Editor’s Note: Arrias this morning addresses one of the primary reasons things don’t seem to be working well in our Republic these days. There was a string that followed about the distance between those that enjoy the sea of cash that is flowing from Government printing presses to a variety of startling things beyond the simple cash payments to citizens whose lives for been altered- or terminated- by the year of COVID management. Beyond the immediate public health crisis, we have spent twice the old monolith of the annual budget- all of it- in the interest of many things that would not have survived the old legislative process. Public sector pensions, for example, were problems before the pandemic, but have been elevated to emergency status because… Well, because there is an emergency. Arrias puts his classical training and analysis to the task. There will be consequences to all the emergencies, of course. And one of those consequences is that there will be more emergencies with more consequences.
– Vic
Cato, Sulla and Government Reform
An elder statesman keeps insisting the leadership of the country “must not lose touch with soil.” By soil he means not simply agriculture, but the common people, those who actually provide the wealth of the country, those who work for a living. They are the nation, and those in power, who collect in the capital and the other great cities of the nation, must not lose sight of the simple fact that the real wealth of the nation is the people’s energy and interests, that real work is what is important, not the machinations of the elites in their meetings in the center.
But, his message angers some, frustrates others, and many of the people of whom he speaks, the farmers (and workers and others, people who live far from the capital or the few huge cities of the elites) feel they’ve been disenfranchised. Eventually, there’s a revolution of sorts, many fundamental laws are re-written, and the old ways are buried in the new – though cleverly covered up, “dressed” to look as if nothing has changed.
One could almost imagine this being said of the United States in the last 30, 40, or 50 years, as the elites in Washington, New York and Hollywood and the major cities, shipped manufacturing off shore, scoffed at “the fly-over” states, and ridiculed those who work with their hands. And they’ve slowly changed laws so that more and more of those same workers they claim to care about, but of whom they have no personal knowledge and perhaps no personal regard, move ever further away on the economic ladder.
What will happen?
The figure crying out was Cato the Elder, who lived in the 2nd century BC. His message went unheeded. By 82 BC Rome had already been through several small – but destructive – civil wars, and this was followed by a third and then the rise of Lucius Sulla, who rewrote the Roman constitution and effectively ended the Roman Republic. What followed was decades of strife, several open rebellions, and the rise of dictators, though Octavius Augustus’s official title was simply “Princeps,” Principle – the first citizen.
Could this happen here? Rome is again instructive. Most political power in Rome was held by a small number of families, all of whom had clients – loyal followers among the citizens of Rome. Some were tribes, others particular work-forces, other’s citizens of this or that region. But there was a constant stream of pay-offs to these clients.
How different is that from the relatively small number of people who hold great political power in the United States, who never seem to leave office, or if they do, hover around Washington waiting for the chance to return to power? Or the great wealth, much of it derived from a symbiotic (parasitic) relationship with the federal government, that is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people who work hand in glove with those in power to maintain the status quo, while working assiduously to undermine the rise of any other concentrations of power, such as a populist political movement?
Rome, of course, was vastly different from the United States. One of the glaring differences is that the Roman Emperors kept power for centuries because they controlled not only the principal client groups in Rome and throughout large sections of the Empire, but they also controlled the army, and the army was professional and loyal.
In the US the military has always been outside of politics.
Which leads to an interesting question: Are the current reforms taking place in the US armed services going to increase, decrease or leave unchanged the services?
That question actually has several key elements; one is whether these reforms will, in fact, reduce overall effectiveness? A second is whether these reforms will appear to reduce overall effectiveness?
The first is an issue for US leadership in deciding where and when and how to use US combat forces. They may be committed to the reforms irrespective of their impact on combat capabilities. That is their choice, it is in fact legal to reduce US combat capability. In so doing they are also responsible for the consequences. The second issue involves those who would seek to exploit perceived US weaknesses, that is, whether the reforms affect US combat effectiveness or not, if a potential enemy perceives that they do, then they may act in a manner that they might otherwise not have.
All this comes at a time when the US, after a 20-year long series of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Republic of the Philippines, Syria, and across much of Africa, has over-used nearly every tactical asset in each service, and more to the point used up the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines who man those assets, sending them out on deployment after deployment. While defense contractors and admirals and generals talk about “recapitalizing the DOD,” a real area of concern is to give the forces – and the actual combat forces of the US are a small bunch – a rest.
But there is no rest in sight, and the reform mentioned above may well make things worse, much worse. Because, while issues of effectiveness are in play, listening to the scuttlebutt of sailors, they see there will be more tasks, and more questioning of their loyalties; the sense is slowly growing in the ranks that the oath of office is, perhaps, being slowly twisted into a sacramentum militare, with loyalty to the regime becoming a prerequisite for promotion.
What makes this scarier still is that there are few if any figures in Washington who have spent any time in uniform, and fewer still who understand how escalation takes place and how to keep from climbing the “escalation ladder.” Rather, war game after war game has shown that the less experience one has in uniform the more rapidly do decision-makers escalate a military response. We are left wondering whether a military action by an enemy that resulted in severe losses to the US might well place an inward looking, reform-minded Washington in a situation where rapid and severe escalation would be viewed as the appropriate means of stopping a war.
In short, we are facing a period of great peril and the problem is becoming ever more complex. Is our leadership prepared to handle this?
Copyright 2021 Arrias
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