LaRouche: State of the Union Address, 2003

- The Military Question: Strategic Defense -
page 29

- The Military Question: Strategic Defense -

Now, let's take the military question. Let's be very plain about this stuff.

The policy of the United States should be, and essentially was, at many points, the strategic defense concept introduced by Lazare Carnot, a great military genius, an engineer and scientist, one of the key figures associated with the so-called Ecole Polytechnique of that period.

Carnot is also famous, between 1792 and 1794, at the time that France was being invaded by virtually every power in Europe, and was about to be carved up, that Carnot was given the unlikely position of being the Minister of Defense in the field, for France, when everybody in Paris assumed that France was going to be dismembered. He, within that period of time, defeated all of the enemies of France, and built the most powerful military machine in Europe, on the land. Then, they got rid of him. But he continued to hang around.

But he developed this idea of strategic defense, as a policy. He based his concept of defense largely on a study he did of the work of a famous French military engineer, Vauban. A couple of years ago, I happened to get into that area, it's opposite, the other side of the Rhein, in France, from a place called Breisach, in Germany, near the Rhein.

On the other side of the Rhein, there's a city, which is still a functioning small city to this day. It's a fortified city, built by Vauban in the earlier part of the 18th Century, at a time, given what military artillery could do at that point, is a very formidable construction. As a result of a similar fortification, Velfours, which is also famous for its role in the Franco-Prussian war -- that the Austro-Hungarians never dared to attack France on that quarter at any time. Because the effectiveness of this principle of fortification, of strategic defense, was so effective, they didn't dare. And therefore, from this, he generalized a concept of strategic defense.

This was then amplified, later, in the same general period, by a young man, who was studying at a military school set up by a Graf Shaumburg-Lippe. The school's program was one designed for Schaumburg-Lippe, by Moses Mendelssohn, the famous Moses Mendelssohn, and this produced Scharnhorst, who was one of the greatest commanders, and military thinkers of that period. And the German concept of defense, based what my dear friend, Congressman Rangel, would approve of, of an idea of using an in-depth reserve of the population, as a trained reserve, as the defense of a nation.

It's what Creighton Abrams, did in terms of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Is to take ... military units for warfare, should be, in a sense, skeleton units, filled in by reserves. Therefore, in order to fight a war, the military would be obliged to call up a trained reserve, to fill the places assigned to them, within the ranks of these units. In that way, you would not go to war, as we did in Vietnam, you would not go to war without challenging the willingness of the population to fight that war.

That's the principle.

The problem we have today, is we have three ideas of global conflict at hand.

The first one... the first two are bad. The first one is the baddest. This is a concept developed by the circles of H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, which became the idea of nuclear weapons as a road to world government. Russell's argument was -- and this is why the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for no other reason -- MacArthur had won the war. There was never a need for the United States to invade Japan, never. No million lives were saved by the bombs, none. The whole thing's a hoax. As MacArthur had already indicated to this staff, that Japan was already defeated, and there was no prospect for invading Japan.

It's also a classical principle which was taught by Machiavelli, for example, in the 16th Century. You don't pursue an already defeated enemy, into its hiding hole. You may start another war. Sit back, and let him surrender.

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