The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for Military History
The Rise and Challenges of the Post-Modern Praetorians
They dismissed from military service the soldiers who had served their full time except 8,000 who had asked to remain. These they took back and divided between themselves and formed them in praetorian cohorts.
(Appian, Civil Wars, Bk V.3)
From the moment of its birth, in 44 B.C., the Praetorian Guard was shaped by a fundamental duality as to its nature and role. The volunteer soldiers of Julius’ Caesar’s veteran legionaries, who had fought at his side and under his command from Africa to Gallia and from Iberia to Thracia -his elite, most loyal troops, were divided by his two successors, Octavianus and Marcus Antonius, into two personal bodyguards whose mission it was to protect and defend their respective masters. After Marcus Antonius’ final defeat, in 31 B.C., Caesar’s nephew recombined his and Antonius’ guards in a standing force of nine cohorts stationed in and around Rome. As long as Augustus lived, the Praetorians’ loyalty and devotion towards the Princeps -their patron, protector, and paymaster- was never in doubt.
In time, the Praetorian Guard evolved into “a powerful and influential branch of the government involved in public security, civil administration, and ultimately political intercession“; and the rise and fall -and death!- of many future emperors was due directly to the personal allegiances and interests of the Praetorian Prefects and the Guards under their command. Yet the Guards never lost their original function of an elite fighting corps who accompanied some of Rome’s greatest emperor-generals in Dacia and Parthia (Trajan) and Germania (Marcus Aurelius) to assist not only in the conquest, but also in the pacification of new territories and their conversion into well-administered roman provinces. Elite fighting units of the largest empire the world had ever known, deployed to expand, protect and preserve Roman rule and Roman law – yet also Palace Guards constituting the last line of defense for their imperial benefactor – or principal tool of his downfall and replacement: the original duality which had shaped the Praetorian Guard from its moment of inception never truly disappeared – but became more pronounced and difficult to grasp with the passage of time. The key role, unsurprisingly, was played by the personal leadership skills and the ability to inspire respect, loyalty and devotion of each emperor; thus Augustus, Tiberius, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius had the total allegiance of the Guard and used it primarily in the field, to expand and consolidate the Roman Empire and maintain the pax romana; lesser emperors used it to protect themselves from their rivals – and often fell under the Guard’s swords as the Pretorians chose a new emperor more attuned to their needs and personal interests.
Roman imperial guard, bas-relief from the Julio-Claudian period.
Armed forces across the globe today have inherited this central duality of the ancient Roman Guards: they all become increasingly specialized either as elite units to be deployed at a moment’s notice in far-away theaters of war to defeat enemies and restore order, peace and civil concord, and thus to maintain and protect the existing global order described, by both proponents and opponents as pax americana; or they remain staunchly loyal to national leaders and protect them and their ruling elites primarily against the threats of insurrection and revolt arising from their own citizens or political rivals. UN and NATO troops as well as Republican and Revolutionary Guards or People’s Armies can rightly claim to be true descendants of the Roman Praetorians who lived, fought and died over two millenia ago.
Michael Mann’s brilliant exposition of the networks of social power and his integration of political, economic, ideological AND military power into his analytical model of investigation of how states, societies and regimes across the world rise, develop and fall taught us again that we must focus on all four of these dimensions of power and the complex ways they interact and reshape each other in particular times and places; no one dimension can be understood in isolation from the other, nor can global processes be explained based on any one, totalizing variable. For both historical and ideological reasons, the Eurocentric, liberal paradigm of post-modern governance too often ignores the military dimension of social power, rejecting it as a retrograde and unjustifiable tool of policy formation and implementation, and resorts to it reluctantly, begrudgingly, almost ashamedly. Post-Modern Praetorians, the UN, NATO, EU and US troops deployed around the world seem, in general (but not always!), to have lost popular recognition as an acceptable tool of public policy and be seen, at best, as a necessary evil and, at worst, as tools of dominance, conquest, injustice and repression.
Bereft of such pangs of conscience, 21st century dictators and autocrats do not hesitate to use military force to both consolidate their internal rule and to project power across their borders, challenging the nascent global order based on principles of democracy, human rights, rule of law and respect for diversity in the name of principles of national sovereignty, independence and difference which only serve to legitimize and justify their arbitrary hold on power at all costs. Stuck in a modernity based on the primacy and power of the territorially-defined, sovereign nation-state, such rulers rely on their Modern Praetorians to acquire, exercise and expand their personal power, in a world which no longer can permit or afford the self-serving, narrow-minded, and morally bankrupt deployment of military power to mask the political, economic and ideological failings of such regimes.
As Mann noted, military power is not the ony aspect, nor even the determinant aspect, of social power and global order; but it remains nonetheless a critical one. It is from the clash of theese Modern and Post-Modern Praetorians, both inheritors of one fundamental aspect of the dual nature of Augustus’ Praaetorian Guards, that will arise a new paradigm of military power for the 21st century and beyond. I hope my studies of War in the Modern World will allow me to better understand this process of formation of the military network of power which will play such a central role in re-shaping our futures for decades, maybe centuries to come.
The US Arms Control Epistemic Community under Eisenhower and the Emergence of an International Arms Control Regime
November 12, 2008 at 7:58 am · Filed under Article Commentary, Cold War History, Military History and tagged: Arms Race, Cold War, Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex
Commentary on Emanuel Adler, The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control , International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 1, (Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination), Winter, 1992, pp. 101-145).
The author’s main thesis is that the US arms control epistemic community, made up of scientists, strategists and academics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, became aware of the vulnerability of US nuclear weapons and concerned about the reciprocal fear of surprise attack, and predicted that both US national security and avoidance of a nuclear war would be enhanced by persuading the superpowers to collaborate in stabilizing the nuclear balance though arms control. Just as importantly, this epistemic community was then able to reach into places where decisions were made and influence the minds of the people who made them, and even, in time, joined their ranks, thereby turning their ideas into widespread national security policy and practice. Their understanding of the nature and uses of such a prudential association arms control international regime was eventually diffused and accepted by the Soviet Union and became the foundation of US-Soviet cooperation not only over the 30 years from 1960 to 1990, but even beyond the end of the Cold War.
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)
The innovation process of this group was fueled, according to Adler, by their realization that nuclear deterrence had become unstable and that a catastrophe could occur against the wishes of adversary states, as well as by a number of events such as Soviet ICBM testing in 1957, the launch of Sputnik in the same year, and the Gaither Committee Report proposing an across-the-board military buildup which alarmed Eisenhower and made him more receptive to arms control ideas.
So, if we accept that the selection process of such arms control ideas which best fit the interests of policy makers and passed the test of public opinion started not only under the Kennedy/Johnson Administration, but was already evident under Eisenhower, then “by the time Kennedy entered office significant trends were under way” (Adler 1992, at 125): a framework of negotiations and a policy on which to build; emerging arms control concepts as legitimate foci of policy debate; government personnel and organizational structures with a vested interest in arms control. Thus, the pioneering work accomplished under the Eisenhower administration played a critical (although not sufficient!) role in the adoption of stable deterrence and arms control notions by the Kennedy / Johnson administration.
This transition from disarmament to arms control, eventually accepted by both US and Soviet policy makers and at the basis of their relationship from 1968 onwards, once the USSR achieved party with the US in terms of nuclear missiles, meant that bureaucracies in both countries “had to go through a process of adjustment and conceptual evolution” (Adler 1992, p. 128). Stable deterrence and arms control eventually became a salient paradigm of national security in both the US and USSR and gave rise to arms control agendas and political coalitions capable to carry them out (Adler 1992, p. 133).
The end result was the creation of an international regime of arms control between two powers with widely divergent goals and values, but at the same time with shared interests in these specific areas – in other words, a “prudential association” regime. “Thus, once arms control ideas became embodied in domestic and international procedures and institutions, the domestic and international games were irrevocably changed. Each new generation of leaders had to make its (rational) decisions on the basis of an inherited intellectual code of international arms control ideas which, with the passage of time, was enlarged, refined, and taken for granted… And since the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, arms control has also become a means for enabling the transition to a new European order” (Adler 1992, p. 140).
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)
If Adler’s analysis is correct, as I think it is, then Eisenhower’s “new thinking” regarding nuclear weapons as well as his foreign policy becomes even more complex than already assumed. The immediate, short-term image he projected was that of a Republican Cold-Warrior President who was determined to use the US nuclear arsenal not only for deterrence, but also compellence purposes (Korea in 1953, Quemoy and Matsu Islands in 1954 and 1958); in the medium-term, his “New Look” policy purporting to see nuclear weapons as the first line of defense in any war was designed to actually avoid the possibility of any war; in the long-term, his openness to the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community shows in a new light his “Open Skies” proposal, his “Atoms for Peace” proposal and even his U-2 surveillance program as they acquire an entirely new meaning and no longer leave the beginning of the Test Ban Treaty Negotiations in 1957 as an isolated moment in his administration.
In effect, at the time Eisenhower took power, the rules of the game for the use of nuclear weapons had not been established, and there was, as Crockatt states, a virtual absence of a negotiating culture” between the US and USSR (Crockatt 1995, at 153). Eisenhower carefully combined the rhetoric of compellence for internal political purposes, with that of a “New Look” policy for both internal budgetary reasons and external deterrence of any wars, whilst beneath these two layers, playing a critical role in encouraging the development and establishment of an entirely new set of rules based on the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community which were to establish the fundamental parameters of a prudential association international arms control regime that was to become the corner-stone of US-Soviet relations for the next thirty years and the best guarantor of the “Long Peace” of the second half of the 20th Century between the two rival superpowers. Eisenhower wasn’t playing poker, nor even bridge, but rather three-dimensional chess…
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