Quote:
Originally posted by NousDefionsDoc
I don't consider the FFL as French. They are expendable to the French government and always have been. I doubt French policy makers count their casualties as "real".
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Airbornelawyer
You are also completely wrong about the Legion. It is an integrated part of the French Army... . The French armed forces are all-volunteer now. Sending Legionnaires off to foreign lands while French conscripts are undeployable is a thing of the past.
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Airbornelawyer
In Afghanistan, both ISAF and the CJTF have a lot of countries represented, but maybe a dozen have played a combat role. And only Canada, Britain, Italy and Romania have deployed conventional ground combat forces. The others have been SOF and close air support.
|
I was thinking about the countries that sent SOF to the CJSOTF, especially TF K-Bar (UK, Denmark, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Poland), as well as the general attitude toward soldiers generally, and SOF in particular, among policy makers, and it occurred to me that there is another way of looking at this. One the main reasons why many French opposed ending conscription in the 1990s (shared by opponents to ending the draft in the US), was the de-linking of the soldier from the people, which they saw as a return to the mercenary armies of the
ancien regime. France under Napoleon created the modern (until recently) concept of the citizen army. As the chorus of
La Marseillaise says:
Aux armes citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
breuve nos sillons.
To arms, citizens!
Form up your battalions
Let us march, Let us march!
That their impure blood
Should water our fields.
Nowadays, the situation may be not that the Legion is just like the rest of the French army, but that the rest of the French army is treated like the Legion - "expendable" as you noted, a tool of the policy makers.
You often see the same attitude here. There was a preference for volunteer regiments over state militias in the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. And the Marine Corps was used as America's Legion in interventions all over the world. Smedley Butler, the most highly decorated American fighting man of all time, turned raging leftist because he perceived the Corps being turned into an adjunct of American corporations.
Remember then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright's remark to then CJCS GEN Colin Powell when he resisted sending US troops to the former Yugoslavia? "What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can't use it?" In a recent Washington Post
op-ed, liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, who never served in the military, stated "A volunteer army could become a mercenary force operating at the president's whim." (to be fair, he also states that "a draft army, always at the ready, also encourages imperial whimsy."). And then there's Stan Goff, who we know did serve in the military and who wants to be the Smedley Butler of today, who wrote a recent
article called:
The Mercenary Variable - Outsourced Combat in Iraq. What Really Happened in Fallujah. Will Mercenaries Help Uncle Sam Beat a Draft?.
In a way, our search for allies, our emphasis on SOF, and our use of PMCs are all part of the same paradigm: a way to get more military manpower without domestic political accountability.
Germany sent the professionals of the KSK* into combat in Afghanistan, but its conscripts aren't going anywhere but on peacekeeping missions any time soon (and then only if they volunteer). And it's nice to talk about "New Europe" vs. "Old Europe," and a "coalition of the willing," but to a great extent, the Romanians, Bulgarians, Mongolians, Hondurans, Tongans and many others are in Iraq and Afghanistan less because of their commitment to the war against militant Islamist terrorists and more out of a desire to get in the US' good graces. Most are not as directly affected by this particular terrorist threat, and as we saw with Spain, when they do perceive a domestic cost, they bail out.
__________
* The Bundeswehr refers to the KSK operator as
der stille Profi, "the quiet pro"; but Profi is also slang for prostitute.
Linear Mode
