| brian douglas skinner | |
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Radical Political Ideas: Military Academies
Mike Turmon:
Abolish the military academies.
Morris Zwick:
CONTINUE to fund the service academies. The military leadership is generally well-educated and not interested in fighting. Its the damn politicians that get us in wars! Military service should be well rewarded as putting one's life at stake in defense of the country is worth a lot. A smaller military force could afford this luxury.
Mike Turmon:
One of the reasons the military has power and influence in this country is that it has a constituency. By this I mean people who are interested in the continuance and indeed expansion of the military. Such constituencies are not concerned with the real purpose of the military, which is essentially defense of U.S. territory and to a lesser extent protection of the national interest abroad. Rather, they are interested in certain side-effects of a powerful military.
The large defense contractors are the most obvious example. Another example is military personnel themselves, which is why I agree with another of Morris's points about reducing the size of the military to a reasonable level, that is, a level consistent with a reasonably framed conception of our national security interests. (Simultaneously fighting two wars off our soil, for example, is not a reasonable conception of these interests, nor is the ability to destroy all life on the planet.) The members of the military vote, and the chances are slim that anyone will vote themself out of a job. Rather, one tends to adjust one's mind to believe that one's job is necessary and important.
This brings us to the service academies, whose purpose has become to create an upper class which can direct and defend the military. I emphasize that the effect inevitably goes far beyond the legitimate aim of educating officers in command and combat techniques. Ultimately, what arises is an autonomous entity, with its own ruling class, its own laws, and its own conception of what is good for the country. It is the crudest sort of beast, being an oligarchy (based partly on heredity) emphasizing loyalty and discipline above all else. And the head of this beast, the ideal which gives its highest expression, is the nobility created by the service academies. This system is profoundly anti-democratic; essentially feudal. Our nation then finds itself appealing to an entity which is fundamentally at odds with our principles to defend us!
Let me make a further point related to military training. Each year many billions of dollars are spent in recruiting and training young people -- I am not just speaking of the service academies now -- in what is, at its base, the use of violence to achieve goals. I believe one of the largest sources of violence in our society is this training.
There are many ways to solve any problem, and people tend to use the one they are most familiar with. These billions, then, are going to equip some set of people with a crude and largely discredited means of solving general problems. This is not just a metaphorical connection, as the Oklahoma City bombing makes clear: the basic bomb construction techniques (perhaps also the overall outlook) were learned in the U.S. Army. The chickens are coming home to roost, although as typical with violence they are crapping in the wrong place. We observe a similar connection in the AK-47s, Uzis, and 9mm handguns now causing so much fear and tragic killing in American cities. One way or another, all that money spent promoting violent solutions comes back to us. As with the service academies, we are supporting essentially anti-democratic means: who has the largest club.
To return for a moment to the issue of the service academies, as a person who has spent almost all of his life to date at school, I generally have a lot of respect for formal education. But, sadly, education (like science or technology) is not an absolute good. When it is called into service of the powerful, and against the interests of the people, it can be as bad as anything else.
