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A former partner
in a top-10 global management consulting firm,
Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional
writer on national security and defense preparedness.
He is also a novelist of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners and
Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and
best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on
future submarine technology and tactics, which
appeared in The Submarine Review, received
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League.
His recent novel Crush
Depth made the Military Book Club's
Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected
as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late
2002. Tidal
Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in
hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made
the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller
List (paperback edition due in October, 2004).
Joe's next book, Straits
of Power, is scheduled for hardcover
publication in November, '04.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis,
a non-partisan international scholarly body
headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life
Member of the following organizations: U.S.
Naval Institute, the Navy League of the
United States, the Fellows of the Naval War
College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation,
and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father
was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in
the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951,
and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the
North Atlantic convoys late in World War II,
before being drafted into the U.S. Army to
serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In
August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life
Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans
of America, partly in recognition of his pro
bono work for Operation
Seabees Knowledge.
Joe
Buff Article & Column Archive
Joe Buff Contact Info:
readermail@joebuff.com
http://www.JoeBuff.com
Joe Buff Books:
Straits
of Power
Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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September 13, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
Looking ahead a tad to beat the rush, 9 November of this year will
mark the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in
1989. Two years after that, in late '91, the Soviet Union officially
dissolved itself -- a mostly symbolic act, since the USSR had by
then very obviously splintered apart from within. Amid the joy and
relief at this sudden outburst of global freedom and peace, some
commentators pronounced "the end of history." By that, so far as
I could tell at the time, they meant the world would quickly become
a sedate and stable place, and nothing particularly important would
ever happen again.
Woops! This just goes to show the perils of making big predictions
in public. History, as the intervening years since 1989 have amply
proven, is still very much alive, compelling, and challenging. Furthermore,
to paraphrase from another context, it's clear that "We don't own
history. History owns us."
I'd like to humbly -- but, with intent, provocatively -- offer
some observations, based on events old and new, to partly debunk
a few persistent myths about how the world really works. Shorn of
the clouded vision caused by these key misperceptions, optimists
among us can hope we'll hear less of such authoritative-sounding
yet deluded pronouncements re foreign affairs, as the never-boring
21st century marches on.
Do Countries Have "Friends"? Nations, as the ultimate sovereign
entities on the planet, act solely out of self interest, as cloaked
as this might be by good manners, polite diplomacy, wishful thinking
-- and well-funded propaganda. Today's ally could be tomorrow's
enemy. Yesterday's mortal foe might turn into today's most die-hard
friend. Just look at the historical record. The UK over two-plus
centuries went from being America's enemy, to friend, to enemy,
to friend, to enemy, to friend, to enemy, to friend. If you're wondering
where this rollercoaster comes from, think about British policy
during our War Between the States, and the war plans the British
Admiralty drew up against us (on paper) amid the battleship-building
races of the early 20th century -- when emerging U.S. industrial
power threatened the UK's precious unilateral mastery over the seas.
The first switcheroo by London from enemy to friend is my favorite
example of how the watered-down "history" comfort-food taught in
grammar school isn't much at all like the actual world.
War with France! From 1798 to 1801, the newborn United States
and Revolutionary France fought an undeclared war at sea, the Quasi
War. (We won decisively.) The fact that it wasn't declared didn't
mean it wasn't serious. Vietnam was undeclared too, right? So, within
barely fifteen years of the end of our War of Independence, during
which Lafayette and his pals rendered us vital military aid against
King George, we were at war with France, and the UK was giving us
some not-so-surreptitious help. The reasons for this sudden reversal
were twofold: The U.S. made the bad mistake of disbanding the Continental
Navy in the mid-1780s, and there was something of a "regime change"
in Paris when Louis XVI lost his head. And yet, not too long after
the end of the Quasi War, England was having at us again in the
War
of 1812. For more recent empirical data, contrast the lineups
in World War I and World War II. Japan and Italy were on our side
in the Great War, but both were our enemies in the rematch that
started barely twenty years later. It does get rather confusing.
Cyclical Isolationism/Pacifism: Every major war quickly
(and erroneously) gets characterized as the last of its kind that
we'll ever need. W.W.I
was the war to end all wars -- sorry. W.W.II
was the war to make the world safe for democracy -- it didn't. The
Cold
War's demise was supposed to ring in an era of warm and fuzzy
global unity -- nope. Each "victory" leads to drastic cuts in U.S.
defense spending, on the premise that big armed forces (and good
intelligence) are no longer needed -- plus, after all, America is
a peace-loving nation. Each time, when the Next Big War breaks out,
we pay a dreadful price in treasure and blood because of this recurring
unpreparedness. It seems there's no such thing as "lasting peace,"
just breathers between big wars. History does not repeat itself.
Warfare does.
We're All Connected: Some folks think, with apparent good
reason, that the world now has so many checks and balances that
third-generation-style major war is impossible: International trade
brings everyone close. Communication technologies -- like the Internet
-- forge a single worldwide village in which large armed conflict
becomes unthinkable. Air travel is so swift, and tourism so economically
vital, that it's senseless for people from different countries to
want to start killing each other en masse. Alas, if only history
bore this out. Prior communication and transportation breakthroughs,
such as the telegraph and the railroad, or the radio and the flying
machine, didn't bring world peace. They just made the prosecution
of war more efficient, and much more deadly. Germany and the UK
were each other's single biggest trading partners in 1914. Look
what happened there.
U-235 Galore: A fine example of how industrial development
and rising economic prosperity don't guarantee peace is found in
the unfolding drama over nuclear proliferation. The latest interesting
brouhaha concerns South Korea's production of a speck of almost(?)
weapons grade uranium. Seems likely this was just an ambitious science
fair project carried too far, by theoretical researchers who hadn't
thought about international treaties. The statecraft difficulties
this incident is causing now with North
Korea and Iran is more than amply covered elsewhere, so I won't
go into that. The point is that the uranium refinement method used
by the South Korean scientists -- the dual-laser method -- unlike
other purification techniques is extremely easy to hide. This does
not bode well for future nuclear arms control. Worse, many international
treaties have perfectly legal escape clauses. For instance, the
Treaty of Pelindaba, signed by African nations, formally bans all
nuclear weapons and their precursor fuel and equipment from that
entire continent. However, always read the fine print. Any signatory
country can withdraw from the treaty due to "paramount national
interests." The proper method of withdrawal is to merely inform
the other signatories. One way -- in a hypothetical scenario intended
to be scary -- that a country could "inform" others would be to
drop an A-bomb on one of them.
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The Law of Unintended Consequences: This law, related to
the infamous Murphy's Law, warns that whenever you make a change
that's supposed to be for the good, that change will have some consequences
you hadn't thought to expect, which are bad. The collapse of the
Soviet Union is an excellent case in point. OK, the world became
a lot less likely to go up in a thermonuclear holocaust. But instead,
we face the constant gnawing worry that one of those ex-Soviet H-bombs
might make its way onto the terrorist black market, and be set off
somewhere in the homeland of the U.S. or another very unfortunate
place. (Say, in Moscow, with the button pushed by Chechen separatists?)
Forward into the Past: Amid all the global post-Cold War
dismaying turmoil and strife, America seems partly in the grip of
a form of denial of our own day-to-day living history -- via escape
within our minds into a pat, upbeat, unthreatening past. W.W.II,
supposedly the last "good" war, is a prime destination for these
journeys of wistful nostalgia -- the end is well known, and it's
happy. Why think about the horrors and uncertainties of Iraq,
Afghanistan,
the Middle East, Darfur, and so on, when we can bask in self-congratulation
over winning the "last" really big shooting war? Of course, in and
of itself there's nothing wrong and a lot that's very right with
honoring our cherished Greatest Generation, and celebrating the
60th anniversaries of climactic battles soon coming thick and fast.
But in idealizing old glories we risk two important mistakes: Firstly,
W.W.II was rife with intelligence failures (Pearl Harbor, Arnhem,
the Battle of the Bulge) and costly military blunders and miscalculations
(Kasserine Pass, the hedgerows of Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest)
-- to think otherwise creates a unfair standard to judge every subsequent
war. Secondly, an over-worship and regression into closed-off prior
history could endanger our most outstanding national strength: that
the USA as a dynamic entity, and We the People as a community of
communities, always look ahead, planning and building a better tomorrow.
Excessive escapism cripples -- it's a surrender in the face of urgent
real-time hardships and conflicts, a shirking of the chore to address
and solve pivotal, complex problems here and now. One hopes this
head-ducking into a rose colored, mythical bygone era won't turn
around and bite.
Quick Summation: Have we really seen "the end of history"?
My answer has to be a loud, Not hardly!
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect
those of Military.com.
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