The Probability Broach: The art of war

Cavalry soldiers charging into battle

The Probability Broach, chapter 18

Gallatinopolis, normally a sleepy rural town, is jam-packed with delegates arriving for the Continental Congress. Win and Lucy elbow their way through the crowds to get to their hotel room, which fortunately they reserved in advance. Win says that many late arrivals are sleeping in their cars. (But why wouldn’t the innkeeper cancel their reservation and give the room to someone else who offered more money?)

Over lunch at a cafe (“THE JEFFERSONBURGER—IT’LL SET YOU FREE”), Lucy reminisces over past congressional meetings. While they eat, she explains more about this society’s history, including some details Win apparently didn’t absorb before.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the North American Confederacy’s largest military engagement was a “Prussian war” in Europe, which was this timeline’s equivalent of World War I. In this chapter, Smith narrates a full account of it:

In 138 A.L. [1914], Prussia decided to emulate North America by confederating Europe—even if it didn’t want to be confederated. In brief campaigns, the other German states, France, Benelux, and the Italies were gobbled up. Spain and Portugal fell to fifth channelists, and England, as usual, was in trouble.

An agitated Congress assembled, the first since 1900, a disheartening sight to Europeans who’d come begging for assistance: even the assembly hall was roughed out of pine planks. The Old World was mystified at the vital barbarity of the New, but they had good reason to ask for help: Scandinavia was threatened by a Czar emboldened by the Prussian distraction, the Finns fighting a gallant but futile guerrilla war against the Cossacks; two great barge fleets stood ready to invade England—under Hamiltonian leadership, the Irish were preparing their final revenge.

Despite Europe’s pleas, the NAC Congress voted to stay neutral. But immediately after the vote, legions of Americans volunteered to go and fight, giving rise to “the fabled Thousand Airship Flight”. That force—including some of the delegates who voted for neutrality—went to Europe to fight the Hamiltonians.

After just a hundred days, the better-equipped and better-armed Confederate force routed the Prussian army and turned the tide:

Wherever they went, Confederates left anarchy behind. Gallatin’s ideas carried them fully as far as the force of their arms; enemy and friendly nationals alike learned quickly. Many a nobleman returned home to find his castle turned into a resort hotel by some local enterpriser. The Germanies and Italies remained fragmented. Spain fractured into a dozen polities. Brittany seceded from France. Armed at Prussian expense, Eire returned to her ancient tribal anarchy. The Balkans sub-subdivided until every village was a nation.

Leave aside the mystifying altruism—in an anarcho-capitalist society premised on self-interest and profit—of people volunteering to fight, at their own expense and risk. No doubt Smith would justify that by saying that the Confederates loved freedom, or some such.

I have a different objection to this. Obviously, Smith wants us to believe that the Magic of Anarchy makes his people superior combatants. He’s said as much before. But if there’s anything that’s inherently a state enterprise requiring centralized control and hierarchy, it’s war. You can’t have an army with no one in charge!

It’s true that a guerrilla force fighting on their own turf can stymie a superior foe and defeat them by exhaustion and attrition. That’s how the American colonies beat the British in the Revolutionary War, and it’s how America was defeated in turn in Vietnam.

But that’s not the same as saying that a country can muster an invasion force, equip them, arm them, and send them across an ocean to fight a near-peer adversary in combined arms warfare—all without anyone in command to decide who should be doing what.

Winning a war requires strategy. There has to be someone to make the broader decisions: when to attack and when to defend; which points of the enemy line to target and which to bypass; how subdivisions like brigades and battalions should coordinate their efforts to support each other; which units should be held in reserve as reinforcements, which should be thrown into the fighting, and which should be sacrificed to achieve a more important goal.

If every soldier is a sovereign individual who answers to no authority, this is impossible. The NAC’s assault would be a chaotic, disorganized melee, failing to concentrate enough pressure at any one point of the enemy line to break through. The brave or foolhardy ones who wanted to be heroes would charge into the fray alone and would likely be massacred. They would constantly argue about where artillery or air support should be aimed. Valuable resources like missiles (Smith alludes to “Goddard rockets”) would be squandered without any coherent plan of which enemy assets they should be used to target.

Smith makes a big deal of how anarchist forces are almost impossible to defeat, since they have no leader who can order them to surrender. In reality, morale would be a constant problem. Since no one was forcing them to be there, the NAC combatants would abandon the battlefield and flee the first time they thought it wasn’t going their way. Who wants to be the last one to die for the losing side?

TPB previously mentioned one more war, with Russia. This section expands on that, saying that it began in 1956, when the Russian czar and NAC prospectors came to blows over mining rights in Antarctica:

The Czar declared war, attacking Alaska, occupied the Kingdom of Hawaii, and invaded Japan, shattering her centuries-old isolation. The Confederate hoverfleet, a small-but-deadly 250-mile-per-hour navy, won decisively at the Bering Strait.

…By 1958, the real war was being waged by advertising people. Broadcasts into the Russian homeland told serfs that their lives were their own, and disputed the fatherly intentions of a ruler who’d let them perish by the millions. Fusion-powered space-planes rained propaganda into the streets of Saint Petersburg.

The flood of propaganda inspires the Russian people to rise up, and the Czar flees. Smith concludes, “The war was over, the last significant nation-state on Earth destroyed.”

I’ll give Smith this much credit: defeating a tyrant by undermining him with propaganda is at least a conceivable way an anarchist society could win a war, as opposed to the virtually-inconceivable scenario of winning a straight-up fight. But what I’d like to know is: who paid for all this?

Two years of round-the-clock broadcasts and leaflet drops couldn’t have been cheap. There are no taxes in the NAC to fund this, so was it funded by the selfless donations of private citizens? If so, how did they overcome the Prisoner’s Dilemma logic of people concluding it’d be rational to sit this out and let some other sucker pay for it?

Or was it funded by corporations who foresaw the opening up of a new market? It would be very much in keeping with real-life shock-doctrine capitalism to participate in overthrowing an existing government, in order to create a captive audience of new customers.

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New on OnlySky: Petrostates fade, electrostates rise

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the world transitioning away from fossil fuels, with or without America’s help.

Last month, a coalition of fifty-seven countries held an international conference to discuss their plans for phasing out fossil fuels for good. Petrostates like Russia and the Gulf nations weren’t invited. Neither was the United States.

This so-called coalition of the willing is fed up with the mainstream U.N. climate track, where a single holdout can stall progress forever, and even when agreements are reached, they’re toothless and non-binding. Countries that actually care about climate change are opting out of this designed-to-fail diplomacy and moving forward with what they can do right now, from funding renewable energy development and battery storage to banning ads for fossil fuel.

This conference shows that petrostates are losing their influence over world affairs. In their place, we’re seeing the rise of the electrostate – countries that secure their own energy independence through renewable and zero-carbon power sources. With their decades of investment in green energy, China has surged to a lead, but countries around the world are racing to catch up. This century will belong to the nations that win this green marathon – and in a massive irony, America’s war on Iran has turbocharged the competition.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Against this backdrop, the biggest story is America’s colossally stupid war on Iran and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. This conflict has cut off 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, most of which had been going to Asia.

The supply shock and overnight price spike was a rude awakening for Asian nations that depended on Mideast oil and gas. In this interview with Deutsche Welle, energy analyst Sam Geall calls it their “Ukraine moment”. First Europe, and now Asia, have realized the folly of basing their economies on a volatile commodity that can be cut off at the whim of a dictator.

And Asia is responding. The magnitude of the crisis has broken through political inertia and cut across partisan divides. As the DW story puts it, “decisions that might have once taken years are being made in weeks”.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

New on OnlySky: Is there a quiet revival?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the alleged trend of young people going back to church, and whether there’s any substance to these claims.

America’s nonreligious population – the “nones” – grew rapidly in the first two decades of the millennium. But in the last five years or so, that previously red-hot growth seems to have slowed down, if not plateaued. Religious apologists have pounced on this, claiming that atheism has reached its limit and that Gen Zers are about to turn back to God in a massive, spontaneous religious revival. One published survey, the so-called Quiet Revival, claims that it’s already happening.

Is there any reason to believe this? You can probably guess.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

After years of declining church attendance, aging and dwindling congregations, and a widespread falling away from faith, revival has come to the West. Faith is cool and countercultural again. More young people are rediscovering God, and they’re flocking back to church in droves. There’s going to be a new Great Awakening very soon.

At least, that’s what religious apologists want us to believe. They’ve written no end of stories insisting on it. For example, there’s this triumphal headline from the alt-right, anti-feminist magazine Evie, “God Is Back And Gen Z Is Leading The Revival”.

There’s plenty of room to debate why the growth of the nones might have leveled off. Are there natural limits—a core of American religiosity that can’t be overcome? Are there broader economic or cultural trends pushing people back to church—as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic, or people in search of a safety net? Was the New Atheist movement the catalyst, and now that it’s faded from prominence, the growth of the nones is stalling?

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Tangled in red tape

Yellow-and-black caution tape

The Probability Broach, chapter 18

Win’s airship has arrived at the capitol city of the North American Confederacy:

Gallatinopolis, geographic and political center of North America, is a crusty little patch of buildings surrounded by an entire planet of wheat fields. A lone highway stretches from the south: Greenway 200, an emerald ribbon in a sea of gold departing northward until it’s covered with a springy mutated moss.

As they disembark, Win is in a gloomy mood. He and Lucy made it, but their friends Clarissa and Ed are gone, kidnapped by the bad guys en route. If they’re not already dead, they’re hostages, and Madison will be sure to use them as bargaining chips to sway the upcoming congressional meeting in his favor. (So much for “the hostage kills you“.)

This section recounts a little of the NAC’s fictional history. In its early days, as Americans expanded westward, the capitol moved with them, but not to a fixed location. It wandered all over the country for years, switching from one city to another. Often, wherever the president lived was treated as the capitol by default. Finally, it was “dumped” at a fixed location in the Dakota Territories, at the exact geographical center of the continent.

Given the huge skyscrapers and other advanced technology he’s seen in this world, Win was expecting something with more gravitas. But the NAC’s capitol looks like a primitive backwater town. It’s all rustic shacks and slapdash buildings, with few creature comforts:

I snorted. “This is progressive, modern, space-age Gallatinopolis?”

“This is miserable, backward, rustic Gallatinopolis. Ain’t it swell?”

I eventually learned not to look down at my feet: the city is preserved exactly as it was eighty-seven years ago—its chief and only industry the much-to-be-despised operation of occasional government. The place looks like a mining boom town: tarpaper shacks ready to burn given thirty seconds of warm weather and a mild breeze, streets narrow runnels of churned mud—but frozen, under two inches of transparent plastic.

Win asks Lucy why it’s in the middle of nowhere and why it looks like this:

“To make it just as inconvenient as possible to everyone! If Tucker’d had his way, the poxy thing’d be in Siberia! Government needs to be tiresome. Folks think twice before they agree to come up here. We’ve met only six times since the capital was moved. That’s six times too many, but anarchy takes practice.”

(“Tucker” is Benjamin Tucker, a socialist anarchist who served as president of the NAC in Smith’s alternate history.)

This isn’t an aside; it’s a key fact about L. Neil Smith’s political philosophy. The North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with only a vestigial government. It has a legislature, but it can’t make laws as we understand them, only recommendations with no coercive power. And even at that, Smith situates the capitol out in the boonies, far from all major population centers, so that it’s as inconvenient as possible for Congress to get together and meet.

This makes it difficult for the government to get tyrannical ideas and start oppressing people, which is presumably the point. However, it also means that in a crisis, there’s a built-in disincentive to action. If the NAC is facing a threat, it’s essentially impossible for it to respond in an organized way. As we’ll see, that’s exactly how things play out.

This doesn’t cross Smith’s mind, because it’s central to his ideology that there are evils that arise from too much government, but no evils that arise from too little. He says so in the fictional quote that opens this chapter:

I am less concerned with good and evil than with freedom and non-freedom. Good and evil may both exist within a free society, But given sufficient time, all that remains under tyranny is evil.

We seek only a consistent application of the principle of liberty, without exception, without excuse, without compromise. We do not promise infallibility, but are determined, against the trend of six thousand years of human history, to make our errors on the side of individual rights.

—Albert Gallatin
Rule of Reason

That sounds very noble and principled. But it runs smack into collective-action problems: situations in which, when each individual makes the self-interested choice, it produces bad consequences for everyone.

There are many examples of this, which I’ve been discussing as we go through the book. I previously wrote about quarantine to fight pandemics; about air and water pollution; about the Dust Bowl, which arose from destructive overfarming; and about irrigating the desert and how to settle the question of water rights.

Most of all, there’s the question of emergencies. If a natural disaster was bearing down on the NAC, or a hostile foreign power was massing its forces to invade, what would they do? How could they muster the organization to respond to a danger that threatened every citizen, when they’ve intentionally made it as difficult as possible to do so?

We never see any large-scale emergencies of that kind in this book. Smith stacks the deck in his favor, writing the plot so that his fictional society never faces a disaster beyond its ability to overcome.

But the real world isn’t so obliging. Nuclear reactors melt down and spread contamination; hurricanes and tsunamis flood coastal settlements; earthquakes shake the ground; volcanoes erupt and wildfires burn; and even the most peaceful country sometimes gets bombed or invaded by a larger, imperialist power through no fault of its own. At times like these, people – including libertarians – quickly rediscover the advantages of having a competent, efficient government to muster defenses, coordinate emergency responders, set up shelters, distribute aid, and take charge of evacuation.

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The Probability Broach: Fire in a crowded theater

A poster showing a theater engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 17

Ed and Win Bear are traveling via airship to the Continental Congress to inform this world of the Hamiltonian threat. En route, they learn that the villainous John Jay Madison has sent his thugs to kidnap their friends Clarissa and Lucy, to use as
leverage at the upcoming congressional session.

Win arrives too late to help Clarissa. So he hurries back to the theater where Lucy was watching a movie, hoping he’s in time to rendezvous with Ed:

Lucy was there, but I can’t say the same for the two thugs they’d hauled out of the theater. A small crowd had gathered around the cashier’s booth, along with a medic, two security attendants, and Lucy, arms folded, gun dangling from one finger.

… “Now madame,” one of the official contingent pleaded, “if you’d put that away, and tell us what happened here. We must have an explanation. It’s a company rule.”

“Stuff your company! If two punks wanna get hurt—I’m practically an innocent bystander!” She gestured sharply with a toe at the figures on the floor.

The medic looked up and scowled. “Come on, lady—you’ve already fractured his skull! Trying for some ribs, now?”

I’ll admit this scene is funny. There’s obvious comedy in Lucy, an old lady (albeit a war veteran), not just clobbering two thugs, but doing it so casually that she’s more annoyed about missing her show than by this attempted kidnapping.

But Ed was supposed to be coming to her rescue. Win asks Lucy where he is:

“Ed ain’t here. These”—she kicked at the bleeding form again—”…came in, sat on either side of me, and—” She aimed a kick at the other unconscious thug, but was restrained. “He had a hypo. They were gonna stick me! So I bopped ’em—couldn’t fire in a crowded theater. Taxation! They bent my front sight!” She peered along the barrel, the crowd in front melted discreetly away.

This is very responsible of Lucy, and I agree. Even in a self-defense situation, you can’t just whip out your gun and start shooting in a dark, crowded theater.

In that environment, if gunfire suddenly erupted, no one would know who was shooting at whom. People would panic. It’s virtually guaranteed that at least some people would leap to the conclusion that it was a mass-shooting spree, draw their own guns, and start firing at whoever they think the shooter is. In this heavily armed society, that would provoke a deadly chain reaction, as yet more people panic and return fire at that person, presuming them to be the attacker—and so on.

You can imagine the pandemonium. People would be shot by pure accident, or knocked down and trampled in the sudden crowd crush as everyone tried to escape at the same time. It would be a horrific mass casualty event. The theater would be carpeted with bodies by the time it was all over.

So yes, I can commend Lucy for staying cool-headed in the heat of the moment. Here’s the problem: Does everyone in this society exercise the same level of self-control?

Because for the North American Confederacy to work, that has to be the case.

Otherwise, every public place and every crowded scene would be susceptible to sudden explosions of violence. When everyone is armed at all times, it only takes one angry, unstable, or panic-prone person to overreact to a real or imagined threat. (And how many disturbed people might there be on the street, in a society where there’s no such thing as court-ordered treatment or involuntary commitment for even the most severe cases of mental illness?)

This goes to show that firearms don’t protect people from all possible danger, as gun nuts believe. Indeed, they make everyday life far more dangerous. That chain reaction of panic and carnage I described would be sure to ensue in any situation where a mystery bullet is fired.

Those mass casualty events should be a regular feature of life in the NAC. L. Neil Smith doesn’t have any explanation for why they’re not, other than to assume that everyone in this society is almost superhumanly cool and calm in a crisis.

The battered thugs are hauled away. Ed can’t be found, so Win and Lucy head to suite 1919, the place Madison proposed for a meeting. They come with guns ready, but the room is empty. There’s no one there—just a note:

Lieutenant:

We enjoyed more success with Dr. Olson and Mr. Bear. Instead of wasting time—and possibly lives—attempting to follow, reconsider my offer before Congress convenes.

M.v.R.

While they’re reading the note, a clerk arrives to tidy up the room for its next occupants. When they ask where the previous occupants went, the clerk says: “Mr. Richthofen and his party took a groundward shuttle not more than five minutes ago. I arranged it myself.”

L. Neil Smith would never have admitted it, but his own writing shows why his utopia doesn’t work.

As I wrote last week, in an anarcho-capitalist world, you’re responsible for your own safety. The problem is that no one can realistically defend themselves all the time against a resourceful and determined enemy. You might get lucky once—Lucy did in this chapter, and Clarissa in an earlier chapter—but if the bad guys can afford to keep trying, your luck is eventually going to run out.

Smith proved that point himself, by having Clarissa talk about how guns are the great equalizer that levels the playing field, then having her get kidnapped offscreen. Now he reinforces the point by having Ed Bear get captured too.

Remember, Ed is a private investigator who’s used to dealing with dangerous criminals, so we can assume he’s appropriately paranoid about his own safety. Also, unlike Lucy and Clarissa, he knew the bad guys were coming. He should’ve been as well prepared as anyone in this world could be. Yet he still got taken hostage without firing a shot.

Throughout this book, the demands of storytelling clash with the demands of political ideology, and this chapter is the most blatant example. Smith wants to convince us that statism causes crime and violence, whereas anarchy produces peace and prosperity. He tells us that his anarcho-capitalist world is peaceful and safe, to the point that crime is virtually unknown.

However, if he were consistent about this, this novel would be too boring to read. To keep it exciting, he added these action scenes—home invasions, shootouts, car chases. They’re the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine palatable. But he doesn’t seem to recognize that having those scenes undercuts the central premise of his philosophy.

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