October 3, 2005
Bold military
advances too often turn into long dirty attritions. In the scenario of
attrition, ever more money needs to be printed to make the payments promised to
war’s extortion. Currency inflates. Interest rates rise. As time wears on,
inflation eventually outpaces interest rate rise, and any growth in gross
domestic product. Loaning out money ceases to be profitable in real terms, and
people hoard anything of real value. The economy chokes. Trust in money is lost,
and along with that, is loss in trust of the belligerent still pursuing war.
Meanwhile the belligerent is trying his best to stamp out his adversary in what
for him has become a race for his political life against time.
Duration of some
war engagements by the United States:
U.S.
revolution
8 yrs,
War of
1812 3
yrs,
Seminole Wars
1st 3yrs,
2d
7yrs,
3d 3yrs,
War
with
Mexico
2yrs,
Apache
Wars
15yrs,
U.S. Civil
War
4yrs,
Spanish
American & Philippine Wars 4yrs,
World War
I
3yrs,
World War
II
4yrs,
Vietnam 20yrs.
Gulf War
I
1 ½ months
As the table shows,
the United States in the past has generally been successful in avoiding long
wars. It also has been able to surmount some attrition situations.
The Seminole
Wars are interesting. Relatively small guerrilla bands exacted an exorbitant
toll upon the United States economy of the time. Still the Seminoles succumbed
in a trail of tears. Although successful monetarily, Seminole guerrilla action
was unable to erode the war’s constituency of support before they themselves
were militarily defeated by tactics not too unlike what is being seen in the
Middle-East today.
Vietnam appears
as a recent war of attrition that was not "won". This war did stop when
inflation outpaced economic growth and rise in lending rates. Consumer inflation
rose from around 1% in the early 1960s to around 10% at the war’s end in 1975.
One cannot definitively conclude that the war ended because of economics, or
even say that the war was the single cause of inflation during those times.
However, concurrency of the war’s progression and a degenerating economic
situation did exist upon which one may speculate that economy played a role in
the diminishing favor for war.
If one does
assume the Vietnam war offers a rough model for studying the U.S. Middle-East
wars of today, extrapolating the economic data and trends, then the economic
conditions seen at the close of the Vietnam war may again be seen in the coming
years between 2010 and 2015. Almost two years into the Iraq war, U.S. economic
indicators appear still strong, but the negative trends can already be seen.
Future is always difficult to forecast. However, wisdom holds being prepared for
the Middle-East engagements to last for several more years.
Robert Shule, Hampton, Virginia
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