Radio Free New Hampshire: Donald, Adam, George, Carl, Nikolai, And Will

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Renaming our Department of Defense as the Department of War is a signature move for Donald Trump. It costs nothing (stationery supplies notwithstanding), it makes a splash, and it pleases his audience. As to why this is necessary: he says it concerns performance. He says we haven’t won any wars since Truman named it the Department of Defense.

Since that’s insane, we should look elsewhere for his reasons. But we shouldn’t look too far. One of Trump’s virtues is transparency. So he is probably just asserting his dominion over our military. Adam did the same thing, by giving the animals their names in Eden. He may also be thinking like a businessman again. Just like Burger King sells hamburgers and My Pillow sells stuffed squares to sleep on, the Army fights wars, so why not say so. Anything else is a wasted marketing opportunity.

Also a lie. After all, the whole idea of a “defense department” that exists to kill people is pretty disingenuous. George Orwell might praise him for this change, even if he would also rue the confirmation of his deepest fears about modern capitalist society.

Just as technology has changed since Truman’s time, though, so has the concept of war. We therefore need to be precise about this nomenclature. Since Trump is now selling the stuff, it would be nice to know what’s for sale.

People have defined war in different ways over the years, and if the past can’t control, it can still inform. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, for instance, declared that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But that phrase says more about its speaker than its subject. For war to be a subset of politics, we need agreement on the rules. We follow a certain procedure, it has a certain outcome, and all parties agree on the legitimacy of that outcome. That’s a great idea when European countries with professional armies find themselves at odds; it’s less than useful when such armies find themselves facing guerilla forces, or popular uprisings, or suicidal cults. When your enemy has taken himself outside the veil of politics, your wars are no longer political. They are cultural, they are endless, they are—in another famous definition-- hell.

We owe that observation to William Tecumseh Sherman, who meant his words literally. The wars in which Sherman fought were factories of carnage. The American Civil War, in particular, was notorious for its brutality. Men died grisly deaths under heartless conditions. European observers were stunned by the ability of American fighting men on both sides to pursue their enemies with an unrelenting cruelty that no continental army would even consider. It was a new sort of warfare with violence meted out on an industrial scale and the world has never looked back.

Trump has not renamed the Pentagon’s bureaucracy the Department of Hell, however, nor the Department of Politics. So he must have something else in mind.

There is a boyishness about this man, an amateur’s attachment to emotion and even to fun. With its antique sound and its aura of toy soldiery, perhaps his Department of War harkens back to his own youthful attachments. Not to World War Two, though; nothing so grim. When children think of soldiers, they think of uniforms and marching and parades; the popular concept is a Napoleonic one. Napoleon’s armies formed up in legible ways on giant green fields; he and his opponents moved their units like chess pieces; horses galloped to the attack, hussars and dragoons and junkers clashed in beautiful uniforms; their skirmishes could be overseen from comfortable hilltops and followed like theater.

But in reality the emperor’s battles were no less horrific than those of Grant or Eisenhower. Gunpowder soaked every encounter with smoke and fire. Cannonballs flew and bayonets stabbed. Men died or were crippled for life without ever knowing how or why. Tactics broke apart as soon as they were set in motion.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes how his character Nikolai Rostov is swept away by one such moment. Rostov acted; he found himself doing something; he did not know why he was doing it; he did not know what the effect of his action was; he did not know how or why it ended. He was later given a citation for bravery, and he realized with the force of revelation: he understood nothing at all.

“Cry havoc,” Shakespeare crowed, “and let slip the dogs of war.” That word has its own logic and we can’t control it. You might even say the best we can do is defend ourselves against it.

Michael Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.