Asymmetrical Information

Megan,

that's Pournelle's response to Eric's first post on the issue:

Jerry Pournelle

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Hi, I jumped to your page from Ravi's blog (http://ravikiran.com/).

Ethics and military? Can they be put together - except in fiction? I guess not. I think its hard to mix both in reality.

Nice blog :)

Is Teshu for real? For many people, true thinking about ethics doesn't begin until you are in the military. That was certainly the case for everyone I knew who found themselves in teh military because they were drafted or joined because of the pressure from the draft.

Being in the military forces you to come to grips with the realities that civilians can, and too often do, afford to ignore. All sorts of ethical questions arise: (1) Is it ethical for a country to draft its people for a war that not everyone supports? (2) Is it ethical to impose your country's will on other countries through the use of force? (3) Is it ethical to have Rules of Engagement that hamstring your ability to accomplish your mission and increase the threat toyour life? (4) Is it ethical to belong to a military organization where it is possible that you might have to kill someone? (5) Is it ethical to belong to the military when you know that you have deep-seated reservations about inflicting lethal force on other human beings? Is it ethical not to train your military to have the best chance at personal survival? Is it ethical not to speak out against (or to speak out; this question applies to both sides) your country's foreign policy when there is no apparent national security interest in a particular war or conflict?

And there are many, many more ethical questions that the vast majority of military people think about at one time or another. What do you think we are (were), unthinking morons who blindly followed the orders of those of higher rank? Although the Soviet military was run along those lines, the American military wasn't. And isn't.

(Side note: I enlisted to avoid the draft in 1968. Became an officer a little over a year later. Spent 11 years on active duty and 17 in the reserves. Retired from the Marine Reserves after 28 years service. My son is a USNA graduate and now a Captain in the Marine Corps.)

As much as I respect ESR, I don't think he read
either Drake's stories about "Hammer's Slammers"
or Pournelle's stories about Falkenberg's Legion
very carefully, or if he did he didn't read the
forewords/afterwords to the stories and the
collections they're found in. Pournelle's
dismissal of ESR's essay as "no better than most
off-the-cuff ramblings" is spot on - I've been
hearing this kind of drivel from equally ill-
informed people since 1976 when "Under the Hammer"
first came out and people started complaining
about "the pornography of violence" that Drake was
allegedly perpetrating.

I recently finished the compilation of Faulkenburgs Legions, which was my first exposure to those stories. I am generally well read with respect to Pournelle, although I don't claim to have read all his stuff. Of course, there isn't a one of the master's (RAH) works that I haven't read more than 2-10 times. I've also read all of Bujold's books more than once.

That being said, Eric Raymond doesn't truly understand what "military" means, and especially what "military science fiction" is. Bujold is not military science fiction. Only one of Heinlein's is (Starship Troopers). Most of Pournelle's work is not military science fiction, and I would argue that Faulkenburg's Legions is not military sci-fi. What it is is mercenary sci-fi, not military sci-fi. David Weber's Honor Harrington series is military sci-fi. Some of David Drake's stuff is military, while the Hammers Slammers series is mercenary. So, for Eric Raymond to compare Faulkenburg's Legion with Heinlein is like comparing apples to oranges.

What probably complicates life for people such as Eric Raymond is that mercenaries usually start out as military, because otherwise the requisite training is really hard to come by. But the mindset of the two organizations is entirely different, as anyone who understands the military who reads Pournelle or Drake instantly sees in the pages of their works. That means that these two authors understand the difference, or they wouldn't be able to have their characters understand the differences.

An example with Pournelle is the code under which one mercenary unit can surrender to another, which is used to preserve the mercenary force when the situation becomes hopeless. Although this happens sometimes with military units, generally speaking military units are more likely to fight to the last man. What makes Pournelle's and Drake's novels interesting is when they explore the overlap between the mercenary mindset and the military mindset. It is not easy to fight nobly when you are a mercenary, but sometimes they (their characters) manage it.

Sorry, gotta go. I think I've gotten my main points across.

I never followed a link to his blog before, and, based on his prejudice and certitude, I feel no need to hurry back there.

How can you claim to have covered the field without mentioning David Weber, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, and the writers to whom they owe debts, such as C.S. Forrester?

As I posted in a comment to that essay, ESR totally missed the point of the Falkenberg/CoDominium series. It is a cautionary tale of what can happen in the transition to empire, of government power unchecked. The CD government is evil, in thrall to a small elite of autocrats that make the EU look like the US Founding Fathers. All scientific and engineering progress is controlled, free speech/free press are things of the past, cross a bureaucrat and you get deported to a remote colony.

When the series was started, the idea of "detente" was in vogue in US policy, and cutting deals with the USSR to bind them to us was being done. Pournelle extrapolated this into the CoDominium, a web of treaties that evolved into a world government dedicated to keeping the US and USSR (and their strategic/commercial interests) on top.

On his blog, JP laments the growth in government and looks back fondly on a time in which the local sherrif's election was more important to daily life than the presidential one. He fears we are on the way to becoming subjects of an Empire, rather than citizens of a Republic.

BTW, best wishes to our esteemed blogger in her new job. Foggy Bottom better fasten their seat belts.

ESR's ability to completely miss the point of Drakes books is quite sad; I'd thought better of him than that. Anyone who could read any of the Hammers Slammers books and think they GLORIFY war and violence either didn't read them, read them through some blindingly thick preconcieved prejudices, or is really quite sick (the moral messages contained in the Hammers series is quite strong). My guess is ESR falls somewhere between categories 1 and 2.

I also agree with earlier comments that he miscatagorized the authors he mentioned, and missed some of the best or most important examples. Perhaps even he couldn't miss the moral component of Orson Scott Card or John Ringo? Or more likely, he mentioned all the authors of the genre he was familar with.

For anyone who is truly familiar with science fiction, it's pretty clear that Eric Raymond is NOT. He's a dabbler at best, and seems to be reading sf with an agenda.

Rather a shame, really, he's capable of much better work than he shows in this peice. It's about as useful and accurate as cocktail party conversation after that third martini.

"For anyone who is truly familiar with science fiction, it's pretty clear that Eric Raymond is NOT. He's a dabbler at best, and seems to be reading sf with an agenda.

Really?

I think I disagree with that...

>>"I think I disagree with that.."

Feel free. But I notice you don't disagree with my statement that he is capable of better work nor that his peice is on the same level as cocktail party conversation.

>>"I think I disagree with that."

ESR may be fairly well-read, but in looking
through his reviews it seems very
clear to me that he does in fact either read
with an agenda or (worse yet) consign authors to
a Good Author/Bad Author category based on nothing
better than his own prejudices. How else can you
explain his reflexive condemnation of practically
everything written by David Drake while
simultaneously praising Steve Stirling's work to
the skies? Drake and Stirling are very similar
writers in style and taste, in my opinion, and if
you're going to slag one of them for writing
"carnography" (the art of writing about meat?)
you should slag the other just as much.

Ah, well, we all have our prejudices, I suppose,
but for ESR to pass off this kind of offhanded
literary criticism as being on the same level as
his more serious political essays was a serious
lapse in judgment. I'll be a little more careful
in reading his work from here on out, as he has
once again provided more proof for the proposition
that nobody is equally good at everything, even in
closely related fields such as engineering and
SF. Come to think of it, some of the worst SF
writers loose have been engineers...

Raymond's problem is that he's a libertarian anarchist. To believe in libertarian anarchism, you have to ignore a central fact of reality: most people want a state. Having blinded himself to this, he's judging stories by how well they correspond to his moral ideals, rather than how well they work other ways.

Also, Raymond doesn't know Pournelle well. Jerry believes that human political society tends to move through cycles of rule of the one, rule of the few, rule of the many, repeat, with occasional large scale crackups of the whole society. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book about this once, and Jerry used to assign it when he taught political science or constitutional law. The CoDominium series is a built on these assumptions, and the society is disintegrating as the series progresses.

Moreover, Raymond doesn't read carefully. He writes "The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order, approvingly — and did. . . .

"Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity. One can't imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of civilians as does Falkenberg."

Except the scene is actually a stadium full of armed rioters who have just attempted to overthrow the local govt., burning down much of a city in the process. Falkenberg is willing to let them live, but only as disarmed prisoners.

Another thing Raymond misses is context. He writes: "Pournelle's soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback who lead them. Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military Fuhrerprinzip, remote even from his own men, a creepy and opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible romance near the end of the sequence." Yes, but Falkenberg's legion was originally the 42nd CoDomimium regiment. It was raised to be just that kind of unit, with its enlisted personel mostly ex-street gang members, and its purpose to keep a dictatorship in power. Near the end of Birth of Fire, Falkenberg asks a young officer (quote approx.) "If this makes you sick, what are you going to do when the Fleet sends you somewhere you have to do something really raw?" Falkenberg is the kind of man he has to be to command soldiers of that type.

Context is also what's missing when Raymond writes: "Two thousand years of hard-won lessons about the maintainance of liberty are thrown away like so much trash," because he assumes there are better solutions available to the characters in that situation. Pournelle's characters don't see any better solution. Given the situation they are in, with the CoDominium breaking down and rival imperialisms starting up, I don't see a better one either.

Re: Pournelle ... why is it that so many sci-fi writers have such crappy-looking and -navigating websites? Isn't it just a bit like an architect who lives in a poorly-designed hovel?

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