have the guts for it.END4contd.
Extracts from Constant Conflict (5)
Ralph Peters
For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history.
Only the foolish will fight fair.
a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs.
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. END5.contd.
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