The Aim of War is to Achieve
Political Objectives
Marshal of the Soviet Union Boris Shaposhnikov captured
the essence of war in military-political terms:
[A] war must begin with the defeat of the strongest and
most dangerous enemy, and it must not be diverted by successes over a weak one
by leaving the stronger to hang over one’s neck... It must be not forgotten
that for the resolution of a war, it is important to have not only military
successes, but also obtain political success, that is, win a victory over a
politically important enemy ... Otherwise, only after an extended period
accompanied even by military successes, will we be forced to return to the same
fight against the main enemy against which we initially were only on the
defensive.[1]
Lessons of the Cold War.
George Kennan in
discussing American foreign policy and democracy notes that we made two big
boo-boos dugint the cold war. (1) to
attribute to the “Soviet leadership aims and intentions it did not really have;
in jumping to conclusion that the Soviet leaders were just like Hitler and his
associates…” with the same aspirations, timetable, and who could only be dealt
with in the same manner as Hitler was. [2] (2)
The second postwar mistake was to embrace the nuclear weapon “the mainstay
of our military posture, and the faith we placed in it to assure our military
and political ascendancy in this postwar era.”[3]
It is from these two great
mistakes that there has flowed, as I see it, the extreme militarization not
only of our thought but of our lives that has become the mark of this postwar
age. And this is a militarization that
has had profound effects not just on our foreign policies but also on our own
society… And this habit—the habit of
pouring so great a part of our gross national product year after year into
sterile and socially negative forms of production—has now risen to the status
of what I have ventured to call a genuine national addiction. We could not now break ourselves of the habit
without the serious of withdrawal symptoms.
Millions of people, is addition to those other millions who are in
uniform, have become accustomed to deriving their livelihood from the
military-industrial complex. Thousands
of firms have become dependent on it, not to mention labor unions and communities. It is the main source of our highly
destabilizing budgetary deficit. An
elaborate and most unhealthy bond has been created between those who
manufacture and sell the armaments and those in Washington who buy them. We have created immense vested interests in
the maintenance of a huge armed establishment in time of peace and in the
export of great quantities of arms to other peoples—great vested interests, in
other words, in the Cold War. We have made ourselves dependent
on this invidious national practice; so much so that it may fairly be said that
if we did not have the Russians and their alleged iniquities to serve as a
rationalization for it, we would have to invent some adversary to take their
place—which would be hard to do.[4][My
highlight]
Kennan notes that the problem is made worse by the
unnecessary wastefulness of it all, the lack of coherent relationship between
the way Congress figures out civilian and military costs.[5]
It sometimes seems to me that those of us not involved
in this great military-industrial enterprise are in danger of becoming, in the
figurative sense, a nation of camp followers, like the pathetic civilian
stragglers who trailed along behind the European armies of earlier centuries in
the hopes of picking up remnants from the relative abundance of the military
resources of food and clothing which the armies disposed.[6]
And because of these requirements we need to keep
demonizing our opponent and giving him qualities which make them 10 feet tall
in order to justify the military-industrial requirements which become
self-generating.[7]
We should not allow politicians with vested interests to define China, North Korea, Iran or any other threat in order to justify military requirements which are not needed for our political / military aims in war.
