Just War and the Bomb

I recently engaged in a debate over at Edward Feser's site regarding the use of the atomic bombs in WWII. Dr. Feser's post also references this article by James Akin. In this post I would like to engage in a lengthier meditation on the use of atomic weapons to end WWII, expanding on some points I made in the comment's section on Dr. Feser's blog.

The first is to reconsider the distinction between "soldiers" and "civilians", and the "innocent" in a world of total war. Just war theory was created back when Augustine was trying to buck up the morale of Romans defending themselves against barbarians. The idea was that the Romans could justly engage in war to defend themselves, including killing barbarian invaders. But this justification didn't extend to non-combatants; say, the barbarian women and children. At that time, there was a pretty clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants. The guys with the swords were combatants, the women carrying children weren't. Moreover, the women carrying children were more a hindrance than a help to the invading barbarians. Armies back then lived off the land they invaded, and carrying along women and children only brought more mouths to feed. So the noncombatants back in those days added no combat value, and were truly innocent.

This state of affairs continued up until about the 18th century. Until then, the horizon of the average peasant was the end of his fields, and whether he would get a decent crop in that year. Wars between Kings didn't concern him overmuch, and he likely only learned the news of war only through an army (his King's or the enemy's) trampling through his fields. These wars were a matter of intermittent battles, between which things were pretty much indistinguishable from peace. The soldiers were armed with sword, pikes and arrows, none of which required a supply train or massive support from the home front. In a war like this, soldier and noncombatant have clear meanings.

Starting sometime in the 19th century - our Civil War is a good place - war began to change. It stopped being the occasional violent contest between armed minorities,  and started becoming an enduring economic contest between nations. Soldiers were now armed with rifles and cannon that required extensive supply support in terms of ammunition and repair.  A medieval army was good to go if everyone had a sword and some chain mail. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia needed everyone to carry a rifle, and also required wagons carrying millions of rounds of ammunition to be effective. It would need millions more after a few days of battle. Compared with a sword or a longbow, the Civil War rifle was an intricate piece of machinery that needed constant maintenance and was relatively easily destroyed and not so easy to replace.  Furthermore, the soldiers and their support were transported on a network of ships and railroads, requiring maintenance and even expansion. The quartermaster and the logistics officer, heretofore minor players at best in war, now became decisively important individuals.

What also changed was the introduction of the mass conscription army. Wars were no longer fought between standing classes of professional soldiers (e.g. the Roman Army - the "combatants" for Augustine), but instead between huge numbers of young men forcibly conscripted from civilian life for the purpose. The point of all these young men was to be the delivery point for all that destructive energy manufactured by the nation. Thus the Civil War battle was largely a matter of rows of young conscripts facing each other, repeatedly executing a series of mechanical motions - just like a factory worker - load, aim, shoot, load, aim, shoot, load, aim shoot - until one of the rows of young men was destroyed. Or both. It wasn't Augustine's kind of war anymore, and the distinction between "combatants" and "innocent noncombatants" was disappearing. For in what way was the factory worker innocent that the poor Georgia boy taking a minie ball in the face wasn't?

And this was something that William T. Sherman understood. His March to the Sea (see Terrible Innocence: General Sherman at War for a perceptive account of this, or Victor Davis Hanson's The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny) evidenced a brilliant understanding of what modern war was about, and also revealed a moral clarity missing from a lot of the armchair generals questioning the wisdom of Harry Truman. Rather than continue the practice of standing up rows of young men to mow each other down, Sherman marched through the South and destroyed the material foundation that kept the Confederacy in existence. His march caused a lot of suffering, yes. But the cost in human life was paltry compared to what was going on in Virginia in the attritional war between Lee and Grant.

Sherman understood that Southern civilians, especially the plantation owners, were in no way "innocent noncombatants." They were the ones who started the war, kept the war going, and insisted that the young men stay in their trenches at Petersburg and suffer. Here is Hanson quoting some of Shermans' soldiers addressing Southern women:

You in wild enthusiasm, urge young men to the battlefield where men are being killed by the thousands., while you stay at home and sing "Bonnie Blue Flag"; but you set up a howl when you see the Yankees down here getting your chickens. Many of your young men have told us that they are tired of war and would quit, but you women would shame them and drive them back.

Sherman did not restrict himself to destroying purely military targets. In total war, everything in the nation is put in the service of the war. A cornfield is just as necessary to the war effort as a cannon factory. So the cornfield was burnt.

And we come to what is missing in the analysis of James Akin and Dr. Feser. Akin writes of "dogs that didn't bark", but the real missing dog is the missing dogface - the 17 year old farmhand from Georgia, conscripted into the U.S. Army, and about to be sent into Japanese machine gun fire. This young Johnny Reb nowhere makes an appearance in the moral analysis of Akin/Feser. But it figured significantly in the mind of Harry Truman, and thank God for that.

The question facing Harry Truman was not the pristine academic one of killing or not killing the innocent. The tragedy of modern war is that the decision often boils down to which innocent lives will be taken. Will it be the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima, or the farm boys from Nebraska and Georgia who will be killed? Why is it a "more morally pure intention" to drag the kid off the farm, put a gun in his hands, and send him onto the exploding beaches of Kyushu, rather than nuke Japanese civilians? To raise this question is to answer it, which is why Johnny from Georgia is missing in action from the Akin/Feser argument. While Akin spends time making fine but pointless distinctions among Japanese targets (only those involving "war resources" are legitimate, when everything is a war resource in a modern total war), he has no time for a moral analysis of the American boys his thinking would inevitably send to their deaths.

Harry Truman was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. The unstated agreement between the C-in-C and the soldier is that young men (and now women) will put their lives in mortal danger under the President's orders; and that the President will not spend their lives unnecessarily. Truman would have violated his duty to every American serviceman if he had a way to end the war, but instead ordered his soldiers into battle in the name of a morally pure intention. Unfortunately, Truman did not have Sherman's option of destroying property rather than lives. Instead he ordered the nuking of Japanese civilians for the sake of saving his men; men who, in the modern fashion, were really just civilians temporarily in uniform. Yes, Truman ordered the deaths of innocent people; in doing so, he avoided ordering the deaths of innocent young American men. There is no way to stay clean in modern war. Just how would the armchair President's have stayed morally pure at the end of the war? This is another dog that never barks in Akin's argument.

I'm glad I served under President's Reagan and Bush Sr., and not Presidents Akin and Feser. I wouldn't want to serve under any President who would send me into machine gun fire for the sake of his moral purity.

And if this puts me out of line with the Catechism.... so be it. But I suspect Akin's interpretation of the CCC passages in question is not the only one.

Conventional Courage and the Western Way of War

Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation recalled for me Victor Davis Hanson's thesis of the "Western Way of War." In a series of books (this and this one for a start - both good), Hanson argues that the West has prosecuted wars in a peculiarly violent and effective manner throughout its history. He attributes this to cultural reasons, which are summarized in the Amazon editorial reviews.

Hanson doesn't get much into philosophy, but I wonder how much the philosophical distinction between nature and convention that I mentioned in this post has contributed to the lethality of the West. Cultures that do not possess this philosophical distinction (and it seems that they do not prior to their encounter with the West, but I am not enough of a cultural anthropologist to say this categorically) tend to have a conventional way of fighting. By this I mean a way of fighting that is not necessarily rationally ordered to the end of victory, but is a stylized way of fighting that has developed for peculiar religious or traditional reasons.

For instance, the life of the Crow warrior was centered around "counting coups", which meant performing bold exploits against the enemy. Lear writes that

If the survival of the Crow tribe as a social unit had been the primary good, one might expect that highest honor would go to the warrior who killed the first enemy in battle, or the warrior who killed the most. But to count coup it was crucial that, at least for a moment, one avoided killing the enemy. There is a certain symbolic excess in counting coups. One needed not only to destroy the enemy; it was crucial that the enemy recognize that he was about to be destroyed.

Lear analyzes the notion of counting coups and concludes that, for a nomadic hunting tribe like the Crow, the crucial point was to establish boundaries with respect to other tribes. The form that counting coups takes with the Crow makes sense from this point of view; tapping the enemy with your coup stick before killing him makes him recognize the boundary he has violated before he dies; taking his weapons from him while he is still alive demonstrates that he cannot pass this boundary as a warrior:

The establishment of boundaries will, of course, be important to any cultural group. But it is especially tricky when it comes to a nomadic group whose migration depends heavily on hunting. As the tribe migrates, its defensible boundaries will shift, but it needs to be able to exert a proprietary claim over the animals within its (shifting) domain; and it needs to be able to repulse the proprietary claims of its rivals. Counting coups is the minimal act that forces recognition from the other side. The about-to-die Sioux warrior is, after all, about to die: if all goes as planned, he will be no further threat to the Crow. Recognition of the Crow boundary is the second-to-the-last thing the Crow warrior wants from him. (The last thing is his scalp, but that will serve as a token that he achieved that recognition.) If the tribe's goal is the firm establishment of a boundary, then the act of counting coups is not excessive. It strikes the mean between the defect of wishful thinking that one has boundaries when one is unwilling or unable to defend them and the excess of slaughtering one's enemies so quickly that one does not obtain from them recognition of anything. When struck with a coup-stick, the Sioux warrior recognizes a Crow boundary because he also recognizes that he is about to die.

The problem with Lear's argument is that, since the Sioux warrior is about to die, what does it matter whether he recognizes a boundary or not? If the establishment of boundaries is the goal of counting coups, then what matters is whether the surviving Sioux recognize the boundary, not the dead Sioux. Furthermore, even if Lear were successful in establishing a rational goal for counting coups, it doesn't follow that the Crow counted coups for those rational reasons. Lear's analysis attempts to show that the conventional form of Crow courage is the form it should take according to the nature of Crow life; in other words, it is an analysis from means to end. But there is no reason to think that Crow traditions were established with this sort of rational analysis. They seem to have developed innocently and unreflectively, like most traditions within aboriginal peoples.

Counting coups is reminiscent of the Aztec way of war that Hanson discusses in Carnage and Culture. Aztec weapons were not particularly lethal; their purpose was to stun the enemy so the Aztec warrior could drag his opponent back to the pyramid to be a ritual human sacrifice. It turns out that this way of fighting was effective against other native tribes for psychological reasons. But it is unlikely that it developed as a deliberate way to psychologically demoralize the enemy. Probably the religious ritual came first, and it was later discovered that Aztec warriors capturing the enemy to be human sacrifices had a particularly devastating effect on their morale. Whatever the case, it didn't have much impact on the morale of Hernan Cortez and his men. One reason so few Conquistadors were able to conquer an Aztec empire of hundreds of thousands is that the Aztec way of war was singularly ineffective against Spanish steel. But, more significantly, the Aztec could not adapt their methods of war to the novel enemy constituted by the Spanish. Their staggering losses to Spanish swords and armor did not cause them to reconsider the practice of human sacrifice as a way of war. Courage for an Aztec warrior still meant dragging an enemy off to the pyramid. They had no rational tradition of philosophy to treat warfare abstractly as a mean to an end, or to understand courage as involving means to an end.

Although Cortez was not a philosopher, he was raised in a culture that was informed by the philosophical notions of nature vs. convention and means vs. ends. Courage in the West is not finally specified by a particular act in battle, like striking the enemy with your coup stick or stunning him so he can be a human sacrifice. It means overcoming your fears and facing lethal dangers in the service of victory - whatever form that might take in any particular situation. Cortez approached the Aztecs rationally as a military problem to be solved. (The moral analysis of the Conquistadors is another subject entirely.) He even went so far as to construct his own navy from scratch to eliminate the Aztec mobility on the lake surrounding Tenochtitlan.

It is the Western tradition of philosophically-based rationality that has made it so lethal, for it has given the West a flexibility and creativity in war not known to non-Western peoples.

Lee, McClellan and Kierkegaard

The key to understanding the American Civil War is.... Soren Kierkegaard.

The reader may be familiar with Kierkegaard's three stages of existence - the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. I will not be concerned with the religious stage of existence in this post. What will concern me is the aesthetic and ethical stages, and specifically one essential difference between them. The ethical man is the man who lives within the concept of duty; and duty is the existential expression of one who lives within history rather than (falsely) above it or outside it. To the aesthetic man, if he has a concept of duty, it is not duty as known by a truly ethical man. The duty of the truly ethical man seems vulgar and anti-intellectual to the aesthetic man. One must first understand history and its meaning before one can know one's duty within that history, or so the aesthetic man thinks. "Duty" for him means constructing a personal theory of history and then putting himself in a relation to that history. Duty for the truly ethical man involves no speculation about history; it reflects his knowledge of what he owes his neighbor, his family, his country, and his God. The aesthetic man views himself as superior to history. He does not exist within history but is history's spectator and judge. He participates in history to the extent he judges that a positive outcome may result from his participation, but he always tempers his commitment in the knowledge that his judgment is fallible and may need to be revised.

General George B. McClellan was the commander of the Union Army of the Potomac during the critical battles of 1862; he was essentially an aesthetic man. General Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during much of the same time; he was essentially an ethical man. It was Lee's character as an ethical man that was the key element in his military superiority over McClellan.

As an aesthetic man, McClellan attempted to overawe history with his own personality. McClellan had his own understanding of the historical meaning of the Civil War and he "placed" himself in it. That place was, naturally, that of "Savior of the Union." Every decision McClellan made was made with one eye on the military situation and another eye on his place in history. This was the source of his famous caution. A serious military defeat, McClellan knew, could result in his dismissal, an event McClellan considered more calamitous for the Union than any military setback. Since he was history's designated Savior of the Union, what would happen to the Union without him? Obviously, the Union could only fall if McClellan were not around to save it. When Lincoln eventually did dismiss McClellan, McClellan's greatest lament was for the poor Union that would no longer have the benefit of his historically necessary services. Lincoln was right in more ways than he knew when he called the Army of the Potomac "McClellan's Bodyguard."

Lee, on the other hand, had no interest in the grand meaning of history. His decisions were all driven by his sense of duty. Offered command of all Union forces by Lincoln, Lee carefully considered the question and eventually sided with the South on the principle that his first duty lay with his home state of Virginia before it lay with the Federal government. His military decisions were driven strictly by military concerns. His disinterest in speculative history gave him a clear sight of immediate reality, and that clear appraisal of the immediate situation gave him a decisive advantage in battle over McClellan. Lee had no concern for his personal place in history; this was the source of his remarkable daring in battle. Lee never wondered whether the South could survive without him. In fact he offered his resignation after the defeat at Gettysburg in 1863.

Now this wouldn't be a Kierkegaard post without a little irony. The irony of the aesthetic man is that his obsession with universal history causes him to have no historical significance, or at least not the historical significance he desired. McClellan did not go down in history as the savior of the Union, but as someone who came close to losing it. The irony of the ethical man is that, by leaving the historical significance of his life to God and concentrating on duty, he may end up having a deep historical significance, probably one he never could have imagined.

In Lee's case, Lee was in large measure responsible for the successful reintegration of the South into the Union in the decades after the war. After the surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia, there were voices who wished to continue an indefinite guerrilla war against the Union forces, something that was very possible. In effect, the South could not win its own nation, but could nonetheless destroy the Union. Lee, with his sense of duty, quickly dismissed any such ideas. The defeat of the South was the judgment of God, Lee thought, and it was the duty of Southerners to do their best to become good citizens of the reunited Union. Lee's military exploits had made him legendary and given him a unique authority with Southerners. Only Lee had the stature to order Southerners to end their hopes of independence and become American citizens again.

The greatest irony, of course, is that Lee, in the end and in a very real sense, became the savior of the Union that McClellan always took himself to be.