RSS
I don’t know if anyone pays attention to the ads that play during football games, but the latest Marine Corps effort, “Toward the Sounds of Chaos,” is truly priceless. It is made to look like a video game, showing armored amphibious assault vehicles roaring up a beachhead surrounded by running riflemen in full battle gear with helicopter gunships and air support above. As the ad approaches its end, one can see the shipping crates on the backs of the armored vehicles with “AID” stenciled in large letters. The ad concludes with “Which way would you run?” Obviously real Marines like to run toward chaos, or, in this case, toward the nearest United Nations aid distribution center.
How nice and heartwarming it is to see a heavily armed Marine battalion delivering what is presumably food and medical supplies to beleaguered folks in some benighted area East of Suez. There is also a Navy ad making the rounds in which the announcer intones at the end “The United States Navy: A force for peace.” All those planes lined up on the carrier deck must be there just to demonstrate that it would be naughty to reject the peace terms promoted by Washington. I have to suspect that this is all part of some nefarious attempt to show the kinder, gentler side of our military while also promoting humanitarian interventionism as an appropriate role for America’s armed forces. But I imagine that the U.S. taxpayer is not really interested in footing the large bill to train and equip Marines and sailors just to deliver relief supplies – they are supposed to be for the defense of the realm. And who wants to be a Marine if it means having to be nice to foreigners?
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
The Navy line is actually ” a global force for good”, but that makes it no less unsettling.
Revolting development.
I want a strong military, especially a strong Navy. But it’s not a global welfare agency for Pete’s sake. If they happen to be in a place where they can perform some benevolent act, great. But we are turning the military into something it should not be.
Sour grapes. Off course recruiting advertising is silly, like most advertising. We can have a legitimate debate about humanitarian wars, but the fact is that relief work is a large part of what the military does these days, and it’s not evident to me this is always a bad thing. Look at the Navy’s role as an angel of mercy in the Indian Ocean after the 2004 tsunami. Undertakings like that do wonders for the reservoir of goodwill toward the United States, an achivement I would argue is far from irrelevant to our security.
It makes it hard for the interventionists to deny that they want the US military to “police the world” when the military itself is blowing their cover. I commented on this when I first heard the Navy comercial.
http://conservativetimes.org/?p=9776
Patrick, I wish that people were as grateful as they should be, but alas we continue to be astonished by their ingratitude. The reservoir of goodwill is quite leaky, and we shouldn’t keep throwing money into it in wasted efforts.
The “realm” is nearly 25,000 miles in circumference. On most days TAC seems greatly uncomfortable with the fact, but on no days does it offer serious consideration of what withdrawal from global commitments would entail concretely.
CK MacLeod wrote:
“The ‘realm’ is nearly 25,000 miles in circumference. On most days TAC seems greatly uncomfortable with the fact, but on no days does it offer serious consideration of what withdrawal from global commitments would entail concretely.”
But, with all due respect, I think this is precisely backwards, CK.
I mean … it’s when you *don’t* make commitments that your freedom of action is preserved, and instead it’s when you *are* considering making a commitment that it’s the time to ask all of what that “entails,” right?
Or, to put it another way, when you don’t make a commitment this tends to entail *nothing* necessarily, because by definition you’ve merely kept all your options open. In general—and I would argue here geopolitically specifically—it’s when you *foreclose* some of your options by making commitments that you better make damn sure what you are obliging yourself both to do—and *not* to do.
There is a story that at the time of the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, Soviet paratroopers, having been thoroughly indoctrinated in the marxist theory of the party as the agent of the workers, attacked the Hungarian secret police headquarters. That is, they sided with the workers. Needless to say that they were quickly set straight by there political officers.
Perhaps something like this lays in wait for us. I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which our troops are sent to perform their internationalist duty, only to go native on first contact. Imagine Hilary’s puffing red face!
“I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which our troops are sent to perform their internationalist duty, only to go native on first contact. Imagine Hilary’s puffing red face!”
Maybe that’s why we didn’t use ground troops in Serbia?
“The “realm” is nearly 25,000 miles in circumference. On most days TAC seems greatly uncomfortable with the fact, but on no days does it offer serious consideration of what withdrawal from global commitments would entail concretely.”
I suppose a country that can’t control its on boders may as well claim that the whole world is its realm.