In Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (Princeton University Press), Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn report that military units were more cohesive if they were composed of men who looked, voted, and worshiped like one another. Diverse units, meanwhile, did not fare as well.
All else equal, soldiers were less likely to desert if they were born in the United States or Germany than if they were born in Ireland, England, or elsewhere. Soldiers were less likely to desert if they were literate and had high incomes.
Holding all of the individual traits constant, white soldiers were less likely to desert if they fought alongside soldiers who were similar to them in terms of occupation, region, ethnicity, and religion. In African-American companies, soldiers were less likely to desert if they fought alongside soldiers from the same region.
But the two economists insist that on its own terms, their Civil War study tells a powerful story: Social networks matter. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Demography, they report that in Union veterans’ old age, their health was worse if they had experienced a high amount of battle stress during the war. That isn’t surprising. The paper’s startling finding is that among veterans whose military companies had been highly cohesive, the effect disappeared.
In a previous paper on economic diversity and community life, Ms. Costa and Mr. Kahn criticized the political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s much-debated 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Mr. Putnam, they said, had exaggerated the decline of American civic life and had looked in the wrong places for explanations. According to Ms. Costa and Mr. Kahn, we shouldn’t blame television or overwork or urban design. The real explanation is the rise in social heterogeneity, which makes people slower to form bonds of trust.
This should surprise no one.
To act together, we need to know that others will back us up for standing up for abstract values — basically, that there’s consensus on those values.
Consensus comes best from those of the same culture, language, background and, yes, those whose ancestors went through the same evolutionary process that shaped their consciousness.
We don’t create ourselves. We are not blank slates. We are what we are, biologically, and evolution is written all over us. It’s ignorant and comical to deny it.
Humans have no place on the battlefield.
They haven’t had for a long time and our insistence on ‘protecting society’ with the poorest, dumbest, least ethnically (deep rural and central urban) advantaged population fractions by essentially isolating them within military reservations and make-work MOS’ codes that do not survive prolonged peace guaranteed us of failing to modernize and streamline (through three iterations of BUR) after the cold war.
And this in turn gave us a very vulnerable, ‘face hardened’, high technology force around an inner core of weak infantry specialists whose reality was that of a high intensity professional logistically backed by citizen soldiery with limited cooks and band tolerance for extended deployment or desultory attrition in either group.
The potential of that kind of forces’ easy IED casualty state is both a temptation to a ‘traditional’ enemy trained in the arts of coup psychology as UCW. And a terrible political handicap to an administration counting the costs of maintaining a standing occupational army in rotation through some far off back of beyond where stop-loss amounts to an imprisonment from reentry into a workplace specialized society where ‘every year counts’ on developing work related skills.
Robots and particularly robotic surveillance systems can get us towards a ‘cleaner aftermath’ as much as firepower dictated front end of combat but the ultimate irony of the ones who stand together surviving together comes down to our ethnic/class/societal construct life values and moral constraint.
Versus other nation state’s where the only unity required is one of sport killing freebie targets to raise your status in the neighborhood. Iraqis did not become nationalists when they fought the dreaded Crusader occupiers. They became exploitationalists for whom cheap weapons and instruction out of Al Qaeda and Iran made it easy to score cheap kills with.
If you are not willing to exercise the **Raw Force** to become -that kind- of enemy’s keeper for the _generations_ it may take to bring about their children’s children’s conversion to your societal model, you should not use the military as an argument for ethnic solidarity. Because if they are not able to achieve it, offensively, in support of your national existence, it doesn’t matter what they do among themselves.
Not least because the military goes a long ways into dangerous territory ‘remaking’ the mindset of every 18-21 year old who fights to bleed-green and if even they cannot master this as a function of centuries of experience in breaking down individuality to instill a group ideals then the notion of using some external value to reinforce the process is ridiculous. Now you have a white brigade, a hispanic company and a black platoon.
What worries and intrigues me is two fold:
1. The Romans knew that their Legions had to pay for themselves in peace as in war and developed an empire of roads and architecture to prove it. In this, could we but abandon the idiocy of for-profit ‘democracy = capitalism’ we HAVE the best trained manual labor force in the world.
2. Obama seems to have this idea of a ‘civilian security force’ superceding conventional militarism which sounds to me like codespeak for a political police force with intent to enforce national will upon the enemy within as without.
If you want to talk about population group X labels as a definition of cohesion and efficiency in times of crisis, you need to first discuss what kinds of degeneration or fragmentation in society could take us to a point where national military forces are replaced by internal security ones and how local ethny ‘National Guard’ militias could offset that with watchers of the watchers to prevent any excesses of national rights from happening unimpeded or at least reported.
Essentially then, you need to discuss the nature of NAU and states rights after the present administration destroys not merely our sovereignity but the population fraction which backs up our POV.
Beware that the organized local labor force, whether volunteer, ex-military or even prisoner dependent which say erects an electric economy and a local infrastructure system to free itself of dependence on an elitist/corporate/globalist supranational budgetary dole ecnonomics may itself -of needs the devil drives- come closer to representing a mini-socialist police state than anything we would presently be comfortable with.
It has been a long time since anyone volunteered for anything expecting nothing but unity with their own in return.
KPl.
[...] standing up for abstract values — basically, that there’s consensus on those values. How diversity kills "An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the [...]