The Military and the Commons: Why would we want the military to command the commons?

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:



The Military and the Commons
Why would we want the military to command the commons?

By David Morris


A few days ago I received notice of a New America Foundation (NAF) hosted conference in Washington, D.C. called “Beyond Primacy: Rethinking American Grand Strategy and the Command of the Commons.” At the conference NAF released a formal report on the subject: Whither Command of the Commons? Choosing Security Over Control.

The authors, Sameer Lalwani, Research Fellow at NAF and Joshua Shifrinson, Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School explained their perspective, “This paper…takes U.S. command of the commons as a given, but asks whether there are less costly and more appropriate ways to achieve it in an increasingly multi-polar world.” “Command of the commons”, they explain, means “the ability to project military power and engage in trade at times and places of its choosing while denying the same privileges to others.”

For us commoners the idea that we would take military command of the commons “as a given” is both infuriating and preposterous. Which raises the question. Why did they use the word at all? There was no pressing need. The thesis, that the United States can no longer afford to spend trillions of dollars to maintain an armed presence everywhere on the planet and can no longer dictate to the rest of the world and must devise ways to cooperate without undermining our security, could have been just as well presented without using the term. Substitute the words “the seas” for “maritime commons” and the argument doesn’t suffer.

But NAF self-consciously did use the word “commons”, indeed so extravagantly that it was repeated more than 200 times in this brief 21 page document, twice as many times, interestingly, as they used the word “military”. So they are making a point. But what is the point? .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/military-and-commons

[OHdem10]

1. Puts bad images in my mind. WWII in another part of the World.

I realize this was not the intention, but the first
image which hit this old brain was Germany WWII.

[Demeter]

2. It's Fascism, no matter how they slice it, nor who does the slicing