The Warlords

by CKR

I haven’t read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror for some time now, but as I recall, it was about the breakdown of Europe in the fourteenth century. Oh yes: the Black Death. The plague took them down. That was where Tuchman said she started from. But she found that it’s more complicated than that. I probably should read the book again; it’s been years, and I’ll take full responsibility for this post, not blame it on Tuchman.

A Distant Mirror and a number of other books I read about twenty years ago helped to form big chunks of my historical thinking. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries have a lot to teach us. Tuchman must have had something in mind when she selected that title, although I’ll argue that the important parallels came earlier. That period is always there in my mind, one thread of a continuo underlying my thinking.

I’ve been cogitating on the concept of “warlord” over the past week or so. ZenPundit startled me with a post on warlords yesterday morning. Mark ponders what the study of the psychology of warlords would tell us, and enumerates some of the more famous. None of them are Americans.

Well, of course not. We don’t have warlords in America, except for maybe in the gangs of Los Angeles and New York, and they are kept safely away from national politics and the eyes of the mainstream media most of the time.

Warlords, warlords. Literature written a century or so before Tuchman’s distant mirror dealt with the integration of fighters into peaceful society. England had been through a bloody civil war of succession, and its polity was not completely separated from France’s. But as the twelfth century wore on, peace settled in under the Angevins in England and under a weak king and strong barons (warlords?) in France. Eleanor of Acquitaine married Henry of England after giving up on Louis of France, although that marriage gave her an interesting trip to the Holy Land and two daughters.

During that peace, daughter Marie of Champagne was able to indulge her love of stories, and her writer, Chrétien, sang about knights and fair ladies who were loosely connected to a king by the name of Arthur. In England, Arthur had been depicted as a nationalist king who might have had something to do with the Angevins, but Chrétien wrote about the lives of the knights. Much of what he wrote involved the difficulties of being, as we might say today, both a fighter and a lover. Taking a bath to wash off the rust from the armor was the first step towards presentability to the ladies in court.

It’s been a problem for a long time, perhaps as long as we’ve been human. Perhaps even chimpanzees suffer from it. We seem to get ourselves into wars, so we need tough guys, but they can wreak a lot of havoc, on themselves and on others, if they carry the habits that serve them so well in war back into society.

Nations were weak at that time; the barons/warlords raised their own armies and challenged the king as they felt necessary. Even the church had its worldly and otherworldly privileges to defend; Henry had that little problem with Archbishop Becket, which he solved as any good warlord would and gave us a useful quotation. Eleanor and Henry’s son John was so abysmal at the king business that the barons sat him down at Runnymede with a list of demands. Son Richard may well have been gay, but he was pretty good at the warlord business until he met that Kurd, Saladin.

Much later, much, much later, Max Weber proposed that one of the distinguishing marks of a government is a monopoly on the use of force. Looking back at the twelfth century and the disasters that Tuchman wrote about, it’s easy to see why we would come to this belief. Letting folks raise private armies seems like a poor idea; you have no guarantee that they will agree with the government on how those armies should be used. Ask Pervez Musharraf.

Do we have warlords in America? We’ve all seen or read The Godfather and “The Sopranos,” so we know that we do, but they’re hidden, so the government officially has a monopoly on the use of force, most of the time. Mafia deaths and wars have little to do with any of our lives, although it might not be surprising if Tony started a blog.

Or do we have warlords in America? As Chrétien and other writers of the twelfth century observed, it’s hard to integrate back into society after you’ve been slaying infidels. You can wash the rust off, but slicing someone with a sword stays with you, for better or worse. Or clearing the area with an M-16. Or standing around looking cool with that gun slung across your arm, sunglasses wrapped around your face, Kevlar vest , t-shirt rolled up to show the chiseled biceps. Or acquiring information in whatever way.

Lerner and Lowe captured it:
Ah, but to burn a little town or slay a dozen men
Anything to laugh again…

What happens if a modern American doesn’t want to wash the rust off? Well, once upon a time, he (and it’s usually he) stayed in the military. But he doesn’t have do to that any more. Spies, muscle, trainers, medics, you name it. The contractors pay better. No life insurance, medical benefits, none of that stuff, but hey! You can pay for it out of that big salary, or maybe you’ve got it already from your stint in the military, right?

Eric Prince has his private army, Blackwater: intelligence, training, muscle, you name it. And he wants to expand. DynCorp has Herb Lanese and Anthony Zinni. Like the gangs and the Mafia, they keep pretty well hidden, but Prince was smoked when his guys got a little too frisky.

Ah, but to spend a tortured evening staring at the floor
Guilty and alive once more

They got caught this time, and the big guy had to sweat. He’s got good advisors, though, and his sound bites seem to have worked. He didn’t even look like he was sweating. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

There's not a folly to deplore
Derry down, derry down
Confession Sunday is a bore
Derry down, derry down

We could add in all those Northrup Grumman signs I kept seeing around Washington. As one of their employees told me, “We are the Borg!” Heck, there’s even one in Albuquerque. They’ve got the private, patented, confidential designs for the missiles and airplanes and vehicles, the strategies and defenses, feints and dodges, attack formations.

Or the now privately-run nuclear weapons design labs.

All those folks, of course, are working for the government. That’s where they get their money and their trained people. So they wouldn’t turn on the government, would they?

I guess you could ask King John. Although the agreement those barons came up with has lasted down to today, or as much as we can expect in a time of fear. Are the interests of DynCorp or the Los Alamos National Security LLC fully coincident with those of the nation or of peace in the world? I guess we could ask A. Q. Khan, if the Pakistani government would let us.

One of the questions I’ve got is why President Unitary Executive is handing out military force, that mark of a national government. It may be the domestic equivalent of getting out of all those treaties. We know that we’re the biggest, strongest nation, so a Hobbesian struggle for domination should benefit us. Likewise, President Unitary Executive is the biggest, meanest guy in the bar, so the rest of us can just get out of the way.

One of the ways that nations tried to tame the warlords in that difficult time from about 1236 through, oh say, the sixteenth century was to unite the baronies through marriage. That didn’t always work well; Henry wound up jailing Eleanor. But after they got the hang of it, it worked better. By the nineteenth century, most of the European royalty were cousins. The downside of that particular arrangement was the familial hemophilia gene that Alexei, the last tsarevich, suffered from. His mother’s desperation over it allowed Rasputin into power, and it all came to no good end. All those cousins didn’t shirk from fighting each other in World War I, either. That old problem again.

So will we see the DynCorp and Blackwater dynasties trading marriageable young people? The Bush family doesn’t have the hang of it yet. Jenna is marrying a Republican political operative. But maybe there’s a job for him somewhere in one of those firms.

Or maybe the Bushes and Clintons don’t need that sort of thing yet. We should look for it in the later generations.

Comments

[zenpundit]

Hi Cheryl,

Thanks for the link!

Agree on the 12th-16th century being a period to examine - it was the European version of China's warring states period, complete with England's "bastard feudalism" and the continent's marauding "free companies" and condotterie.

"Well, of course not. We don’t have warlords in America, except for maybe in the gangs of Los Angeles and New York, and they are kept safely away from national politics and the eyes of the mainstream media most of the time."

Most of the Americans who could qualify as "warlords" lived in the 18th and especially the 19th century - Filibusteros, pirates, Border Ruffians, Range warriors, "The Swamp Fox",Indian chiefs, William Walker, Nathan Bedford Forrest - the end of American private & semi-private warfare came with the closing of the Frontier. Teddy Roosevelt could still form "The Rough Riders" in 1898 but no private citizen could do so in 1918.

"Eric Prince has his private army, Blackwater: intelligence, training, muscle, you name it. And he wants to expand. DynCorp has Herb Lanese and Anthony Zinni. Like the gangs and the Mafia, they keep pretty well hidden, but Prince was smoked when his guys got a little too frisky."

Prince ain't a warlord. Blackwater isn't able to function as a " free company" in the international arena (nor, should they be permitted to do so) and their lucrative business model as a privatized apparat of the USG would instantly collapse if they tried. Of the modern PMCs, only the defunct South African Executive Outcomes had true freedom of action and that but for a brief time.

Of course, what we may see someday is is a top notch PMC that does not enjoy the cozy special relationship to major power governments that Blackwater and CACI posses, relocating to a weak state that can be counted on to pass the military equivalent to bank secrecy laws. They would still need to tread lightly around great power interests though.

[CKR]

Of course Prince is a warlord: his own private army, intelligence, all the necessities. So far, the rules nominally are that he has to work for the US Government, but he has said that he has great ambitions: clearing things up in Darfur, making his, er, training services available worldwide.

It was "trainers" that we first sent to Vietnam, and "trainers" in Central America. Even now, we're "training" the Iraqi army.

We see the mission creep of the Department of Defense, which is funded more generously than the State Department, so it appears more effective, so it is funded even more. Why should the private armies be any less susceptible to mission creep, especially when their management contributes to the right political parties.

Eric Prince (and others) have what it takes to be warlords: ambition, love of war, money and armies. The danger in removing the government monopoly on force is that you don't know when the holders of that force will decide that sticking with the government is no longer in their interests.

Ask King John.

[James]

I would argue that a territorial base is necessary to qualify for true warlord status: a place where the warlord's men feel relatively safe and among a friendly, or at least obedient, population. In that sense the Mafia dons really couldn't really be called warlords since the 1970s, when white flight broke up the ethnic Italian urban enclaves that sheltered them.

The Hispanic drug gangs, especially the enormous "transnational" gangs, are more like the private armies of the 14th century. They operate from shanty towns and urban zones across the Western Hemisphere, screened and supported by civilians whose distrust for the government makes them turn to the gangs for protection. Some of the larger ones may have as many as a hundred thousand members scattered in cities from California to Brazil.

If Prince lost the support of the US government his operation would fold pretty quickly. This is what happened to "Executive Outcomes," after all. I think it's important to distinguish between the "warlord" and the "condottieri." The true warlord has translated his military might into political power that enables him to build on his gains. When a successful mercenary is given a territory that frees him from his dependency on a patron, then he may be elevated to warlord status. In this sense, perhaps Prince's ambitions in Darfur indicate his true desires and, of course, the risk in allowing these private armies to be formed in the first place.

[CKR]

Nice one, James!

Mark implied the requirement for territory. I'll have to agree that that is part of warlord status.

And I was being a bit flip (doesn't always get through on the internet, I know) about of course Prince (nice name, no?) is a warlord.

He's not a warlord...yet. I would feel much better for this sort of force to remain a government monopoly.

[zenpundit]

James is correct about independence being a prerequisite for warlordship. Without it, you are merely a mercenary or, at best, a satrap. A warlord by contrast, is beyond all law except the law of the jungle.

When Chang Tso-Lin ruled Manchuria he was a warlord in the truest sense ( I think his armies topped 300,000 men). When his son ( "the young marshal") was deposed by Japan's Kwangting Army, and became a Kuomintang governor of a nearby province, he lost that critical independence, despite having a large body of armed men. Chiang later placed him under house arrest, where he stayed for much of the 20th century.