Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[marct]

Hi Tom,

If by "fatally flawed" you mean Huntington's writing off or Latin and Orthodox civilization as distinct from, and generally inimical to, Western Civlization, I am inclined to agree with you. I think I know why he did it: Because with those two in our camp, and portrayed on a map, it looks like we are well poised to dominate the world for the next couple of thousand years, but without them, it looks as if we're on our last legs.

Oh, it's flawed at that level, too, but that wasn't what I meant. His entire thesis is based on a fatal flaw which, at it's root, is the association of a "civilization" with a genetic grouping. In reality, there are three fatal flaws in it. The first is that he doesn't understand genetics and uses "culture" (actually "civilization") as a proxy for it. The second is that he doesn't understand genetic variances and the interplay between genetic groupings and cultural groupings. The third fatal flaw is that he doesn't understand the relationship of culture as a selection criterion in natural selection.

Given those three flaws, I would have to chcracterize his exclusion of the Latin and Orthodox "civilizations" as a minor peccadillo .

Conversely, I don't know how one argues against the notion that, historically, conflict along civilizational lines among peers and near peers tend to be particularly intractable and bloody, since it usually is.

It's a theoretical distinction that flows from his flaws. Given his model, it's the only possible solution. However, his model cannot account for the rise of trans-civilizational actors or intra-civilizational ones either.

Hmmm, let's see: how would Huntington account for the rise of the Cosmos? What "civilization" would they be part of? (Note: for those who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a scenario that is playing out right now that Tom examines in some of his books)

At best, Huntington's model would have to assume that such groups were a) part of a "civilization" and b) were diasporic in some sense. He would have to model them, since he uses an organicist analogy for civilization, as an "infection" of some type (cf Mein Kampf, Book 1, Ch. 11 for an example of this).

Getting away from the flaws in Huntington's model for a minute, and back to your observation about peer and near peer competition, sure they happen and, you're quite right, only a twit would argue against that. Of course, "competition" doesn't necessarily mean conflict, it could be economic, it could be status oriented (think about the monumental architecture of the early Sumerian city states), etc. I'm not saying that it won't be conflict, just that that will not be a constant.

Furthermore, it is likely that in any long run of peer / near-peer competition, sets of "conventions" governing both competition and conflict will appear as a way of reducing the risk of total annihilation. A good example of this was the development of the Five Empires agreements (~1800 - 1300 bce) between some pretty different "civilizations who were all peers / near peers. On the flip side, sometimes they just end up annihilating one another...

I'm inclined to disagree that Latin states "cannot" become industrialized, in part because some of them seem to be, in part because some of them have been for some time, and in part because the opportunity is opening for them as the core west deindustrializes and shifts ever more to service. This is not to say that they will industrialize well, or honestly / without massive corruption, or efficiently, or anything along those lines. But, if you look at countries capable of building, say, tanks - not bad measures of industrialization - among the few countries that can, can because they have, are Brazil and Argentina. (Though, admittedly, the TAM was rather light and based on a German design.)

Tom, I've got to agree with Dayuhan here:

If dishonesty, corruption, and inefficiency - or to add a few, environmental devastation, sweatshop labor, union-busting, etc - are signs of not industrializing well, then I'm not sure anyone has ever industrialized well. All of these and more were present in abundance during the early stages of industrialization in the US and Europe, and in industrializing Asia.

Can they industrialize? Sure they can, that really isn't the question for me at least. For me, it's more a matter of how they industrialize, using what relational model. Britain (and the US) industrialized along a Robber Baron mode of relations which, in the case of Britain, had already been a cultural vector for several hundred years before the invention of the Watts engine (the Enclosure Movement). The key problem, at a social level, is how do you bring industrialists into a beneficial relationship with the rest of society? In Britain, they did it in part by creating new Peers of the Realm. and intermarriage with the great families. In the US, they did it by letting industrialists control large parts of the political process, although I don't think that option is as stable as the British one.

So, how is it being done in Brazil and Argentina?

Then there is the issue of capability vs. utility. Sure, both Brazil and Argentina can produce tanks, but should they? What are the social relations of their society likely to produce if large numbers of tanks become standard equipment?