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The Will of Defense as Fundamental Factor of the National Strategy.
The will of defense of a nation is her capacity to cause, create, develop and support her defense forces. The strength of the defense forces, in turn, rely on the necessary support of the economy of the country and the diplomacy of the state. The “defense will” is an expression of the will of being and the vital capacity, even biological, of a society. The will of defense will be healthy, normal and sufficient when the defense forces and the support of the country’s economy and the state diplomacy are proportional and adapted to the political objectives of society. Those must also be adequate to the possible threats that the country may have to oppose, both within and without the country and within his geopolitical region or other threat sources. This capacity and its performance in different situations stems from a correct “national moral”.
The defense will is shaped normally in the Armed Forces, as specific instruments of the defense function. The Armed Forces include the human resources, psychological and intellectual resources and material resources. In a modern society, the chain of transmission of the popular will to the Armed Forces, passes through a series of intermediate sociological gears of authorities and institutions. These ones crystallize and fulfill the popular will. Albeit with all the shades, errors and deviations derived from the degree of imperfection existed in the society’s institutional system and among some authorities. This implies that a direct military attack on the civil populace, does not debilitate the will of defense already shaped within his Armed Forces. Military actions to undermine the will of defense most be focused on the enemy armies, followed by the political system of the enemy’s country including his political objectives, plans, and alliances, as well as his military and auxiliary industries. not on the society from which she springs. Only finally would be the focus of attack or pressure on civilians of the enemy country.
The civil populace, which is not intrinsically organized, but dominated by the ideological and institutional apparatus of the state, is capable of absorbing tremendous military blows. Examples of this are the bombing raids that Germany and North Vietnam endured for years. Ultimately, only the invasion of Germany forced its surrender. There is also the case of Iraq which was submitted to an economic siege in which his people were impoverished. Still, the Iraqi regime was even stronger than at the end of the allied invasion in the winter of l991, having suppressed internal opposition from Shiites and Kurds and having attracted the support or admiration of its resistance in the Arab world. Despite these, Iraqis did not rise against their political institutions and the content and the expression of Iraq’s national defense will was not altered. In the most radical case of a nuclear war, great civilian losses would occur initially, yet if the Armed Forces remained relatively intact due to defensive deployment and protection measures, it could prolong the defense of its country and even win.
This brings us to time as the environment in which the will of defense is expressed, and whose effective factor is national moral. In effect, the defense will is constructed in the time and to destroy it requires actions during time. Those engaged in insurrection come to understand this point well; that a prolonged war directed at the source of the defense will, the country’s people, will in effect attack the country’s national moral. She is the collective conviction of how best to live by following historically-proven trends of peace, progress, service and justice. This certainty is assumed by a society as its own vision, or conception of its destiny. When individuals or groups do not subscribe this vision, or when they pervert it, the quality of national moral deteriorate. Without illusion and enthusiasm, societies and men cannot achieve or create beneficial enterprises. Enthusiasm is a force of spirit which conquers moral and ideological entropy and that is inevitably generated in societies.
When leaders also are in tune with the right social trend and the wishes of their people, a moral community is established between leaders and their people that harmonizes national and social feelings. This process is the origin and creator of the national moral of societies and is at a different qualitative level than that of purely biased, ethnically-based or group-based interests. An ideological agreement joins people, who recognize that ideology as being in favor of the people. Still, this process remains subject to deviations and historical aberrations. Process for creating a national morality are positive when leaders collectively act with honesty and inspire their people to follow «correct ways» of living, within all the possible ways of living available to them. This implies and demands a certain ideological guide on the part of the social leadership, which is one of its main functions. Abuses of this responsibility are represented by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Mr. Goebbels. The natural organs for forming and transmitting the national moral are far from official offices of propaganda. The reason is that they are found in the nuclei of society’s collective action and in her natural and institutional leaders. That is to say, the spaces in which national moral is created are homes, schools, churches, parties, trade unions, working centers, and associations in general. It is in the day by day of men living in community, where blows up and is practiced what we want and are going to be as an alive society.
The Mechanism of the Flow and Reflux of the Civilizations.
The commercial routes and the habitual contacts between border civilizations are their authentic supplies and exterior communications lines. And, when these arteries are neglected in the periphery of the “influence zone” of a civilization, the civil, religious and military experts of other one come to repair, to occupy and to vitalize her. The absorbent «aspiration» created by the decadence of other, created by her «existential emptiness», attracts a foreign steam of ideas, methods, words, inventions and styles. In the debilitated and permeable foreign zone first appear the travelers, commercial or secret agents, cultural delegations, missionaries, professors and diplomats. This way, often the military action is not more than the political confirmation of an existing and manifest superiority, which emerges and shows irresistibly from many other fields of the human activity. And the territorial earnings are consolidated by the arrival of the civil servants and administrators and the professions of growth and development, architects, engineers, land-surveyors, artists and a swarm of go-getters, unscrupulous opportunists and adventurers. From this human flow, specially the last mentioned, because their immediate future is a blank page, always arise decisive prominent figures for the new implantation.
In the XVth and XVIth centuries Spain was in vital boiling. At sight of all, was taking place a wide social and ethnic phenomenon, of difficult containment for it. For a «privileged luck» of historical and social circumstances, combined with the Fortune or the Providence, as it is preferred, we were advancing over «giants shoulders». The political union had been completed and soon it would follow by the religious one, and our creative national impulses were reaching Europe and America. That phenomenon is going to create, first, a suction and, then, an inevitable absorption of the peripheral and bordering social forces, integrating them in Spain. Everybody want to be of the nation in summit, all want to take part of the success and the relative prosperity. To all they encourage the victories and the energies of Spain and nobody wants to be a stranger or to be at margin of this vital national process. And the integrator, carrying and transmitter language of all the spiritual and materials efforts of that nation in march was the Spanish, not the peripheral regional underlanguages.
It might be thought then that the stabilized societies and civilizations would be the culmination and desideratum in their development. As this way they would be sure, beneficial and attractive. But no. To a civilization, the development penury, the languor in her vital effort is already a sign of decadence. If it does not flow, adapts, tackles and advances, it will be stagnating, losing the survival and rotting. As it would happen to a fresh water current, which pass was remaining repressed. This happens in periods measured in many years, which escape to the perception of the ephemeral man.
The observable facts that define the temporary decadence of a matured civilization are: the vital national energy, which feeds the «national moral» and a healthy «defense will», vanishes; the arts and letters become formalist and sterile; the emplacements, colonies or peripheral partners are neglected or given up and the exterior politics turns coward, delicate, stuttering and prudent. This backwarc movement of a civilization creates an existential emptiness, which attracts and gives impulse externally to another neighbor one. Forming a «natural cosmic swaying», because the Nature loathes and flees from the «emptinesses».
And there is also a great hope. The human useful and creative activity resides in the fulfillment by all the members of a social group of the daily tasks, with constancy, effort and appreciation. This «attitude and permanent action» of many men orientated in a sense and direction, is capable of regenerating, of raising and encouraging to weak or sick group. It is the yeast of the spirit that “makes bread” the amorphous disoriented mass. Let’s not forget the axiom: «The man puts the effort and the Fortune or the Providence puts the Force». And, let’s also remember that God does not love the lazy one. There is nothing any more, not anything less…
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