Clash of Clans - The Techno-Canton Military

How community will enable decentralized martial capability

The Techno Canton will require some level of martial prowess to establish and maintain. Centralized Power will not easily suffer nullification and occlusion, nor will predatory empires pass up easy acquisitions. Any level of independence and freedom desired by a Canton will need to be backed by force, even if hopefully only a deterrent.

The themes of the Techno-Canton so far have been community and decentralization. From a deterrent perspective, the first will enable the second. As stable communities emerge from lower transience and remote work capabilities, so too will their own sense of identity and interests.

Those interests will need to be protected from two types of threat: External (or International) and Internal (or Domestic), each with their own challenges.

EXTERNAL

Ever since two hunters made a deal to go over a hill and take a single farmer’s crop together, humanity has banded together into ever-larger groups to overwhelm their enemies. Gangs to tribes, tribes to cities, cities to nations, nations to empires.

The successful Canton must stand athwart this interminable trend of history and yell “Stop.” They may not stand alone - indeed remaining within a federal system could offer many upsides¹. In addition to mutual defense agreements, a Canton might benefit from access to trade blocs and limiting warlords.

To the degree the Canton must stand alone, it will focus on defense. Offense is the domain of empires. Simply being on defense has also been a significant force multiplier historically. To the degree that weapons development favors stand-off capabilities like hypersonic missiles and cheap anti-tank weapons, that multiplier will only be enhanced.

In any case, modern cities will not be easy to take. Autarkic, decentralized cities will pose a special challenge. Expending the resources to capture (or even just raze) a city will need to be justified.

Most Cantons, except perhaps some upstarts, will not be able to change their strategic location. Natural resources, proximity to axes of advance, or a position between belligerent powers will be relatively immutable and may provide their own justification for capture/razing. Cantons may still be able to increase informal costs to interference by providing valuable services. Industrial production is probably not enough - it didn’t work for France at the beginning of WWII (in fact it did the opposite) and it does little to calm nerves in Taiwan.

Services, however, worked well for the Swiss (combined with a robust defensive capability). The same services that a successful Canton will provide to its own people may be valuable enough to other players to factor into the strategic reckoning. Even during periods of intense conflict, there will be markets for banking, trade, adjudcation, and elite education that all sides will want access to. They will not be worth wrecking, especially if combined with the threat of diverting serious resources from the main fight.

In short, a combination of federal/imperial participation, standoff defensive capabilities, decentralized economics, and valuable services will be a good starting point for handling external threats.

INTERNAL

The trickier security challenges will be internal, because they are extremely difficult to organize for. External threats are easy to organize against because the threat is clear and often the rally is led by Centralized Power. Direct coordination (overt OR covert) against internal threats, on the other hand, is quickly detected and smashed. Where it isn’t outright illegal, it is often unpopular.

It follows then, that for Cantons seeking a degree of independence from a larger polity, the most effective martial groups will not be military in origin. They will be hierarchical organizations with communication structures that can quickly fill command & control roles when threatened.

To begin with, that probably means civic groups. The original Techno-Canton essay imagined that the Cantons would emerge to fill the gaps in governance left by collapsing currencies and demographic pyramids. The gaps created (intentionally or otherwise) by anarcho-tyranny can probably be added to the list. Groups that take up the provision of security, record-keeping, arbitration, banking, and education in those vacuums will be the likely candidates called upon to protect a Canton mayor or governor leading a nullification.

Municipal groups spring to mind, but fraternal organizations, trade associations, or even churches could be candidates as well. Of course, this has not escaped the notice of Centralized Power, but as long as these organizations remain mission-focused and - when necessary - defensive, it will be extremely difficult to monitor and neuter every organization filling a legitimate need.

Over a slightly longer timeframe, however, the most effective groups will likely be large, proximate families - clans. Lower transience will drive not just local identity, but family identity. The family is not mutually exclusive to governance services. A successful clan will have members involved across many facets of Canton life. An attack on any one of them will generate a defensive, rallying response across the entire group.

The inter-dependencies this introduces will make it much more difficult for Centralized Power to isolate and neuter one function at a time, as well as lengthening the planning horizon of the Canton.

Of course, if the family were really likely to be so effective, you would imagine that the centralized powers that be would be doing something to front-run that risk, right?

NEO-FEUDALISM

But if we assume that maybe there is something to the idea of family units providing governance and, in particular, defense, isn’t this just a kind of neo-feudalism? Won’t this generate a slide into endless conflict and warlordism?

Well, maybe. I can’t say that it won’t, but that may not be all bad. The Magna Carta was the result of pressure from feudal entities on a centralized power structure. While not explicitly “feudal,” the US Constitution is similar: local organizations forced centralized power to the negotiating table.

Even if a new Magna Carta or US Constitution is too optimistic, Canton feudalism may still be the best way forward. During the 20th Century, the risk to civilian populations from External threats was outstripped (or at least matched²) by the abuses of unchecked Centralized Power. The low-level conflict likely between Cantons is probably a better outcome for humanity than the industrial-scale death tolls that rotten monoliths routinely produce.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the military threats to the Techno-Canton are likely to be faced with a combination of deterrent hardware, economic resilience, and deeply integrated communities. How well those factors work internationally will probably come down to strategic factors. Internally, they will depend on the discipline and skill of nominally non-military organizations and the strength local/family identities. While these decentralized and potentially martial organizations run the risk of increasing low-level conflicts, this is probably an acceptable tradeoff for inoculating society against the mass murder of their own people that uncontested, centralized governments are prone to.

1. Indeed, “canton” in English implies a subdivision of a larger political unit. 

2. This largely depends on how you want to count the deaths of WWI and WWII. There is a good case for assigning all of the Axis deaths in WWII (including Jewish) to Internal causes and maybe a good number of needless Soviet deaths too.