CYNICAL PUBLIUS: Élan, Social Justice, and Losing Wars.

Military historians talk a lot about “revolutions in military affairs.” Usually, this refers to a game-changing technology that obliterates existing doctrines and tactics almost overnight. Examples include the phalanx, the longbow, the rifled musket, targeted indirect fires, the machine gun, the airplane, the submarine, the tank, the nuclear bomb, and the drone—the list goes on and on. However, revolutions in military affairs often do not relate directly to technology. Instead, they are frequently rooted in changes in guiding philosophies born of the “moral” (as Clausewitz describes it) rather than the physical.

That’s what Social Justice Warfare is—an expression of the moral over the physical elements of warfare. It is the idea that “diversity is our strength” and that the progressive policies of so-called “social justice” have a place in winning wars. Social Justice Warfare holds that political orthodoxies can overcome the intrinsic violence of war. Then it dawned on me: Social Justice Warfare is the modern equivalent of the pre-World War I French military doctrine of “élan.”

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