full assessment of his subject, since the sciences of sociology, anthropology, economics and political science, were either non-existant or in their infancy. All are mitigating or aggravating factors in warfare.
Finally, Clauswitz's main contention that "War is the continuation of politics by other means" is very often reversible (i.e. Politics is the continuation of war by other means). The best example fo this dictum I can think of would be the Cold War.
Quote: Uh Huh... Just like Japan was supposed to dominate the world according to the pundits back in the 1980s.
No comparison between japan in the '80's and China today. We did not send factories, capital and knowledge to Japan in the 80's.
We came back to beat Japan by making a better product. Our wages were similar. These i no similarity with wages with china so hard hard we work to make a better product they will bet us by cheap labor in the end.
Those are interesting projections. That's a pretty dismal trickle down theory. We shall see.
Let's see, we're running a $650 billion dollar trade deficit with China (approximately) per year, but nobody in China is making any money. Ahhhhhh, okay.
Thanks for the comments.
P.S. Don't get angry and quit posting. Develop a thick skin. You opinions are as important as anyone else's.
All I'll say is that we "forget" or discredit the lessons of Clausewitz at our peril. There is a quasi religious belief that WW2 "changed everything forever" and thus the doctrine of MAD was born. Certainly, the advent of weapons of mass destruction changed things. But to think that they made great war obsolete is childish. I turn it around as follows. Imagine how to conduct a great war using weapons of mass destruction in the most scientific and logical way, and other weapons in the ways that make sense for them. Imagine how to conquer successfully. If one can imagine such things, using all of the facts, logic and historical learnings they can access, then, one may be able to anticipate surprising new developments that will take 90 plus percent of the analytical community off guard.
Ping to #48.
Clauswitz makes sense only if you believe that people fight for purely political or economic reasons. While the majority of "great wars" are, in fact, fought for these reasons, they are not the ONLY reasons operative. This is why Clauswitz is wrong. And this is supposedly from a man who was inspired to write his treatise while watching the French revolutionary armies attack Moscow! He obviously did not learn anything from the experience. The French (not Napoleon and his marshalls) soldiers that marched on Moscow were not driven by nationalism or intent on plunder -- they were bringing a revolutionary ideology of freedom to an oppressed people. Happily and voluntarily.
The folks out here who fear China are overlooking two very important issues, both of which the PRC itself often ignores (which is kinda interesting). The first is that if American investment dried up tomorrow, China's economy would collapse in a relatively short time. We are, to paraphrase Lenin, selling the Chinese the rope with which they will hang us. There are still American politicians and businessmen out there that fervently believe that the CHinese government will eventually see the light vis-a-vis free trade. This is a fallicy because the Chinese economy, as it currently stands, does not engage in anything that could be called commerce in the most parochial sense. It's merely a political ploy to keep the population in line an dlaboring under the false belief that it's actually getting rich. In the meantime, we're merely preventing bad investments from becoming major losses.
The second overlooked issue is simply human nature. Masses of Chinese who are now finding a few crumbs falling into their laps will a) begin to want to protect the crumbs and b) eventually demand more than crumbs. Both will involve a liberalization (in the purest sense) of law and economic policy in China -- which is exactly what the communist leadership DOES NOT WANT. When "reform" movements begin to pick up steam in China, the government will react the way it's always done -- crack down hard, only this time, the reformers will be much better organized, informed and able to continue dissent.
Therefore, it is my belief that China will succumb to massive INTERNAL strife long before it finds itself confronting the west in war --- strife that will be caused because human nature (admittedly nudged by politics, tainted by economics)will assert itself.
Now, as to your formulation for future warfare --- you are under the impression that nuclear war could be integrated into a scheme in such a way as it would be severly limited. The problem with this is that you have failed to note that nukes are POLITICAL and not MILITARY weapons. This is something the Russians were able to grasp very early on, and we were not.
If you go to war on Clauswitzian premises (war is political or economic), and then unleash nuclear weapons, you disprove Clauswitz immediately. If your war was driven by politics, then your goal is to make your enemy think more like you or expand your ideology. You cannot do that when he's a mass of vaporized ash, and the example you present to the rest of the world does not make you popular. If your goal was economic, then you unleash destruction on economic bases and resources which you now cannot obtain or recover --- you destroyed them and made then radioactive for the next few hundred years. In the end, you have achieved nothing.
Nuclear weapons are merely a threat to be used to influence the behavior of your enemy in a limited fashion. The Cold War bore this out. War did not end because both sides could fry each other, it merely became more limited in scope and revolved around the superpowers using other peoples as proxies and political pawns. Neither side would actually go to war with each other, but they could still advance their ideologies on a limited scale.
Human nature rears it's ugly head again: neither side would want to be responsible for the destruction of mankind, and so there is a tacit agreement not to cross that line except in extremis. It would have taken an invasion of the Soviet Union or the continental United States to unleash nuclear hell during the Cold War. In the case of China, we could not conquer them nor they us. The distances and scales are too great for a conventional war to be very effective. China could not transport and supply a force sufficient to conquer and occupy, certainly not in the face of American naval power, and neither could we do likewise.
That leaves China in the position of having to try to cow us with a nuclear deterrent. The Chinese nuclear arsenal, at present, is a) puny by comparison and b) not under the control of madmen bent on destruction, but rather the perpetuation of their power and ideology. They fear their own more than they fear us. The Chinese nuclear arsenal is not intended to be used against the US, but rather to give us second thoughts about interfering in their internal affairs.
RE: "The problem with this is that you have failed to note that nukes are POLITICAL and not MILITARY weapons. This is something the Russians were able to grasp very early on, and we were not."
I disagree. They constitute excellent military weapons for specific purposes. The only reason they have not been used is because the Western countries against which they would actually be used militarily have kowtowed, negotiated, surrendered, run away from or done anything but fight to win an undeniable victory in each situation where they might have actaully been used (e.g. to resist the Communization of Eastern Europe, in the Korean War, in SE Asia, etc). So, since during the so called Cold War, the West reliably never really stood up to fight, fearing, as we did (and still do) the realities of Great War, there was no reason for our enemies to use them on us. But a false peace can only be sustained for a finite amount of time. The period since 1945, notwithstanding aforementioned self arresting wars, has been a remarkably lengthy interwar period. Also, we must consider the amazingly long lived UN facade as well - Western buy in to what is a de facto appeasement and stalemate mechanism has certainly played a prominent role in maintaining the false peace. The coming fall from false peace will be hard and fast.
Martin Van Creveld -- Transformation of War.
It's interesting ... a data point. But not the only one.
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