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(en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: Militarism and Management for an Inhuman World - Charlie Barnao (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Sun, 6 Oct 2024 06:18:30 +0300


The news of the conflict in Ukraine or the genocide of the Palestinian population do not seem to affect much of the public opinion. Perhaps we are somehow accustomed or resigned to war and its horrors. Perhaps because we have been involved, for decades now, in numerous armed conflicts and we have almost never considered "our" conflicts, the ones we have fought so far, "wars", but have called them "international missions", "police operations", "actions to fight terrorism", "peace keeping actions", etc.
This is the process that Samuel Moyn, professor of history at Yale, calls the humanization of war. That is, the efforts to make war "more ethical", to "avoid torture", "limit civilian casualties" (through "smart bombs", "surgical military operations", etc.). However, according to Moyn, these efforts at representation have not only not achieved the desired result, but have even supported the military enterprise, making it stronger. As wars have become more "humane" (assuming that this has actually happened) they have also become infinite. And, we can add, wars are "endless" not only in the strictly temporal sense. War becomes "endless" also because the cultural, economic and political apparatus that supports it is gradually expanding well beyond the confines of the strictly military sphere.

Our society, our daily life, in fact, are steeped in militarism and the "ease" with which we accept and experience wars around us is probably also linked to the deep militarism that has now pervaded our entire culture (understood as values, norms, etc.). Militarism, in other words, is a cultural system, often latent, that pervades in a subtle and concealed way daily practices in the most disparate worlds: from sport to business, from the entertainment industry to school and university, from social policies to justice.

The spread of this social model centered on war, therefore, affects both the civil and military spheres. The two spheres are mutually intertwined, making it difficult to distinguish their respective borders. This dual role takes shape, more or less explicitly, in the three dimensions: economic, cultural, political. The economic dimension of this model of action is clearly manifested in the increase in military spending in the state budget; the political one focuses on the idea of resolving conflicts (internal or external to the country's borders) with the priority use of force; the cultural one is supported by a system of values, norms, symbols linked to militaristic culture.

A fairly striking example of the intertwining of economic, political and cultural aspects, when we talk about war, is given by the defense industry. The Italian Leonardo s.p.a. is a clear example. In Leonardo s.p.a., the largest arms industry in Europe, one of the largest in the world, with approximately 30% state participation and approximately 70% of turnover in arms, the intertwining of the economic, political and cultural dimensions is clearly represented in three well-known public figures: Guido Crosetto, former senior advisor to Leonardo and former president of AIAD (the association of industrialists of Confindustria in the defense sector), is now Minister of Defense; Luciano Violante, former president of the Anti-Mafia Commission and then president of the Chamber, today presides over one of Leonardo's two cultural foundations, which have the task - by statute - of spreading its cultural vision in civil society; finally Marco Minniti, former Minister of the Interior, is now president of the Med-Or foundation, another cultural foundation of Leonardo s.p.a, with a mission similar to that of the Leonardo foundation and, among other things, dedicated in particular to spreading its message in Italian universities. Within the scientific committee of Med-Or, it is surprising - but perhaps not so much - the presence of numerous Italian academics, including about ten current rectors and some former rectors.

The world of war is linked to that of business and management not only because some of the largest and most powerful companies are involved, directly or indirectly, in the production of weapons and because, as in the case of Leonardo s.p.a., they invest so much, in terms of economic and human resources, in the diffusion of their cultural model and their social vision. The world of business is historically linked - we could say "almost ontologically" - to war. Managerial science (and, in particular, operational research that constitutes its heart), as a discipline, was born during the Second World War and has its roots in the history of armies themselves.

Historically, the military is one of the first examples of rational organization. As such, it paved the way for other organizations to work out how to achieve their goals and optimize ways of doing things. The standardized division of labor in the military, based on strict instructions and discipline, as in the armies of the Persian and Roman empires or in the troops of Maurice of Orange in the 16th and 17th centuries, formed the basis for the principles of scientific management formulated centuries later. Chinese general Sun Tzu's Little Book of War Strategy and Tactics has become very popular among business and economics professionals. Accounting techniques have their origins in the classification practices developed at the early days of the West Point military academy. Engineering as an academic discipline also originated in the military: military academies around the world were the first engineering schools. The Normandy landings and subsequent supply chains had a major influence on the development of business logistics and the spread of this knowledge from the United States to the rest of the Western world.

Jean Chapoutot, a historian from the Sorbonne, studying the deep connection between management and war, even identifies a substantial link between Nazism and management. We know, after all, that militarism is an essential component of any type of fascism. Chapoutot states that current managerial thought is partly a legacy of Nazism and highlights surprising parallels and points of contact between Nazi culture linked to resource management and modern managerial techniques. He does so by reconstructing the story of Reinhard Höhn, an SS officer and director of the state research institute at the University of Berlin who, after the war, transferred Nazi ideas into the scientific discipline of management, founding the most important management school in Europe in Bad Harzburg. It trained the managers of over 2,500 companies, including Audi, BMW, Hoechst, Bayer, Telefunken, Esso, Krupp, Thyssen, Opel, Ford, Colgate, Hewlett-Packard.

But let's get back to current events. The link between militarism and management is now also explicitly manifested, for example, with a military language now internalized by the world of business and management and with personnel recruitment programs by some companies that no longer hide the fact that they are looking for specific military skills, especially with reference to job positions of figures who will manage personnel. As for the first point, metaphors now rooted in management culture such as "strategic positioning", "blue ocean strategy", "the manager as a general" and "perimeter defense" clearly derive from military history. On the topic of recruitment, one of the most striking cases is provided by Amazon, with a massive program for hiring ex-military personnel (to date already over 100,000). Bezos himself states that with these programs his company seeks workers whose military experience, characterized by "a propensity for action and obtaining results", becomes particularly "valuable in guiding people in our frenetic work environment".

From various points of view, therefore, the armed forces have developed knowledge and practices that have been taken up by organizations born later in other civilian environments. However, in more recent times, the roles seem to have reversed. Several scholars of the military world observe a new trend in this deep bond: today the military seem to follow and learn from business management more than businesses follow and learn from the military.

But whatever the direction (military-civilian or civil-military) war and its culture are cynical and destructive violence, suffering. War is torture, rape, brutal crimes, no matter where it is fought or supported and - as Samuel Moyn reminds us - it is a dangerous illusion to think that there is one war more humane than another.

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