Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

War begets war: it is an old truism, and internecine wars — of the type twice fought on American soil — typically have their antecedents in prior wars. Consider our Revolutionary War, whose cri de coeur was “no taxation without representation.” But how often we overlook that Britain imposed these heightened taxes on the colonists to service debts from the French and Indian War. Consider our Civil War, which was fought to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. But how often we overlook that what upset the balance between free and slave states were territorial acquisitions made during the Mexican-American War. This pattern extends also to the key personalities of these conflicts, who first appeared on the historical stage in the prior war — George Washington, who at the end of the French and Indian Wars was a minor officer of mixed reputation who had once surrendered to the French, and Ulysses S. Grant, who mustered out of the army not long after the end of the Mexican-American War. When Robert E. Lee surrendered to him seventeen years later at Appomattox, Grant reminded Lee that they had met once before, in Mexico. General Lee, who had been a colonel in that first war, apologized; he could not recall having ever met Grant. A recent raft of commentary — from articles to books to endless cable news segments — has asked whether the United States is headed toward another civil war. Anxiety about the subject grips us. Could our divisions metastasize into war? We watch the trend lines: increasing income inequality; racial resentments; hyper-partisanship; outbursts of violence. Which of these could prove combustible enough to incite a war? In recent years an alarming number of Americans have been moved to protest, to riot, and even to engage in insurrection. And like our Civil War and our Revolutionary War, the propellant that turns civil discord into civil war may not exist in our current discontents, but rather in our last war, which was fought far from our shores. “The baby boomers turn is over,” said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller as he stared into the camera. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.” His video, posted to Facebook, immediately went viral. He recorded it at his desk in Camp Lejeune the day after a suicide bomber at Kabul International Airport’s Abbey Gate killed thirteen American service members and over 170 Afghans. In his nearly five-minute-long post, Scheller lamented the Biden administration’s handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and called out senior military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’” But Scheller’s remarks went one step further than a simple demand for accountability. He went on to quote Thomas Jefferson, who said that “every generation needs a revolution.” When I finished watching the video last August, I wasn’t certain what to make of it. My first instinct was to categorize it as a rant. If it wasn’t clear already, after the bombing at Abbey Gate it became evident that the Biden administration had handled the evacuation of Afghanistan with an exceptional degree of incompetence. Emotions remained raw, so a rant — even if inappropriate and perhaps even illegal when delivered by an active-duty officer — seemed understandable. Upon further reflection, however, I slowly came to realize that what I had watched was something else: an act of self-immolation. Before his swift relief by senior officers that same day, Scheller held battalion command. The Marine Corps is very selective about which officers it grooms to become battalion commanders; the fact that Scheller held that job means that he was — until recording his video — well-regarded, a Marine with a future in the Corps. Furthermore, Scheller was seventeen years into a twenty-year career. At twenty years he would have been eligible for retirement at half his base pay with other benefits, such as healthcare for life. It took him exactly four minutes and forty-five seconds to throw all that away. Scheller is a husband and a father. Why did he do this? Before last year’s cataclysmic withdrawal, Afghanistan was not a place, or an issue, most Americans cared about. In 2018, according to Rasmussen, 42 percent of the country couldn’t even say whether we were still at war there. Over the past two decades, the war in Afghanistan was waged by an all-volunteer military and funded through deficit spending. Unlike other wars, there has been no draft and no war tax. It is often said that while America’s military has spent the past twenty years at war, America itself has been at the mall. This has led to a massive civil-military divide. The botched Afghanistan withdrawal, in which many active duty as well as retired military members received hundreds of phone calls and texts daily from their Afghan allies who were being left to fend for themselves against the Taliban (and who have already suffered at the hands of the Taliban in the months since our retreat) only deepened this sense of alienation among many who had served. One need only look back through history — from Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France — to see clearly that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. These are the exact conditions that exist in the United States today, in which we are witnessing a politicization of the American military with few precedents, from General Mark Milley marching across Lafayette Park in his fatigues with former President Donald Trump, to the congressional testimony of senior officers — on everything from January 6 to right-wing extremism to critical race theory — becoming fodder for late-night cable news anchors who seek to position those in uniform