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Tough nuts
I have been recently reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead for the second time. It is a very good book. I enjoy it for the overview it gives of war and for its sharp description of the different characters. Yesterday one passage got me thinking:
“We have the highest standard of living in the world and, as one would expect, the worst individual fighting soldiers of any big power. Or at least in their natural state they are. They’re comparatively wealthy, they’re spoiled, and as Americans they share most of them the peculiar manifestation of our democracy. They have an exaggerated idea of the rights due themselves as individuals and no idea at all of the rights due others. It’s the reverse of the peasant, and I’ll tell you right now it’s the peasant who makes the soldier.”
The book is about the Second World War and was written in the 1940s. When considering the United States’ standard of living now, can you imagine how bad its individual fighting soldiers are? We can count ourselves lucky if China turns out not to be a predatory power because with the tough nuts in its military, we’ll never be able to get them out if they launch an invasion. The book also mentions that soldiers fight marginally better on home soil, but I reckon the West would struggle to form a decent military to combat China’s thousands of soldiers. Besides, the United States is too busy picking on the weakest countries in the world to bother with China.
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Posted: 5:47 PM, 30/10/2008 in ChinaShare on Facebook |
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I should point out, that there is far more to the fighting effectiveness of a soldier then what the paragraph alludes too.
To date, the Chinese army remains untested. I suspect that the US will learn a significant amount from the experiences in Iraq (Vietnam taught a lot - and many of the principles that came out of the conflict were ignored in Iraq).
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Posted by Anonymous at 2:14 PM, 1/11/2008 |
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