382 Chapter Ten
Europe and the USSR is sufficiently delicate to require very careful
management. But the problem does not threaten the existing political
order. Neither does the divergence between the interests of the
military-technical elite and the rest of society, however real the com
petition for resources may be. For half a century, military-industrial
elites have nearly always prevailed over domestic rivals without much
difficulty. Time and again fear of the foreign foe persuaded the politi
cal managers and the population at large to acquiesce in new efforts to
match and overtake the other side’s armament. The escalating arms
race, in turn, helped to maintain conformity and obedience at home,
since an evident outside threat was, as always, the most powerful social
cement known to humankind.
Yet how far such shadow boxing can go is problematical. Atomic
warheads changed the rules; and the absurdity of devoting enormous
resources to the creation of weapons no one dares to use is obvious to
all concerned. This means that the vast armed establishments cur
rently protecting the NATO and Warsaw Pact powers against one
another are liable to catastrophe not merely from the external attack
they are designed to survive but also from internal decay. Such decay
is facilitated by the way in which long-standing notions of heroism and
the military calling meet with frustration in technically up-to-date ar
mies and navies. Push-button war is the antithesis of muscular prow
ess; and the niggling routine of bureaucratic record-keeping is no
less at odds with naive but heartfelt feelings about what fighting men
should be and do. Such tensions are as old as the bureaucratization and
industrialization of war; but the dawn of the rocket age, with its over
whelming preponderance of action at a distance, from which the mus
cular and merely human input has almost drained away, constitutes a
mutation of the art of war with which soldiers’ psychology does not
easily keep up.^20
All the same, short of defeat in war, drastic demoralization of mili
tary personnel is perhaps unlikely. Traditional methods for inculcating
and sustaining military discipline remain very effective. Close order
drill has lost none of its capacity to arouse elemental sociality among
those who participate in it hour after hour. Its utter irrelevance in
modern combat may not matter. Other rituals and routines, too, may
arise and exert self-perpetuating power to channel and stabilize be
havior both within the armed services and in civil society at large.
- For remarks about the conflict between heroic and technocratic roles see Jacques
van Doom, ed., Military Profession and Military Regimes: Commitments and Conflicts (The
Hague, 1969).
