Due to recent events I’ve been subscribed to a number of newsletters and podcasts concerning themselves with various aspects of current affairs and economics in the widest sense. One of them, War By Other Means, looks at a number of classic war/political thrillers through the lens of national security. Because it’s interesting to (re-)watch some of these with certain questions and premises in the back of the mind I just put that entire list here for further inspiration.
National Security Films for the Whole Family
JAMES
MAY 12 
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Sicario, Villeneuve, 2015
It’s been a while since I’ve written about film, literature, or music. Which is what I actually want to write about. I am just forced to write about other things against my will. So I’m writing about films I think people interested in national security should watch.¹
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2000 Meters to Andriivka
2000 Meters to Andriivka is a documentary set during the 2023 Ukrainian counter-offensive and focuses on a singular Ukrainian unit fighting through a small strip of forest. It’s a small and claustrophobic film told largely through GoPro footage from the fighters involved in the offensive.
People oftentimes forget—when looking at the scope of these conflicts—that the actual battles that take place are hyperlocal. It’s small groups of men and women engaged in bloody fighting in thousands of strips of land across a nation. It’s not some large coherent thing that can be intuited by looking at arrows on a map, but struggles between dozens of people playing out across the scope of an entire front.
If you care about these things, you have to remember that nothing happens in the abstract. It’s not just looking out across a strategic and operational concept and weighing numbers on a ledger. It’s one squad of friends in a brutal slog to take one position at a time.
A Bridge Too Far
This is, in some ways, an addendum to 2000 Meters to Andriivka.
Operation Market Garden was—despite the best efforts at revisionism from some—a disastrous Allied operation in World War II based on flawed assumptions and unrealistic expectations. Told as a historical drama, A Bridge Too Far captures the planning and fighting of Operation Market Garden from the strategic level down to the tactical levels of individuals fighting over the various objectives.
How it is that strategic and operational planning is conceived through idiosyncratic political necessities and the personalities of individuals at higher levels ends up impacting the fates of individuals tasked with carrying out those plans is essential to understanding the responsibilities placed on any decisions regarding war and peace.
It is a case study in how hope and optimism that is untempered by reason over what is and is not possible will, inevitably, be crushed by reality.
Sicario
What is even possible to accomplish in national security? Can we actually achieve a grand strategic end state as we did in the aftermath of the Second World War? Or is the best we can hope for just managing a crisis and keeping risk within acceptable bounds?
Sicario is a film about a lot of things. The aesthetic appeal of violence. The amoral nature of national interests. How cool mustaches look. How amazing a cinematographer Roger Deakins is.
It’s also worth seeing as a film about the limitations on options and how we deal with concerns that fall further down on our priorities.
We don’t have the political will to actually combat a problem. We can never seem to implement policies that will address the roots of an issue. What do we do then? Maybe we just have to live with a world where the best we can do is short-term mitigation and kick the can down the line for someone else to deal with.
Dr. Strangelove
Speaking of managing risks, why do we consider risks when we talk about national security? We think of the great opportunities that the use of national power can achieve, but what happens if it all goes wrong?
Dr. Strangelove is obviously a satirical film, but it was based on arguments around deterrence that were prominent during the Cold War. Besides the commentary on how insane the capability to inflict widespread death on adversaries is—the film has a worthwhile point about what we’re doing when we’re doing national security.
What is your job when thinking of national security? Is it just thinking about marshalling instruments of national power to achieve interests? Or is it about calculating ranges of options that fall within an acceptable boundary of risks? Are you really being serious about national security if you’re not considering that just maybe an adversary will escalate past what you thought was possible?
Beasts of No Nation
The problem with thinking of nothing but risks—and only with potential consequences—is that you forget what instruments of power can actually accomplish. Across the world, conflicts rage that barely reach the pages of newspapers.
Beasts of No Nation is about one of those conflicts. Quiet on an international scale. Without any real end in sight. Destroying the lives of everyone involved. The arcs of the lives of individuals are irretrievably broken because of the violence they become participants in.
We hear about Gaza. We barely hear about Sudan. Or Myanmar. Or the Central African Republic. We forget that in dozens of countries across the globe, millions of lives are torn apart by the constant fighting and destruction caused by chronic insecurity.
We mostly stood aside while al-Assad gassed his own people. We did nothing when the Tutsi faced genocide in Rwanda. We made half-hearted statements of concern about killings in the Congo.
It’s easy to find yourself wrapped up in a supposed “realist” calculus about the distribution of power in the world and become absorbed in your own theories about what the best allocation of resources is. You can always talk yourself into how something shouldn’t be done. It’s easy to forget that those decisions cause people to live lives filled with death and destruction that could have been different.
The Battle of Algiers
National security is also a question about who exactly you are. It’s often put forward that there are objective things that can be called national interests . But it’s not exactly true.
National security is a statement about principles for a political community, and it reflects who we are.
The Battle of Algiers is a semi-historical account of the French attempt to combat the Algerian nationalist insurgency, focusing on the early phase of the conflict in Algiers. The insurgents resort to indiscriminate targeting of civilians—a precursor of the later unbridled massacres of the FLN.
Likewise, the French—despite being former resistance fighters against Nazi occupation—resort to the torture and killing of Algerians in a hopeless fight against an enemy they cannot begin to understand.
Both sides are pursuing what they conceive of as their national interests—for the Algerians, it’s a free and sovereign nation, and for the French, what they perceive as an integral part of France itself. The Algerians end up finding themselves free, but trapped with an autocratic government. The French find themselves facing down a coup attempt from paratroopers who style themselves as men of action, who should steer the fate of France.
What we choose to do—and how we choose to do it—is who we are. We can attempt to separate these two things. We can say that what we do for national security is distinct from our domestic life. It is not.
Z
Where does national security end? Who decides what constitutes a threat to security? Does national security include our fellow citizens?
Z follows the course of an internal plot—heavily based on the establishment of the Greek Junta in 1967—to stifle a domestic democratic movement and install a military junta in the name of national security.
The members of this movement, you see, are a threat to the foundations of the State and are harming the Nation.
Is there no greater national security threat than the risk from radicals within? Isn’t anyone opposed to the interests of your political faction a threat? I mean, after all, you are the one who actually understands what the country actually needs.
How far can you blur a line? What can’t be a national security threat if you draw no bounds around the profession? Any political opposition can be labeled as a threat. Any neighbor can be an enemy in waiting.
What stops the security forces of any nation from seeing itself as the only true arbiter of what is or is not acceptable?
1
I’ll admit, this is a very Franco-American-centric list. I’m American. I was (once) fluent in French. What do you want from me?
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