MUSLIMS MUST NOT READ THIS

[KANGAROOISTAN]

REPOSTED BY KANGA from soc.culture.iranian
Arash wrote:
> A look behind the philosophy and practice of Americas push for domination of the
> worlds economy and culture. First published From Parameters
> (http://carlisle-www.army.mil), Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: U.S. Army War College
>
>
> U.S. Army War College Quarterly
> Summer 1997
>
> Constant Conflict
>
> http://www.estripes.com/photos/24604_92716363b.jpg
> U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters
> Parameters[AT]carlisle.army.mil
>
> 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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
> U.S. power and the U.S. military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a
> psychological warfare (PSYOPS) tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real
> or potential opponents.
>
> Saddam swaggered, but the image of the U.S. 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 U.S. 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, Occupied Arran, 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 U.S. Army officers.
> http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm