An Army of One

Guest Essay

When I tweeted out Yarvins essay “Monarchism and Fascism Today” my mutual @nathanielF_105D made a series of very compelling comments in reference to the article. So compelling, in fact, that I asked him to write a guest essay. If you’ve read the Yarvin article and you wonder why he says Fascism of the 20-40’s is not going to happen

today, this essay may shed quite a bit of light on it. And if you haven’t read Yarvins essay, do so!

AN ARMY OF ONE

Recently, that political Nostradamus Mencius Moldbug (who some people inexplicably call “Curtis Yarvin”) published a speech he had given on the relationship between fascism and the political situation in the United States, today. For my part, I’d like to expand on a few things he mentions in it.

Fascism - true fascism as it was, not the propaganda term - was a direct consequence of the crescendo of mass warfare that began in the 19th Century. Whole societies mobilized to fight wars of grand scale, culminating in the Great War, in which both Hitler and Mussolini fought. That the First World War was the defining experience of the leaders of the world by the 1930s is not controversial. What may be less well understood is how the structure of the armies of the Great War era influenced the politics of the 1930s and 1940s.

At the time of the outbreak of war, the infantry company - a unit of about 200 men - was accepted as the basic unit of maneuver of most armies in the world, including the Imperial Germans. Below the level of the company, an army had no independent command structure; in other words, this was as “fine” as the command ability of the army got. 200 men could be easily given orders to move somewhere or assault a position, but special arrangements would have to be made to give orders to 10 men.

The surviving veterans of these vast armies shaped postwar political fascism as much as fascism tempered and focused them. Soldiers, now voters, were already groomed to accept being organized in huge numbers around a single charismatic leader, and to follow him unfailingly. This - the political reality of the 1920s - forms the bedrock of ascendant fascism. Fascism is then, effectively, the total mobilization of these military organizational structures for political purposes. These structures were a remarkable innovation in collectivization that was uniquely suited to democratic politics.

That experience shaped those political movements down to Hitler’s famous toothbrush mustache. In the early part of the war, Hitler, like many Germans, wore a Kaiser Bill mustache, but the advent of gas masks which sealed against the face (not unlike a certain other kind of mask) prompted him and many others to clip it short. After the Armistice, Hitler not only kept the cropped cut, but exaggerated it into its recognizable form, which until that time was associated primarily with comedians.

11 million German men fought in WWI, almost 20 percent of the country's population, and nearly half of the male population of the country. This would be a powerful demographic in any country with electoral politics. It’s no surprise, then, that Hitler wore that “comedic” mustache, to say to those men: "Look at me, I am one of you. I still remember the gas."

Our United States, a century later, has experienced neither any such war nor any such extreme mobilization of the kind where self is sublimated so extensively to the whole. Our last veteran of that Great War, in which we played only a small and brief part, died a decade before this paragraph was written. The wars of our time are very different beasts. The so-called “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), named as such to echo a war it doesn’t resemble in the least, was a colonial war, much more akin to the expansions of Rome. America’s soldiers, who fought in that war, number a relatively scant 1.8 million - less than 1 percent of the population. 

Nor were these 1.8 million organized in the same way. By the end of the Second World War, the squad -  a mere 12 men, normally - had become the standard unit of maneuver. By the time of the GWOT, the US Army had long since adopted the “fireteam” concept, 4 man maneuver units. By the 2010s, the military had become enamored with the idea of moving all its units closer to special forces in training and doctrine, effectively “Rangerizing” the Army. As part of this, the “buddy pair” or “battle pair” was introduced, so battlefield maneuvers now could be conducted organically by as few as two men. 

This miniaturization proceeded apace during this period, with the introduction of the “Brigade Combat Team” (BCTs), a unit of 4,413 men in three battalions with integral supporting assets like divisional artillery, which the Army explicitly describes as “a division in miniature”. The BCT has been the fundamental structural unit of the US Army since the mid-2000s.

The US Army, unlike the militaries of the Great War, mobilizes men in a dissimilar departmental structure, more similar to corporate structures where each employee has his specific role, than the homogeneous mass conscript armies marching over Europe a century ago. Fascism depends fundamentally on the democratization of the military force structure. The US has a military, but not a large one (proportionally), and not one that's organized anything like the militaries of Europe in 1913. What we have, instead, is a force that seems to rely on the assumption of heroic individual character.

If the most famous US Army slogan is “Be All You Can Be”, then the most infamous slogan must be the one that replaced it, “An Army of One”. In 2017, I wrote (in a completely different context than this):

    “In January of 2001, the US Army introduced a new slogan to replace the classic “Be All You Can Be” which young men had recruited under for over two decades. The branch’s new slogan was “An Army of One”, signaling a brand new take on a force that wanted desperately to reinvent itself. Those behind the slogan sought to re-humanize the Army, atomize it, bring it down to its individual components, i.e., the people who filled its ranks. It would be, they hoped, the slogan of a new Army that through the strength of its individuals helped make the world a better place. Over the next 5 years, however, it became the slogan under which men and women all over the world would sign up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror.

“The slogan communicated the complete antithesis of everything an army should be. Armies are not about individuals in isolation, but about teams of people working together towards a single aim. They are not about making people feel special, but about winning wars. “An Army of One” branded the Army as a force, not of disciplined units working in concert, but of heroic individuals fighting alone. As a reflection of what the Army should be, “An Army of One” was a complete failure. It was quietly retired after just five years in 2006, replaced with the current “Army Strong”.”

This slogan best illuminates the general pattern of US military organization and theory since the end of the Cold War. Today, soldiers are given 30 pounds of ceramic body armor which protects them better than the sheet steel on a WWII-era Japanese tank. In their behavior, they are expected to be exemplars; teenagers drafted through the carrot of incentives and the stick of poverty into a role where, to their superiors, nothing less than Captain America will do. During the GWOT, regular troops were turned into virtual MPs, tasked with policing entire cities when their Iraqi and Afghan allies couldn’t, or wouldn’t. They were denied fire support (famously, at the height of the RoE strictness during Afghanistan, it required a General’s sign off to call in so much as a mortar round), and denied the authority to shoot back, if their attacker so much as entered a house. They were expected - teenagers with basic carbines and nothing more - to engage emplaced machine gun ambushes at distances of half a kilometer or more. Hazing, a practice thousands of years old, went away, unbecoming as it was of these newly minted Avengers. When they came home, endless rape prevention and sensitivity courses, just in case their souls weren’t scrubbed completely clean yet.

It might be confusing to say that the US military promotes “heroes”, because as Lippincott tells us, the military is woke and broke (and it is). However, comparing the military’s - and especially its veterans’ - relationship to the American political landscape, there is no obvious pot of what we’d recognize as fascism brewing there. The men of the American warrior-caste are neither numerous politically, nor are they inheritors of a mass organizational structure. In fact, it seems almost the opposite is true. After all, “An Army of One”, that’s some Bronze Age shit, don't you think