Marketing

Oh What a Lovely War

In 2012 the UK Ministry of Defence produced a paper giving advice on how to "market" war to the public.  The intention was to work out how to increase public support for the various wars the UK was engaged in at the time.  One suggestion made was to make less of repatriation and funeral ceremonies of those who had died.  Downplay the negative.  Accentuate the positive.  That sort of stuff.  Typical marketing fluff.

The document, written in November 2012 and obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, discusses how public reaction to casualties can be influenced and recommends that the armed forces should have "a clear and constant information campaign in order to influence the major areas of press and public opinion". (The Guardian)

The folk don't like hearing and seeing that soldiers and airmen have been killed.  It is a negative.  It ought to be downplayed.  Don't regard these people as heroes who have laid down their lives for the protection of their loved ones, their neighbours, and their nation.   That ends up accentuating the negative, which will reduce "market" appetite and demand for war.

But wait a minute.  This is war we are talking about.
  It is not the release of the latest smart phone.  The very fact that the UK government is having to consider marketing strategies to make war more publicly supported indicates that the war is most likely an illicit enterprise.  War can only be justified in the face of clear and present danger.  Clearly, if a war lacks the support of the population, the implication is that there is no danger to the population clearly to be seen.  Neither is it present. 

The Ministry of Defence paper recognises the problem.  There are wars which have high public support.  There are other wars which do not.  Maybe the UK government and politicians should consider where the difference lies.  It might mean that a much more restrained doctrine of war would emerge, instead of going halfway around the globe to participate in internationalist follies, whether as part of NATO commitments, or to play second, supporting fiddle to President Obama who infamously campaigned on the notion that Iraq was a "bad" war, but Afghanistan was a "good" war that the US should really, really fight because it involved good old fashioned "nation building".  How sad--and wicked--that so many lives would be sacrificed for something so fatuously  idealistic and completely unrelated to anything vaguely resembling "clear and present danger". 


It is arguable that a nation may face clear and present danger and going to war would be resisted by the population.  Maybe doctrines of pacifism have garnered widespread support.  Maybe the population has concluded that life under the invader would be preferable to their current lives.  But these would be extreme and unusual circumstances.  They certainly don't apply in the UK at present--or to any Western nation as far as we can tell.  In fact, the MOD paper acknowledged just this point.

The eight-page paper argues that the military may have come to wrongly believe that the public, and as a result the government, has become more "risk averse" on the basis of recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "However, this assertion is based on recent, post-2000 experience and we are in danger of learning false lessons concerning the public's attitude to military operations," the paper, which has no named author, adds.

"Historically, once the public are convinced that they have a stake in the conflict they are prepared to endorse military risks and will accept casualties as the necessary consequence of the use of military force."  To back this up, it cites "robust" public support for earlier conflicts – the Falklands war and operations in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 2007. "In those cases where the public is unconvinced of the relevance of the campaign to their wellbeing they are not prepared to condone military risk and are acutely sensitive to the level of casualties incurred.  "Neither the action in Iraq nor the operations in Afghanistan have enjoyed public support and we are in danger of learning a false lesson from the experience of the last 10 years."  (Emphasis, ours)

That this argues (from experience) is that the UK population operates with a war doctrine which justifies war on the basis of "clear and present danger" and is cynical about and even contemptuous toward wars which do not. 

The bottom line is this: in the UK the general population does not see a clear and present danger from the mujahideen in Afghanistan, half a world away.  To be sure, the UK has faced a clear and present danger from (UK citizen) terrorists.  No-one complains about the actions of the police, intelligence and security services to detect and apprehend and punish such miscreants.  But to suggest--as has been suggested--that there is a direct danger from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the UK is to draw forth a long, tenuous bow.  Hence, the UK warring in that place lacks public support.  This becomes a clear indicator that the war itself is illegitimate.  You cannot, after all, fool all of the people all of the time. 

But there is a danger.  The more illegitimate and illicit wars undertaken, the more cynical and war-weary a population becomes.  When an actual clear and present danger emerges, the risk is that the boy will have cried "Wolf!" once too often, sapping the resolve and will to fight when it is vital.  This leads to a paradox: the more warlike and belligerent a nation, the more it is likely to collapse.  The more illegitimate and unjustified wars a nation fights, the more vulnerable it becomes to general capitulation amongst the population, should a clear and present danger emerge.  Politicians and governments which uselessly expend the lives and materiel of its armed forces are weakening and putting at risk the sovereignty and defence of the nation. They are like a Fifth Column in our midst.

It is not accidental that the post-script to World War I in the UK was three decades of strong pacifist sentiment that left the UK exposed and vulnerable in the face of the rise of Hitler's Third Reich.  And what generated pacifist sentiment?  It was the widespread public revulsion of the War which many came to see as having no meaning, no justification, and in no way representing a clear and present danger. 

Let the bellicose and the war-mongers amongst us take note.  Your illicit militancy is actually weakening the nation, sapping its will to defend itself.  Ah, but who cares?  We can always have recourse to the marketing department of the Ministry of Defence.