Janowitz and Huntington—Better Together: A Response

Suzanne Nielsen and Hugh Liebert recently published “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers” in which they argued that officer education is too enamored with Samuel Huntington’s aging theory of civil–military relations from Soldier and the State. Huntington’s ideal of objective control grants senior military advisors autonomy within their professional sphere, and it best ensures that unvarnished military expertise survives politically charged national security decision making processes intact, regardless of which party controls the White House. While these features explain Huntington’s traditional popularity with the military, Nielsen and Liebert warn that Huntington’s separation between military and civilian matters in theory engenders wishful thinking in practice, so much so that officers neglect, to the detriment of national policy, Morris Janowitz, Huntington’s cofounder of the modern study of civil–military relations. However, the civil–military community should reconsider banishing Huntington in order to appreciate Janowitz.

Cruel Means, Bitter Ends

When, if ever, is it okay to let evil win? Should all wars be fought to the bitter end, or is ending the suffering of your people more important? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the Prime Minster is a long-time military man sworn to fighting the evil aggression of the Theocratic Republic of New Anglia. The war has been going on a long time. As a military leader, he ran on the platform of ending the war in his first term. He is elected and brings his most trusted military advisors with him to office. Albert was one of those trusted advisors he brought with him. Days before a large military operation, Swift Wind, is about to take place, Albert makes a startling discovery. There is a leak in the President’s office, the Angelians know of the coming invasion. Albert rushes in to tell the Prime Minster who promptly locks him in the bathroom and tells him he is the one who is the leak. Swift Wind is meant to fail. The Prime Minster has decided that the only way to end the suffering is to lose the war.

Fates of Ryazan Citizens Participating in the Spanish Civil War

Последние несколько лет богаты для нашей страны различными юбилейными датами, в первую очередь связанными с военной историей Отечества, в частности с оказанием военной и экономической помощи республиканцам в годы Гражданской войны в Испании (1936–1939), началом и окончанием Великой Отечественной войны (1941–1945). Цель настоящей статьи — установление личностей и судеб уроженцев Рязанской губернии (в территориальных границах до Октябрьской революции), принимавших участие в обеих войнах. За 2,5 года пребывания в Испании советские военнослужащие и гражданские специалисты способствовали тому, что у республиканцев в кратчайшие сроки появились авиация, полевая и зенитная артиллерия, танковые части, службы их обеспечения. В Испании в качестве общевойсковых советников, зенитчиков, танкистов, летчиков, моряков, работников оборонных предприятий, переводчиков, врачей находились 46 уроженцев земли Рязанской. Почти все они были награждены орденами и медалями за мужество и героизм в этой первой схватке с фашизмом, а затем в Великой Отечественной войне. Судьбы добровольцев сложились по-разному, некоторые из них не вернулись с фронта, разным был и вклад их в общую победу, однако каждый из них защищал от фашизма и свое Отечество, и другие страны. Предлагаемое исследование может быть использовано для патриотического воспитания граждан Российской Федерации как в уважении к Отечеству и его защитникам в целом, так и в воспитании гордости за свою малую Родину — Рязанскую землю. Recent years have seen many important dates closely associated with Russian military history, such as military and economic assistance to Spanish republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). The aim of the article is to investigate the fates of Ryazan citizens (we take into consideration the territory of the Ryazan province as it was before the Great October Revolution) who took part in both wars. With the help of Soviet militaries and civilians, who spent 2.5 years in Spain, Spanish republicans managed to acquire aviation, field and anti-aircraft artillery, tank divisions, maintenance teams. 46 Ryazan-born citizens worked in Spain as military advisors, antiaircraft gunners, tankmen, pilots, seamen, employees of defense enterprises, translators and interpreters, doctors. Almost all of them were awarded orders and medals for gallantry and bravery in battle against fascism during the Spanish Civil War and later during the Great Patriotic War. The volunteers had different fates. Some of them never returned from the war, they contributed differently to the victory over fascism, yet every one of them defended their motherland and the world against the fascist threat. The present research can be used for patriotic education of citizens of the Russian Federation. It can help teach people to respect their motherland and its defenders and to feel proud of their home region of Ryazan.

Israel, Guatemala, and the agricultural roots of an authoritarian internationalism

On Christmas Eve 2017, less than a month after President Donald Trump unilaterally announced his decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Guatemala announced that it would become the second country in the world to make the same move. This article locates the historical background to the recent embassy move in the building of model villages throughout Guatemala during the height of the Guatemalan Civil War. Throughout the early 1980s, Israeli agricultural and military advisors helped to militarize the Guatemalan highlands by training Guatemalan police and military to construct plantation-style model villages. Employing the language of rural development, these model villages became a core counterinsurgent tactic for former General Efrain Rios Montt’s infamous “scorched earth” policy. The article concludes by discussing how we practically cross our own mental barricades to refocus Palestine/Latinx solidarity movements toward agriculture. What possibilities are opened up when we stand from our grounded solidarities and commit to refuse exceptionalist narratives and single-issue organizing, particularly in our shared commitments to more effectively combat the ongoing practices of war-making and imperial violence?

Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War

This article analyses a mid-20th century computerized pacification reporting system, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), used by the US military to measure hamlet-level security and development trends in the Vietnam War. The significance of the HES was its capacity to translate US Military Advisor observations of Vietnamese hamlet life into a machine-readable format used by US military systems analysts to disclose ‘patterns of life.’ I show how US Military Advisors operated as ‘embodied sensors’ within the HES, producing a distinctive location-based event ontology – a ‘view of below’ – accompanied by rudimentary digital maps in-formation from incoming hamlet-level observation streams. I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of ‘epistemic violence,’ rooted not so much in the narrative subjection of the ‘Other,’ but in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.