Pussycats: Why The Rest Keeps Beating The Rest, And What Can Be Done About It Kindle Edition

A much needed, but unfortunately unheeded, work. A scholarly condemnation of modern western armies with opinions reinforced by judgements found in the classics, in the Scriptures, in history, and in current events. I wish today's politicians would take this message to heart, but unfortunately for us, "What difference does it make?"

It is no wonder that this book had to be self-published as I cannot imagine a mainstream publisher would touch a manuscript that like this that so eloquently gores just about all of the sacred cows of the modern liberal movements but especially that of feminism and the infantilism of western society.
As usual, Dr. van Creveld is insightful and devastating when describing the ills besetting the modern west and particularly the continual decline in actual military capability of the west. He correctly identifies that the problem with the West's inability to defeat 3rd world insurgents lies not in western inability to fight but in the west's reluctance to actually prosecute such campaigns to their logical conclusion to achieve victory. He diagnoses the major problems as the infantilisation of the post-WWII generations, the rise of feminism, and the replacement of duties with rights and hits the nail on the head in all three areas.
This is an excellent work that should be on the reading list of all western militaries, not that any military leader would be willing to put it on there much less try to stem the rot.
If you have read van Creveld's "Culture of War" then you need to read this as well. If you have not then you need to read both.

wonderful book.

Disagreeing with Martin van Creveld’s predictions feels like arguing against tomorrow’s sunrise. His successful forecasts are legion. The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz (1991) reads like a future historian’s analysis of our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Around 1995 Martin van Creveld told the CIA that Mexico would become the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty. They thought this was delusional; I suspect events since then have changed their minds.

So his new book deserves close attention: Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West. It discusses issues of great importance and covers a wild field of vital questions.

Van Creveld warns that social changes are eroding away the West’s ability to defend itself — reducing its once powerful armies to pussycats. This is probably false as an explanation for the defeats of conventional armies since WWII when fighting non-trinitarian (aka 4GW) armies in foreign lands. It looks prescient as a warning about the future.

Van Creveld’s fascinating book, Pussycats, is one more piece in a series of fundamental texts. Prominent among those are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which together did so much to shape Western thought over the last two and a half centuries or so. All these outstanding works share the idea that the relative power of nations is not fixed. Instead it is influenced by cultural, social and economic processes inside each country. These processes generate weakness or strength, entropy or sudden outbursts of energy. Such outbursts in turn enhance both the nation’s power and its quest for even greater power. History points to the existence of close links between cultural, social and economic affairs on one hand and military-political power on the other. A country that does well on the former front will likely do well on the latter, too.
The way van Creveld sees it, Europe’s triumphal march, which lasted almost five hundred years, provided one example of the links in question. The march got under way just before 1500 when the Ferdinand and Isabel did away with the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. It culminated in the first decade of the twentieth century when five European Powers, plus the European-derived US, ruled over 80 percent of the earth’s land mass and 100 percent of its oceans. The decline of Europe after 1945, and that of the US in recent years, was accompanied by the miserable failure of its armed forces on countless battlefields, starting in Indochina and ending in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria
As van Creveld says, in the capitals of the West something is rotten. The fault, Pussycats argues, lies squarely with the waning of the West’s will to power and the growing unwillingness of its armed forces to fight. Five factors, van Creveld writes, brought about the decline. They are, the way the young are raised; the disintegration of the military spirit; the way women are “integrated” into the military; worship of the false god, PTSD; and the de-legitimization of war itself.
First, for quite some time now Western society has been doing what it could to infantilize its young and prevent them from growing up. It does so by means of a peculiar form of impotent parenting that is lacking in authority and fails to tell them where the limits are. Working hand-in-hand with parents is an education system which, starting in kindergarten, does what it can to suppress originality on one hand while treating each child as a potential genius on the other. Even if, as a result, standards have to be lowered.
Various organizations, claiming to “protect” children, insist children have only rights but no duties and therefore that every one of their demands must be met. Last not least, the legislatives of many countries have enacted laws that make it easy to take children away from their parents and turn them into public property while ignoring both their own wishes and nature’s laws. The outcome is youngsters who, when compared to those of the Third World, are confused and soft. And who would have been hopelessly incapable of meeting a Talib, or a member of Daesh, or al-Nusrah, on the battlefield, even if doing so had occurred to them.
The disintegration of the military spirit is said to be the outcome of several factors. Among them are changes in military language, which has become both circumspective and prolix; as well as the attempts to fit military behavior, customs, and traditions into the framework provided by post-modern political correctness. Between them, these attempts almost amount to re-engineering the military DNA; that is why entire armies of lawyers had to be mobilized in order to make them work. Soldiers had to be re-educated to respect gender, race, ethnic origin, even the enemy himself. All this at the expense of the open communications, simplicity, and loyalty which used to characterize armed forces at their best and which created and maintained the organic ties between uniformed men. The kind of ties, also known as cohesion, without which no fighting formation, small or large, can exist.
At the most basic level such cohesion is based on integrity, meaning honesty, loyalty, respect, virtue (in the sense that Machiavelli uses the term), and mutual support. Van Creveld believes that, in an army which does not allow the troops to express their true thoughts without having to fear that lawyers will pounce on every word, such cohesion is impossible. Conversely, when forced to prefer the norms of political correctness to truth they deceive themselves and make others deceive them. According to van Creveld, the reason why the Western military, with the US military at their head, are slowly disintegrating is because their troops are compelled to deny both their own nature and their integrity. Where there is no integrity there can be no cohesion, no fighting power; and the other way around.
The integration of women into the Western armed forces reflects the difficulty those forces have experienced, and are experiencing, in attracting men. Van Creveld never doubts the logic of employing women in work for which they are suited, including research, development, medical services, legal services, engineering, administration, and logistics. After all, the objective of the armed forces is to end the bloodbath known as war in victory; anyone who can help them do so is fit to wear uniform. But when a coalition of radical feminist organizations and populist politicians try to turn the forces from fighting machines into instruments of social change and gender equality the inevitable outcome is an army of pitiable pussycats.
Van Creveld is horrified by the attempt, so obvious in all western countries, to implement radical feminist ideas by means of “gender norming.” Meaning not only a lowering of standards to allow women to join combat units and obtain the corresponding rewards, but the right to themselves decide when to end their participation, even in wartime. The tail—gender equality—has started wagging the dog—the military. The outcome, so van Creveld, is to lower morale, throw cohesion to the wind, and reduce the organization’s ability to achieve its objectives.
The worship of the god of PTSD, van Creveld continues, is a modern fashion that reduces the order of battle by a very considerable factor. It also shatters the confidence of the troops in each other and in headquarters. The fact that soldiers might lose their lives or be injured has been known and understood since the earliest days of war. However, prior to the birth of modern psychology and psychiatry nobody thought that war would necessarily cause warriors to go mad or lose their ability to fight. Having examined the evidence as provided by literature, history and art, van Creveld concludes that there have indeed been cases in which individuals were upset, became hysterical, ran way in fear, etc. However, absent political, cultural and social pressures, as well as public legitimacy, PTSD could only go so far.
Some armies treated cases harshly, quickly turning them around and forcing them to return to the front. Others, including the Roman one, gave them a dishonorable discharge. Such measures probably went far to ensure that only genuine cases should be let go. However that may be, van Creveld argues that the vast increase of PTSD in present-day armed forces does not necessarily mean that modern war is more terrible than its predecessors used to be. As is proved, among other things, by the fact that even personnel who operate remotely-controlled vehicles contract it and, in some cases, are expected to contract it. According to him, the real reason why Western troops have turned into pussycats is the social de-legitimation of war.
War and warfare are the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means. Stripping states, peoples and individuals of the veneer of civilization, as they do, they have always required some kind of legitimation. War’s essence, its very heart, is a murderous activity which does not always make it easy to distinguish between praiseworthy deeds and criminal ones. Political leaders dislike being accused of aggression and soldiers refuse to be called murderers. Legitimacy is what enables both the former and the latter to defend themselves against criminal charges and all kinds of moral reservations and gain society’s esteem. That is why, van Creveld says, leaders and commanders have always tried to justify their reasons for going to war and the way they waged it.
Until the establishment first of the League of Nations and then of the United Nations, little thought was devoted to whether humanity might do without war. Since then, however, more and more people in the West have reached the conclusion that any war, even one waged against the most wicked, most threatening opponent in the world, is a crime. Van Creveld sees this process as an outgrowth of the post-modernist “rights discourse” so common in the West, the US in particular. By putting the individual at the center of existence, this discourse has fundamentally altered the relationship between him (or her) on one hand and society, or the state, on the other.
No longer is a person seen as having two sides, a private one and a public one; instead, the new discourse insists on his (or her) right to live in maximum comfort without outside intervention. The outcome has been a new kind of moral egoism, or egoistic morality. Anchored in the law, it is totally opposed to such values as sacrifice and loyalty; precisely the values on which soldiers have always been raised and armies, based. Where right has priority over duty, says van Creveld, no war can be legitimized and no armed force worthy of the name, consisting of troops ready and willing to fight, established or maintained.
The book examines the factors that have caused the West to lose its fighting power and its troops to become pussycats. What it does not do is argue that fighting power is the only factor leading to victory, let alone that its lack is the lonely reason why Western forces have so often been defeated by ill-organized, ill-trained, ill-equipped, and even ill-clad Third-World terrorists, guerrillas, insurgents, and militias. Instead, many other factors are involved. Among the most important are leadership at all levels, organization, command and control, doctrine, weaponry, and others. Often weak fighting power is the outcome, not the cause, of problems with all the rest. Nevertheless van Creveld’s claim that the spread of PTSD in the wake of the Vietnam War has played a major role in causing the failures inspires respect; as he says, quoting Nietzsche, the best cure for the soul is victory.
Van Creveld does not share the apocalyptic vision which sees hordes of warriors belonging to Daesh, Al Nusra, and Boko Haram will take over the Middle East and Africa and proceed to invade Europe and/or the US. In his view, so vast is the advantage in firepower the West enjoys over those bands as to render any such thought absurd. He does, however, worry about terrorism and raises some interesting thoughts concerning the direction in which things may move; thus making the book relevant and up to date.
An analytic writer, Martin van Creveld follows in the footsteps of great historians such as Sir Michael Howard and Sir John Keegan. Like them, he tries to read historical material the way their authors wrote them and analyze them. What he does not do is to take them apart and reassemble them so as to make them fit his thesis, as de-constructivists so often do. He invests his creativity, indeed his personality, as well as his subjective point of view in trying to identify the logic of his chosen subject so as to liberate it from the infinite mass of detail and explain the “laws” that make it function. That is how he examines the impact of women on fighting, the phenomenon known as PTSD (even before it was recognized), educational methods, and many other historical topics including the Homeric poems, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Polybius’ History, and much more. This explains the use of numerous footnotes whose purpose is to enable the reader to go back to the sources and judge for him (or her) self.
As so often, van Creveld’s writing style is direct. He makes no attempt to hide behind ambiguous terms or obey the commands of political correctness. On occasion he provokes, as in his discussion of the “achievements” or radical feminism which, seeking to raise women’s status in society, has caused standards in the military to be lowered to the point where that military is no longer attractive even to them. Another advantage of the book is that it has succeeded in compressing the subject into two hundred pages, footnotes included. This brevity enables the reader to put his (or her) time to the best use.
Relatively short as the book is, it offers a broad point of view which should appeal to many different kinds of readers including, above all, officers. Among them, the most important are those who serve in the forces van Creveld characterizes, rather disparagingly, as pussycats, and who are compelled not only to accept the reality the book describes but to pretend it is the way to progress. An ancient Chinese proverb says that the best place to hide is under the lantern. Van Creveld’s book may help military commanders understand that the environment in which they live, and for whose creation they are partly responsible, is detrimental to fighting power. If so, it will have achieved its purpose.
Another reason why commanders may find the book interesting is because it has so much to offer by way of outlining the ways previous generations of soldiers dealt with the problems it considers. That includes the methods used for creating cohesiveness, the integration of women, PTSD, and much more. Hopefully the fact that many of van Creveld’s arguments are quite unorthodox should increase the attractiveness of his work. His discussion of the impact of society on the military, and the danger posed to the latter by the attempt to turn it into a laboratory for post-modern and post-humanist experiments, might have greater appeal to the educated layman. Democratic politicians trying to conduct such experiments have an easy time of it, given that the armed forces are run in a non-democratic way and sworn to obey.
The question as to how the experiment may end, and whether the armed forces which have been turned into branches of NOW will still be able to achieve their objectives, gives rise to some quite uncomfortable thoughts. Feminist politicians such as Sweden’s foreign minister who, following the Russian invasion of the Crimea, declared that the way to oppose Putin’s “macho aggression” is a feminist foreign policy based on representation, resources and respect may have to ask themselves whether the pussycats they have fostered are still capable of any effective action at all. Other readers may find quite a detailed discussion of the Revolution in the Military Mentality that has been brought about over the last three decades or so, and the negative impact it has had on military performance.
To sum up, Pussycats is a diamond, brimming with knowledge and understanding, fluent and provocative. Recommended ! recommended !recommended !

Creveld can't write a bad book-he is so good I enjoy his writing on subjects I normally avoid. If you have read a lot of his more recent books, this one won't have a lot of original subject matter-but I still enjoyed it and was happy to support a great author.

Quite good, but weak on "what next" other than "we keep losing if this goes on." In essence, we need better leadership and opinion class. Well, as of today (Armistice Day, 2016) we've got that - at least potentially.

Required reading if you're not a chump.