Real World Economics: One lesson of war is its inequities

Edward Lotterman One beauty of economics the investigation of how human beings use scarce materials is that its basic principles apply to life even if money is not involved Opportunity cost externalities sunk costs marginal changes imperfect information all pop up in non-monetary human relations These may be within the household Whom do we marry and why or what careers we follow But economic principles also show up in apparently non-monetary actions of our nation Whom do we wage war against and why Which of us is put in harm s way and how Which of us escapes combat When U S forces are firing live ordnance against our enemies on a monthly if not weekly basis these are not abstract questions They cut deeply to who we are as a nation and a people This obviously is a personal essay It springs from two chance reminders from my past as I was reading about current issues One reminder is a snapshot of a USAF F- Thunder Chief nosing over to drop a second napalm bomb on a hillside in Vietnam in The second one is the rd Airborne Brigade s daily casualty account for July detailing all the brigade s killed-in-action and wounded in the hours ending at p m that day Fifty-five years later I still re-read it every July It lists two men killed and wounded Five years into the rd s seven-year stay in Vietnam these were high numbers Except for the first KIA listed the other casualties all were from one unit Company A th Battalion rd Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of rifle companies in the four infantry battalions of the oversized brigade One first lieutenant had been wounded the day before The WIA-MFW B Legs notation communicated us that he had been wounded in action with multiple fragment wounds in both legs His comrade Lt Kenneth Slaughter had been killed only hours before the statement was issued It also listed of his men wounded at the same time Two only had sprained backs thrown through the air by the blast of the pounds of TNT as the bursting charge in a -pound dud mm U S howitzer shell Specific enterprising Viet Cong had defused this and turned into a booby trap detonatable by wires from brush a inadequate hundred feet away Ten men had suffered FW or MFW fragment wound multiple fragment wounds to legs arms hips and elsewhere Three who had been hit in the head or face were all marked NED for no eye damage However their lieutenant s death was macabre listed as KIA-T A B Legs R Arm TA meant traumatic amputation blown off rather than S A for surgical amputation Putting their leader s scattered body parts in a Pouch Human Remains had to have been terrible for the unhurt men in his platoon but almost certainly something they had done before While rifle companies had a nominal strength of particular men it was rare for any to have much over - Including the lieutenant from the day before Company A had suffered literal decimation One-tenth of them had been struck down even if not killed Lt Slaughter was a high school graduate rushed through Officer Candidate School who died two days after his st birthday As the next-senior officer he was slated to take over as company commander in September had he lived I knew him only as a name tape on the uniform of someone I had sold a money order to or perhaps stood with in the developed photo pickup line at the tiny PX Other info about him I learned only after his death A somber tale But years later how does it really matter And what economics can possibly lie in any of this It matters a lot And economic principles aid our understanding In questions of justice permeated who we sent to Vietnam and what tasks they were given Over years of war graduates of Edison High School in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia would be KIA So would nearly from Detroit s Central H S Only Harvard University grads perished Over West Point grads would die but the number of lieutenants with years of school and six months of OCS such as Lt Slaughter killed was far higher In a rifle company in the nd Airborne two years earlier none of us enlisted men in my platoon of -plus had a college degree But at Landing Zone English in Vietnam the -man military intelligence detachment just down slope from us had only two or three without bachelor s degrees A multitude of in the army had sneered that the AA in the nd s shoulder patch meant Almost African rather than All-American because we had the highest proportion of Blacks of any division Getting the extra in jump pay on top of PFC base pay of helped keep families alive in South Chicago or on the Mississippi Delta The bunkmate below me kept a month for haircuts shoe polish and sodas The rest went to his mama on their sharecropper acres Yes details now differ There is no draft and no exemptions therefrom that favored middle- and upper-class white boys Pay is higher now and attracts nearly enough enlistees War is higher tech Shot-down unmanned remote control drones supplant human military casualties but not so for civilians Seal Association and Delta Force members are true supporters Nevertheless questions of justice over who our society chooses to send to war remain sharp Moreover issues of how efficiently or inefficiently we expend materials matter to society And the opportunity cost of what we do not fund because we spend billion in taxes on defense involves justice as well as efficiency The broadest issue affecting society as a whole is why and when we unleash our military power against other nations or groups within them In what strategies and for which reasons do we do this Do we consider the negative spillovers often in the future of attacks we find convenient now Thus my photo of the F- dropping napalm on a jungled hillside as far from my camera in as our condo near the Bell Museum on Larpenteur is from the deli at Como and Snelling I first must emphasize that I was never in combat in Vietnam By then I was a postal clerk and was never in vital danger never out in the rice paddies or mountain jungle in a rifle company I had been trained as an B light weapons infantry and had served briefly as such in the nd But then karma detoured me through the U S military mission to Brazil before Vietnam By then I was more valuable as a postal clerk than a rifleman I saw very unpleasant things and had passing scares but my life was never really in peril Yet violent war was all around us There was not a day or night that you did not hear artillery fire You knew what was outgoing somewhere and incoming somewhere else You heard small arms fire especially at night When a medevac chopper or gunship had to go up at night exhaust from its turbine spooling up fluttered the screen above my ammunition crate bunk We clerks spent long hours on perimeter guard because infantry units were dead exhausted when back in from the bush And inevitably perhaps driving down to the Phu Cat AFB miles south you might come across an enemy grotesquely dismembered or incinerated in a firefight before dawn Excessive empathy is a curse Napalm flame flashing above trees made me think of the poor guys on the receiving end So did ground vibrations from three B- s dropping -pound bombs in the central highlands just to our west Sound travels times as fast through bedrock as air and so the audible rumble came later and then sight of the bombers turning back to Guam But I learned that distance from violence makes it less disturbing I still have occasional dreams of the pass after pass that a helicopter gunship made to save a patrol in a desperate situation a third of a mile off our perimeter Yet my unease must be a tiny fraction of that of men from either side on the ground that night How is this relevant to current national policies Because more than any other industrialized nation in the world we are quick to use bombs and missiles against people or nations that have angered or even just frustrated us No enemy bomb has ever fallen on the lower states Only a fraction of of voters have ever been within even a mile of a bomb or howitzer shell exploding EMTs and ER workers see grotesque mutilations of human bodies but the rest of us don t We never worry that various -year-old in a trailer at Minot AFB joy-sticking a Predator drone will mistake our backyard bash for an insurgent conclave and blow us and our toddlers away with the pounds of plastic explosive in a Hellfire missile The upshot of the very socially and economically skewed way we staff our military and the complete isolation of our citizenry from the horrific realities of modern weapons means that we are quick to call for and use military force against others The negative primary secondary and tertiary results of that radiate out in ripples that eventually rebound to our collective harm Related Articles Letters With claims of more huge fraud in Minnesota these questions come to mind Real World Economics Elasticities help explain tariffs impact Real World Economics Trump s chaos hurts his own cause and all the rest of us Real World Economics Looming farm emergency by the numbers Real World Economics Fed up Delusions about the central bank continue St Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul edlotterman com