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| Europe |
| al-Guardian trash talks the US military by Richard Drayton |
| 2005-12-29 |
| Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons Watch the adjectives and sneer all over this article. Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power The tragic irony of the 21st century is that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world's stock markets in 2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a New American Century's ambition of "full-spectrum dominance" - in which its country could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars" - was a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the 1990s. But darker dreams surfaced in America's military universities. The theorists of the "revolution in military affairs" predicted that technology would lead to easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters advised on "future warfare" at the Army War College - prophesying in 1997 a coming "age of constant conflict". Thomas Barnett at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral Cebrowski in developing "network-centric warfare". General John Jumper of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space. American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly called the "God's-eye" view of satellites and GPS: the "global information grid". This hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst, the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others into submitting to the stars and stripes. On the logo of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia - knowledge is power . The IAO promised "total information awareness", an all-seeing eye spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action, calls for a "systems administrator" force to be dispatched with the military, to "process" conquered countries. The G8 and a few others are the "Kantian core", writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper's poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by force to the unlucky "Hobbesian gap". Imperialism is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with technology giving sanction to those who intervene. The Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely balanced civil war. The one-eyed Mullah Omar's great escape on his motorbike was a warning that the God's-eye view can miss the human detail. The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains. and it gets more and more nasty through the article. Loaded terms and phrases everywhere.... |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #17 What a waste of words. Too many of them in fact. Words are a terrible thing to waste. So just let me say Richard Drayton eat feces and die. |
| Posted by: Mahou Sensei Negi-bozu 2005-12-29 22:26 |
| #16 This is so pretentious it could be published in the New York Times. |
| Posted by: RWV 2005-12-29 22:09 |
| #15 "Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power" The paradox of an eleventh-grade vocabulary coupled with a second-grade mind. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2005-12-29 19:42 |
| #14 Okay, you're right. An automatic Sextant is in order. It can also double in use like a simile. |
| Posted by: Leon Clavin 2005-12-29 17:10 |
| #13 It helps to have a clock too, guys. |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-12-29 16:55 |
| #12 Clavin, baby, it was a metaphor. You post it, you eat it. As for telling me what to do, heh, don't be so Leon, be more Spemblish. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-12-29 16:55 |
| #11 Don't be so sensitive Calhoun. I was rethinking the post and figured that a sextant is only really useful for the occasional fix, so indeed, you would need a compass for real-time course feedback. Unless you had a quality goldie who could constantly point home. |
| Posted by: Leon Clavin 2005-12-29 16:29 |
| #10 Byte Me, Leon. Ever hear of GPS? |
| Posted by: .com 2005-12-29 15:40 |
| #9 Got to agree with ZF. :> You don't take one compass reading outside San Diego and just sail to Hawaii - you adjust your course 10, 20, 30 times per day to correct for the myriad factors that affect your boat's meandering path. Luddite. Ever hear of the Sextant? Never allow your vessel to meander, it's unAmerican. |
| Posted by: Leon Clavin 2005-12-29 15:30 |
| #8 You've touched upon something which I think is fundamental to, well, to everything, anymouse. You get a solid dose of it in the "State of Fear" background speech by Crichton - another of his masterful analyses, BTW. Reality is composed of a googleplex of Complex Dynamic systems. You don't take one compass reading outside San Diego and just sail to Hawaii - you adjust your course 10, 20, 30 times per day to correct for the myriad factors that affect your boat's meandering path. And, 'tis true of everything more substantial than a Looney Liberal Lefty Brain Fart. I, for one, am extremely happy that the opposition are simpletons - rigid, inflexible, irrational, and irrelevant. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-12-29 14:55 |
| #7 What is not said because of his own LLL insanity...is that the US military and intelligence is learning and learning fast...and dynamically changing. This is not the same USMC-USA that went into Afghanistan 4 years ago, and into Iraq almost 3 years ago. Let the Euro-pussy drool, click his ruby slippers together. We are a far better fighting force (and trained for 21st century warfare) than we were pre 9/11. |
| Posted by: anymouse 2005-12-29 14:17 |
| #6 Eurabia at its best. Good luck for the future, little infidels living under the muslim masters. |
| Posted by: Poitiers-Lepanto 2005-12-29 12:12 |
| #5 The guys is a regular contributor on Counterpunch so you can see where he lives in the fever swamp (the deep end). |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2005-12-29 12:03 |
| #4 It is thus so because we make it so. We could have just as well taken the Mongol approach and leveled and burned cities and towns that were trouble. Making birds carry their own rations to fly over the area. However, we bear the cost in blood and entanglement because we are who we are and do not engage in such behaviors. Now had we done that, be assured that Al-Guardian would have declared us the Anti-Christ and evil. On the other hand, when we spoke, we certainly would be listen to very carefully and very rarely mocked by pathetic third rate hacks writing on dog wipe. |
| Posted by: Flaimble Snoluter5515 2005-12-29 11:24 |
| #3 I can remember in the 90’s listening to senior leaders talking of technology and how satellites and smart bombs will remove the soldier from the battlefield. They talked of this as the end all to war, but they reminded me of crows looking jewelry, and about as logical as a monkey looking at a wrist watch. Air Force General Short was one of them in his arguments that we could take Belgrade without putting troops on the ground. We learned the lesson this idiot, Richard Drayton, writes about back in the 90’s in the Balkans with Short’s bombing of Belgrade. Smart bombs and Apache helicopters being controlled by generals in, Frankfort or DC alone won’t do it. It takes soldiers on the ground, controlling the technology, making the decisions, and holding the ground to be successful. What we learned in the Balkans was exercised very successfully by the ODA’s in Afghanistan and other places around the world. This propagandist needs to put his thesaurus away and read a little Robert Kaplan to better understand how we have capitalized on technology and used it to enhance the fight. Then he can sit down and STFU! |
| Posted by: 49 pan 2005-12-29 11:01 |
| #2 Article: One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. I guess if by "tie down", he means "prevent from staging the next invasion", he's right. But this is a trivial sense of the phrase "tie down". The fact is that North Korea hasn't moved on South Korea, and China hasn't moved on Taiwan - or Japan. Note that Russia hasn't taken this opportunity to retake the Central Asian states or the Baltic ones, let alone reconstitute the Warsaw Pact. In what sense does this talking head from Cambridge mean Uncle Sam is "tied down", if its potential adversaries haven't taken action to exploit the American Gulliver's temporary weakness? Could it be that the combined military establishments of North Korea, China and Russia don't view America as being "tied down"? Could it be that a Cambridge lecturer has a inferior understanding of America's military capabilities compared to the military men who have to stake their reputations, and perhaps their lives, on the accuracy of such judgments? |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-12-29 10:45 |
| #1 A good sign. If the grauniad says it's bad news then it's probably good news. Betting against an organistation so consistently wrong allways pays dividends. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2005-12-29 10:31 |