Might Cut Down on Foreign Wars

John Not-Edwards flags this from CNN:

Troops pay baggage fees on way to war zones:

(CNN) -- Some airlines are charging U.S. soldiers extra baggage fees to take their military kits with them as they set off for war.

Some U.S. airlines give military personnel a break on baggage fees, but others levy surcharges.

Military personnel carry large, heavy kit bags containing boots, clothing and gear. In the past few months, airlines have instituted fees for all travelers ranging from $15 for one bag to $250 for a third. ...

CNN treats this as a slander on the airlines, but isn't there a bit of command responsibility here?

John mutters "only in America," but I don't know--I can easily imagine the Russians insisting that their soldiers pay their own freight to Georgia.

They Hate Us for our Freedom

You knew this already, but here is a good summary:

According to a 2005 report … the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial countries, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate emp[loyers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and correction at all levels of government, a fourefold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century. . . .

Source: that’s Glen Loury, here, as quoted in Timothy Taylor, Recommendations for Further Reading, 21 Journal of Economic Perspectives No. 4, 229, 230 (Fall 2007). Couple that with Jon Markman’s estimate that the share of our work force in the, ahem, “security industry” is 25 percent. Wonder how to analyze this in terms of the fact that the U.S. also accounts for 48 percent of all world military spending…

How Could It Be Otherwise?

So they’re selling their stories, and the Brits are peeved, although perhaps not as peeved as yesterday (link—Kevin Drum offers a wry spin here). Let me offer two “on the one hands, one "ironic footnote," one “on the other hand” and an afterthought--

First: these are volunteers, not so? And isn’t this a core problem with a volunteer army? For at least the last couple of hundred years, we have tried to build our armies on models of national pride and some sort of communal loyalty. A volunteer army says (no matter how hard it tries to say otherwise)—at the end of the day it is all about money. We’ll pay you more than you’re getting at home (and if you are lucky, maybe you get out and go to Blackwater). Meanwhile at home, we make much of the fact that there’s no “shared sense of sacrifice” in this war, aside from “support the troops” tee-shirts. But given the framework, how can we expect “sacrifice” on either side?

[Ironic Footnote: It is interesting that while the military moves towards a cash nexus, some of the most successful “private” corporations are those that can build a team spirit, a sense of group loyalty—“balance sheet patriotism,”you might say.]

Second: But it is not just state v. market—states in their own right are in absolute decline. There is hardly a corner of the world where national identity is as strong now as it was 50 years ago. We meet dual nationals, transnational domestic alliances, Chinese restaurants in Manitoba, Black African priests in Ireland. State v. market is one framing narrative. We could just as well speak of state v. warlord, state v. patriarch or state v. (though oddly, this one has more sinister overtones)—state v. “cosmopolitanism.”

But, But, But, But, But: I risk letting myself be misunderstood here. The casual reader could be forgiven for inferring that this is just one more lament for a lost sense of community (“Young folks nowadays…”). It is and it isn’t. Go back 50 years or so to the apogee of the nation-state, and you will recall that it wasn’t such a pretty picture. For bullying arrogance and mind-numbing conformity, there is nothing like national unity. This sense of community may be hard to do without, but it wasn’t much to live with, either.

And an Afterthought: In the end, I wonder how many of the critics are just annoyed that the kids aren’t sharing the wealth.