US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997: Constant Conflict

[babylonsister]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm



Constant Conflict

US Army War College Quarterly

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 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.

more...

[whistle]

1. The conservative agenda, war, war profits, global imperialism

[Igel]

2. I rather like how he formulated some things.

A couple, phrased differently, I've heard from a few DUers (ayeshaqiqa comes to mind).

Some things that I think will be disliked are merely facts. Others have insight largely missing from Americans--the information that people in other countries base their gut opinions of Americans on. "Baywatch", indeed (intensely popular all over the world in the mid-late '90s).

And in some cases--as well as the overall conclusion as to how the Armed Forces are to be equipped--he's wrong. In some cases, the last decade's shown him to be egregiously wrong.

An interesting read.

[babylonsister]

5. But Baywatch was so 90s, as was this article. I think America has

really prevailed in other countries for other reasons nowadays.

[EVDebs]

3. DOD can't find $2.3 TRILLION

http://truemajority.org/oreos/

and, as the site above shows us, we could be doing soooo much more with what the Pentagon wastes !

CBS News 'War On Waste'
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

[bemildred]

4. This guy could suck the lead out of a pencil. nt

[babylonsister]

6. Hmm, I don't quite know what that means.

:shrug:

[bemildred]

7. This is like a blow job for Rumsfeld and the RMA people..

Intellectually, it is drivel, a free-associating power fantasy. I'm sure it was very good for his career though.