Reflecting on the NYT series on rebuilding the US military, including cost estimates. Got me wondering. What would extensive peace and civil disobedience training for national defence cost? Not interested in why campaigns like that wouldn’t work or why the best defence is a good offence, just some comparative albeit speculative numbers on the actual cost of developing national programs of peace seeking, passive resistance, and civil disobedience.
What kinds of things might such a program include? Everything from high level conflict resolution and cooperation skills to “okay, class, today we’re going to learn the hokey-pokey. ‘You take your right leg out, you take your left leg out, we all sit down and wait the bastards out.’”
What might this cost? Compared to an F-35 program, say, or annual military fuel consumption? Cf Eisenhower’s 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech:
“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
Potential threats to the country. So you could say, " well, sure, you can invade but you’re not going to get what you want." Strength through peace and peaceful resistance instead of peace through strength, as it were.
I’ve heard both of these arguments for more than 50 years and have of course read the short story. Thus my request that we simply run some numbers here. What might active national peace/civil disobedience programs cost?
If we want to use fiction for insight, let’s also read Eric Frank Russell’s “And Then There Were None.”
As for “profit?” the current arrangements seem to cover that amply.
What is an “active national peace/civil disobedience program”?
You mentioned classes where an old hippie shows everyone how to link arms and sit down. Who is taking these classes? Are we adding them to high school PE and disbanding the military? Are we drafting everyone into the “National Civil Disobedience Corps” and having them drill these tasks for hours a day? Etc.
Also, if the order goes out for everyone to ride up and disobey, what if some people disobey the order to disobey?
I thought this was about civil disobedience, but killing all our enemies one by one in a thematically ironic way befitting their crimes sounds like a much better plan! Oh, wait, that’s Agatha Christie.
Without “running the numbers”, it seems obvious that the amount of money required to supply up to, say, ten hours of civil disobedience training to any interested person would be a tiny fraction of the national defense budget. It still seems questionably useful for national defense, since the scenario where the US is actually occupied by foreign invaders seems incredibly unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. For countries in other geographical situations, it might be more useful.
I would strongly support my State or city government putting programs to provide such training in place, however. It’s not foreign invaders I’m worried about.
There are times when it’s necessary and proper for a nation to employ violence and deadly force to achieve its policy goals, just like there are times when it’s necessary and proper for law enforcement to do the same.
And with that in mind, it’s a very prudent thing to be prepared and able to do so if necessary.
It’s hard to say, but the cost can get very high once tactics like infrastructure destruction come into play. For example I recall reading how the Iraqis got the US to give up on stealing their oil in part because they destroyed the (near impossible to defend) pipelines faster than they could be fixed. It worked, but that was still a lot of hardware somebody had to pay to replace afterwards.
A sabotage campaign in the US could easily cost billions. Especially considering the shoddy state of our infrastructure in the first place.
Well, in the case of the US we likely don’t, since we’re big and rich enough that resisting force with force is almost certainly going to be the better choice. A smaller, less powerful country on the other hand is much more likely to be attacked by another nation so much more powerful that military resistance just wouldn’t work.
You’re asking, “how much would it cost to set up a national civil disobedience force to protect us from invasion”. You have not defined what kind of force you want, how many people it would have, or what kind of training it would have. If you had provided that info, we could simply do some basic math to see how much it would cost to emply the number of people required. But since you didn’t provide that info, we need to puzzle it out on our own.
If you tell me that you want an organization to accomplish a task, but don’t describe the organization to me, and I want to come up with an idea of what that group would be like, there’s only one way for me to do that: think about the kind of properties this group would need to have in order to accompish the stated task.
For example, if you said “I want to replace the US Coast Guard with a force of men on ride-aboard lawnmowers with which we can mow the Great Plains down”, you don’t have to explicitly tell us how many men this force will have and what model lawnmowers they’ll use; we can have a discussion about those things, how much land a man can mow in one day, how quickly grass grows on the Great Plains, how to distribute gasoline to the lawnmowers, etc. - and that’s probably the direction a thread like that would take. Maybe there’d be a sidebar pointing out that in addition to your Lawnmower Cavalry you’re going to need some Weedwhacker Infantry to mow around rocks and trees, and a spinoff discussion of how rough the terrain in the Great Plains is to assess how much of the force should be mounted.
But it’s clear how an army of lawnmower men might mow the Great Plains, even if it’s a ridiculous task; it’s not clear how your suggestion of a civil disobedience force is meant to work. Before we can come up with a force sufficient to protect the US through civil disobedience, we have to understand what that means, and so, we are asking questions to try and understand what you imagine this force would actually be like.
Once we know what you actually want, we can talk about cost.
The policy is to screw everyone else. The goal is to achieve that.
I don’t know what they are going to do with all the money that they steal, When there is nothing left to buy, they are going to be just as jacked as the rest of us.They really haven’t thought this out.
I meant “policy” in the generic sense of a nation’s foreign policy aims.
The point is that nations have militaries as an option to forcibly achieve their foreign policy goals, whether those are to keep others from conquering them, keep pirates from disrupting trade, or even wars of aggression. Whatever the foreign policy goal is, using the military is an option, although not necessarily the best, and rarely should it be the first.
In response to the OP: How is this going to work? Say a foreign invader like the Nazis comes in and sees that the local population has no military but is just doing peaceful resistance. What stops the Nazis from just physically carting up all the resistant folks and putting them into the Zyklon-B gas chambers? Like, literally nothing.
That’s the thing; like all one-size-fits all mono-strategies for dealing with problems, there are situations that peaceful resistance just can’t deal with. In real life you want more than one tool in your toolbox.
Because yes; peaceful resistance is predicated on the assumption that your opponent doesn’t consider “just kill them” an acceptable or even desirable tactic. If they do then “peaceful resistance” isn’t resistance at all. Standing in front of the tank doesn’t help if they just shrug and run you over.