March 21, 2003

The President Calling Families?

I was just sitting here at work trying to get through some paperwork and I heard something that really is emblematic of how war has changed for us.

During WWII, we had hundreds of secretaries typing thousands of letters of condolences for the families of US servicemen that were killed in battle.

I am listening to my local AM news station, 580 WDBO in Orlando, and Jim Phillips was talking with someone (I wasn’t listening close enough to know who he was talking with) and they started talking about the helicopter that went down in Kuwait yesterday. I believe it was Jim’s interviewee that mentioned that the President was in process of communicating with each of the families who lost someone in the crash.

Think about that change for a second. We have gone from hundreds and thousands of impersonal form letters each day to there being so few casualties that the President himself is able to call each family. In fifty years we have managed to change the way that casualties are viewed; they have gone from a given number per day to a very few which allows the President to put a face to the consequences of his decision.

We have always been reluctant warriors. This change in the way casualties are viewed, will make this President and future ones, think even more before sending our men into battle. He can no longer escape from the ramifications of his decision by looking at numbers. He now will have to look at faces. He will now have to read the files before making the most difficult and painful call that the soldier’s family will ever receive. In the end, he will know the men who died because of his decision.

And this is good. Seeing the people who made the ultimate sacrifice because of a Presidential order will help to ensure that we only go into battle for things that are truly important. I’m glad to hear that the President is making the calls. It is an indication that he believes in the importance of this war. It also tells me that he is going to make sure that everything possible is done to minimize casualties. Let’s hope that there is no more need to put another file on his desk.

Posted by Chris at March 21, 2003 10:03 AM | TrackBack | Linked by:
Comments

Very well said indeed

Posted by: Rebecca at March 21, 2003 08:46 PM

well, yes, and no.

I don't know that past Presidents took the lives of American youth unseriously. Maybe yes, but probably no, I think.

And yes, we should carefully weigh the long term human cost of each and every military decision we make. BUT.

A problem in this era is that our enemies out there, and yes we have lots of them, see our consciousness of casualties as a weakness, not a strength, and that makes our enemies bolder and more eager to put enough casualties on us to make us quit. THAT is a notion that somewhere, sometime we need to disabuse them of - I don't know how, but it's a real, real big issue.

It was in fact an Al-Q'aida strategy in Somalia to "bleed the US" that led to the Black Hawk down fiasco, and the strategy worked. And that took less than 50 casualties. And part of our weakness in Somalia directly led to 3,000 casualties on September 11th. So, it's hard to know what to do or how to do it, even when the lives at stake are the primary consideration. The American flight from Somalia was, in retrospect, one of the worst decisions ever made by an American President.

I saw an interview with a veteran Afghani fighter in the middle of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban. That Afghani was asked (a guy on our side, by the way), who are the better fighters, Americans or Russians, and he said, "of course, the Russians. They take casualties and just keep coming. Americans are scared."

Now, I think the outcome of our effort stands in stark contrast (so far) to the Russian experience in Afghanistan, but still - the notion of American attitudes towards casualties globally is approaching the point where it's ironically possibly leading to more casualties. That's all.

Posted by: Anarchus at March 21, 2003 09:43 PM


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