Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(5)

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.

Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(4)

Constant Conflict
RALPH PETERS

the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.
They ache to return to a golden age & create a paradise of their own restrictive design.


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.

Army War College:
"All of you pathetic slaves need to be killed!!!"
« on: May 09, 2010, 11:19:34 AM »



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.

to be CONTD.(10 JULY 2011 SUNDAY.)gut5

Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(3).

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.

American culture is alive.
American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude.


Constant Conflict
RALPH PETERS
(From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14.)



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.
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.
To be CONTD.(10july2011)

Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(2).

an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into "structures of everyday life."

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.
to be CONTD.