"Constant Conflict" by Ralph Peters
Nes
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 neighbours, 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."
The US knows it is or will soon be hated by the entire World - by the
"nasty, brutish, and short circuited" majority. It KNOWS and has known for
some time now, as this essay shows, that the US has to kill and kill in
order to attempt to remake the World in its own casino-capitalist image.
There is no other way - or that is the elite opinion of the most respected
body of national US opinion formers, the top military brass and its
eager-beaver strategists, to whom democracy is nothing but a "deft liberal
form of imperialism"!
"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."
Bon appetite - a "New American Century" gripped by rampant, violent fascism,
the military might of the post-modern state combined with the economic force
of US backed corporations! Will such a "machine" really manage to dominate
the World as much as those self-congratulatory, narcissistic, hubris prone
US elites presume? Don't you believe it! - unless you're one of those who
LIKE the idea of US World hegemony, then you SHOULD believe it, indeed, you
ought to bless the proponents of state terror and violence for their effort
to achieve this brutal and inhuman World order!
NB! Longish, but high quality of expressed opinion.
Nes
*********************
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
Constant Conflict
by RALPH PETERS
From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14.
US Army War College Quarterly
The United States Army's Senior Professional Journal
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/parahome.htm
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.
_________________________________________
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.
_________________________________________
Reviewed 8 May 1997. Please send comments or corrections to
Param...@carlisle.army.mil
mario the great
"Nes" <nospam-nmo...@myrealbox.com> wrote in message
news:brssj3$647n4$1...@ID-130862.news.uni-berlin.de...
snip
*BARKELEY, DAVID B.
Rank and organization: Private, U.S. Army, Company A, 356th Infantry, 89th
Division. Place and date: Near Pouilly, France, 9 November 1918. Entered
service at: San Antonio, Tex. Birth: Laredo, Tex. G.O. No.: 20, W.D., 1919.
Citation: When information was desired as to the enemy's position on the
opposite side of the Meuse River, Pvt. Barkeley, with another soldier,
volunteered without hesitation and swam the river to reconnoiter the exact
location. He succeeded in reaching the opposite bank, despite the evident
determination of the enemy to prevent a crossing. Having obtained his
information, he again entered the water for his return, but before his goal
was reached, he was seized with cramps and drowned.
O...@oak-invalid.com
<nospam-nmo...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>"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 neighbours, 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."
American Nobel Peace Prize Winners:
1912: Elihu Root (US)
Oak
The Happy Hippy
"mario the great" <ma...@gregorio.fsnet.co.uk> wrote ...
[snip]
> *BARKELEY, DAVID B.
>
> Rank and organization: Private, U.S. Army, Company A, 356th Infantry, 89th
> Division. Place and date: Near Pouilly, France, 9 November 1918. Entered
> service at: San Antonio, Tex. Birth: Laredo, Tex. G.O. No.: 20, W.D.,
1919.
> Citation: When information was desired as to the enemy's position on the
> opposite side of the Meuse River, Pvt. Barkeley, with another soldier,
> volunteered without hesitation and swam the river to reconnoiter the exact
> location. He succeeded in reaching the opposite bank, despite the evident
> determination of the enemy to prevent a crossing. Having obtained his
> information, he again entered the water for his return, but before his
goal
> was reached, he was seized with cramps and drowned.
RONGHI, FRANK
US Army Staff Sergeant
US soldier Frank Ronghi has been jailed for life, without the possibility of
parole, for the sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Kosovo
last January. 36-year-old Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi admitted the crimes,
committed while he was on NATO peacekeeping duties, to a US military court
in Germany.
mario the great
--
Š Mario Gregorio 2003
"The Happy Hippy" <the.hap...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:B19Fb.7583$FN....@newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net...
So you're saying because some is bad, they are all bad, very interesting
theory, let me think... where I read it, ahh yes I remember now it was
applied by a very famous antiwar man, Adolph I think he was.......
The Happy Hippy
"mario the great" <ma...@gregorio.fsnet.co.uk> wrote ...
> So you're saying because some is bad, they are all bad, very interesting
> theory,
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Was there anything but a simple
statement of fact which I sent ? No. Did you see any edirorial or comment ?
No. You posted to show the good side of those in the American military, I
posted to show the other side of the coin.
You have leapt to a conclusion with absolutely no idea as to why I posted
what I did, but I'm sure that, now you've decided why I did, you'll use it
as a personal insult against me.
> let me think... where I read it, ahh yes I remember now it was
> applied by a very famous antiwar man, Adolph I think he was.......
When you first started to post to this newsgroup it looked promising that
you would bring some fresh life to it, now when you start to compare me with
Hitler, you are showing yourself to be a complete fucking idiot.
Š The Happy Hippy, 2003
mario the great
--
Š Mario Gregorio 2003
"The Happy Hippy" <the.hap...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:iHDFb.8558$FN....@newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net...
I was not so difficult to find out how is your real tollerance toward
people, well done.
Sorry if you I insulted your delicate soul saying you remember me Hitler,
what I should say about your "complete fucking idiot".
I'm too old for this stuff.
regards
Mario
The Happy Hippy
"mario the great" <ma...@gregorio.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:bs771a$ea1$1...@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
>
> --
> © Mario Gregorio 2003
Actually, you'll find I have a very good tolerance of people, except for
those who judge me for something I never said and never infered, and then,
based upon their own assessment, make wild accusations and personal attacks.
Come at me like that, and I will come back giving as good as you can dish
out.
> Sorry if you I insulted your delicate soul saying you remember me Hitler,
> what I should say about your "complete fucking idiot".
> I'm too old for this stuff.
Well don't play the game then; you started it. Bye.