Vocab for War
I have often
marveled at America for being the only country which goes to war and expects
zero casualties! Of course, that’s mostly because the US fights its wars way
outside its borders which inevitably raises the question domestically: why
should our guys die for some reason associated with another corner of the
world?
Starting with
the advent of missiles and now with drones, it’s entirely possible for the US
to fight most wars without putting any “boots on the ground”.
Jonathan
Bernstein argues that this new type of warfare, with no soldiers on the
ground, deserves a new term. Why? To make it clear to the American public that
succeed or fail, they won’t see any body bags being flown in:
“The press, along with the political
establishment, utterly failed to find, or at least to consistently use, a vocabulary
for what was on the table. Certainly air or missile strikes are an act of war,
and should be reported as such; just as certainly, those sorts of limited
attacks always bring with them the risk of additional involvement – either from
retaliation or from mission creep. At the same time, calling that “going to
war” summons up images of, well, troops marching, and casualties coming home to
hospitals or in body bags. Even keeping the risks in mind, that’s not what was
being talked about. A vocabulary is really needed to make clear that it is
“real” war, but that it’s also not at all similar to Iraq, the Gulf War, or
other full-out invasions.”
“I don’t see why a new vocabulary is
required. If firing missiles at the armed forces of another government is an
act of war, and it certainly is, the vocabulary to describe this already
exists. If many people have a certain idea of what it means to “go to war” that
refers to a bigger commitment than “limited” strikes, that doesn’t change what
the government is proposing to do.”
Before you
dismiss the call for new war vocabulary as just an instance of The Animal Farm or 1984’ish approach to play with words to distort the truth, consider
what Nassim Taleb wrote in The Bed of
Procrustes:
“We humans, facing limits of knowledge,
and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by
squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive
categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the
occasion, has explosive consequences.”
Is it time to
think if the word “war” is now a “prepackaged narrative”, to use the Taleb
phrase? Has technology changed war to a point where we need a new narrative, a
new word? Is Bernstein right after all?
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