A Crash at the Edge of Empire and the Duties of the State

A charter aircraft has fallen from the sky near a long‑range radar site in Alaska: two pilots, six passengers, no survivors, a “vital mission in a demanding environment” now reduced to blackened wreckage and a list of names yet to be told to their families. We are not informed precisely what business brought them there; we are told only that the site guards the airspace of a great power. That ignorance is disquieting for curiosity, but it is not fatal to judgment. We know enough to see a familiar pattern: the instruments of national defence extended to the most inhospitable frontiers, and civilians hired to bear part of the burden.

When I wrote in the Wealth of Nations of the sovereign’s duties, I placed defence first, justice second, public works and institutions third. Long‑range watchfulness over the skies of a vast and thinly peopled territory belongs plainly to that first class. No private company, left to its own lights, would erect beacons and keep constant guard merely because strangers might some day be protected. The necessary expense is great; the return in profit to any single undertaker is small or nothing; the benefit is diffused among millions who never see the radar dome, much less the men and women who service it.

Yet the aircraft was not a soldier’s transport but a civilian‑contracted machine. The state, while retaining the power and responsibility of command, has here turned to the market for the skill of flying in harsh conditions, of maintaining remote facilities, of supplying what my contemporaries would have called frontier garrisons. This mixed arrangement does not alter the nature of the duty; it only alters the instruments by which it is discharged. The sovereign still acts; he only does so through a chain of contracts and sub‑contracts, whose links may not be visible to the impartial spectator who reads only of “dedicated professionals” in a brief dispatch.

From the point of view I described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that spectator feels first what every decent mind must feel: grief for eight lives ended in the course of honourable employment. They rose that morning, not to pursue some vain pageant, but to “carry out a vital mission” in a bleak corner of the world where few would willingly dwell. Whatever their wages or profits, the risk was real, the work exacting, the benefit public. We readily ascribe to them a species of praise‑worthiness – not because they courted death, which would be folly, but because they accepted danger in the service of a duty which is not easily divisible into safe and perilous parts.

But sympathy, if it is to rise above mere sentiment, must learn to reckon costs. The visible loss is eight souls and a broken machine. The unseen burdens are spread more widely. Taxpayers, most of whom will never hear of Cape Newenham, finance the radar, the contracting offices, the investigations that now begin. The families of the dead bear sorrows that do not appear in any account of national income. Future crews, seeing that even routine flights may end in ruin, may rightly demand higher wages for the same work, or more stringent precautions, which are themselves a kind of tax upon the public. Every such policy has its price; every price must at last be paid by someone.

In this instance we have no evidence of that “conspiracy against the public” into which, as I once observed, people of the same trade are so apt to fall. No merchant here is shown begging for a monopoly of transport to the site, no guild of contractors is visibly shutting out competitors under the fair‑sounding pretext of security. The danger lies rather in a different quarter: that distant legislators or planners, distressed by the accident, will trust too much to their own system, and imagine they can rearrange the whole apparatus of military contracting as if the great chess‑board of human society contained only passive pieces, and no pilots with families, no villagers, no taxpayers with limited patience for cost.

The wiser course is both more modest and more demanding. The state must continue to provide for defence, for there is no safety in leaving such matters to the higgling and bargaining of the market alone. It must examine, with the most suspicious attention, whether incentives in these contracts press too heavily upon crews, or conceal risks that a more candid accounting would expose. It must publish what can be published, so that the public who pay can judge whether the danger is proportioned to the end. And it must remember that every “remote” site is staffed by men and women who are not remote to themselves, and whose quiet courage is the true, if often forgotten, price of security.

A wealthy and powerful nation can afford many comforts; it cannot afford to forget who climbs into the aircraft when the air grows thin and the radar must not fail.