Financial Times

JVP and JHU are too oriental for military dynamism
By Nous
The spectre of war has risen. Businesses are quivering with fear. Yet what is more perilous for businesses - a victory or defeat for Mahinda?
Mahinda’s cohorts, the JVP and JHU have created a widespread impression that, if victorious, they are even prepared to wage a direct war to shock, defeat, destroy and annihilate Tamil terrorism for the sake of a just and honourable peace in the country.

However, according to the conventional wisdom of Western military historians, the likes of the JVP and JHU have no appetite for direct warfare that is subject to civilian audit and involving pitched battles, in which the ethic of personal honour is embedded, and where battlefield bravery is largely a matter of saving the unit or formation.

Historically, those baptised in dogmas of mysticism and irrationalism and in the allegorical and rhythmic logic of the Orient, from transcendental meditators to believers in statism and entitlement democracy, have demonstrated the potentiality, it is said, largely for wars of attrition – the “hit and run” protracted wars - asymmetrical warfare or terrorism.

The connection suggested here is not between skin colour, race or genes and war-making styles, but rather between political, ethical and intellectual orientation and military dynamism.

The following passages from John Keegan, Britain’s foremost military historian help create an impression of the East-West divide in war making:
“Oriental war-making, if we may so identify and denominate it as something different from Western warfare, is characterised by traits peculiar to itself. Foremost among them are evasion, delay and indirectness.”

Even such successful horse conquerors as Attila, Genghis and Tamerlane, “chose to fight at a distance, to withdraw when confronted with determination and to count upon wearing down an enemy to defeat rather than by overthrowing him in single test of arms.”

Moreover, in civilisations of Asia, war making was also circumscribed by fear of change and novelty which the exposure to warfare with alien cultures might introduce. In China, the Confucian ideal of continuity and maintenance of institutions led the Chinese to organise the military life to “preserve cultural forms rather than serve imperatives of foreign conquest or internal revolution.”
Thus, Sun Tzu in his “Art of War” could write, “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.”

In contrast to the Oriental preference for indirectness, deception and manipulation, the idea of decisive battle, the practice of face-to-face battle to death began to emerge in the early eighth centaury B.C. Greece. This marks the true beginning of Western warfare, according to the American classicist and historian of war in antiquity, Victor Davis Hanson.

Hanson writes that at its birth, it was a case of small property-owning citizen-soldiers seeking “their enemy face-to-face, in a daylight collision of armies, without ruse or ambush, with the clear intent to destroy utterly the army across the plain or die honourably in the process.” The origins of the idea of decisive battle are also traced to the unequivocal results of athletic competitions of Greek Olympics.

However, Hanson points out, “Only freemen who voted and enjoyed liberty were willing to endure such terrific infantry collisions, since shock alone proved an economical method of battle that allowed conflicts to be brief, clear-cut – and occasionally deadly.”

The most obvious aspect of Western military dynamism is its technological superiority. History of gunpowder is instructive here. Though invented in China, every major development in firearms took place in the West, not because the Chinese were stupid, but because, out of fear of instability, the imperial despotism prevented the masses from experimenting with it.
There are no taboos in the West to prevent the marriage of the experimental temper of its heritage for natural inquiry with capitalism even in matters of weaponry.

Military dynamism, in a word, appears to be rooted in the sense of self, inviolability of property, ethic of personal honour, consensual government, capitalism, and propensity for natural inquiry.

Now both the JVP and JHU would have to recast their basic dogmas, if they want to embrace the whole nine yards of military dynamism. However, let us assume the possibility of such a radical recast. Thus let the JHU admit that the sense of self, the feeling of a personality is real and not an illusion; and let the JVP admit at least grudgingly that each must have his own to express the feeling of a personality; but there would still be the issue of the ethic of personal honour. After all, we are seen to be a nation living by an ethic of expediency rather than of honour when even a product of such privileged circumstances as President Kumaratunga could betray her own party in the dying days of her vain and futile political career – a career untouched by transformational politics.

The strife between the better and the worse is eternal. The world has not reached the end of history in its evolution toward societies where liberty is sanctified and thinking is naturalistic to make war obsolete. However, the war making style that comes naturally and is philosophically a second nature for both the JVP and JHU is fourth-dimensional warfare or terrorism. Businesses, whose devotion to the better is steadfast, need to discover when to abandon pacifism.

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