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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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach