[ExI] Who is safe?

[Darren Greer]

>Future warfare may have no explosions, no injury or death,
no clear chain of command, no uniforms, no fires, no starving refugees.
Warfare has already suddenly lost one of the most universal aspects: the
terror and confusion of battle.  Future wars could start and end quickly,
with many of the participants unaware that a war had occurred.<

For two hundred years the standard bible for military colleges and
officers-in-training around the world was Von Clausewitz's On War. This
detailed how to win wars since Napoleonic times: nation fighting nation and
making the attack phycological, economic and
strategic, effectively strangling the resistance out of large
nationalized populations though strategic bombing and localized battles in a
"theatre", attrition and laying siege. In the nineties, Martin van Creveld,
an Israeli historian, published a book called The Rise and Decline of the
State, and since then, spurred on by
increasing terrorist and guerilla warfare tactics and
internal acknowledgment of the failure in Vietnam, that book and others by
van Creveld have been the philosophy-of-war manuals for the Pentagon and
many other national military organizations.

The American writer Robert Kaplan also explains quite well in The Coming
Anarchy how wars are fought have been changing dramatically in the last
three decades and will continue to change. Edward Said had quite a bit to
say over the changes in*why* they are being fought.  Interesting stuff. I'd
like to see some of those old posts.


Darren

P.S. If you haven't already and decide to you want to read Van Creveld,
might want to brew lots of coffee. I got through him, but his style is
terribly dry.

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:40 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> ... On Behalf Of spike
>
> >...Watch carefully in the next few weeks.  Listen and think of every
> possibility.  There may be more than one bad guy, who may not even be
> working together, nor all be on the same side... Keith I don't know if you
> were ever a San Jose Mercury News reader, but if so, you may have followed
> Gary Webb's career trajectory...His story hit the headlines over 14 years
> ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday... spike
>
> Note that when any major news agency takes a head shot, its credibility
> never recovers.  The Merc has been in decline ever since the 1996 debacle.
> CBS has not ventured very far into political scandal reporting since 2004,
> for it is too easy for them to imagine any other news agency, such as that
> fair and balanced outfit, making snarky comments such as "...CBS, the
> neeews
> agency of Dan Raaaather, is reporting..."
>
> Long timers here may recall discussions on the future of war we used to
> have
> here about 10 or 12 years ago.  We remarked that future warfare may be
> unrecognizable as such, for it would be missing many of the universal
> aspects of warfare that has been with us since the first ape hurled a stone
> at another ape.  Future warfare may have no explosions, no injury or death,
> no clear chain of command, no uniforms, no fires, no starving refugees.
> Warfare has already suddenly lost one of the most universal aspects: the
> terror and confusion of battle.  Future wars could start and end quickly,
> with many of the participants unaware that a war had occurred.  The damage
> may not be apparent for years, if at all.  It may be debatable whether the
> events can even be called warfare.  The damage may be ambiguous.
>
> We are in such an ambiguous warfare right now.  Imagine for instance,
> somehow all passenger airline travel is choked to death by the necessity of
> security measures that cause a sufficient number of customers to just say
> no, and we drop below critical mass to sustain the system.  Real or implied
> threats cause the whole system to just collapse or flame out.  But then
> businesses compensate by figuring out ways to move information instead of
> meat.  It is far cheaper and in many ways more effective to move bits
> instead of butts.
>
> Who won and who lost?  Why?  How?
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
"In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses
stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." -
Remembrance of the Daleks
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