Midweek Musings
Dec. 3rd, 2003 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chickenfeetI just finished Nigel Bagnall’s The Punic Wars. Bagnall was Chief of the the General Staff in Britain when Thatcher was PM so he has an interesting first hand perspective on political influence over military matters which he applies to the conflict between Rome and Carthage.
There are a couple of points on which he is particularly interesting. One is the extent to which inadequately trained political appointees hampered the Roman war effort. One is inevitably reminded of Rumsfeld’s alleged interference in the US deployment to Iraq. Nowadays of course a Rumsfeld can’t be appointed to a field command but one does wonder about the extent to which the politicization of the US Armed Forces affects operational matters.
A second issue that Bagnall explores at length is whether certain states have a cultural propensity to settling their differences by force. He draws parallels and distinctions between Rome and Russia/Soviet Union arguing that both were/are expansionist but that Russia does not share Rome’s tendency to resort to arms, keeping war as only one tactic to be used as appropriate, In republican Rome, by contrast, successful field command was an essential element of a political career and expansionist war the chief source of national and individual wealth.
This too of course had me thinking of US parallels and a possible relationship with the Economist article on the deep divide in American politics I referred to last week in this journal. It seems to me that that geopolitical divide is a reflection of the broader cultural patterns explored by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. He identified four ur cultures in the US. His Cavalier and Borderlands cultures would map pretty closely to the Economist’s right wing bloc and his Puritan and Quaker cultures to the left. Might it not also be that the right bloc has, in Bagnall’s terms, an intrinsic propensity for war? It would help explain for example how the massively materially inferior Confederate States were able to maintain the fight against the Union so effectively for so long.
The implications are interesting. I don’t believe (Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding) that the US is expansionist in any classic sense of the term so potentially we have a non-expansionist state with an on again, off again propensity to use force to settle its disputes. Said state now possesses a preponderance of military force over any possible rival that even Rome at its height never possessed. Let us hope that the US does not throw up another Cato.
There are a couple of points on which he is particularly interesting. One is the extent to which inadequately trained political appointees hampered the Roman war effort. One is inevitably reminded of Rumsfeld’s alleged interference in the US deployment to Iraq. Nowadays of course a Rumsfeld can’t be appointed to a field command but one does wonder about the extent to which the politicization of the US Armed Forces affects operational matters.
A second issue that Bagnall explores at length is whether certain states have a cultural propensity to settling their differences by force. He draws parallels and distinctions between Rome and Russia/Soviet Union arguing that both were/are expansionist but that Russia does not share Rome’s tendency to resort to arms, keeping war as only one tactic to be used as appropriate, In republican Rome, by contrast, successful field command was an essential element of a political career and expansionist war the chief source of national and individual wealth.
This too of course had me thinking of US parallels and a possible relationship with the Economist article on the deep divide in American politics I referred to last week in this journal. It seems to me that that geopolitical divide is a reflection of the broader cultural patterns explored by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. He identified four ur cultures in the US. His Cavalier and Borderlands cultures would map pretty closely to the Economist’s right wing bloc and his Puritan and Quaker cultures to the left. Might it not also be that the right bloc has, in Bagnall’s terms, an intrinsic propensity for war? It would help explain for example how the massively materially inferior Confederate States were able to maintain the fight against the Union so effectively for so long.
The implications are interesting. I don’t believe (Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding) that the US is expansionist in any classic sense of the term so potentially we have a non-expansionist state with an on again, off again propensity to use force to settle its disputes. Said state now possesses a preponderance of military force over any possible rival that even Rome at its height never possessed. Let us hope that the US does not throw up another Cato.
