This diary began as a comment in a dialogue with someone on a KOS diary about another topic. As it turned out the writer I was responding too said he was a stationed on a destroyer and his wife was also in the Navy, active duty which gave me pause to reflect.
I wondered how to respectfully point out that his present “profession”and the way it is defined and presented in public discourse is part of the problem?
I feel it is time we let go of the notion that warriors and wars are inevitable and even admirable part of a national policy. The exigencies of life on a changing planet guarantee that doing business like a 19th century industrial bully in a 20th century world will end in failure!
Some think that the role of the military is in”Conducting wars?” I disagree that the role of the “Military” should be “conducting wars.” Now, go ahead and laugh, but wait a second;
1.) words shape our thought and our actions. By implication this definition implies our military is an aggressive arm of our foreign policy. I think we should offer a more benign definition:
The role of the military is to defend our homeland!
Even this simple definition provides a practical and logical basis for such activities as intelligence gathering. But, it doesn’t start out with a chip on our shoulder.
2.) Our country has just exited several centuries where our nation aggressively expanded it’s role in the world via “conducting wars” of basically economic expansion. I live in a state, Hawaii, that was acquired, illegally, in just this manner. Look it up if you don’t believe it.
3.) As the intelligence information analysts say, “the information set” has changed globally:
a.) America let the nuclear cat out of the bag at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now any fool with enough money can purchase the fixins and row a boat with a nuclear warhead into a destroyer (think if the guy who did the Cole had a nuke in his boat?) or New York City. We are reaping the whirlwind of our military action during WW2, today. Everybody on the planet now has a shot at mutually assured destruction. In the long run perhaps ending the war the way we did was not such a wise thing?
b.) CHINA will soon eclipse us both militarily and economically. They have more paper (they own our large debt)on us than the rest of the world combined. It is my prediction that after the Olympics in China in 3 years they will start making their move on the dollar. When they start buying oil in Euros we are in deep deep shit. Also, their sheer size and production capacity make them the comparative industrial colossus as we were in WW2. We cannot kick their ass.
4.) Our planet has problems of a natural nature that are becoming more pressing as time goes on. Massive responses are needed to survive the coming crisis. We all must work to a common goal to succeed.
5.) Fifth and perhaps not the least important is the psychological set we have embraced when we abandoned a “universal draft and volunteer, citizen soldier” army like we had before Vietnam for one composed of “professional warriors!” Universal military service is a great democratizer! A professional military in my opinion is like having a loaded gun in the house; The temptation and access and it’s very existence make it more likely to be used.
It is time for a paradigm shift my friends. The testosterone that has served us so faithfully for centuries needs to be re-tasked to work toward consensus peacefully. Our resources are limited. The planet is at risk. We should muster Chewbacka and R2D2 and the rest and get to the real issues that threaten our lives not our pocketbooks alone.
We need to wage peace not war and “protect” our homeland, not “conduct wars” on foreign soil in a illegal manner to assure a profit margin to some corporation. Enough.
Think about it. Alexander the great’s time has passed. Let’s get some new heroes.
Posted at KOS and Euro Trib also ….
I’m very much in agreement with your position.
To answer your question abut the role of the military, I’d argue it is currently to secure what a number of us are seeing as the New World Order, or a neoliberal empire, consisting of a clique of international elite players. The U.S. is playing a leading role in this endeavor. It has a huge host of government funded NGOs which work hand in hand with transnational corporate leaders to gain regulatory advantages and trade advantages. Their version of “democracy promotion” through these processes is the promotion of polyarchic governance friendly to neoliberal trade polices, which is a more controllable version of “democracy” than the popular democracies that are beginning to emerge in Latin America, Chavez’s Venezuela for one that scares the crap out of them.
This foreign policy strategy has been moved gradually into place over a long period of time (accelerated since the Truman Doctrine) and has many institutions deeply entrenched. It’s a process that moves pretty much on its own outside the revolving doors through which the elites we elect move, so that who ever we elect tends to be part of it. If they are not, as I would say those such as Kucinich, with his proposed department of peace, and Nader are not, they can be marginalized by the very depth this has been institutionalized.
I believe the people can still change it, and I am working as hard as I can to understand it and share what I find, for whatever it might be worth. It seems people do have to be aware to begin to move.
don’t understand to the extent that they have been “educated” to believe in their own invincibility and nobility.
Enough!
Charlmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire was quite an eyeopener with regards to the topic of this diary.
ie: 737 military bases worldwide… the “empire” is not sustainable in the long run.
What is this “homeland” that you are talking about? “Homeland” was not a word that was employed in American English prior to the hysteria that the Bush regime roused after 9/11.
“Homeland” is a fascist expression, an attempt by the neocons to find an equivalent to the Nazi German term “fatherland”, which would seem too sexist today.
This country is definitely in trouble, when even diarists on progressive blogs embrace fascist language. Your proposed definition of the purpose of our military is not benign at all.
What would you substitute? I guess “country” is the most appropriate and least loaded in terms of propagandistic meaning.
Altho, I must say after first reacting to the word “homeland” much as you did above when I first heard it a few years ago, I’ve now come to like the word.
I find it suggests a “husbandry” or “inner looking” rather than “outer looking” mind set. Homeland suggests a belonging too.
We have to be very suspicious of this word, given that Americans were able to get along fine without it until Bush started his war without end.
To use this word is to affirm that America should be an empire. The reasoning is very simple. Why is the Department of Homeland Security called what it is? A more natural name for it, not requiring the coining of a new word, would be the “Department of National Security”. The reason it couldn’t be called that is that “national security” has taken on a peculiar meaning: running the empire.
Thus, to use the word “homeland” is to engage in doublespeak. Up through the Second World War, the Department of War was called the Department of War. Now it is called the Department of Defense. Similarly, American empire is called “national security”. If the National Security Council were called what it really is, the “Imperial Council”, there would be no reason not to call homeland security national security.