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The “Poor Game†of the Modern U.S. Way of War
March 20, 2021 by Scott Faith
This first appeared in The Havok Journal on March 23, 2014.
The modern U.S. military is preoccupied with non-military goals and is hobbled by inhibiting complications inflicted on the military from the outside, chief among them the following: risk aversion, casualty avoidance, and over-indulgence in the discredited theory of democratic peace.[1] Inhibiting the flexibility and effectiveness of the U.S. military are politically-driven conditions that foist upon the military the expectation it needs to be “good,†but not “too good†at killing the enemy, and that avoiding casualties, either U.S. or foreign, civilian, or military, is far more important than actually achieving victory. This leads to a system in which calculated risk-taking, a key component of strategic military success throughout recorded history, has been abandoned in favor of a system of calculated risk-avoidance, which paradoxically leads to longer wars and greater loss of life. Then there is the national obsession with the democratic peace theory, which holds that democracies do not fight wars against each other.
So if this is true, then the solution for world peace is simply to establish democracy everywhere. The problem with this theory is, of course, it completely overlooks human nature. Some peoples in the world aren’t ready for Western-style liberal democracy. Other peoples don’t want it. And then there is the problem that the democratic process sometimes produces results that are fundamentally at odds with America’s values. The elections giving rise to Hezbollah’s pre-eminence within the Palestinian Authority and the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are prime examples of this.
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