I find it impossible not to be deeply drawn into the unfolding of the war in Ukraine even as I’m wary of my own interest. I’m wary because I don’t come to it with a deep prior knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian history beyond some level of generalist understanding, so I’m more dependent than I like to be on mainstream reportage to make sense of the news.
I’m conscious of the degree to which the flow of information is coming from sources who are either directly conducting infowar or who believe that letting a reporter or analyst produce reportage serves the cause. The Ukrainian military and government facilitate frontline access for observant, honest reporters like Luke Mogelson because they believe that truth is on their side, a proposition that I’m inclined to agree with. And yet I am wary.
I’m suspicious of my own interest because I know that many other conflicts that deserve to be covered just as thoroughly don’t get that attention because Western readers don’t care about the war or the people waging it, or because the people fighting have no interest in allowing reportage or because it would be even more dangerous to cover than Ukraine is, hard as that might be to imagine.
But one way I can push back on myself in that respect is to ask “What are we learning about modern wars more generally through this one?” The inclination in the press is to stress that Ukraine is the first “total war” on European soil since World War II, which I think among other things underrates the Balkan wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. It’s not the first “total war” of that kind since 1945 on a global scale, though. The Korean War, Vietnam and Cambodia, Eritrea and Ethiopia, various Arab-Israeli wars, the Gulf War and the Iraq War, the multi-sided war in Syria and the current conflict in Yemen, the complex multi-state war in Congo, the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. But even wars involving insurgencies that outsiders don’t class as ‘total wars’ between states have something of the same winner-takes-all feel, the same existential stakes, something that shines through in James Brabazon’s distressing, intense memoir of covering war in Liberia, My Friend the Mercenary.
So one thing in that respect—the insights that Ukraine might provide about other conflicts—is the question of when wartime corruption is too much, which is ostensibly why there’s been a change in the leadership of the Defense Ministry in Ukraine.
It’s hard to say for sure if the change is happening for the attributed reasons. Maybe this is just how Zelensky placates Western donors who need a head or two to roll for perceived lack of wartime progress. This is, after all, a standard playbook move for all states that are dependent on the largesse of donor states or international organizations. When there’s an official visit from your donors and the donors are theatrically performing their unhappiness, figure out who to blame and throw them under the bus, typically someone who is already a political enemy that can be disposed of safely or someone who has no meaningful political friends. Your donor doesn’t want to hear that there are systemic or structural problems that their money can’t overcome, or in this case, that counteroffensives against a large, entrenched military force are going to be grinding affairs even in the best case scenario.
But maybe it really is corruption, and then that raises an interesting question. When does a state at war need to be run better than a state in peacetime? It’s not clear that it’s because the former is an existential crisis and the latter is not.
On one hand, wealthy hegemons can waste money like crazy in ways that would be quickly labeled ‘corrupt’ during wars that are not in fact existential. The United States during its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan gave out massive amounts of money to corporate profiteers, mercenary units and local clients without necessarily expecting much in return and while the press and domestic critics might have made some noise about it, nobody in charge seemed (in public at least) particularly alarmed or worried about the waste of money and resources. Because it was not an existential threat. Hell, when the Pentagon does try to be more efficient in its budgeting, politicians in both American political parties often force it to waste huge gobs of money because their districts or political donors will benefit from that.
On the other hand, peacetime states can be mortally wounded by an inability to rein in corruption and waste when they take on the character of a Ponzi scheme, rapidly emptying the nation of all accumulated household wealth at every level of the social hierarchy.
On some level, corruption in wartime is a basic fact of life, the grease that allows a war machine to lumber on. The people making weapons and supplies have to get paid, and payments from a state whose productive capacities are under direct attack and whose long-term existence is in doubt are harder to come by and potentially worthless in the near future. Under the circumstances, anybody who can procure what is needed is understandably going to charge a premium—or is going to divert some of what they procure to paying customers elsewhere. Everybody understands, up to a point, that this is what has to happen.
There’s an easy place to draw the line, which is when a procurer is selling materiel to either side. It happens, but that’s a dangerous game, as it ought to be. There’s a slightly harder place to draw the line, which is when whatever is being procured doesn’t get to where it’s needed, or arrives in a state that hampers military operations so substantially that it’s the major source of wartime vulnerability. That’s been one of the major reasons that Russia hasn’t won the conflict outright relatively quickly, and it may have been part of the issue at stake in the political shift in Ukraine. When there’s a real existential threat (whether to a nation or to a regime in control of a nation), it cuts both ways: there’s latitude to do what is needful, but not getting it done is intolerable.
As I think on it, this seems to me a premiere reason not to use the metaphor of “war” for solving other kinds of major problems, e.g., not to say “war on drugs”, “war on hunger”, “war on poverty”, and so on. It’s not the militarism and violence of the metaphor, it’s that the metaphor hitches up to the existential permissiveness that wars allow states and civil societies, the sense that it’s ok to do whatever is needful to solve the problem. That’s why the United States has more of its own citizens and residents in prison than any other society on the planet and yet still has a major problem with drugs and the major problem of people who fantasize about the idea of getting really tough on drug-dealers, as if there is some further frontier of incarceration—or summary execution—that would fix the problem once and for all. The existential terrain of a “war on X” where there can be no surrender or negotiation with the enemy is what makes it impossible to actually pursue a resolution—and it forgives in advance all corruption along the way.
Even states at war fighting for their lives can’t afford to be that permissive. Corruption at some point is treason. New weapons deployed heedlessly at some point escalate the conflict beyond what is survivable. And no one dreams more of and actually seeks peace than a society of hard-fighting people who want their lives back. Whereas metaphorical wars on social and economic problems tend to become forever wars the moment the metaphor is uttered: impossible to stop, impossible to unthink, encouraging parasites who will never unlatch their grip. It’s not the problem that’s the existential threat to civil society in those cases, it’s the enabling power of the metaphor.
Image credit: "Pacific Lamprey at the Oregon Zoo" by USFWS Pacific is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.