A Blockade Built on Burnout Is Bad Defence

We are told that an enormous ship, carrying more than 5,000 souls, has been kept continuously at sea for nearly seven months, enforcing a distant blockade. The reported facts are homely rather than heroic: mold in the showers, broken plumbing, laundry idle for weeks, long stretches without hot water, a meal dwindled to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. Families speak of exhaustion, declining morale, and even suicidal thoughts; at least one sailor, it is said, has gone overboard and had to be recovered. This is not the romance of arms, but the prosaic reality of defence when the body is neglected in the name of the flag.

In the book where I examined the wealth of nations, I assigned to the sovereign three great duties: defence, justice, and certain public works and institutions which profit society though they may not repay a private undertaker. Defence, then, is not an optional luxury but a primary obligation. Yet every such obligation must be discharged with prudence. The visible benefit of this deployment is easy to describe: a show of force, a blockade proclaimed as “indefinite”, the satisfaction of appearing resolute. The costs are less visible: sleep lost, minds frayed, pipes unrepaired, courage eroded into despair. Good government counts both columns; only folly attends to the loud part of the ledger alone.

When merchants petition for restraints upon trade, I counselled that their proposals be received with the most suspicious attention, for such schemes generally enrich a few while silently taxing the many. Something of the same spirit is required when admirals and ministers press for a rhythm of operations that pushes a ship and its crew past ordinary limits. The interest of the military profession is not always identical with the interest of the nation, still less with that of the individual sailor. Promotions, reputations, and the splendour of being thought unyielding may all incline commanders to ask for more endurance than is truly needful, especially when the bill is paid in other people’s bodies and other people’s sleep.

In my inquiries into moral sentiments, I argued that the impartial spectator within us judges not by success but by praise-worthiness. Consider what such a spectator would feel, informed of these conditions and of the length of this voyage. To require men and women to labour, eat, bathe, and sleep for many months in decaying accommodation, with insufficient food and failing sanitation, is not merely uncomfortable; it is unjust, when relief and repair depend chiefly on discretionary decisions taken far from the smell of the mold. A commander may still receive public praise for “indefinite” resolve; but to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and no institution can rest securely on applause it does not deserve.

Human nature, too, sets its own limits. Self-interest, operating under rules of justice, is a powerful principle for order: the sailor will willingly endure much when he sees that his hardship is necessary, proportionate, and shared. But any system that relies upon extraordinary virtue — upon endless cheerfulness in the face of half-rations, upon perfect composure amidst suicidal comrades, upon discipline maintained when the ship itself seems neglected — is built upon sand. Burnout, attempts to flee over the side, the cry of “there is never a moment of peace in your mind”: these are not mysteries of morale, but predictable consequences when men are treated as if they had no principle of motion except that which superior officers impress upon them.

Long ago I described the man of system, so enamoured of the beauty of his own plan that he imagines society to be a great chess-board, on which he may arrange living pieces at will. The notion of an “indefinite” blockade, maintained by a handful of giant ships kept perpetually at sea, has about it the same seduction. On paper, the squares are clean; the pieces never tire; the plan is invincible. On steel decks, the showers clog, the toilets fail, the food runs short, and the living pieces — who have principles of motion and of suffering of their own — begin to move in ways the planner did not intend. Disorder enters, not from the enemy, but from the refusal to see one’s own people as anything other than counters in a game.

The deception of ambition, which I once illustrated by the poor man’s son who toils all his life for a tranquil grandeur that never arrives, has its public counterpart. Nations too may be bewitched by the glitter of power: the idea of projecting force “indefinitely”, of commanding distant straits and markets, flatters their imagination. Yet if the price of that imagined security is paid in the quiet misery of thousands confined on a straining vessel, eating thin meals in moldy quarters for month after month, the bargain is ill made. A wise state seeks not the most splendid posture of defence, but the most sustainable one; it does not lean upon the invisible hand to mend broken toilets.

I do not contend that this ship should at once abandon its station, for I know neither all the dangers it deters nor all the arrangements that might replace it. I contend only that to hold her at sea in this condition, for this length of time, is a failure both of prudence and of justice. The same ingenuity that contrived such a vast instrument of war can surely contrive rotations, repairs, and provisions that respect the limits of flesh and spirit. When a great power rests its security upon the exhaustion of its own defenders, it has mistaken oppression for strength, and is already less safe than it appears.