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/HarperCollins in hardcover in November, 2003, and the paperback edition (October, 2004) quickly hit high on the Barnes & Noble bookstores weekly National Bestseller List. Joe's next book, Straits of Power, was published in hardcover in late November, 2004, and before Christmas broke into Amazon's Top 10 Men's Adventure Fiction.
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. In November, 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc.
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Joe Buff Books:
Straits
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Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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December 21, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
This is supposed to be the time of year when people across America celebrate "peace on Earth and good will toward men," a concept that ought to transcend any particular religious beliefs -- even atheism. Yet looking around at the state of the world, I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it hard to keep in the spirit of the season. The holidays must be a particularly difficult time for all those who lost loved ones and friends on 9/11/01 or during military operations and raging insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. Plus, don't forget the troops who were wounded or maimed, and the permanent price to both them and their families. December, 2004 could well set a new record for "the year-end blahs," regardless of which presidential candidate you were rooting for, and whatever your personal opinion on current U.S. involvement in overseas combat.
How do we make sense of the self-contradictory American habit of loving peace while waging war? Though it might yield small comfort for some, a perspective could perhaps be gained if we stop to recall how deeply ingrained in our national culture it is to fight for freedom.
First, a reality check on "fighting for freedom." No matter how noble the goal and how glorious-sounding the words, the process is always brutal and traumatic for all those busy killing and dying along the front lines. Modern-era media breakthroughs, including color photography and then portable videocameras, satellite TV, and the World Wide Web, have vividly brought home -- an intentional double meaning -- exactly how gory a battlefield can be. But it's important to remember that warfare has always been exceedingly gory. Bullet wounds, severed limbs, pulped skulls, and serious burns, were as awful to experience and as hideous to look at in 1778 or 1863 as they were in Korea or Vietnam and are still today -- and battlefield medicine gets increasingly crude-to-nonexistent the further back you go.
America fought every war we ever fought because we believed that we needed to. While alternate history "what ifs" can be entertaining and enlightening, this learning tool only goes so far: Speculation on the nicer things that might have been -- if only the politicians and the generals on both sides had tried a tad harder to talk instead of shoot -- can't change what actually happened. Nor, personally, do I buy into the theory that America's wars are fought because of our own out-of-touch or power-mad leaders, egged on by capitalist war profiteers, who callously knew that it would be the little guy -- John or Jane Doe from Anytown, USA -- who'd get sent off to stop a bullet or a razor-sharp, white hot piece of enemy shrapnel. Some of our most blood-stained "war presidents" of all time, such as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, are widely regarded as great statesmen with impeccably high ideals.
Sure, patriotism whipped up to the point of nationwide jingoism, and war hysteria bordering on mob rule, formed part of the backdrop in each big American war -- but so did rational pacifism and pragmatic isolationism, causes as noble as freedom to those who preached them.
We fought because we had to. Our democratic way of life, and the way of life or sheer survival of other peoples abroad, were genuinely threatened by the forces of ruthless tyranny.
Most relevant of all to establishing proper perspective, I think, is that this willingness to shed our own blood -- and spend decades more beyond that nursing those wounded in body or mind -- has manifested itself repeatedly for our country's entire two-century-plus lifespan. America was born in war, our War of Independence. Our Union was preserved by war, the War Between the States. Either we're incredibly stupid, and keep making the same mistake again and again in almost every generation, or we're truly committed to the belief that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are worth dying for. (Myself, I go with the second explanation for our history.)
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And don't kid yourself that things suddenly went bad and stayed bad after the so-called Last Good War, World War II -- a war in which, please recall, many troops spent years at a time in hostile foreign places, thousands of miles from their loved ones, after joining up "for the duration." War at best is hell and often it's worse than hell. Every war we ever fought had its own stupefying intelligence failures, its dreadfully costly planning blunders, its choking logistical bottlenecks, and its faulty or inadequate "come as you are, use what you have" equipment and doctrine and weapons systems. Probably without exception, every war we ever fought also lasted much longer than we thought it would. The promise "Home before Christmas," speaking of the holidays, is infamous for not specifying Christmas of what year. Enemies do have these nasty habits of not giving up so easily, not showing much respect for our preferred schedules, and stepping all over our wishes for happy, safe family gatherings.
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