Secretary Hegseth Channels General Sherman

Addressing the crash of a US KC-135 air refueling plane this past Thursday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth remarked,

War is hell. War is chaos. And as we saw yesterday with the tragic crash of our KC-135 tanker, bad things can happen. American heroes - all of them.

CENTCOM confirmed that while the crash involved an unspecified incident with two aircraft in friendly airspace, the loss of the aircraft "was not due to enemy action or friendly fire". So, what was it due to? All we really have is Secretary Hegseth's characterization: "War is hell. War is chaos."

As best as commentators with experience in mid-air refueling can surmise without other confirmation, two KC-135 tankers collided during some type of refueling maneuver. One was so badly damaged that it immediately crashed, killing all six of its crew. The other had less severe damage, it was able to return to its base, and its crew survived.

I've been ruminating on the idea I began to develop a week ago, that "just war doctrine" is a category error. Let's apply this to the KC-135 collision. On one hand, it was a wartime event. Accidents are common in wars. Someone lights a cigarette near an ammunition depot far behind the lines, it explodes, and many people are killed and maimed. It's neither enemy action nor friendly fire, it just happens in war.

Can we interrogate such an episode using "just war doctrine"? I don't see how. Just cause? The cause is basically absurd, it doesn't compute. Legitimate authority? Murphy's law, stuff happens. Right intention? Well, it was neither friendly fire nor enemy action, no real intention there. Last resort? No resort, it was an accident. Probability of success? Murphy's law, success not an issue. Proportionality? Shouldn't have happened at all.

It's just something that happens in war, a terrible accident. "Just war doctrine" is irrelevant. The only solution to the problem of wartine accidents is to eliminate war, but war is part of the human condition, and it won't go away. So there is a whole type of wartime event to which "just war doctrine" can't be applied, but they can't be separated from the nature of war.

In Gilbert Ryle's famous example, a category error is like a university president explaining to a visitor the function of the various departments, the registrar, the dining hall, the dormitories, the alumni office, but the visitor replies, "You haven't shown me the university". In the case of just war theory, a cabinet secretary might explain the various events in a war to a visitor, attacks, defense. medical care, logistics, accidents, war prisoners, and so forth, but the visitor replies, "You haven't shown me the justice".

What interests me in the current debate (such as it is) over "just war doctrine" is that there is so little reference to the experience of professional military, who only now and then make what is essentially an argument that war is a category whose nature is injustice. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a general, not a philosopher, nevertheless made remarks on war as a category throughout his life, for instance in a letter dated September 12, 1864, to officials of Atlanta, including Mayor James M. Calhoun, advising them to evacuate the city, because he was going to burn it down.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable and the only way that the People of Atlanta can hope to live in peace & quiet at home is to Stop the war, which can alone be done by admitting it began in Error and is perpetuated in pride. . . . I want peace and believe it (can) now only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war partly with a view to perfect & early success.

This he finally did on November 11-15, 1864. He appears to have given the Atlanta authorities every warning that this would happen, along with every assurance that his army would provide cover and help for all those evacuating, but in the end, he would have to deatroy the whole city. The question of whether Sherman's burning of Atlanta was "just" is still open; the Georgia historical marker on the burning notes,

On Nov. 11, 1864, Chief Engineer Orlando M. Poe directed the demolition of stone and brick buildings using specially made battering rams. On Nov. 15, Poe's troops burned the wooden buildings in the downtown business district around the site of this marker. Though houses and churches were not targeted, some were burned nonetheless. Many houses had already been dismantled by both armies to make way for fortifications. Contrary to popular myth only forty percent of Atlanta was left in ruins.

I've alwaya thought that the Cathechism of the Catholic Church throws up its hands in uncertainty at the end of Paragraph 2309, which outlines one set of "just war" criteria. It enumerates them, with particular stress on avoiding "evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated" -- but in the end, it simply says, "The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good."

In other words, figure it out as best you can. Because, I'm increasingly convinced, war is its own category. You can't parse the good and evil out of it.