Coffee this Friday, October 20, at the usual time and place.
(1) The only way out is through: “The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” So said the jurist Charles Evans Hughes in a now-famous speech he gave to the American Bar Association in New York in 1917. Though Hughes, who would later become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was making a point about the President’s powers in wartime, I was reminded of the phrase when I read Marc LiVecche’s recent article for Providence:
[M]any of those calling for a proportionate response make the common mistake of apparently believing that proportionality requires Israel to only exert that degree of force that Hamas has exerted against it—or to only do that level of harm that Hamas has exacted against Israel. This is the wrong weighing. It is wrong because the criteria against which a proportionality claim is weighed is not what the enemy has done, but what you intend to do; that’s to say: the war aims. In a just war, the aim of war is, ultimately, peace. Peace, in turn, ultimately can be achieved only when the causes leading to war have been rectified: when the threatened innocent are made safe, when injustices have been righted, or when evil has been appropriately punished. Taken together, this is to say that a just war is aimed at peace through decisive victory. The enemy need to have know they’ve been licked. A war that is right to fight is right to win. The moral calculus the Israelis must make is whether war—and what actions within that war—will lead to greater goods or greater evils. This calculation will be weighed against whether not going to war—or not fighting a certain way—will lead to greater evils or greater goods.
To the aims of a just war, I would add only that deterrence—preventing recurrence—must be weighed in the balance, too. Peace, we remember, isn’t the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. So, LiVecche concludes, “the only morally and strategically responsible war aim for Israel is the destruction of Hamas’ ability to harm Israel,” which can only mean “the destruction of Hamas itself.” “It will be a terrible path to walk. But it might be that the only way out is through.”
(2) Taking the weather by storm: From war to weather—though, as this Humanities essay makes clear, our technology for predicting weather arose, as so much does, as a military project:
[Army officer Albert J. Myer] was the chief of a small and rather obscure bureau known as the Signal Corps, which had overseen communications and information systems for Union forces but was now languishing without a clear mission…. A military weather service would provide a way to keep Myer’s bureau alive…
In the summer of 1870, the first class of newly enlisted privates reported for duty at Fort Whipple, which had been repurposed as the newly established Signal School. There, soldiers underwent a basic training regimen that consisted not only of military drills and signaling practice, but intensive scientific instruction….
As the Signal Corps grew, the focus on tracking storms expanded to incorporate forecasts (which were referred to as “probabilities”). Daily weather maps and bulletins produced by the Signal Office were displayed in post offices and observer-sergeants submitted their information to local newspapers. The work … was no longer benefiting just commercial interests—ranchers and sailors and farmers—but the public at large. At least one-third of households in the United States, Myer estimated at one point, were receiving weather information from the Signal Corps in one form or another.
There’s much to commend in this piece: the role of new technology (the telegraph), crowdsourcing, how military objectives morph into civilian opportunities, and more.
Hope to see you Friday.