Pressing the Civvy Button

I’m not sure if it will amputate capabilities we need but that comes down to what you think we need the military for. Warning soldiers not to speak to their MPs sounds particularly disgraceful but surely ex-soldiers are going to their MPs. Unfortunately the rest of it sounds like what is happening across the public sector in the UK.

The Police see themselves as also not having a normal job but this is how the government wants to treat them. I’ve been made redundant from an FE college then kept on part-time I now hope to pick ups some teaching. Schools are having more decisions made centrally with no consultation. The NHS are fighting radical changes which no party had in the manifesto before the election. HE is facing major cuts as is local government so there will be smaller budgets with an ageing population etc.

So, seeing as how the UK government is so eager to keep their Tridents, how’s that whole “independent non-nuclear Scotland” thing going? I don’t see any hint of a plan for moving the subs if they don’t get to stay where they are…

ajay: “I just keep thinking “we used to be able to afford stuff. We used to be able to afford university tuition, and maintenance grants, and carriers, and a four-division BAOR, and pensions… where’s all the money going?” Into lower taxes, I suppose.”

Into the hands of the rich, pure and simple.

Maria, I’d say that anybody who’s not near a critical bump-up for time in service should leave now. The big thing to ascertain is if the firings are concentrated among people who are *almost* due for something; firing somebody in the year before he qualifies for a half-pension was probably not an accident.

Why did you expect the peace dividend to be anything but a dividend to shareholders?

This is a marvelous analysis of what the hiring situation is like these days, and in part, as you go deep into it (and put things in context), this is a real world working of how hysteresis plays out.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-bad-jobsor-no-jobshappen-to-good-workers/

Oh, I don’t know, it seems in recent years the professionals have had a pretty good strike rate. And I don’t see what good moving to a different country would do – they are an export-focused industry after all

Tom C #13 – and we all know how well the hiring of mercenaries worked for the Italian city states…

This is one of the key points about the privatisation of public services in the UK – The removal of control and responsibility ever further from the public. Not that there was necessarily ever a golden age of it, but I’m pretty damn sure that e.g. the police were more embedded in and accountable to local people 20 and 30 years ago than they are now and will be when privatised to hell.
For instance, the cuts being imposed on the police are unhistorically huge, and the response of the ‘managers’ seems to be to run away from teh problem by handing it over to private companies on the theory that they’ll do the dirty work for them and get rid of all this pension nonsense.
(Of course if yuo cut everyone’s pensions how is the city supposed to have anything to invest?)

Odd piece. I sympathise with the chaps whose unnecessary jobs are disappearing, and agree the process could be managed more humanely, but struggle to see how anyone in their right mind could view a smaller army and military spending cuts as a negative outcome. Less money wasted on destructive wanking over lost Empire. Hurrah!

Falklands definitely need to be defended against outrageously silly Argie claims.

I guess it turns out there’s a difference between “support the troops” and “support the war” after all.

I spent a fair amount of time around American military households in Belgium, and I’m not sure there’s any amount you could pay me for that kind of career. A career officer rarely acquires a productive trade useful outside of the military. Command experience does not translate well into business management. Technical trades are something the military outsources as often as it can. And the skills you do have – being a career soldier – are ones you’re not allowed to just hire yourself out for. If you don’t like the conditions in the American army, you can’t just send your resumé around to other militaries. And you can be fired at any time, for any reason, any time someone wants to shore up the budget.

And that’s without considering combat and the other major sources of stress in the armed forces.

Seen as a career choice, it looks like a pretty bum deal. I don’t think it’s something we’d put with from a private employer. Maybe the soldiers need a union.

Even as an American who doesn’t think we need a military capable of defeating all of the rest of the world’s armed forces combined, I’m appalled at the way we treat our troops, subjecting them to repeated deployments which we know cause permanent harm to their mental and physical health.

Whatever anger we may have against the policies of our various nations should not be directed against those who enlisted to carry them out, since they’re also victims of our governments’ conduct.

There appears to be a mismatch between our use of troops and the rest of our military might. If we spend more than every other nation combined, but force the infantry to serve tour after tour in unprecedented fashion, we are massively fucked up. We don’t know what we’re doing.

ajay, I don’t think taxes have come down much , if at all, since the Tories came in. Spending and the deficit are still rising so I would like to know where the money is going too.

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I was making a comparison not with 2009 but with 1980.

JQ: I must admit, I had thought until now that military jobs retained the kind of security that used to be associated with the public sector in general

You’re right. Military jobs still have the kind of security that is associated with the public sector in general.

It’s just that the rest of the public sector has been laying people off too.

Why does the UK need anything more than a home defense force and a coast guard?

Because
a) the UK has commitments to assist in the defence of its allies, in NATO and elsewhere, which cannot be easily abandoned: the US in particular has shown a recent tendency to take offence when its allies fail to help it defend itself against real or imagined threats; France, by contrast, has been a good deal more level-headed

b) the UK also has overseas territories which need to be defended – the Falklands of course, but also a surprising number of others

c) historically, the UK has participated in several overseas UN peacekeeping operations – Bosnia, Kosova, Sierra Leone and others – and disaster relief/civil contingency operations, which would not be possible without a deployable army, in other words something a bit more than a coast guard and home defence force

“Are you hoping for job openings next year in Damascus, Tehran, Cairo or the Falklands?”

Somalia and/or Yemen, actually, according to David Cameron a couple of weeks ago.

Daniel #17 – we don’t have much of a coastguard left either after the last decade of cuts. It’s so bad now that a volunteer force of coastal patrollers has been formed, so hopefully that will retain some of the local knowledge which can come in a bit handy you know, even nowadays with gps and more accurate charts.

another friend whose husband has done two tours back to back and is considering a third so he’ll be ineligible for forced redundancy for another year.

Have I read this correctly? If someone chooses to do a tour of combat, they are ineligible to be made redundant? I can sort of see the reasoning, but turned around it seems like a very horrible kind of blackmail.

sorry, cross-posting

“dropping someone a few months before they get their pension is just a dick move wherever you are.”

Do I read this aright? My naive view is that, if doing a job for n years entitles you a pension of x, then doing a job for y% of n years should entitle you to a pension of ~y% of x. I can appreciate that things may be More Complicated Than That, but if doing a job for 95% of n years entitles you to a pension of 0 then that is just insane.

Daniel #35- I can’t quite tell if you are taking the mickey or not. A modern army is a long way different from a Roman army in terms of expertise and specialisms, thus comparisons are a bit silly. The army doesn’t like conscription because it takes something like 2 years to get a soldier fit and capable and embedded in their role.
We do in fact need careerists for the same reason we need professors and long serving police officers and doctors and whatever – as repositories of knowledge and experience. Otherwise you go through a huge wasteful period of re-learning everything that the previous generation knew. It isn’t enough to have fancy training courses, actual personal experience counts for a lot, and the denigration of it over the last decade is another reason things are in a mess just now.

They thrived for hundreds of years wedding the principle of citizen obligation to civic defense (albeit, a stretched interpretation of civic defense); no standing army. The whole thing went to ruin when they abandoned this principle.We don’t need too many careerists in the military.

Machiavelli also argued that a citizen militia would outfight a mercenary army or a feudal levy because, VIRTU! But then Machiavelli was wrong.

Also, like hell it all went to ruin. After the Marian reforms, the newly-professionalised army of the Roman Republic conquered half of the known world and held it for four centuries. Professional soldiers defeated Spartacus and conquered Gaul and Britain, and held the limes for hundreds of years.

If you’re wondering what happened the last time Britain tried to go to war with a massive army of newly levied citizen soldiers, here is your answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_day_on_the_Somme

The tiny long-service professional army of 1914, the army that formed the British Expeditionary Force, was the most effective army in the war, man for man. It shot the German infantry flat at the Marne. When it came up against a German citizen army – the reservists of the Fourth Army – the German losses were so heavy that the battle was remembered as the Kindermord bei Ypern. That’s your inexperienced citizenry in arms there, all those little field-grey specks lying all over Flanders with .303 calibre holes in them.

Since then, Britain has fought by choice with a professional army, and when it had no option – as for most of the Second World War – it has taken care to train them extensively before putting them in the field.

So Daniel is the new resident clown? Who invited him in or did he choose the job himself?

Also the americans in north africa did have to learn, and they learnt the hard way as usual, although by the time of D-day they did know what they were doing.

Bearing in mind though that shedloads of the people from WW1 were still around in WW2, and I’m damn sure that counted for a lot in terms of expectations, organisation and experience in all parts of the armed forces and those back home. E.g. the civil service plans for evacuating, feeding and calling up people, all drew upon experience of WW1.

And the Marshall kicked the crap out of the leadership of the US Army long before the US got into the war. IIRC, he sacked one-third of the generals between Sep 39 and Dec 41. The US drafted a bunch of people, starting in 40(?).

As ajay said, it’s nice to have the luxury of taking the first couple of years of the war off.

@ mollymooly 36, I think it’stopping people drawing their pensions after x years of service. They will still be entitled to get a pension but will have to wait longer for it.

>>As ajay said, it’s nice to have the luxury of taking the first couple of years of the war off.

Well……, other than providing fodder for Goering’s amusement, what exactly did the English military accomplish in the first 2-3 years of the war other than get chased out of France?

Well certainly in the US experience, having a giant continuous military post WWII has really led to a string of smashing military successes.

ajay:

If you’re wondering what happened the last time Britain tried to go to war with a massive army of newly levied citizen soldiers, here is your answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_day_on_the_Somme

Not to continue the derailment, but I don’t think this should be let stand. My understanding is that the first day of the Somme was a catastrophe primarily b.c the artillery bombardment preceding the assault failed to do much damage to the German positions and entrenched machine guns. Also wire that was supposed to be cut sometimes was not. Also the creeping barrage got way in front of the advancing soldiers. In other words, technical and technological problems produced a mass-scale slaughter. I suppose an army made up solely of experienced professional soldiers might have suffered somewhat lower casualties, but the first day of the Somme probably would have been a disaster regardless of the army’s composition. (btw I have not read the Wikipedia entry, so I don’t know what its view is.)

57: oh, failure has many fathers, but a big feature of the New Army in 1915-16 was that they were sent to the front very quickly, and did frontal wave assaults because they hadn’t had the time to learn the fire-and-movement tactics that would have saved a lot of lives. July 1 1916 probably not the best example of this. Sorry.

But sticking to the topic: I am not sure how strong an alumnus network someone leaving the British military will have, outside certain specialised areas. We’re not a very militarised society so there are not many other ex-servicemen in positions of power – much less so than in the US.

@ajay
I think you’re right. I meet some good people at networking events who get some money from the MoD to help build networks with employers to give ex-servicemen a chance. So there isn’t a strong network, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be paying to construct one.

The big trouble is, of course: with the economy the state it is in, so few companies are hiring, it’s hard for anyone to get a job, let alone a serviceman with good but possibly tangential skills…

In the US, if you leave the service with enough rank, defense contractors are line up to hire you. If you are of a lower rank, there si always private armies and driving truck for Haliburton.

Stephen @65
“I suspect that a competent regular army [i.e., a professional army] has its points.”

Sure. That’s one of the reasons for example, as might have been mentioned upthread, the ‘all-volunteer force’ has been popular with the US’s top military officers, none of whom would support a return to conscription, afaik. I think there are arguments that can be made against the all-volunteer force, but those arguments have mostly to do with civic and societal considerations rather than strictly military ones. Probably the same is true in UK.

Thank you for this, Maria. Powerful and true.

And “the pension is no longer received because the person did not earn it, falling a couple of months short” is exactly what my father experienced just a few years ago, after about three decades of highly regarded public service. It’s I don’t know, soulcrushing in a way that’s hard to comprehend at any distance or level of abstraction. You’ve probably expressed it better than I can hope to. It feels like someone is stealing your life’s work from you, like it’s taking away all the accomplishment and high regard you’ve accumulated in your years of service. As if all that was just a cruel joke, spanning years, at your expense.

I had always envisioned the phrase “they pulled the rug out from under me” as a vaudeville prank, the kind of cheeky/silly pratfall that makes for decent physical comedy, with everybody smiling and pulling faces. Then my dad (who’s not particularly innovative) used it to describe having his retirement benefits cheated out of reach. He’s pretty literal-minded, and never cared much for the kind of comedy he saw as people goofing off. So the phrase was different, sincere. It’s not just the physical pain of landing roughly, it’s the humiliation of having been shown for a fool all those years. You thought they were going to honor your service. You thought you were secure. You thought you had solid and sensible plans for the end of your life, or for the next stage of your life. You were. And are. A god damned fool.

It’s such a breach of trust. There’s really no coming back from it. If it was committed by one particular person

And you captured really well the greater intensity of these feelings for someone in military public service. Not only the danger involved in the work. At least the rest of the public sector doesn’t have to hear every politician openly declare their appreciative commitment to ‘the troops’ while failing to support them. Shrink the military, by all means, but do so in a way that painstakingly supports the productive and meaningful employment of those leaving the military service, please. At the very least don’t pretend to be doing so while not even making an attempt. (Hearing your work vilified by every campaign ad on TV is of course pretty damn harmful in a different way, but at least the villains decrying “government bureaucrats” aren’t baldly lying about their commitments. It’s more of a tragedy, less of a farce, and of the two tragedies are easier to live through, because you can retain some trust that your younger self made good choices, that you didn’t deserve or earn this outcome through unjustifiable ignorance or insufficient character. If one must be nullified and deemed redundant, better that it be with the grace of open malice than with the fatuity of false pretenses. Better that their antagonism against you be plain and widely seen; at least then there’s the structural reassurance that your allies failed you. It’s much more wounding to discover you didn’t actually have allies all along, that you were foolish to believe in any of the promises or assurances you received.)

It’s worse to have been tricked all along than to be ambushed in the fifth act. I can see that in how my dad expresses his anger very personally directed against Jim Doyle, who was the newcomer governor when the severe cuts began. If he can be justifiably bitter and resentful of the change that nullified him and the people that presided over that change, that’s some cold comfort at least. Some sliver of trust, faith or simply a quid pro quo, like you said. To hear every politician solemnly declare admiration and support for his work would have been more than he could bear.

…That’s maybe the best I can do to contribute to the description. Too abstract and too affected or melodramatic or something. It’s been painful to watch my father’s tragedy unfold even from a distance, these days mostly inferred from the change in adjectives my mom uses in her letters. (My father barely even talks any more. What’s the point, once words don’t mean anything?) I can only imagine it’s ten times worse to experience it more directly, and, ten times worse to see campaigning politicians blatantly keep up the same farce they’ve been deceiving you with and basically getting away with it.

[…to be completely OT for just a second, seeing Maria’s post and Belle’s comment above and Niamh’s recent post was good/reassuring/nice/whatever positive noun obtains, but uh.. does anyone know, is Tedra still around? ‘s been three months…]

My God you Brits really do love your military! Well more power to you I guess, but it really shouldn’t be so controversial that the rest of the world isn’t so impressed.
Stephen’s 55 was very nicely put, and would be all the more impressive if he didn’t spend his spare time trolling about Charles Trevelyan(out of all people) and was willing to pay ‘kudos’ to that great mass of people who died in the East.

Anyway, back to 2012, and also hoping that will be the last deraily thing said, I’m glad topics like reneged on pensions and unemployment are being spoken about by posters on CT. My genuine sympathies to those in the British military suffering, even if the whole institution should have been dismantled in 1945.

@67, LFC

Well your quote from Keegan illustrates well two major reasons for the abandonment of fire-and-movement that had nothing to do with training:

At the battle of Loos the preoccupation of the General Staff had been to ‘keep the troops in hand,’ with the result that the reserves had been kept too far behind the lines and, when sent forward too late, deployed in dense masses. The preoccupation before the Somme was with the danger of the troops taking cover and not restarting the advance once they had lain down.

“Keep the troops in hand” meant under control, with the implication that they weren’t to be trusted. The “danger of troops taking cover” followed from the same fear. This was quite a turn around from the same people who only a few years earlier had trumpeted the primacy of the offense and the moral superiority of the righteous European soldier under arms.

Command and control in 1915 was not as bad as in 1815 — it was immeasurably worse. Once the troops left the trenches, they had no communications equipment whatsoever. But unlike his forbears at Waterloo, when fighting was carried out in densely packed linear formations, the WWI soldier was forced to disperse or suffer rapid and total annihilation by heavy artillery.

The upshot was that officers between company and corps level had essentially no ability to manoeuvre, or for that matter even to find out what was happening. This did not discourage their psychological need to exercise total control over what went on.

This communications problem had been apparent for decades, as had been the other implications of an abundance of heavy high-explosive shells and machine guns. In fact there was little new about the battlefields of the Somme apart from their industrial basis; a 16th Century sapper would have understood at a glance exactly what was going on and why.

The slaughter on the Western front resulted not from a failure of foresight but from a refusal to accept things people like Ivan Bloch had pointed out and people like the Boers had illustrated in a practical way. This wasn’t accidental. The generals’ careers, and in fact their entire worldview, hinged on their incomprehension of these things.

rf@72
Honestly my last contribution: thread not entirely derailed if it is thought to cover nature of imperial oppression, etc.

I’m a little puzzled by rf’s reference to my supposed unwillingness to “to pay ‘kudos’ to that great mass of people who died in the East”. Long ago when I studied Greek, kudos meant glory which cannot be paid (or bought). If you mean you think I am unwilling to acknowledge the heroic Soviet contribution to the defeat of Germany in BM II, I can only ask from where you get your apparent belief in your powers of telepathy? As far as I know I have never written anything on CT about that. Possibly you believe that, if I mention some British and Commonwealth successes in the first three years of the war in response to an idiot, I must deliberately ignore the Soviets. If so, please learn a little logic.

For the record: in my opinion, the Soviet contribution to BMII consisted of:
1) Assisting the Germans in their conquest of Poland, invading and oppressing Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and (as far as they could) Finland.
2) Supplying the Germans with as many strategic materials as they asked for: most of the bombs dropped on British cities in the blitz came from planes running on Soviet fuel.
3) Extremely valiant and astonishingly incompetent attempts to hold back the German invasion of the Soviet Union, up to the point of nearly losing Moscow, with enormous casualties.
4) Extremely valiant and decreasingly incompetent efforts, still with enormous casualties, to expel the Germans from the regions they had conquered.
5) Extremely valiant conquest of Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany and Austria, etc., still with enormous casualties, and subsequent oppression
of people there.

As for trolling re Charles Trevelyan: all I have said is that, when responsible for preventing starvation in the early part of the 1840s famine in Ireland, under Peel’s administration, he did a very efficient and successful job. That is well known in Ireland, if not in Boston. It was not his fault that the subsequent Russell administration – put in place, by the way, by the Irish Catholic MPs who contributed to Peel’s downfall – at first relied on inadequate market forces.

@Stephen

I’ll need to bear in mind that any time I post a message on the internet it might end up next to one of yours.

In your account, Daniel O’Connell’s “Irish Catholic MPs” (such as Pierce Butler, Henry White, Baron Annaly, Sir Valentine Blake or Henry Grattan, etc.?) conspire to destroy the country. How could they have overlooked the charms of the “Irish Coercion Act”? Just as well that candidates representing the will of around 75-80% of the population came away with barely a fifth of the seats.

As for the Soviets, their “astonishingly incompetent attempts to hold back” almost 200 enemy divisions “up to the point of nearly losing Moscow, with enormous casualties” are as nothing compared with “the repulse of invasions of Kenya and the Sudan, [and invasion of] Abyssinia… Eritrea, Somaliland”. Your list of British achievements is longer, presented with monotonic postivity and therefore better. No need to mention Dunkirk or Greece — those dead should have known not to throw their lives away in battles that weren’t also “achievements”.

The Soviets certainly had a thing or two to learn about oppression. After all, why oppress yourself when you can hire others to oppress for you? And with Iraq you cite a felicitous example as demonstrated by its subsequent tranquility.

You express adulation or contempt: one selection of facts, or another. Hence, just as Trevelyan is a cartoon villain to your opponents, for you he is a saint. In aggregate, your posts are a reminder that anti-nationalism in Ireland is often and sadly not anti-nationalism at all, just another form of nationalism.

If you demonstrate that you have no sense of judgement by joining the military, why do you expect to be treated like normal people?

I believe the redundant soldiers are meant to join the shrinking ranks of teachers, imposing army style discipline on asbo-inclined youth. I seem to remember a discussion here a couple of years ago exploring the possibility of former troops plonked I front of year 9 on amonday morning with a minimum of teacher training.

Daniel @79
I agree, keeping the Mediterranean open was important, and Mers-el-Kebir (and the disarming of the French fleet at Alexandria) an important part of it. But I think British achievements in the first three years of war, which was the point that you originally raised, were rather more than that.

Suppose that the various achievements I mentioned had all been failures. We would then, in September 1942, have Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran in hostile hands – I repeat, German units in reality got as far as Mosul – and Axis forces occupying Malta, Egypt, Sudan, east Africa and Madagascar (which the French were offering to Germany and Japan as a submarine base), no hope for British forces in Cyprus and Palestine, and a precarious situation in Aden and Kuwait. I think that the strategic situation of the Allies would then have been rather worse than not having full control of the Mediterranean. Not to mention the consequences of the survival of German, Italian and French surface units. You may of course disagree.

And as for your original comment that the British were only “providing fodder for Goering’s amusement”: if that had been an even vaguely approximate reflection of the events of summer 1940, the strategic situation would have been very different indeed. But if you are daft enough to believe what you wrote at first, I’m not surprised that you also believe that (a) I have denied the accomplishments of the Soviet armies (b) the ground war in the west was largely the work of the US. Very considerably, yes, but see Ajay@45

Adrian Kelleher @78
I have no objection at all to our posts appearing together, and I can’t see why you do.
This thread is going seriously adrift, and I will say no more about wars other than to make the obvious point that appreciation of one nation’s contribution is not denigration of all others; and the slightly less obvious one that the lamentable disasters after the recent invasion of Iraq, led by a fool and a liar, are entirely irrelevant to the very useful effects of the British invasion of Iraq that kept the Germans out in 1941.

An equally obvious point is that if I say Trevelyan was not the devil his opponents claimed, that does not mean I think he was a saint: merely a hardworking, conscientious civil servant who until the fall of the Peel ministry, and after the Russell ministry changed their policies, prevented millions of Irish from starving. These good deeds have not, of course, gone unpunished.

Oh please, just one more off topic comment – using one operation which went awry to denigrate the entire effort by the allies in the west compared to the allegedly wonderful and effective USSR armies through the entire period is a bit silly.
Also of course a quarter of a million of axis soldiers were caught in the north of Africa when it finally fell, comparable to Stalingrad.
And finally, how exactly was Britain supposed to do it? The USSR had the manpower and resources immediately to hand, britain did not. The USSR totally didn’t notice the invasion until too late, despite suggestions from the UK. It’s all very well pointing out the work done by the soldiers etc. in the east, but to use that as a means of doing down people who simply didn’t have the same facilities available is childishly mean, to say the least.

Trident? I’d rather replace 50% of the military, including especially Trident, with a non-trivial number of Astutes and a residual air defence capacity. However, this desire is not a reason to treat service personnel badly.

Rf #89 – you seem to be supposing that it is acceptable and desirable to say to a possible hostile country “You do anything to us and we’ll nuke you”. Never mind that would lead to megadeaths of civilians, nuclear pollution etc.
I’m as much against pointless international engagements as the next person, but I can’t see how threatening to kill everyone is a really good defence mechanism.

That seems a bit extreme.
What does happen when you give everyone guns to allow them to defend themselves? The incidence of death by shooting goes up. So what happens if everyone has nukes and massacring civilians is okay? More nuclear war.

Basically, I think the proposal is nonsensical.

Even as a lurker, I’m very disappointed to have these military threads on CT, especially in these times when joining the military and working to build a career in it are conscious choices people make, with full knowledge of what these choices mean. Even worse, in this case, those concerned aren’t naive youngsters enticed by the glamour of guns and travel around the world.

It is worse when those choices are made in a time like this when the resources used to sustain the UK armed forces would be much better spent elsewhere, and when we are undeniably aware of the folly of the military adventurism and interventionism that British troops are engaged in. Assuming he’s adamant that custs be made, where would Gideon make them if he didn’t make them here? Would CT be happier about that choice?

Also, and writing from East Africa, British troops aren’t exactly loved here. There’s the colonial atrocities which have been covered on the internet before, but there’s also the costs to communities where unexploded munitions have cost lives and resulted in disability. And we don’t even want to start talking about the rapes and the abandoned mixed race children of central Kenya.

Orwell (who disposes peremptorily with the Irish variety also) on the psychological advantages of transferred nationalism:

“The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

“But for an intellectual, transference has an important function… It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge… In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.”

Attn: Stephen, Myers, Dudley-Edwards et al

guthrie: what I was exposing was neither new nor controversial: it’s simply the basic principle of MAD doctrine, which has been thoroughly tested and found working. Since they were invented, with the exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have been used exclusively as defensive tools.

Mind you, ceteris paribus, I would also discard the nukes; but here the choice is NOT ceteris paribus: between the status quo and keeping the nukes while downsizing the army, the second choice is far better. For this reason, I applaud Obama’s attempt to curb nuclear weapons, since the US has no intention of decreasing its army, while I also fully approve Cameron’s choice in this issue.

Putting money in the army is worse than simply wasting it, since not only Britain gets (almost) no benefit out of it, but also gets quite a few pointless wars.

And what basil said @96.

True enough on my abysmal spelling. The point still stands however

I just remembered that during the cold war the USSR and USA, not to mention France and the UK and Germany all ran down their military establishments so that the biggest outlay was for the nuclear missiles, thus proving Manta’s idea works.

guthrie: USA and USRR were maintaining some empires (or should I say “empires”, given the discussion in the other CT thread?), so they needed conventional weapons.

I am saying that UK is not maintaining an empire, so it does need an army. I would say that the history of British and French military involvements in the last 60 years fully prove my point: if they did scrap their armies, they would have had the same benefits (no invasions) without the costs (maintaining the army + military interventions): could you please explain where do you disagree? Do you either think that
a) if Britain scrapped its army, URSS would have invaded it, in the face of nuclear deterrence?
or
b) Britain got some substantial benefits from its army, outweighing both the incurred costs? But then please do specify what were those benefits.
Having pilots able to land on a battleship, to quote Maria’a example, is not a benefit: at most it is a mean to an end, but I don’t see what the end is.

More importantly, you (and Maria!) should explain, if Britain scrapped its army now, what would be the disadvantages: because in my book “Not being able to send troops to Iraq” and “not being able to bomb Libya” count as pluses, not as a disadvantages.

Moreover, I read that huge military costs contributed to USSR downfall, so for it even the benefits of an empire did not count for much.

guthrie, “Oh yes, regarding the last 60 years, you need to prove that not having an army at all would have resulted in no invasion (of Britain, I suppose, since we are discussing British army): what aspect of “nuclear deterrence” is unclear to you? The part where a soviet army lands somewhere in Britain and nuclear war ensues?

Let’s consider a more realistic example, instead of Austria: West Germany.
As far as I understood how things worked, the scenario was the following: Soviet troops invade West Germany, USA retaliates, nuclear war ensues, everybody dies.
Notice that in this scenario whether West Germany and/or Britain has an army or not is irrelevant: the only important thing is whether USA was believed when it said that it would retaliate, with nuclear weapons if necessary.

More to the point: in 2007, long after the end of cold war, GB spends 2.4% if its GDP on military stuff; see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm
Japan, to take an extreme example, 0,8%, Spain, 1,2%, Germany, 1,5%, Italy, 1,7%, and Poland, who has much more to fear than UK, 1,7%: where is the benefit of all this extra money?