[dreadgeek]

I am not a military historian. I'm not even going to pretend that I can play a military historian on the Internet. The discussion of the firing of McChrystal and the larger issue of the Afghanistan war has me thinking, however, about how to deal with the question of warfare as a tool of geopolitics. I am not pro-war however I am what I hope is a geopolitical realist. Right now and for any foreseeable future, the way geopolitics is done one of the pieces that nations have on the board is a standing military. While I understand the reflex to condemn all war and to try to distill it down to its simplest *possible* essence, I don't know how useful it is in understanding why we get into wars, how we can avoid them in the future and how we get out of wars. For me, I think the idea that 'war is always about money or resources' actually clouds the issue and doesn't allow one to think about the subject on its own terms.

I get it that war is unpleasant. Although I was lucky enough not to see combat in my time in the military, I am the daughter and mother of combat veterans. I served under men who had fought in combat. I am not trying to argue for the glorification of war, nor am I trying to argue in favor of either action the US military is embroiled in currently. Rather, I'm trying to deal with the issue of warfare beyond either the reflexive Liberal position (always bad, we're always up to no good when we're involved in a war) and the Conservative position (kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out--as long as I don't have to do the fighting).

To do this, I think it is useful to try to deal with geopolitics using the most hard eyed, coldly realistic realpolitik we can muster. By doing so, I think it allows us to actually dig deeper into the issue.

For instance, I think we spend too much on our military and I think our current strategic posture makes no sense. Do we have legitimate national interests? Yes. Do we have legitimate transnational interests? Yes. So, I see no reason why we maintain our Cold War defense posture in Europe. It is vanishingly improbable that any two given European nations are going to war with one another and there's just no way that Russia is going to invade Western Europe anytime soon. No European nation has anything to gain by invading another and Russia has absolutely nothing to gain by invasion that they couldn't get some other way. We *never* had any legitimate strategic interest in Iraq and any strategic interest we had in Afghanistan in 2001 no longer exists. We could, I think, pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq entirely and withdraw from Europe without any significant harm being done to our national interest. On the other hand, there is a *legitimate* national and transnational interest in maintaining a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Why? Because huge amounts of the oil used by EVERY country flows through that area and everyone--from you and I to every person who could lay their hands on a boat and some explosives--knows it. In order to keep oil prices somewhere in a region that could be called stable world markets have to have a reasonable surety that the oil will get from A to B without being blown up. To do that, you need a deep water navy. We have the best blue water navy on the planet--in fact, we have the only navy that is probably capable of making certain that the oil tankers get from point A to B. It is in the global interest for oil prices to be stable and it is in the US national interest for this to be so as well.

Now, we could wish that our civilization was not dependent upon fossil fuels and I think we should not be dependent upon them. We might wish that it didn't take a deep water navy to secure the shipping lanes. But wishing doesn't make it so. The job has to be done, the US Navy can control any large body of water and the air space above it for a few hundred miles at the time and place of their choosing. Therefore the US Navy is best positioned for the job. (As an aside, this is a legacy of both WW II where sea power was decisive and the US/NATO war plan for WW III which would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The war plan called for the army in Europe to fight the world's greatest holding action while the navy owned the Atlantic ocean and then a huge resupply mission would be undertaken. The Russians could resupply by train, the Americans had to resupply by ship.)

It's a different way of thinking about the same subject. The reflexive Liberal response to the above is "why do we have to be in the Persian Gulf at all". The reflexive Conservative response is "withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe! Are you mad?! 9/11 and Hitler!". Neither response actually deals with the realpolitik that the SecDef and SecState as well as the POTUS and the Joint Chiefs actually have to face. It requires, on the Liberal side ,getting over the knee-jerk "if the American military did it, then it must be evil and done for some horrible purpose". Have we done things in the name of national interest we should not have done? Yes. Absolutely. But that is no reason to assume, at the outset, that any and all military actions involving the American military were undertaken for horrible, backhanded reasons or that national interest is just another word for "policy makers waking up and deciding to send a bunch of poor kids to kill a bunch of brown people because it's Thursday".

As MsD pointed out, national leaders--not ours, not anyone's--spends blood and treasure to fight a war because they are in the mood. They do it because they *want* something.