> Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.
No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:
> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
> In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […]
I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).
I wanted to address this though:
> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.
But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
> I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).
Except it wasn't just a change in the name in the department: the Department of War actually became the Department of the Army, the DoNavy was merged with, the Air Force was split off from being with-in the Army (USAAF -> USAF), creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA, etc:
> But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
And sometimes a war does not happen because someone has a big enough stick that other people don't want to risk it being used on them. It's not like the 'other side' was passively sitting around:
I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent.
Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change.
The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
They noted it but I think the important part was before then the Department of War only really existed when congress declared war. Once the war was over 95% of those people went home and back into civilian life. So even if a President wanted to start a war they had limited resources to do so unless Congress declared war and re-expanded or formed a Department of War.
Right. But somewhere in between then and now the powers of the President expanded so that "the actual exercise of military force" in the name of defense ("preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies") involved fighting in wars.
Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
> Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):
> it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget
WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)
The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.
Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.
Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.
> Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war
Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself
Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.
> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.
> morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”
It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.
> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war
Agree.
> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”
We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
World War 2 did not demonstrate that, the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents. What kind of narrative even is this?
> the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
Big difference between defense of a country and starting wars. Canada and Switzerland don't start wars but they still have a military in case they ever need it to protect from an aggressor. Like Russia or the Canadian neighbor to the south who has a president making social media posts with the US flag over all of North America. Which suits the name, "Department of War".
Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
I do hope John Ternus & his team change it up, but I wasn’t expecting it from this event. He’s only been CEO for 9 days & this was probably shot before then.
On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.
The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.
> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."
Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:
> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.
> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus!
You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.
The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.
Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally, at all (and I do feel you are interpreting my comment uncharitably).
It has nothing with knowing you or not to do at all, I was just commenting on the contents of your post, not about you.
I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus". One is borrowing the negative connotation for a purpose, because one has (for other reasons) decided that the religion or ideology is bad.
The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
> Sorry, I didn't mean to make any statements about you personally
Hakuna matata.
> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".
The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.
> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.
Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.
“The system” by which I assume you mean the Government of the United States or America doesn’t need to, because “the system” is sovereign. Corporations are not. They get checked when they get checked, and this ruling only avoided a worse-case scenario for Google. It wasn’t a win for them either.
I wish Twitter had been dead when Elon bought it, but no, Twitter was far from dead. X actually has fewer MAU as far as I can tell[1], and I wouldn’t call it dead either.
[1]: Seriously though, I can’t find good data I trust on this so correct me if you’ve got a good source saying otherwise, or even if someone has something substantiating this better I would take that too.
And thus for a very long time, and even today to some extent, the Japanese (or their cultural theorists at any rate!) have viewed themselves as the inheritors of "true" Ancient Chinese culture -- unsullied by Mongol/Manchu/Communist influence.
There's some truth to this. The Japanese preserved certain Tang Dynasty customs which were lost to China, and they have some of the best collections of Tang-era artifacts.
This line of thought was, however, used in very unfortunate WWII-era propaganda, like "we have to invade China to rescue its civilization, only we can do this!"
In my experience the Chinese very much think this as well. Though it can be framed in a more derogatory way as "derivative" or "they just copied us"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
Sushi is exceedingly modern. It's "derived" from a fish preservation method... which relies on salting and fermenting, so not really "raw" (more like sauerkraut than shredded cabbage).
I had no idea! Very interesting. Even though it's so central to people's regional identity and general culture, a lot of Chinese food also has surprisingly recent origins. It's especially surprising b/c people generally are quite orthodox about their cooking and are rarely "experimental" (as in the west) - like the high brow seriousness surrounding sushi with it's standards and traditions. So it gives it a sense of historical gravity that's not actually there
The article doesn’t say why, but at launch the MacBook Neo was the most inexpensive Mac Apple ever made, and it’s a full proper Mac. Despite being inexpensive, it also isn’t junk.
Chromebooks can be had for cheaper, but if a school district was on the fence before about moving to Macs, then Apple made the decision much easier for them.
It is a good idea to give children well designed and nice things, if this can be afforded. An item that is well designed and nice looking tends to receive better care. To a degree this is what you'd want to teach - to really care.
There isn't a guarantee, if you'd give a child a nice looking thing, that a child would care. But given a piece of junk, they'd surely would not, that is guaranteed.
> Apple's latest earnings call revealed a wave of K-12 districts abandoning Chromebooks and Windows machines in favor of the company's new MacBook Neo
It's not just Chromebooks but Windows machines. Schools really should be providing OS-agnostic computer education, and for that they really should support any machine, especially Windows machines which more easily support changing their OS.
This just changes from having them teach "click this Windows-specific icon to do this" to "click this Mac-specific icon to do this".
Schools are still being used as a tool of OS companies to lock-in users for life.
You're not wrong, but I've sat in an elementary school classroom while a teacher was doing the computer class.
It was already difficult with a class attempting to follow instructions in a single OS; if a teacher had to be giving three sets (at least three!) of instructions to a bunch of kids, they realistically wouldn't get anything done in the 50 minutes they have each week.
I could see a proposal to using one trimester for Windows, one trimester for Mac and one for Linux - because it genuinely is kind of hard to switch from one to the other, and it would be useful if kids had a basic familiarity with all three. (Though, how do you choose which distro to use for Linux? Or do you just make them walk uphill each way on the command line?)
You work almost exclusively with the common ground, the common conventions. Teach them file managers, "programs" in a very general sense, windows (being able to resize and position them, the window buttons (to close, maximize, etc.), window menus, etc.), the concept of saving a file from a program, file extensions. You take little pauses to explain how things may differ slightly between OSes.
You take the same approach with programs (web browsers as opposed to simply Chrome, spreadsheets as opposed to simply Excel, etc.).
Once they have the common ground, you can expand on differences, but always OS- and program-neutral, because schools shouldn't be a marketing tool.
The idea is that students should be able to use any computer in a very basic extent. It doesn't take much.
> (Though, how do you choose which distro to use for Linux? Or do you just make them walk uphill each way on the command line?)
You pick the one that has the most common ground with the other OSes.
Again, you're not wrong, but I think you're underestimating just how much hand-holding and very specific instructions a lot of kids need in these classes.
You have to teach them both the general concepts ("data lives in things called files, each file lives in a folder, folders are arranged in a hierarchical tree-like structure") - but you also have to teach them to actually use these things, and you have to wait for each student to have done The Task that is being asked of them. Because if you just talk in vague abstractions, it's not going to sink in as much as Doing The Task will.
If you have any sort of opportunity to observe a elementary or middle school computer class, I strongly urge you to. It's very enlightening.
(Actually, observing any kind of class is very interesting. I used to do it at least once a year for work. I know that every profession is probably super interesting to an outside observer, but - especially as a parent - that was wildly interesting and worthwhile.)
And they all have Firefox and LibreOffice Calc installed, so you can teach them how to use a web browser and a spreadsheet in an OS-agnostic (and DE/distro/WM-agnostic) way.
I don't think the schools are worried so much about not knowing how to teach students to use a word processor, but rather their IT staff not being able to maintain the equipment and set things up properly.
Kids will learn how to use basically any software easily, they are sponges. The poor admin that has to deal with all the lost machine and device enrollment, and password resets and OS upgrades borking stuff, they are the ones who schools are optimizing for.
I wouldn’t get too excited on this topic. The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations, and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers, and most likely accessed through Google Chrome either way.
If they want to game, they’ll eventually get a Windows PC. Even if the school district doesn’t deploy Macs, they’ll likely end up with a Mac by the time of college anyway. And tomorrow won’t be the Year of Desktop Linux either, unless Microsoft really really botches Windows.
> The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations
Which should make things easier to educate OS-neutrally.
> and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers.
> > The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations
> Which should make things easier to educate OS-neutrally.
It also makes it unnecessary to teach minute differences. If a student needs to make a switch later for educational, vocational or interest-based reasons, they can figure out the minute differences or seek help.
>> and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers.
> That's what I object to.
I figured you would, but again: anybody will learn any system they need to because of either work, education or personal reasons. People don’t switch off Excel & don’t want to switch off of Excel because they don’t have to. If you’re only ever going to learn exactly one spreadsheet app in your life, Excel is the one you probably want to learn, unless you don’t strictly need Excel for your vocation, then you can make the choice yourself. Options exist, but it’s fine to treat Excel like the default, because it is.
Both Windows and ChromeOS have Debian subsystems that are easy to enable and use. I prefer the macOS way for my job, but for students it doesn't really matter.
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