How to Counter New War Offensives? Increasingly Militarised but Less Secure; On relinquishing The Freedom To Breed

Countering New War Offensives: Islamic terrorism in the 21st century has clearly hijacked the war agenda and as of now Islamic terrorism has left the world including the US, Russia, European Union, Japan and India groping for answers and solutions. This trend is alarming and leaders of the world must realize and understand the gravity of the problem. THIS IS WAR. Its happening in bits and pieces but no one is able to put the pieces together and see the big picture. Terrorist offensives in the US, Europe, Russia and India have a chilling similarity. Islamist terrorist offensives are being made in a concerted effort at democratic nations espousing the cause of liberty and equality. This is the onset of World War III (WW3). 

China’s stealthy and suspicious rise to global power status, the anarchy within Pakistan, Iran’s nuclear programme, Israel’s continuing slugfest with Palestine, and India barely being able to keep its house in order all point to the unsettling conclusion that WW3 will happen in Asia-an arch speading across middle east, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, SE Asia and China. Contrary to established wisdom, WW3 will not be a conventional war. It will be terrorist attacks on a large magnitude in multiple locations throughout Asia, US and Europe. Conventional wisdom and armies will fail to tackle this threat. So how do nations deal with this new form of war?

Rearranging armed formations: The conventional way of dealing with insurgencies and terrorism through the creation of manpower intensive and equipment conglomerates like divisions and brigades have to be done away with. Now 30 percent of a conventional army has to be regrouped as small and agile fighting units of 15-25 troops each. You can have 2,000 to 4,000 such units deployed throughout the country or in foreign bases or in troubled areas. The conventional armed bases will soon give way to such small units with attack capabilities and interlinked with each other through crack telecom facilities. 

Such units will have to mingle with the local crowds, have terrific intelligence gathering acumen, should be equipped with mobile and light attack weapons, and should be constantly on the move scourging the landscape for signs of trouble and should not be based in one place for more than a month. They should be like nomadic camps with good and makeshift gear. Further, such units should be sanctioned by the host government to launch search and kill missions at terrorist groups and bases in enemy countries without actually launching a war.

Fearsome Legislation: Countries must put in place draconian laws to deal with terrorism. A proven and confirmed terrorist should have no legal recourse. Efforts must be made to capture them alive, on grilling them and getting a detailed debrief, lateral indoctrination on acceptable norms and if these fail, the only option left is to inflict on him a gruesome death publicly. This will be a grim and a stern reminder to would-be terrorists. The execution must be swift and quick.  Strike fear and terror in the hearts and minds of people who create terror and fear in the innocent public.

Strategies for India: Many scholar and pundits in diplomacy have hinted that WW3 (conventional or unconventional) will happen in Asia envisaging ground, aerial and sea offensives. India cannot remain a mute spectator to these developments around its periphery or inside its territory. We need a change in war doctrine. Our armed forces cannot be put perennially in the country’s defense. We need to have the prerequisite of striking and attacking first. As a corollary, 30-40 percent of troops and armament for the army, airforce and navy must be attack and strike-based. They must have quick mobility, the attack formations must be small in size and multiple in numbers and the armament must be small for troops of 20-30 and must be quick to be deployed. The navy must be encouraged to buy attack patrol boats with gunnery and missile manning 10-15 sailors each.

The dilemma of war and peace  and freedom to breed is shown in this abstract of the article The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin (1968). At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, JB Wiesner and HF York concluded that: “Both sides in the arms race are confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation. The class of “no technical solution problems” has members. My thesis is that the “population problem” as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. 

It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem—technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the winning the game of tic-tack-toe. Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow geometrically or as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world’s goods must decrease. Is ours a finite world?

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed. When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of the greatest good for the greatest number be realized?

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcise the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the invisible hand, the idea that an individual who intends only his own gain, is as it were, “led by an invisible hand to promote…the public interest.” Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. 

If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez faire in reproduction. It it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible. The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet in 1834 by a mathematical amateur William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it “the tragedy of the commons,” using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” 

He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which infact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather’s great book. This argument is straightforward and Darwinian. People vary. Confronted by appeal to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. 

The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation. Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not be forever. As with the four letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of the meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected. To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. 

Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favour the conscienceless. We institute and grumblingly support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons. Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man’s population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has to be abandoned in one aspect after another. The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. 

Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandise for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short. The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”---and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.