Constant Conflict/RALPH PETERS
http://web.archive.org/web/19980711230628/http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
From Parameters, Summer 1997
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(Americans ?), 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.
(TO BE contd.)
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