The Committee of Public Safety

Brutus

StrategyPage examines the Somali pirate problem in Solving The Somali Pirate Mess:

Problem:

Now that the pirates have demonstrated their ability to operate far (over 700 kilometers) from shore, it’s no longer possible to use naval patrols. There is simply too much area to patrol. What the naval commanders are considering is a convoy system for any ships passing within a thousand kilometers of the Somali coast. But with ocean going ships, the pirates can operate anywhere in the region. Between the Gulf of Aden, and the Straits of Malacca to the east (between Singapore and Indonesia), you have a third of the worlds shipping. All are now at risk. Convoys for all these ships would require more warships (over a hundred) than can be obtained…

Solutions?:

That leaves the option of a military operation to capture the seaside towns and villages the pirates operate from. This would include sinking hundreds of fishing boats and speedboats. Hundreds of civilians would be killed or injured. Unless the coastal areas were occupied (or until local Somalis could maintain law and order), the pirates would soon be back in business…

Already, many ships are going round the southern tip of Africa, and avoiding Somalia and the Suez canal altogether…about a third of the ships seized this year had taken precautions, but the pirates still got them. Warships could attempt an embargo of Somalia, not allowing seagoing ships in or our without a warship escort. Suspicious seagoing ships, and even speedboats, could be sunk in port. That would still produce some videos (real or staged, it doesn’t matter) of dead civilians, but probably not so many that the anti-piracy force would be indicted as war criminals.

The problem with the historic solution is fashionable scruples:

In the past, piracy was suppressed by foreign navies destroying the towns [or] villages the pirates used as bases. This is no longer politically acceptable, and no one is yet willing to send troops ashore to fight the warlords who created and maintain the pirate operations. The nations with the military forces able to go into Somalia (like the U.S., Britain and France) are well aware of the region’s history, and the willingness of the Somalis to just keep fighting.

Why these scruples which first appeared around the Crimean War and have only increased since? Azar Gat examined some possible answers to this question in War in Human Civilization:

• Wealth and comfort: people in the pre-industrial age lived the Hobbesian life: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “In economically developed ‘consumer societies’”, says Gat, “the average man and woman now routinely enjoy greater comfort that the aristocrat of earlier times” (that may change by next week. Check back later).
• Metropolitan service society: “According to Vegetius, echoed by subsequent authors down to Machiavelli, sturdy farmers were the best recruits…typically immigrating from diverse quarters, the residents of large metropolitan centres in particular lacked traditional communal bonds of solidarity and were free from the social controls of village and small town communities. Exposed to the cities’ quick dealings and temptations, they were regarded as too fickle, rootless, undisciplined, and cynical to be trusted.” Gat adds, “adaptation to military life comes far less naturally to people from contemporary affluent societies who are accustomed to deskwork in the office and the seclusion of residential suburbia than it did to their farmer and factory worker predecessors.”
• The Sexual Revolution: “Greater sexual availability, associated with the pill, women joining the labour market outside the house, and liberalization in general, may be another factor that has dampened enthusiasm for war in advanced modern societies, especially among unmarried young men. Traditionally constituting the most aggressive element in society, largely, as we have seen, because of their unsettled status, young single males now find around them a wide range of outlets for their restlessness. Correspondingly, foreign adventure, which once lured many of them away from the dull and suffocating countryside and small town communities, has lost much of its attraction, especially for city folk, whereas the sexual aspects of such adventure are severely curtailed by state military authorities.”
• Fewer young males: “In today’s, affluent societies, however, with birthrates falling below replacement level and with increased longevity, young adults-including males-constitute a shrinking portion of an ageing populations. Before the First World War, males aged 15-29 constituted 35 per cent of the adult male populations of Britain, and 40 percent in Germany; by 200o their share dropped to 24 and 29 percent respectively.”
• Fewer children per family: “According to this argument, whereas in the past, too, parents obviously loved their children dearly and were very anxious to spare them from the Moloch of war, it has become that much more agonizing for them to lose a child when a typical present-day family numbers only one or two children.” Gat is less kind to this argument, pointing out that with the higher infant mortality rate and reliance of parents on grown children as their only social security, parents in pre-industrial times needed them more. The ability of modern citizens to resist sending their children off to war is higher now than in days of yore.
• Women’s franchise: “Indeed, studies in the west during the past decades have shown a consistent gender gap in attitudes to the use of military force, with women being about 5-15 per cent less supportive of it. As elections are often decided by a small margin and governments are necessarily responsive to their electorates, such gender differences might play a significant role in tilting the electoral balance against military ventures in modern affluent liberal democracies. The liberal/democratic and sex-related explanations for peace thereby overlap: women’s vote has been suggested as a reason why liberal democracies became more pacific in the twentieth than they had been in the nineteenth century.” Gat qualifies this reason by pointing out that women can become quite militant if they are afraid of threats to hearth and home like terrorism.
• Nuclear weapons: Self-explanatory.

What a mess. No wonder non-Western cultures think the peaceful sentiments the West expresses are a cover-up for some dark, sinister motive. If you’re living by the Old School rules, our actions are so inexplicable that they look like a massive conspiracy.

UPDATE: Some Western culture can be transferred. Read this analysis of Somali piracy over at Coming Anarchy. Do it now. We’re watching…