Constant Murdering
~TRUTH 666~
domination of the worlds economy and culture. First published From
Parameters,
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/
Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College]
Constant Conflict
US Army War College Quarterly
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our
lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around
the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural
and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive.
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world
safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends,
we will do a fair amount of killing.
We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once
our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time.
Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the
challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort,
digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally,
financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners,
are a minority.
For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or
effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and
short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and
information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans,
in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or
who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile
themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their
inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and
ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American
century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more
lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without
precedent.
We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of
civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see
higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than
ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men
and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more
will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of
demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of
imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the
defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between
information masters and information victims.
In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider
and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the
literate and illiterate. While superior information--often embodied in
military technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to
be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping
and pillaging were done). Technology was more apt to batter down the
city gates than to change the nature of the city. The rise of the
modern West broke the pattern. Whether speaking of the dispossessions
and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of
machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European
imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever
further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life." Historically,
ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only
error.
The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable,
uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures
unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in
Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the
dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and
sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and
alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or
ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or
to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer
understand the world, and their fear is volatile.
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it
seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack
the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective
option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and
cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire,
there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the
techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal
states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The
attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed,
although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood.
Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained,
and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.
These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or
the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their
cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven
dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off
blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in
Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.
It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap
between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals,
countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or
countries could "make it" on sheer muscle power and the will to apply
it. You could work harder than your neighbor and win in the
marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and it offered
near-ecumenical hope. That model is dead. Today, there is a growing
excess of muscle power in an age of labor-saving machines and methods.
In our own country, we have seen blue-collar unions move from center
stage to near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At the same
time, expectations have increased dramatically. There is a global
sense of promises broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the
planet believe they have played by the rules laid down for them (in
the breech, they often have not), only to find that some indefinite
power has changed those rules overnight. The American who graduated
from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would allow his
family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many such
Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with
images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are
excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no
longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace
of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens.
Some do not.
The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican
university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness,
exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society,
marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of
information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the
West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and
satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of
us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming
down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and
unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world
affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to
describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the
foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by
America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly
enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is
excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own
poverty.
Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as
inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as
seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because
America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region.
Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot
square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he
has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How
could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is
an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of
conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing
elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack
the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he
acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal
guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his
culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of
victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source
of dynamic hatreds.
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American
culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint.
But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance,
replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates,
Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human
beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating
themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most
powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures.
While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong
enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not.
The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that
the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It
stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for
the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the
identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the
faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the
Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather
"Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at
operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder
even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor"
in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the
addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay
for the privilege of their disillusionment.
American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable"
products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought
ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static
perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the
dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works
are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the
quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American
culture is alive.
This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not
expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All
previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an
ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of
uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have
not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our
national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than
exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that
feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our
most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere.
American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from
the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our
music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a
Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives
that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the
level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental
impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel
as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended
or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The
enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far
more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.
When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video
images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image
trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual
outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain
of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and
opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the
opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they
collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.
As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or
dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there
will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other
resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place
will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents
divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic
trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical
production industries, because there will always be another country
willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack
the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived
as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge
as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be
the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil
strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will
continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts
statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its
allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to
intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever
we have the guts for it.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our
lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around
the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural
and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive.
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world
safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends,
we will do a fair amount of killing.
We are building an information-based military to do that killing.
There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our
military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he
knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and
efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will
involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be
the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines,
that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the
lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important
technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the
ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill
accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban
battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet
will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats
into low-income housing. There will be no justification for
billion-dollar bombers at all.
For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military
peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The
violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties
possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning
will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets,
should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater
threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military
system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts
spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic
collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed--emotions rather than
strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.
We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of
weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we
selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of
warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still
be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed
should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but
never all--of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational
advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous
that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power.
Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the
moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's
heart.
Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat
models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military
capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our
military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without
becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on
our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from
military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms
of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight
fair.
The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince
Congress that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the
Chinese are only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly
assume that while foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze
every trend correctly, and continue to achieve higher and higher
economic growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On the
contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and
leading a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original
industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look
like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic
ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at
the cutting edge of wealth creation.
Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was
oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even
calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a
sure prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our
nemesis. No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a
reason to fear the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American
can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free
membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority
of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the
greatest engine of positive change in history.
Freedom works.
In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even
approach the capabilities of our information-based force because it is
so profoundly an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army
will employ many marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still
be the soldier, not the machine, and our soldiers will have skills
other cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts,
fleeing human complexity, like to project enemy capabilities based
upon the systems a potential opponent might acquire. But buying or
building stuff is not enough. It didn't work for Saddam Hussein, and
it won't work for Beijing.
The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will
be impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able
to come from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our
officers and soldiers. For all the complaints--in many respects
justified--about our public school systems, the holistic and
synergistic nature of education in our society and culture is
imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a second-nature grasp of
technology and the ability to sort and assimilate vast amounts of
competitive data that no other population will achieve. The
informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying
to anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level
foreign elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with
television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does
with the classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education
system as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the
meantime, our children are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection
in coping with the information deluge that is drowning many of their
parents. These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. We just
have to make sure they can do push-ups, too.
There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage war immer so ernst,"
that translates very freely as "The sky has always been falling."
Despite our relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most
powerful, robust culture on earth. Its discontinuities and
contradictions are often its strengths. We are incapable of five-year
plans, and it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption,
technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength our nearest
competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our military best,
we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we
insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for unaffordable,
neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility.
Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases that
will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow's service
members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our
inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and
prop-driven bombers would be today. We are not providing for
tomorrow's military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the most
humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing our best to shut it
inside a technological straight-jacket.
There is no "big threat" out there. There's none on the horizon,
either. Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to
focus on the constant conflicts of richly varying description that
will challenge us--and kill us--at home and abroad. There are plenty
of threats, but the beloved dinosaurs are dead.
We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of
the world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not
embark upon the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our
national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling
it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures,
information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills
necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only
beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear
or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will
not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to
watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them,
and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating. If we
insist on a "proven" approach to military affairs, we will be throwing
away our greatest national advantage.
We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the
right information.
Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information
proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new
catchphrase--information warfare--and then duck. Although there has
been plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been
as helpful and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high
school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have
hemorrhaged defense dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell
us what we already knew. Studies study other studies. For now, we have
decided that information warfare is a matter of technology, which is
akin to believing that your stereo system is more important to music
than the musicians.
Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall
get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it
comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology)
the Russians can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one
can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman,
China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese
belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus
population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of
free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of
achievement.
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened
identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are
attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is
infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to
be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very
struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion
fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We
should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes.
They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further
increasing our relative strength.
It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of
warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But
Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets.
The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face
of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US
military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological
warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or
potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US
military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften
them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand.
Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff
in the movies. If the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in
battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey's tanks.
Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat
multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford.
We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.
Within our formal military, we have been moving into information
warfare for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and,
especially, data dissemination within the force has broken with global
military tradition, in which empowering information was reserved for
the upper echelons. While our military is vertically responsible, as
it must be, it is informationally democratic. Our ability to
decentralize information and appropriate decisionmaking authority is a
revolutionary breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans
decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but only within carefully
regulated guidelines--and they could not enable the process with
sufficient information dissemination).
No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants,
sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely
to do so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power
within our military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize.
Pragmatic behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as
divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the
behaviors are changing. What, other than its flag, does the division
of 1997 have in common with the division of World War II? Even as
traditionalists resist the reformation of the force, the "anarchy" of
lieutenants is shaping the Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do
not understand what their lieutenants are up to, and generals would
not be able to sleep at night if they knew what the battalion
commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army is changing
itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing
themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should
be a welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain
rigidly hierarchical.
Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual
soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are
either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's
inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage
against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot
escape. The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders about the
degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of American culture is
reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of Japanese
militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that any
of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong.
Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.
In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that
freedom had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always
find enemies. The problem with freedom is that it's just too damned
free for tyrants, whether they be dictators, racial or religious
supremacists, or abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders,
exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and demands personal
responsibility. What could be more threatening to traditional
cultures? The advent of this new information age has opened a fresh
chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It will be a
bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and head-bashing. The
number one priority of non-Western governments in the coming decades
will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information within
their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of
conservatism--informational corruption--and will cripple their
competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.
The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be
troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it
violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle
streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will
fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics,
domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.
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Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief
of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare.
Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served
exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army
Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in
international relations. Over the past several years, his professional
and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia,
Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria,
Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma,
Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean
Ridge. He has published widely on military and international concerns.
His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon
Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to
acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with
Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army
officers.
Tom Aldrich
Good article, considering your intent.