The Worth of War (30 page)

When Americans are characterized as “citizens,” the term implies individuals with rights, liberties, and personal autonomy. Citizens, indeed, have some power
vis-à-vis
the government. And, since the state needs popular cooperation against external foes, it continues to promote a sense of citizenship even when extending its protection. Victims, on the other hand, are weak persons in need to the government's protection. Victimhood represents a significant demotion for citizens. Rather than exercise power, victims cower in their homes hoping to be kept safe. And yet, as Simon points out, political discourse and legislation seem intent on describing Americans as crime victims, the loved ones of crime victims, and potential victims of crime rather than citizens. Protecting citizens from crime becomes the state's business instead of and in addition to protecting them from foreign threats. And, under the rubric of increasing such protection, the US government, in its domestic wars on crime, drugs, corporate crime, and the internal terrorist threat, has, in recent years, greatly expanded the reach and power of its coercive and administrative machinery. As in the case of any other protection racket, the protector becomes as much or more of a threat than the putative attacker.

In recent years, thousands of new federal criminal statutes have been written to protect the public and safeguard the potential victims of crime. There are currently some 4,500 federal criminal laws on the books, nearly half enacted since 1970.
¹⁴
It should be recalled that the Constitution, itself, listed only three federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. Most of these statutes deal with environmental protection, securities regulation, corporate governance, product and workplace safety, terrorism, and the myriad of other matters related to the expansion of the national government's authority and responsibility. Not surprisingly, given the growing number of federal laws that it is now possible to violate, the number of federal prosecutions has increased as well—by nearly 150% since 1980.
¹⁵

Accompanying this expansion of federal criminal law has been a determined effort by the executive branch to circumvent the limitations that traditional procedural safeguards impose upon the ability of the government to incarcerate those it deems blameworthy. Under pressure from the Justice Department and afraid of appearing soft on crime, Congress has enacted statutes that federal prosecutors have been able to use to remove one after another impediment to the prosecution and conviction of the targets of their investigations. For example, a number of federal criminal statutes, such as the Clean Water Act, weaken the traditional
mens rea
requirement, allowing criminal prosecution of individuals who were, at most, negligent. In one recent case, a construction supervisor was sentenced to six months in prison and a $5,000 fine for Clean Water Act violations when a backhoe operator on his crew accidentally pierced an oil pipeline discharging oil into a nearby river.
¹⁶
The Supreme Court has said that overlooking questions of intent may be necessary to protect complex regulatory arrangements.
¹⁷

In a similar vein, Congress has enacted statutes that have been used by the Justice Department to criminalize efforts by individuals to defend themselves or even to assert their innocence. For example, in a well-known recent case, Martha Stewart was prosecuted for violating the federal fraud statute, as well as the statute that prohibits making
false statements to federal investigators, in her response to the government's allegations that she engaged in insider trading. The government was never able to muster the evidence needed to actually charge Stewart with insider trading. This inconvenient fact, however, did not stop Justice Department prosecutors from charging that she made false statements to federal investigators and committed securities fraud by frequently and publicly asserting her innocence. The government claimed that Stewart's assertions of innocence were actually efforts to halt the slide in value of her company's stock and, thus, constituted a form of fraud.
¹⁸

In addition, acting without a clear statutory mandate, the Justice Department has worked to develop new techniques to circumvent limits on prosecutorial discretion. One of many important prosecutorial strategies that have evolved in recent years is the tactic of discouraging white collar and—especially—corporate defendants from fully availing themselves of the legal advice to which their resources would normally give them access. At least since 1999, the Justice Department has told defendants that they would be more likely to face criminal charges if they “lawyered up.” This policy was formalized in the often-cited “Thompson Memorandum,” drafted in 2003 by then–Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson.
¹⁹
The Thompson Memorandum states that in deciding whether to charge a corporation with a crime, federal prosecutors should consider, “the corporation's timely and voluntary disclosure of wrongdoing and its willingness to cooperate in the investigation of its agents, including, if necessary, the waiver of corporate attorney–client and work product protection.” The memorandum goes on to say that the prosecutor should consider “whether the corporation appears to be protecting its culpable employees and agents,” and may consider “the advancing of attorneys' fees” and sharing of information pursuant to a joint defense agreement. In other words, corporate officers are to be discouraged from retaining counsel, refusing to disclose privileged information, or developing complex defense strategies, by the threat that the government will treat these as indications of likely guilt. Some of these policies were modified but not ended by the Justice Department in 2006.
²⁰

Lest it be thought that the erosion of legal safeguards affects only greedy corporate chieftains or dangerous terrorists, it is worth taking note of some contemporary federal cases. In recent years, a Michigan landowner was convicted of a criminal violation of the Clean Water Act for moving sand onto his property without a federal permit. A minor union leader was convicted of making false statements for replying “no” to federal investigators who asked him if he had accepted a bribe. A college teacher was convicted of mail fraud for granting degrees to students whose work had been plagiarized.
²¹
Perhaps these cases remain the exceptions rather than the norm, but they illustrate the possibilities. As sovereignty is boundlessly strengthened, the influence and the security of the citizenry are reduced and the chance that ordinary citizens will be subjected to arbitrary treatment is increased.

Of course, all this is sugarcoated by government agencies that claim to be acting only for the benefit of the public. Security services need to spy on millions of Americans to protect us from foreign terrorists. Schoolchildren need to be subjected to urine tests to battle drug abuse. We need a federal agency protecting us from the most important threat facing the nation today—the use of performance-enhancing steroids by professional athletes. And, of course, this discussion sheds a different light on the issue of gun control. Armed citizens are far less likely than their unarmed fellows to need and seek the protection of the state.

In these, and many other ways, the aftermath of war can change the character of the state's protection racket without bringing it to an end. Absent war abroad, the state seeks enemies at home against whom to protect its people. In so doing, it transforms citizens into victims who will fearfully pay for protection from one another.

INTRODUCTION

1
. Henry George, “The Law of Human Progress,” in
Progress and Poverty
(New York: Classics Club Library, 1942).

2
. John U. Neff,
War and Human Progress
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 19.

3
. Geoffrey Perret,
A Country Made by War
(New York: Vintage, 1990).

4
. William H. McNeill,
Plagues and Peoples
(New York: Anchor, 1977).

5
. Johan Galtung,
Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace, Conflict, Development and Civilization
(New York: Sage, 1996).

6
. Philip Kitcher, “The Taint of Social Darwinism,”
New York Times
, April 8, 2012,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/the-taint-of-social-darwinism/
.

7
. See Richard Nelson's review of Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudson, “The Limits of Lamarckism Revisited,”
Evolutionary Theories in the Social Science
, May 18, 2004,
http://www.etss.net/index.php/weblog/booksandreviewsfull/189/
. See also Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudson, “Evolutionary Theorizing beyond Lamarckism: A Reply to Richard Nelson,”
Journal of Evolutionary Economics
, 17:353–359 (April 13, 2007),
http://www.geoffrey-hodgson.info/user/image/rejoindernelsonjee.pdf
. For a useful review of the various issues surrounding efforts to apply evolutionary theories to societies, see John Laurent and John Nightingale, eds.,
Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2001).

CHAPTER 1: WAR AS AN AGENT OF RATIONALITY

1
. Azar Gat,
War in Human Civilization
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). Also, Philip Bobbitt,
The Shield of Achilles: War Peace and the Course of History
(New York: Knopf, 2003).

2
. Angus Campbell et al.,
The American Voter
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), ch.7.

3
. Norman Podhoretz,
Why Are Jews Liberals
(New York: Doubleday, 2009).

4
. See Michael Shermer,
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies
(New York: Times Books, 2011). Also, Ariel Gluklich,
The End of Magic
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

5
. David Kuo,
Tempting Faith
(New York: Free Press, 2006).

6
. Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest, “The Aztec Imperial Expansion,” in
Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

7
. “The Inca Imperial Expansion,” in ibid.

8
. Christopher Tyerman,
God's War: A History of the Crusades
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).

9
. Edward Peters,
Inquisition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 84.

10
. Conrad and Demarest,
Religion and Empire
, 126.

11
. Ibid., 41.

12
. Benjamin Ginsberg,
The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 42–43.

13
. Peter Pulzer,
The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 315–16.

14
. Raul Hilberg, “The Bureaucracy of Annihilation,” in Francois Furet, ed.,
Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews
(New York: Schocken, 1989), 120–30.

15
. Detlev J. K. Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Also Michael Geyer, “The Nazi State Reconsidered,” in Richard Bessel, ed.,
Life in the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford, 1987), 57–68.

16
. Daniel Goldhagen,
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Vintage, 1997), 166.

17
. Martin Van Creveld, “An Army Marches on Its Stomach!” in
Supplying War
:
Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

18
. Kenneth Slepyan,
Stalin's Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 39.

19
. Richard Overy,
Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort, 1941–1945
(New York: Penguin, 1988), 133.

20
. Van Creveld,
Supplying War
, 175–80.

21
. Gordon Fraser,
The Quantum Exodus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 118.

22
. Ibid., 111.

23
. Ibid., appendix.

24
. Ibid., 119.

25
. Ibid., 125.

26
. Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 415.

27
. Ibid., 445.

28
. Fraser,
Quantum Exodus
, 78–83.

29
. Jean M. Hungerford, “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare,”
The Rand Corporation
, ASTIA Document No. ATI 210673, April 14, 1950.

30
. Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian Wars
, vol. 5.

31
. Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
(New York: Amazon Digital Services, 2014).

32
. Ernest Volkman,
Science Goes to War
(New York: Wiley, 2002).

33
. Niccolò Machiavelli, “Of New Dominions Which Have Been Acquired by One's Own Arms and Powers,” in
The Prince
(New York: Mentor, 1952).

34
. Carl von Clausewitz,
On War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

35
. B. H. Liddel Hart,
Strategy
(New York: Meridian, 1991).

36
. Arthur Ferrill,
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1988).

37
. Peter Heather,
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Edward Luttwak,
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), and Edward Luttwak,
The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011).

38
. Sun Tzu, “Waging War” in
Art of War
.

39
. Niccolò Machiavelli,
The Art of War
(New York: Da Capo, 1965), 13.

40
. Machiavelli,
Prince
, 82.

41
. Kautilya,
The Arthashastra
(New York: Penguin Books, 1987), part 5.

42
. Michael Bweckley, “Economic Development and Military Effectiveness,”
Journal of Strategic Studies
22, no. 1 (2010).

43
. Walter S. Dunn Jr.,
Hitler's Nemesis: The Red Army, 1930–1945
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 4.

44
. Heather,
Fall of the Roman Empire
, part 1.

45
. Martin Van Creveld,
Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982).

46
. Gat,
War in Human Civilization
, part 1.

47
. Kautilya,
Arthashastra
, part 11.

48
. Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus,
De Re Militari
, book 1,
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~madsb/home/war/vegetius/dere03.php
.

49
. Machiavelli,
Art of War
, 58.

50
. Ibid., 162.

51
. Kautilya,
Arthashastra
, part 11.

52
. Randall Collins,
Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

53
. Karl Marlantes,
What It Is Like to Go to War
(New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2011).

54
. The exception involves what Collins calls “forward panic,” most often associated with military confrontations when armies in retreat are slaughtered by their advancing foes. Collins, “Forward Panic,” in
Violence
.

55
. David Grossman,
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
(Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009).

56
. S. L. A. Marshall,
Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947).

57
. Grossman,
On Killing
, 177.

58
. Ibid., 258.

59
. Henry Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” in Peter Paret, ed.,
Makers of Modern Strategy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 64–90.

60
. Ibid., 70–71.

61
. Ibid., 71.

62
. Paul Kennedy,
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War
(New York: Random House, 2013).

63
. Sun Tzu,
Art of War
.

64
. Ibid.

65
. Donald W. Engels,
Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

66
. Timothy May,
The Mongol Art of War
(Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2007).

67
. Victor Davis Hanson,
Carnage and Culture
(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 77.

68
. Van Creveld,
Supplying War
, 82.

69
. Ibid., 97.

70
. Geoffrey Perret,
A Country Made by War
(New York: Random House, 1989), 230.

71
. Russell F. Weigley,
The American Way of War
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 131.

72
. Ibid.

73
. Perret,
Country Made by War
, 322.

74
. Joanne E. Johnson, “The Army Industrial College and Mobilization Planning between the Wars,” monograph prepared for the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Fort McNair, District of Columbia, 1993,
http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA276612
.

75
. Sun Tzu,
Art of War
.

76
. Machiavelli,
Art of War
, 17.

77
. Ibid., 176.

78
. Machiavelli, “In What Way Princes Must Keep Faith,” in
Prince
.

79
. Von Clausewitz,
On War
, 1:50.

80
. Max Weber,
Economy and Society
, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1,151.

81
. Charles Tilly, ed.,
The Formation of National States in Western Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

82
. Samuel Finer, “State and Nation Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in ibid., 84–163.

83
. Bhavya Lal, “Knowledge Domains in Engineering Systems: Systems Analysis,” (MIT, 2001),
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:QzF6sYI4CjoJ:web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/Systems%2520Analysis.doc+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh7EN0V5R8o9riakMCiqg-Ma8 i81tlo0ELxuapqphzvwsSBwuuaHnBSNX7bJbc8yFwfjano1YAKFgbd-CDDqXUlMX1-2KlYbOvOgM4X-ZK8zPrzIt-nLrP9SLHQ-n3_a432nOv1&sig=AHIEt bQ47SzlYePjRyYBShlsKrwiQ-rEBA
.

84
. Weber,
Economy and Society
, 1,155.

85
. Ibid., 1,156.

86
. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio,
The Ten Books on Architecture
(New York: Dover Publications, 1960).

87
. David Williams, “Mass-Produced Chinese Pre-Han Bronze Crossbow Triggers: Unparalleled Manufacturing Technology in the Ancient World,”
Arms & Armor
5, no. 2 (October 2008): 142–53.

CHAPTER 2: WAR AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

1
. William H. McNeill,
The Pursuit of Power
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 44–45.

2
. Ibid., 45.

3
. Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: Norton, 1999), 75.

4
. McNeill,
Pursuit of Power
, 81.

5
. Samuel E. Finer, “State and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in Charles Tilly, ed.,
The Formation of National States in Western Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 105.

6
. Douglas E. Streusand,
Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010).

7
. Finer, “State and Nation Building,” 107.

8
. David Arnold,
Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106.

9
. Ibid., 108.

10
. Ibid., 110.