Deudney, David. "Security." In Dobson, Andrew and Robyn Eckersley. Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. 2006.

a sibilant intake of breath

It does not follow, however, that it is counter-productive to form alliances with parts of  the military.

1. The military is a HUGE enterprise with many different groupings and individuals. It is unwise to write off so many people with a blanket policy.

2. There is a difference between an "aggressive military policy" and "the military."  If and when the United States changes its course, there will still be a military. At some historical junctures, the military has played a progressive role, for example, in the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

3. I wonder if part of the appeal of blanket condemnations is that they avoid the difficulties of working with real people. Alliances take effort and thought: When are they worthwhile? How to deal with disagreements? The solution of the 60s/70s was to retreat into self-righteousness and moral absolutism. The result: 30+ years of conservative domination of U.S. politics.

4. If there are emergencies and social disorganization, the military will become involved.

5. I've found that some military planners and think tankers are far ahead of the environmental community. For example, they picked up on the idea of peak oil much more quickly than mainstream environmentalism and they are not as prone to wishful thinking.

This is specifically a response to David Roberts fear that wanting to convert the military budget to green tech is going to alienate military institutions that are potential allies. This post is a strong argument against that point.

decoupling defense planning from scaring/killing people, and national security from inter-national in-security -- forward-thinking defense by a military that recognizes the political temptations of its own existence as a security risk

decoupling profits from political power imbalances maintained by force -- good luck

I'm confused. I never said that military institutions are potential allies (though I agree with Bart that they are). I said they are potential enemies. My point was that predicating the clean energy shift on draining substantial money from the military budget would make the military industrial complex -- the military itself but also the vast network of defense contractors, businesses whose survival depends on defense contractors, politicians in hock to defense contractors, etc. -- an enemy of clean energy. I worried that starting out by making an open enemy of one of society's most powerful institutions was tactically unwise.

You say here that the military is the enemy and we should treat them as such.

I don't understand how this is meant to be an argument against my point. Can you clarify?

grist.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_share.

And there is an advertising company that calls itself MindShare.  But your more generalized usage is not only perfectly clear, it is useful.

And thanks, Bart, for your reference to the Carnation Revolution, about which I did not know anything.  I have now added the recent Portuguese movie, mentioned at the end of the Wikipedia article, "Capita~es de Abril," to our Netflix queue, Portugal being one of our favorite foreign countries.

Coming of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, and laying the foundation for my ideas and values regarding how society should work, I fully and instinctively share the mistrust of the military -- including, perhaps unfairly, of individuals who dedicate their lives to military service -- to which Bart refers.  But I agree with Bart in principle, that environmentalists and other progressive activists can often enough find common cause with the military.

In principle.  What that kind of cooperation might actually look like would need to be considered carefully.  As for what DR had been proposing, in response to which Gar is saying that that would be a very bad direction to go in, that is rather over my head.

Anyway, different militaries do different things, and have different places in society, in different countries.  In the Carnation Revolution, many in the Portuguese army may have sided with the revolutionaries, not so much because they had liberalizing sentiments, as because they thought that the fossilized Salazarist regime was making their mission in the African colonies too difficult.  Still, the image of their "exchanging flowers for bullets" is a pretty one, reminiscent of anti-Vietnam-war protesters putting flowers into the barrels of the National Guard's rifles.

A better known example of members of the military joining the revolutionaries is gloriously recalled in the classic movie by Sergei Eisenstein, "Potemkin," which shows how the crew of that battleship turned its guns against the czarist forces during the Russian Revolution.

More recently, during the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, which had such a horrible conclusion, it was widely reported that the various units of the Chinese army that were sent in to control the demonstrators were divided in their feelings toward them.  Many agreed with those sympathetic to the demonstrators, that it would be wrong for the army to injure civilian citizens.  There is that world-famous icon of valiant protest, the unarmed man blocking a line of tanks: it testifies not only to that man's courage, but also to the forbearance and sympathy of the unseen driver of that first tank.

In Pakistan, the jury is still out.  General Musharraf abused his authority, and trampled on the constitution.  But with him marginalized, most reports say that the military itself is well-disciplined, and has been a stabilizing force in the country; and that so far its leadership has been perfectly willing to support the country's democratic institutions.

According to a curious detail in a report in the NY Times from Basra, a widespread feeling of many Iraqis there is that our allies the Brits were disgracefully risk-averse, and therefore have never done enough to prevent violence between rival Shiite gangs.  The Iraqis who feel that way conclude that the British troops have in fact been reflecting the strong anti-war sentiment of the British public, and failing to carry out the mission required of them originally by the pro-Bush pro-war Blair government.  "Passive-aggressive" might be a term that applies.

In this country, of course, there are all sorts of complexities.  My late great uncle, who was in the army during WWII, in France and Germany, said that the intensive recruitment, and especially the draft, that the US military required in order to fight that war, in fact resulted in a great social benefit, because they brought together people from all over the country, who otherwise would have been ignorant of all regions but their own.  That was not enough to end prejudices altogether, needless to say; but my uncle seemed to think that on balance, it greatly increased tolerance and understanding.

Race-baiting was an important, if not always explicit, part of maintaining the war effort against the Japanese.  James Michener adapted his own wartime experiences in the New Hebrides into a double love-story in his "Tales of the South Pacific."  Interracial romantic relationships, and prejudice against them, are at the heart of both stories; but Michener reports that, somehow, the experiences of American men and women in the military have helped them overcome whatever prejudices they came with.

Michener's book was of course adapted into the classic Broadway musical "South Pacific," which is enjoying a universally acclaimed new production.  Frank Rich has written very well about it, in today's New York Times.

Another kind of prejudice, viz. homophobia, is reflected in the military leadership's insistence on keeping in place the notorious "don't ask, don't tell" policy.  It is not possible to generalize, but one gets the impression that a majority of lower-ranking people in the military do not care what the sexual orientation of their comrades might be.  If ever the leadership is enlightened enough to reject that policy, people in the military may very well be at the forefront of one important progressive cause by accepting openly gay men and lesbians as their trusted comrades and friends.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

People like Bart show their conservative, pro-status quo feathers by things like denigration of activists of the '60s and '70s.  Those people generally needed and showed far more courage and self-sacrifice than the activists of today, who "protest" by joining safe, family friendly "demonstrations" that are far more like mutual admiration parties than the real demonstrations of the '60s and '70s where we took significant chances of getting our heads bashed in by the army of the rich, AKA cops.

As to Bart's comment on not wanting to work with "real people":  That term is nothing but a euphemism for "real assholes."  Have you ever actually interacted with a enough people in the military to know what they're generally like?  Most of these people are uneducated, aggressive, hateful, anti-environmental, racist, sexist jerks from the southeast, AKA, inbred white trash.  When I was a long distance mover, I met and worked with many military families, and I didn't find any redeeming qualities there, sorry.

The major military institutions are not going to support a conversion to a greener less militaristic society.

A number of people in the military and intelligence communities have made the connection between oil dependence and foreign wars. They are not enthusiastic about weakening the military in futile wars and losing the lives of American service people, so that civilians can drive SUVs to their heart's content.

And from what I can tell, this sort of thinking is not confined to isolated individuals, but is not uncommon among key figures and institutions.

See, for example, Going Geo-Green by Kelpie Wilson.

Or this talk by James Woolsey in Eugene:

You wouldn't have thought it possible: a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency drawing a standing ovation from a room full of left-leaning environmentalists right here in Eugene.

I'm not saying that all is ducky. There are some troglodytic strains within the military and even the more reasonable sectors have a different set of priorities than most people at Grist.

Still, the coming hard times may force a solidarity that we never dreamed of. As Kurt Cobb said in a prescient essay (The Politics of Survival):

What we are witnessing is the collapse of the politics of left and right and the replacement of those politics with what I call the politics of survival. Those who come to understand the gravity of our energy situation quickly abandon their previous political views and instead focus pragmatically on how we can make a successful energy transition. They do so because they know the cost of failure is too high a price to pay for ideology. In the politics of survival ideology counts for almost nothing. Pragmatic plans count for everything.

I've speculated before that as we go over the energy peak, our philosophy will change. Those centrifugal forces which drove us to expand all over the planet, thanks to cheap ever-growing energy sources, will become centripetal forces, bringing us closer together with a view to more harmonious living.

Another way to look at it was in this weekend's NYT Magazine in an article comparing humans with the other apes. The circle of our compassion will have to, (and already partially has) grow to encompass the whole planet:

Of course, humans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside "the group." Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that "they" threaten "us." The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution -- more easily said than done -- is to find new ways to define the group.

Michael Tomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

True sustainability is the only thing worth fighting for!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5BYEOQYLo

The 5% Project

DR's comment was indeed kind of scary -- sorry Dave -- because it seemed to be arguing for cutting off debate, or self-censoring, although I assume that that wasn't the intent.  The military will always fight tooth and nail to maintain and expand their budget -- that is their main reason for being.  It is not to protect the United States.

Now, as Bart points out, there are military personnel and there are military personnel.  I have had the honor of meeting Chuck Spinney, who worked in the Pentagon for over 30 years, and was one of its most famous whistleblowers (you can google him on counterpunch.com for some recent diatribes).  

Indeed, it should be possible to convert the military-industrial complex to civilian production -- a project of the late Professor Seymour Melman for decades, who even had a bill introduced into Congress every session to mandate every military firm to set up "alternative use" committees that would plan for conversion.  But as you can imagine, the military was not pleased.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, the only way to decrease the militarism of American society is to drastically decrease the military budget, which is the basis of U.S. military power.  Now, it may be the case that many people in the military are aware that there is something very wrong going on, and they might even be willing to decrease the military budget in order to increase the security of the people of the United States.

Because that is indeed the ultimate irony here -- in order to guarantee the long-term national security of the United States, the manufacturing sector of the economy must be rebuilt -- sustainably -- or else the wealth of the country will collapse, and with it, the military will collapse too (hopefully it won't be as in North Korea, as Dale Allen Pfieffer reports in "Eating fossil fuels", in which people starve so that the military can survive).

So, yes, conscientious military personnel should be sympathetic to environmental and peak oil concerns -- there are certainly plenty of well-educated and curious people in the military -- but the institution as a whole will not be sympathetic, unfortunately, it will only be sympathetic to itself.

If we argue that taxes should be increased on the wealthy and corporations in order to fund the greening of America, one would expect that the wealthy and corporations might turn tail and become very anti-any global warming legislation.  Does that mean that we let the rich and wealthy and powerful off the hook?  This is the larger question that DR's scary but thought-provoking question raises -- and my two-cents worth are, we might as well talk about it now, because when the environment hits the fan, the rich and powerful will be looking after themselves, first and foremost.

And in order to have a strong manufacturing sector we need a strong, healthy, educated work force.  National power always comes back to we the people.  For every soldier, many people keeping the support structure going are necessary.

The more high tech the military, the more support it takes.  All the way back to paying for continuing education and healthcare  for every citizen , that is the norm in Europe and Scandanavia.

I don't trust the emerging super powers, Russia, China, and India to protect planet earth.  Do you?

Even with our form of government, corrupted as it is by lobbying for corporate power,  environmental concerns are mainly ignored.  What is the form of Chinese and Russian governance?

It is very confusing as the dictatorship of the proletariat has been taken over by corporate power, I would name it corporate feudalism.  The Saudi mode of government, so revered by the neocons.  That they have instituted it here.

Can Barack turn it back?  McCain won't even try, his whole staff is filled up with lobbyists.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Are we going to use force to make them more earth friendly? Does the U.S. really need to spend around the same on our a military as every other nation on earth combine?  Since WWII does the record show the U.S. has used its military power responsibly ?

And one more thing I forgot to mention in my response to Bart's initial post: that the military could be expected, to any degree, to support progressive change is laughable.  The example you cite is an extremely rare exception.  The only times the military doesn't support those in with money and power is when the latter takes money and power away from the military.

Additionally, with over a trillion dollars devoted to military spending annually, national debt accumulating, and annnual spending deficits the norm, military policy and spending priorities must be a serious part of our national political discussion. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has completedly ignored the issue of defense spending. Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Ron Paul were essentially viewed as part of the lunatic fringe for suggesting that our military and defense priorities are wrong. None of the remaining candidates for President is contemplating a serious shift in military policy, although an Obama administration is far more likely than the other possible administrations to move us in the right direction.

Those of us focusing primarily on climate change and environmental issues wonder if the climate crisis, peak oil, and rising energy costs will be understood as serious enough problems to cause us to re-exmaine our military policy. Are these problems now more urgent (from a political perspective and culturally as opposed to scientifically) than other major issues such as health care, decent public education, and social security, which have been around for decades and have never been deemed significant enough politically to truly re-order our spending priorities? Perhaps fiscal sanity will take hold and the military budget will be  cut on that basis alone, but it would be far better for transformations in our understanding of defense, militarism and foreign policy to occur on their own merits and not as a response to crisis.

Still waiting for the peace dividend. . . .

Government encroachment (the Bush admin has only been quantitatively the worst, not qualitatively different), corporate encroachment (surveillance, databases, privatizing public spaces and resources), the whole gutter crew of religious and "patriotic" yahoos, the aggressive property-"rights" cretins, all of these assail <human> freedom more and more with every passing year, and it's certainly not the military's mission or desire to defend against this. On the contrary, by definition the military is one big Yes Man for the power structure.

Who REALLY fights for American liberties? Domestic activists - environmental, energy, labor, civil liberties, community, and others. Without us, there would be no freedom left. And it's this activity which would, in any human system, get the resources currently being thrown into the infernal pit of the death machine.

I can only take comfort from the fact that, the higher-maintenance the machine, the more readily crippled it will be by Peak Fossil Fuel.

If the US and Europe have much larger "legacy" responsibility for putting carbon in the atmosphere, than they also have more "legacy" responsbility for lording it over and pillaging the nations and ecosystems of the planet (I urge you to read Clive Ponting's "Green History of the World" if you are not familiar with this literature").

Hal9000, great comment, the question is, can we reorient our spending (and taxing) priorities.

Formerly a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Clive Ponting achieved notoriety in July 1984, when he sent two documents to Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, about the sinking of an Argentine naval warship General Belgrano, a key incident in the Falklands War of 1982. The documents revealed that the General Belgrano had been sighted a day earlier than officially reported, and was steaming away from the Royal Navy taskforce, and was outside the exclusion zone, when the cruiser was attacked and sunk.

So you think the benevolence of the other empires matches US empire, maybe in terms of bushco leadership it does.  We have sunk to their level, with kidnapping, torture, and murder become US giovernment policy.

I am hoping a new administration might do better.  Maybe not, but it's the only hope we have.  reform of the other big three empires is a remote possibility indeed.  We still have elections here, flawed and scammed yes.  But it's still better than the rest.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

And so it is a bit puzzling, and disturbing to read, in the editorial on the proposed new G.I. Bill in today's NY Times, this remark:
"This page strongly supports a larger, sturdier military."

SMLowry,
thanks for your generous observation, and for your recommendation to make an effort to understand "warrior culture," a more promising foundation than the rather reductivist assertions made here and there in this thread.

Wolverine,
somewhere recently, you wrote something to the effect that enlisting in the military bespeaks some moral deficiency.  I tend to agree.  But again, we should not ignore complexities.  Some who sign up indeed do so because all they live for is engaging in serious competition, and playing on a winning team, which IMHO is pretty sick.  Among these are the kind who look forward to being entitled to fire guns and kill people, the sickest of all.  Cf. the movie "Jarhead," based on a well-received memoir by a Marine -- ironically with a good liberal-arts education! -- , about his experiences during the Gulf War of 1991: that whole gang of young men come across as dehumanized monsters.  And any who do not interpret their conduct and attitudes in that way are themselves a bit dehumanized, thanks to our militaristic society.

But then again, there are those who sign up who do so without fully understanding what they are getting themselves into.  They deserve a measure of compassion.

Anyway, the role of the US military may be evolving.  Andrew Revkin, the environmentalism-writer whom many Grist folk love to hate, wrote this, in his blog on Arlington National Cemetery (he connects the filling-up of the cemetery with the filling-up of the planet):

<<
These days, armed forces increasingly find themselves hauling survivors from the wreckage of collapsed cities or providing aid to tsunami victims, even as they remain poised to do leaders' bidding on battlefields. Strange times. Perhaps we're in a slow transition toward a new definition of security including security from natural hazards, along with the human species' darker tendencies. That does seem to be a natural, and necessary, transition as we head toward 9 billion people on a finite planet. Too soon to say.
>>

That may remind us, too, of Jon Rynn's interesting suggestion, a while back, that the US Navy should be given the mission to enforce regulations of fisheries in international waters.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

the federal executive branch is by no means the only hope anyone has. the bush-cheney people are a reflection of our own inattention and passivity. the worst reflection, yes, but a new administration will still only be a reflection, not the power itself.

Chomsky: China does not pose a military threat. In fact, of all the major powers, China has probably been the most restrained in building up its military forces. China poses a very serious threat because it cannot be intimidated [by the US].

[The US] is a little bit like the mafia. The Godfather does not tolerate disobedience, even in a small storekeeper, let alone somebody that matters, so that's a threat.

However, the US relationship with China is also very ambivalent. On one hand, from the point of view of state power, China is threatening because it follows its own course.

On the other hand, powerful business interests in the US are of course highly influential in determining state policy. These businesses have a real stake in China - it is a wonderful platform for cheap exports and it's a potential market. They want relations with China to be strong, but there is an internal conflict in the US.

Remember that China has enormous financial reserves that surpass Japan - it is the leading holder of foreign reserves - it is keeping the US economy afloat. So it's a pretty tricky, complex relationship.

it seems unlikely that the reduction in funding could precede a noteworthy growing anti-militarist sentiment

If we try to play through DR's original fear, that somehow the military would start to lobby against global warming initiatives, it seems to me that the first manifestation of anti-militarism would be an occasional plan put forward by activists, somewhat on the fringe, to decrease military power; this wouldn't bring much of a response.

Even if, after certain bats had reappeared from hell, all the big environmental groups got together and agreed that after they urged people to buy CFL's they should also talk about cutting the military budget, I think the military would still not be too worried -- what would worry them would be a movement so large and broad, encompassing so many groups (say, the sort of thing that scared them about Martin Luther King, African-Americans, Latinos, unions, peace-types, environmentalists, etc), that they would have the following problem:

A significant majority of the Congress people whose constituents work in military firms -- and most come from districts that do, since the military-industrial complex is the greatest political machine of all time -- would stand up and say, "we'll cut back the military budget, even though some jobs might be lost in our district" (or converted to civilian use, ideally).  

Obviously, this would take quite a shift in mainstream thinking (and thanks for the reference to protecting the life in oceans, cc, I do think that that is one of the few missions that it would be worth accomplishing!)

Amazin', I'm not quite sure what you mean about losing the big stick, we never used it for anything  environmentally benign.  Again, the goal is to be multilateral, not unilateral, and draw in as much of the world's population as possible in the great tasks ahead -- and that is certainly not a military problem but an economic, political, and educational one (the last task one which you are very helpful with, for instance).