A sample of one proves nothing, but it can at least fail to disprove some theory and new raise questions. A fascinating but terrible Wall Street Journal report tells the story of Daniel Swift, a Navy SEAL who had deserted and died fighting in Ukraine earlier this year (“‘War Is Fun’: The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting,” May 12, 2023).
After deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, Swift was not able to adapt to ordinary social life. “War is fun,” said a US Army veteran. In many ways, the story of Mr. Swift is consistent with the economic way of looking at individual choices including those involving violence.
UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer reminded us that there are two broad options in life: peaceful cooperation or violence. Swift’s life story confirms that some individuals have a comparative advantage in violence, whether it is biologically innate or acquired or a combination of both. A comparative advantage describes what one can do comparatively better than some others and thus specialize in. Adam Smith believed that comparative advantage was acquired: “The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.” One problem is how, in a free and civilized society, some accommodation can be reached with violence-prone people. One way is to punish them when they are found guilty of unjustified violence. Another one is to bribe them with consumption opportunities if they stay peaceful.
Whether Mr. Swift was attracted to the special forces because he already had a comparative advantage in violence or whether he mainly acquired it there, I do not know. Regarding the other army veteran already quoted on the fun of war, the Wall Street Journal also reports:
Civilian life, he added, didn’t offer the same camaraderie or sense of purpose: “War is easy in many ways. Your mission is crystal clear. You’re here to take the enemy out.”
But what did people like him and Mr. Swift learn in school? Didn’t they learn in some way that life is more complicated than camaraderie in ordered missions? Looking at the memoirs Swift self-published under a pseudonym after his desertion (and available on Amazon), it’s not clear that he learned anything other than sports and wrestling in high-school—although his book is engaging. The dysfunctional families in which he and many of his childhood friends lived certainly did not help. He wants to have us believe that his wife did not either, but it’s easy to understand that long deployments are difficult for everybody in the family.
After Swift came back from his last deployment, he faced what psychologists call “adjustment disorder.” He was arrested for domestic violence and charged with false imprisonment, children endangerment, and domestic battery. His wife obtained a protective order and was awarded a large part of his salary. He could not see his four children, which he seemed to love, although perhaps gauchely. In his book, he denies the charges of violence. A felony conviction would have ended his military career, which is the only thing he knew. He deserted before his trial.
Another reflection is in order, which is often neglected in pacifist circles. Men who have some comparative advantage in violence are useful to protect others against unjust violence. Unjust violence will always exist. Protecting even imperfect liberty has a value. And, of course, soldiers are not all, and should not be, violent brutes (“killing machines,” as Trump proudly said of “our boys” from the depth of his wisdom). But even when a (defensive) war and its methods are just, it remains a difficult challenge in a free (or more or less free) society.
READER COMMENTS
Emily
May 17 2023 at 9:08am
A lot of people have trouble adjusting to post-military life, and many of those people weren’t as far to the pointy end of the spear as as Swift was. The purpose and structure part are independent of the violence aspect. If you enlist as a teenager, you may never have lived off-base as an adult or made a resume and job-searched in the normal sense.
It’s also hard to parse out how much of this is selection vs. treatment — that the military selects for people who want that kind of structure, vs. makes some group of people not really able to function in the civilian world. Some of the disability incentives are also not great, but that doesn’t seem like it was happening here.
steve
May 17 2023 at 1:47pm
I think you cover this well. Its a common issue among those who were not actively in combat, though it seems to be more common for those who were. (There weren’t really clear lines in our most recent wars, unlike WW2, so in a sense everyone was at risk of being a casualty.) I think camaraderie underestimates the intensity of the relationship. You are away from family and you depend upon the entire group to not only compete your mission but for everyday stuff like companionship. Its not really family but closer to that than most working situations.
I think the selection is mostly self-selection. It is a voluntary military. The recruiters mostly just try to meet numbers, not try to find particular kinds of recruits. Someone with a history of violence might not survive in the military since you also need discipline.
Steve
Bill
May 17 2023 at 11:38am
Brings to mind the “Hurt Locker” movie.
Craig
May 17 2023 at 11:50am
“Men who have some comparative advantage in violence are useful to protect others against unjust violence. ”
How many Swiss soldiers are attacking their spouses and abandoning their children to return to whatever dopamine hit he needed to get from combat stress?
If you are trained to be a skilled worker in a nuclear power plant, the fact you had a comparative advantage in knowing those systems would prove useful to society, but if that radiation exposure dosimeter they make workers wear lights up indicating excessive exposure to radiation, comparative advantage or not, they pull you out of there.
@Emily “that the military selects for people who want that kind of structure,”
It definitely does that of course. There are people who definitely like that kind of structure.
“vs. makes some group of people not really able to function in the civilian world. ”
I’d suggest its a function of being exposed to combat itself and whereas in the case of the radiation, there’s an objective brightline standard, exposure to combat has a deep psychological impact and individual resistance to that will vary. Why? I’m not sure, but from just what I am reading here, Swift was a broken person, incapable of being a husband to his wife and a dad to his children.
“But even when a (defensive) war and its methods are just”
Indeed an important qualification, but I’d suggest feeding America’s children to sustain the wanton militarism of the regime is not just.
So if you have children who aren’t quite of military age yet, hold them close and teach them well because there are ghouls out there like Milley who would lay claim to their services to fight whatever conflict the regime deems just enough to fight staged from one of the 600 bases these war criminals have sprinkled around the world. People have fortunately started to wise up to it too. Recruitment is down 25%. I just started to see the first articles out there discussing the potential necessity of a draft in the future.
Its May 17th, 2023 and right now the federal government is being led by people I wouldn’t follow to WaWa for a free cup of coffee and they have led us to the brink of nuclear and financial armageddon.
#outofnato #endtheendlesswars #nationaldivorce
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2023 at 12:09pm
Craig: Isn’t an alliance generally the best form of self-defense, including from a dissuasive viewpoint? Switzerland is an interesting exception, probably the exception that confirms the rule. But note that it is itself an alliance of cantons, and that the country is literally in the middle of NATO countries.
Craig
May 17 2023 at 12:44pm
Switzerland of course is also multiethnic so Swiss neutrality is also a practical response to many Franco-German wars which, if Switzerland took a side there very well could be a civil war.
Current US militarism is vestigial from a time in 1947 when Europe was recovering from war and the Red Army with its Warsaw Pact allies were poised on the Elbe. Europe is now relatively prosperous, a non-US NATO is conventionally much stronger than Russia in every category and is also backed by nuclear weapons. The NATO HQ building in Belgium is even made from glass. In my view Europe can and should be able to defend itself.
With respect to Asia, one can look at South Korea and Taiwan, two prosperous countries who are both relatively smaller than China, South Korea of course having the added disadvantage of sharing a land border with North Korea and having Seoul in artillery range. So naturally one would think that both Taiwan and South Korea would spend more per capita on defense than the US being right on the frontline of the potential ambitions of the Chinese and/or the North Koreans? Nah, you’d be wrong, they spent less than half per capita of the US.
The US invaded Iraq, not once, but twice and I’m sure John Bolton and Liz Cheney are dusting off plans for the third invasion on September 1st, after all — goosestepping into Iraq, its what neocons do, right? They don’t touch North Korea, do they? Why? Maybe the nukes. maybe, right?
The US has two massive oceans, Canada to the north, Mexico to the South and enough nukes to destroy the planet five times over. The US govt is broke and the list of things I’m willing to sacrifice my son’s life is extremely short and unequivocally does not include Europe, South Korea and Taiwan.
God helps those who help themselves.
“The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities… it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements.
— George Washington’s Farewell Address
““Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” — Thomas Jefferson inaugural address.
David Seltzer
May 17 2023 at 4:03pm
Pierre: I have trained in the art of violence from the time I was twelve. Competitive boxing, four years in the military and years of training with IDF Krav fighters in Israel. A large part of that training focused on avoiding confrontation. Risk assessment. Situational awareness and relying on disabling fighting skills when necessary. If you and the commenters will be so kind and indulge me, this is an excerpt from my self published short story The Collector. It describes adjustment disorder for a returning combatant. The protagonist, David Sanders, thinks about his best friend :
-Bishop’s life ended in a rice paddy when a Bouncing Betty cut him in half. Viet Nam was family. Viet Nam was the sting of imminent death. Viet Nam was the rich flush of life at the edge of death. When Sanders returned to “the world,” he tried to replicate… feel… what he felt in Nam. The civilized world was just that. Vague, routine and glacial in its trudge toward purpose. At the end of the day, week, month or year it was “safe.” Nothing boiled. Nothing made his mouth dry. Nothing at risk-
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2023 at 5:59pm
David: Interesting. Your comment is related to Fukuyama’s original analysis of discontent in “democratic” societies. I quote from my Regulation review (if you can bear a long quote):
I would however oppose to your hero what the veteran quoted by the WSJ claimed: it is not the purpose of a free society that is the problem, but the opposite; it’s its lack of imposed purpose (or “end” as Hayek would say) on individuals, the fact that one has to find his own “mission” himself.
David Seltzer
May 17 2023 at 6:50pm
Pierre: Thank you. Thymotic desires can be dangerous to a liberal society as in the Trump example. My pursuit of physical and intellectual development was not incentivized by the desire to be recognized as greater than others. Only to be my greatest self. In a world where autocracies hold power with the threat of force, I remain prepared. I willingly accept a world of mundane morality.
Mark Brophy
May 17 2023 at 9:25pm
Special Forces veteran Mike Glover had much to say on these subjects and others on the Joe Rogan podcast episode 1931. It was very enlightening.
Monte
May 18 2023 at 2:41am
Jack Hirshleifer said of Conflict and Settlement:
We can easily surmise what Daniel Swift’s preferences (war is fun, camaraderie and sense of purpose) and opportunities (fame, fortune, escaping justice and/or a mundane existence) might have been, but what can we say about his perceptions?
Concerning perceptions, enlightenment thinker John Locke held that “the human mind is a blank slate at birth, ready to be written over by sensory experience.” Alternatively, neuroscientist Beau Lotto, in his book Deviate, tells us that “perception, broadly taken, is not what our eyes and ears tell us; it is what our brain makes us see and hear.”
So, are our perceptions created from the outside in, or from the inside out? Until we have a frame of reference, how can we speak to our own perceptions, much less Daniel Swift’s?
Pierre Lemieux
May 18 2023 at 8:43am
Monte: Good questions. I suspect that by “perceptions,” Hirshleifer referred to how an individual perceives his circumstances or “feasible set.” An individual is modeled as making his choices on the basis of his preferences and his constraints or how he perceives them. That is subjectivism. We have reasons to believe that a farmer who chooses to plant and sell soybeans, and succeeds doing so, has a comparative advantage in that area (comparatively to, say, shooting others). It must be the same, mutatis mutandis, for a warrior like Swift. Hayek explained that economics starts from what the individual thinks, or perceives if you wish. The issue of where these ideas come from is not relevant in economics. Finally, note how free-market prices efficiently guide individual action because they incorporate the (social) reality of all other individuals’ preferences and perceptions–although you might say that this is not as relevant to military central planning.
Jon Murphy
May 18 2023 at 10:04am
I think it is relevant in a public choice, non-market decision-making way. While there aren’t prices in wartime actions (battles, campaigns, etc), incorporating individual preferences and perceptions does matter a lot. More decentralized command structures, ones that allow for more freedom of thought and action among subordinates, are highly successful. The incentive structure matters, of course, but it’s about things like medals, promotions, wages, etc., as opposed to prices.
Monte
May 18 2023 at 12:28pm
Thanks for clarifying, Pierre. I was stuck in the process of how we form our perceptions. But as you point out, it’s enough to proceed on the basis of Hayek’s explanation in order to model Swift’s choices economically. Hirshleifer depicted this beautifully with his graphical illustrations of the Potential Settlement Region (PSR), or as you put it, the feasible set.
In Hirshleifer’s example, we can replace income with lifestyle in the individual case of Swift. He was faced with the choice of either a peaceful, mundane existence, or a violent and exciting one. He chose the latter, suggesting his PSR was comparatively small.
This was my Aha! moment. Social reality, not individual reality, is the more important explanatory variable in terms of economic analysis.
Pierre Lemieux
May 18 2023 at 1:21pm
Monte: One point regarding your last sentenced must be mentioned and relates to methodological individualism. In economics (and, I think, any social science worth its salt), society is the explanandum, not the explanatory variable. We start with the individual–his perceptions and actions–to explain society, not the other way around. Individual actions lead to a certain configuration of society (prices are an easy example to think about), which then guides individual actions (the topic of your last sentence). If there were no individuals, there would be no human society. A social class, for example, is not alive and does not act.
Monte
May 18 2023 at 3:03pm
I think I see your point. Might it have been more accurate to say that social reality is the more important explanatory variable in terms of a broader analysis of the collective actions of the individual?
Pierre Lemieux
May 18 2023 at 4:14pm
Monte: In the Hayekian (and a large part of the liberal) tradition, social reality is the configuration of the interaction and consequences of all individual actions. An individual will perceive society as a given: he generally cannot change it (like a price that he can only pay or decline to pay). In this sense, society is a constraint on an individual’s actions (perhaps this is what you were after?). Note that the freer society is, the more the individual may pursue, and is capable of pursuing, his own personal goals within it. But any rate, the individual makes choices and we can model them the way Hirshleifer or other neoclassical economists do. The consequences of these choices then become part of social reality.
Perhaps the best way to express what we are discussion is that society is the product of human action, but not of human design–which was the formulation of Adam Ferguson, espoused by Hayek. Does that help make clearer the large issues we are discussing?
Monte
May 18 2023 at 7:53pm
Yes, thanks. Very interesting topic of discussion.
Jim Glass
May 18 2023 at 1:20pm
The Wall Street Journal some years back had a story detailing how the Air Force knowingly looks for fighter pilots with the same personality profiles as the leaders of street gangs who lead their crews into the turf of other gangs looking for fights. The main difference being 20+ IQ points and a good education.
I don’t know about “bribing” them. But providing consumption opportunities can certainly work with those who have the IQ points to make use of them. Air Force fighter pilots go on to fly your commercial jets and to have all kinds of productive careers as law-abiding good citizens. However, without the IQ points…
“For chronic adult offenders, however, the average IQ is 85, 1 standard deviation below the population mean. A study of Texas inmates who entered the prison system in 2002 indicated that approximately 23% of the inmates scored below 80…” Correlates of Crime.
Pierre Lemieux
May 18 2023 at 1:57pm
Jim: Perhaps. But the economic approach (pioneered by Gary Becker) avoids the problem of what is IQ and what it measures (a problem actually illustrated in the text you linked to). In the economic approach, an individual commits a crime when he gets, or thinks he will get, a higher net benefit than his next best alternative would provide him. When the expected cost of shoplifting diminishes, the incidence of this crime increases (see San Francisco currently). My preferred example, regularly observed: when the price of copper on world markets increases, theft of copper wires increases (and mutatis mutandis when the price of copper decreases).
Pierre Lemieux
May 18 2023 at 2:05pm
Jim: Post Scriptum: I would not deny that an Air Force pilot or a philosopher knows more (and probably can learn new things more easily from where he is now) than a street gang leader or a street porter.
Mactoul
May 18 2023 at 10:11pm
Humans have self-domesticated themselves principally by executing trouble-makers. This is thesis of Demonic Males by Wrangham, a primatologist.
It is well- known that in primitive tribes upto 25 percent males die violently and same was all probably true in all prehistoric societies. Steven pinker writes about consistent decline in violent deaths in historic societies upto present day. This was achieved by state action. Not by bribing but by executing and otherwise curtailing reproductive success of violent males.
Jon Murphy
May 19 2023 at 9:00am
To be clear, whose thesis is this? Pinker’s, Wrangham’s, or yours?
Mactoul
May 19 2023 at 8:29pm
Wrangham’s. Primitive humans didn’t have alpha males — coalition of beta males killed any would-be alpha.
Coming to historic times, you have capital punishment given out quite liberally which would certainly have major effect on reproductive success of violent males.
Jon Murphy
May 19 2023 at 10:21pm
And what evidence does he provide for this thesis?
Mactoul
May 20 2023 at 5:39am
Multiple lines of evidence make this thesis credible. Much lower rates of violence in humans relative to chimpanzees, egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers , neoteny in humans lent support to self-domestication hypothesis.
Execution of trouble-makers Or more violent males is more speculative but how else would drastic fall in human societies to be explained.
Jon Murphy
May 20 2023 at 7:20am
Doux commerce is a big one, especially for modern times. The development of property and ethical systems as well. There’s actually decent empirical evidence supporting these points.
Jon Murphy
May 20 2023 at 9:33am
Here’s the thing:
I find Wrangham’s thesis improbable because, at least the way you describe it here, it’s based of discredited ideas. Tendency toward violence does not seem to be transmitted through genes, so “curtailing the reproductive success” of violent individuals wouldn’t matter.
Mactoul
May 20 2023 at 8:06pm
Jon Murphy,
Why wouldn’t a tendency towards violence be transmitted genetically?
In fact Wrangham gives example of precisely the same.
Upon what exactly do you base your firm, not to say dogmatic, pronouncement.
Mactoul
May 20 2023 at 8:07pm
Commerce doesn’t explain fall in violence. Fall in violence being a precondition of commerce.
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