Alen recited slowly: "Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised."
"Chapter 14," said blackbeard mechanically. "We leave such clues lying by their bedsides for twenty years, and they never notice them. For the few of us who do—more training."
"Will I learn to throw a knife like you?" asked Alen, repelled and fascinated at once by the idea.
"On your own time, if you wish. Mostly it's ethics and morals so you'll be able to weigh the values of such things as knife-throwing."
"Ethics! Morals!"
"We started as missionaries, you know."
"Everybody knows that. But the Great Utilitarian Reform—"
"Some of us," said blackbeard dryly, "think it was neither great, nor utilitarian, nor a reform."
It was a staggering idea. "But we're spreading utilitarian civilization!" protested Alen. "Or if we're not, what's the sense of it all?"
Blackbeard told him: "We have our different motives. One is a sincere utilitarian; another is a gambler—happy when he's in danger and his pulses are pounding. Another is proud and likes to trick people. More than a few conceive themselves as servants of mankind. I'll let you rest for a bit now." He rose.
"But you?" asked Alen hesitantly.
"Me? You will find me in Chapter Twenty-Six," grinned blackbeard. "And perhaps you'll find someone else." He closed the door behind him.
Alen ran through the chapter in his mind, puzzled, until—that was it.
It had a strange and inevitable familiarity to it as if he had always known that he would be saying it aloud, welcomingly, in this cramped cubicle aboard a battered starship:
"God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us."
The Stars at War
Jerry Pournelle
The Soviet Army has no recruiting posters. It doesn't need them. Not only are there no volunteers in the ranks of the Soviet Army, there can't be. There's no provision for volunteering for the ranks.
There's no need for volunteers, because every male Soviet citizen is conscripted at age 18. Every six months, approximately one million young men enter the system. They stay in for two years of training, after which they remain in the reserve registers until they reach the age of 50. They can be called up at any time.
There are always nearly two million men in the Land Forces alone; within ten days, these could be expanded to some 21 million. The Land Forces contain 123 divisions and 47 independent regiments of motor-rifle divisions. Each division has 23 tank companies and 67 artillery batteries.
There are also 47 Tank divisions, plus independent regiments and battalions. All in all, the Tank Army forces have some 54,000 tanks.
The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces muster some 325,000 troops. There are at least 1,400 land-based ICBM rockets. Five hundred intermediate range missiles (IRBM) are deployed in the Western USSR; this includes 315 mobile SS-20's. The SS-20 can be reloaded, and many of the launchers already have at least one nuclear-tipped reload weapon.
In 1944, General Patton raced across France with his 3rd Army. The 16 divisions of First and Third Armies were supported by 5,600 trucks of the Red Ball Express. In 1975, the North Vietnamese Army moved south against Saigon. Its 20 divisions were supported by over 10,000 trucks and vehicles, nearly all of them sent into North Viet Nam from the Soviet Union. Those were the transport vehicles the Soviets could spare from their military establishment. The Red Army today has access to nearly half a million supply vehicles.
Germany entered World War II with 57 submarines. Britain had 58, Japan 56, and the United States 99. In 1941, the Soviet Union had 212 submarines in commission. They have about 275 submarines now, in addition to 83 Strategic Nuclear Forces nuclear subs. Of their 275 "regular navy" subs, at least 100 are nuclear powered.
We could continue, but surely the point is clear? The Soviet Union has built an enormous military machine, the largest peacetime military establishment in the history of mankind, and continues to maintain it. The expenses are great, but the Kremlin's control over the Soviet Empire is strong; apparently, the expense does not greatly concern the Politburo and its secret inner circle, the Defense Council.
We don't have to look into Soviet motives to conclude that the United States must respond to this enormous military buildup. The official policy of the Soviet Union is "world liberation." One may argue that they don't really mean it, and that their revolutionary ardor long ago expired, but world revolution remains their official aim. If it is immoral to tempt a poor man by making theft easy, it seems no less so to tempt the Soviets by making conquest cheap and bloodless.
In fact, it is pointless to debate the issue. No responsible President or Congress can or will advocate leaving the United States helpless in the face of the growing Soviet strategic threat. Unilateral disarmament may be a subject for debate within the population, but it has been overwhelmingly and repeatedly rejected by the American people, and our political leaders know this.
Granted that we must respond to the Soviet military threat, though there remains the problem of what the response should be. It is no good responding ineffectively.
We could, if we chose, attempt to match the Soviets in men, machines, and weapons. Their military machine costs much less than ours, of course. As an example, they pay their soldiers no more than $25 U.S. a month. Even so, the United States is far wealthier than the Soviet Union, and there is no question of our ability to afford a military establishment equal to or greater than theirs.
The costs would be high. Taxes would rise, and there would be real cuts in our standard of living; but we could do it. We could match the Soviets gun for gun, tank for tank, plane for plane, ship for ship.
We aren't likely to do that. Indeed, the events of the past two years demonstrate that the Congress isn't likely to do half that. Current administration efforts to bring the defense budget up to the proportions it held under John F. Kennedy have not been successful. Moreover, although the courts have held universal conscription to be constitutional, it certainly wouldn't be popular; and without universal conscription, we could never match the Soviets. We aren't that rich
This, too, is a pointless debate; in the absence of some clear and unambiguous provocation, such as a massive invasion of Western Europe, or direct attack on Israel, the American people are not prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. We won't give up consumer goods, cosmetics, and the myriad luxuries we enjoy, nor will we opt for universal conscription. There is just no way that we'll respond to the Soviets by building a peacetime military establishment similar to theirs.
Unfortunately, although we have rejected matching the Soviet military establishment, we have not seized upon any viable alternative. Instead, we putter about, building some of this and some of that, hoping that our technological superiority will somehow do the trick even though we have no clear cut strategy of technology.
This has not always brought about good results. As Congressman Newt Gingrich, among others, has repeatedly pointed out, simply throwing money at the Pentagon is wasteful. Given money but no marching orders, the Pentagon almost always buys more M-1 tanks for the Army, more carriers for the Navy, wings of F-16's for the Air Force. They buy "things people can ride on," as one analyst recently put it.
Left to its own direction, the military is very conservative. Military establishments tend to keep the old, while flirting with the new and glamorous; to buy one or two armored cars, but keep horses for the cavalry. To put catapults and seaplanes on battleships, but reject aircraft carriers as not needed.
The result is a lack of direction. As the Wall Street Journal put it in November 1982, "The Pentagon is an enormously inefficient nationalized industry. Its decisions are less the implementation of a coherent strategy than a matter of three services dividing a patronage pie. The most predictable result has been to deaden innovation."
The bold new systems are shunted aside; or, if the Pentagon is forced to deal with
them, they are studied, tested, restudied, and retested. Then, suddenly, often as much a result of the geographical location of the factory that makes them as of strategic necessity, some of the most glamorous systems are procured.
We end up with weapons that no one is trained to use, aircraft with no spare parts and few trained pilots, communications systems that don't quite work, ships without trained sailors to man them, and missiles that work splendidly in test situations, but have profound problems on the battlefield.
I do not mean here to argue against high-technology weapons systems. One of the clearest lessons of the Viet Nam War was that high technology pays off. From "Blackbird" gunships to smart bombs and automatic mortars, high-technology weapons proved to have high effectiveness, and to be relatively cheap compared to the results they achieved.
The Falklands battles demonstrated the same point. High-technology weapons are essential for modern warfare. Moreover, the weapons must be in the hands of trained, able, and dedicated troops. It is not enough that we design and develop high technology weapons systems. We must build them, deploy them, bring them to operational effectiveness, and maintain them. Anything short of that invites disaster.
However, it is not enough merely to recognize that high technology is vital to our future. There must also be a strategic focus. As Stefan Possony and I have argued elsewhere, we must have strategic direction to our military research and development. We must have a strategy of technology.
That won't be developed overnight. Most analysts believe it will require a grueling and painful reorganization of the entire defense establishment. That will generate great opposition. There are too many vested interests for things to be otherwise.
It will also require time. We may not have that time. Military establishments, ours among them, have always been inefficient, and better organized for the last war than the next. If we wait for perfection, we may well wait forever.
Thus three facts stand out:
1. The Soviets have an enormous military establishment, and we are not going to match it tank for tank and gun for gun.
2. Our present course of buying some of this and some of that, more tanks here and more planes there, isn't an adequate, or indeed reasonable, response to the threat, and "reform of the Pentagon" and other efforts to "trim the fat and reduce waste" aren't likely to succeed very quickly, if at all.
3. We have to do something and soon.
This reasoning was the starting point for Lt. General Daniel O. Graham's strategic analysis. If what we're doing isn't going to work, and we have to do something, where can we go? Graham concluded that we needed a bold new approach, a strategic sidestep; that we had to stop competing with the Soviets in areas in which we can't win, and begin to compete where we have the advantage.
His analysis led him through high technology to space; to the High Frontier. As Dan Graham has repeatedly said, he didn't start with any prejudices toward space as a decisive frontier. All his training and experience pointed him elsewhere. It was the search for strategic initiatives which led him to his conclusions.
The above was written as the preface to General Daniel O. Graham's book High Frontier. That book presents, in detail, a bold new strategy for the defense of the United States and Western Civilization. The concepts of High Frontier are very new and different, but the plans suggested were realistic. Some of the nation's best engineers and development scientists have examined Project High Frontier. Many began their analysis convinced that High Frontier couldn't work, or would cost too much, or would take too long. As they became more involved, they changed their minds.
I know, because I was one of them. I am not any longer a professional scientist, but I stay in touch with the aerospace community. When I was first told of High Frontier, I searched among those I respected for engineers and scientists opposed to the plan, and introduced them to the team of equally respectable advisors assisting General Graham. In some cases I was privileged to sit in on the resulting debates.
Certain conclusions emerged. First, we do hold the advantages in space. Our technology is more advanced and more reliable, and the Soviet "brute force" approach to problems creates as many difficulties as it solves when applied to the space environment. We don't have everything our way in space, but we are clearly better off in a high technology competition than trying to match their conventional military establishment.
Secondly, High Frontier will work. There can be arguments over details, costs, and schedules. As with all strategic plans there will remain uncertainties: the first thing taught to career officers is the maxim "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." But it will work, and those who all too predictably argue that High Frontier's supporters don't understand the laws of physics are cordially invited to present their case—not to Dan Graham, who doesn't understand the laws of physics, but to the prize-winning physicists aboard General Graham's team.
In The Strategy of Technology, Stefan Possony and I argued that the United States ought to abandon the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, sometimes known as MAD, in favor of a strategic doctrine of "Assured Survival"; that as a Western nation adhering to the Judeo-Christian tradition, we should be more concerned with preserving our nation than with assuring another's destruction.
I concluded that: Project High Frontier presents a practical way to achieve that goal.
In fact, we builded better than we knew. Part of the High Frontier analysis was a presentation to President Ronald Reagan. It must have been convincing, because on March 23, 1983, the President made his famous "Star Wars" speech, in which he asked the scientists and technologists of the United States to end the terrible fears of our strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, and adopt a new strategy of Assured Survival.
I've discussed that in some detail in Mutual Assured Survival by Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing (Baen Books).
In 1970 Stefan Possony and I published The Strategy of Technology. The most important point made in that book was that technology can be directed by a strategist; that technological breakthroughs can be created on demand if sufficient technological resources are focussed in a rational way on strategic problems.
The "Star Wars" speech proved that we were more right than we'd known. Once the technological community became focused on the problem of making the ICBM "impotent and obsolete," it turned out to be rather easier than we'd thought. The Manhattan Project turned up three ways to make atomic weapons; all worked.
Strategic Defense Initiative research turned up five ways. General James Abrahamson, SDI Director, has confessed to an embarrass d' richess. He has to choose among strongly competing alternatives, all of which will work.
One of the most important discoveries was that ground-based lasers are not only feasible, but a likely way to defend a nation. We speak here of enormous lasers; lasers built near, say, Hoover Dam, and capable of turning the enormous output of that dam into laser energy. This is combined with new techniques that unfocus the laser beam at the ground, so that the atmospheric distortions refocus the beam. The result is that the laser beam is perfectly focused when it gets above the atmosphere.
With lasers that large, and a mirror in orbit to redirect the energy, it's not necessary to "point and shoot"; you can raster the entire target area; sweep the beam in a deadly conical pattern to sterilize the whole ICBM corridor from the USSR to the U.S. For good measure these lasers can be used against submarine-launched missiles.
Finally, enormous lasers like these can launch ships from the ground. Arthur Kantrowitz invented that technique way back in the 60s; the ground-based laser provides the energy for a rapidly climbing rocket. It's almost as if the light beam pushes the ship to orbit. The result is that ships get to orbit for fuel costs alone.
There are other ways to destroy incoming ICBMs. As Professor Greg Benford said when I told him of some new breakthroughs: "Really, if you stop to think about it, if you can spend ten million bucks a shot, why is it surprising that you can shoot down a delicate little thing l
ike an ICBM? Not much has to go wrong to keep the ICBM from working. . . ."
The technology is there. It isn't simple technology, and it isn't cheap; but it has already been demonstrated. We can build enormous lasers, on the ground or in space.
Note too that if we put them on the ground they can be extremely powerful; as I said above, you can put the laser next to a dam. The "planetary defenses" beloved of the old imperial-style science fiction have just become a reality. Planet-based laser beams can reach out as far as the moon to engage and destroy armored space ships.
The technology is there. It will be built. The only real question is, who will build it? If we delay long enough, there will be imperial stars all right: but they will be red stars.
THE END
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