(06-22-2020, 05:20 PM)TnT Wrote:(06-19-2020, 11:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Sarkar suggested that most of the West was approaching the end of the Age of Acquisitors as economic inequality intensifies, culture becomes depraved, the system turns out horrible leaders who fit the worst deeds of rapacious plutocrats (what could better fit that than Donald Trump?), "society" unravels in economic and social atomization, and everyone seems to run away from any sense of responsibility. People look for easy money...but few people are creating wealth unless they are under abject fear of rapacious plutocrats and their agents. Rationality recedes into the background as many believe that they can choose their own reality.
Chaos erupts... and the only people who still have any knack for organization, the enforcers of the Acquisitive Age, the soldiers and police, are in the best position in which to establish any semblance of political or administrative structure. Society begins to resemble a barracks in which people have less freedom but far more security. Consider of course that hunger is not freedom, an open window upon opulent splendor that most people can only find offensive is not a scene of beauty. This is not to say that we are in for a series of coups or revolutions; it is possible that the post-Crisis era is one in which leaders find ways in which to keep people from needing a revolt just to gain or recover some sense of dignity.
The Age of the Soldier is one with simple rules and much more conformity -- but also a time of less economic disparity. Even if leaders are elected democratically they will fit the pattern. Incomes will show a reversal of the trend of intensifying inequality. Regional and ethnic differences in result will become less blatant.
Something that interests me ... in the U.S. most of the higher ranks in the military get sent to the "War Colleges" where they receive what can only be said to be an extensive "liberal education." They study a lot of subjects besides military science. The result of this is that many come out as legitimate thinkers who can analyze, dissect and make sense of complex circumstances facing our society. I once subscribed to Parameters, the research journal of the war college at Fort Leavenworth. A very interesting publication. The papers could be coming out of any state university.
The foot soldiers, on the other hand, it is said that they are the Donald Trump fans. One wonders what might happen if a military coup became the only option for civil order in the U.S. How would that play out? Who would shoot at whom? Do they line up the nanny-state bureaucrats, the "liberal" college professors, and the registered Democratic Party members and shoot them?
Or do the well-educated officers bring order to the country by some more civilized means? And can they count on their troops?
The lower-ranking officers typically have their focus on such matters as logistics, scheduling, communications, and military technology... and what in civilian life would best be described as 'supervisory skills'. In the military those must be applied rigidly to avoid local disasters. The senior officers may be involved in things that junior officers do not do, such as diplomacy. As I put it, any child can make a sweeping movement across a map, nut it is the senior officers who effect such a sweeping movement across a map. The senior officers typically set occupation policy, which may include drafting an arrest list in the event that enemy figures have done something particularly nasty such as genocide, slavery, pillage, or mistreatment of POWs.
Junior officers may win the battles (a narrow focus), but the senior officers need to win the peace (a broad focus). They may have economic decisions to make, such as how to get the local food supply working again (as in send the POWs to the rice paddies in Japan to ensure that there be a crop of rice in 1945 that prevents mass starvation of the Japanese) or what changes will need to be made in the educational system. Oh, the personality cult of the former Great Leader must be shattered?, Senior officers may need to re-organize a judicial system, which may include purging corrupt judges and prosecutors who have innocent blood on their hands. Field engineers may have the responsibility to improvise bridges for fording rivers, but there might be a need for industrial engineers to get the steel works that your air force recently bombed into smithereens back in operation -- and that is not for the field engineers. Senior officers are more likely to need to rely upon civilian authorities who do not do things the military way.That includes elected officials in one's own country.
OK... so you are Omar Bradley and you have huge responsibility in occupied Germany. You will need Germans to do the raw labor of construction work, but you will need to find German administrators who are both competent and trustworthy. There will be plenty of poseurs and even more ex-Nazis. Whom can you trust? The rebuilt or newly-built bridge across the Rhine will be a German bridge soon enough, and it will have to fit German needs, including the local railway gauge. The military bridge built to get troops across the Rhine built cheaply and quickly under military conditions for military purposes might be built too low for allowing the usual river traffic, and it will need to be replaced once river traffic can be restored.
I would suppose that the more militaristic a society is, the less that a senior military officer must make compromises to meet the realities of civilian life. The more market-oriented the society, the less it is a command society, and the less it acts as if a military hierarchy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.