STRATEGIC POST-COMBAT WARFARE

(33) War is the deliberate use of armed force by one social entity against another. War requires specialized labour—affective, cognitive and physical attributes—normatively labelled attributes as loyalty and endurance for example—labour that is in kind and degree foreign to other human endeavours. The British military historian John Keegan (1993) states “…view with extreme suspicion all theories and representations of war that that equate it with any other activity in human affairs” (xvi). This caution must be respected, for producing propaganda or dictating economic policy is not inherently life threatening. While this may seem obvious, a purposive physically hazardous occupation as soldiering differs in kind from that of writers, politicians, economists or educationists. Death is not a usual occupational hazard in non-military professions. Using the concept of warfare to describe other forms of organized violence is a fraught undertaking.

(34) The last generation of French social philosophers have seemed quite willing to tread this ground however. Each lived through the German occupation of France during WWII, and perhaps common experience led to common theoretical occupation with war. Deleuze, Guatarri, Foucault, Virilio, Derrida (born in Algeria), Baudrillard, to name but the most prominent, theoretically foregrounded warfare in ways that separated it from actual armed combat, extended it into the spheres of activity Putin identified—education, culture, economics and politics. Interestingly, the Israelis applied Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of smooth and striated space to actual warfare, using it to theorize tunnelling through buildings—homes, offices, factories—to build safer routes through hostile human geographies rather than travelling on exposed pre-existing routes (Weizman, 2007).

(35) These French theorists—and others such as Manuel de Landa (1991)—have moved from unilinear developmental models of war to models of multiplicity capable of containing contemporary war, where the lack of front lines, common theatres of perception or even perceptible combat theatres prove the rule rather than the exception. In addition, contemporary surface combat, the combat of armed fighting forces per se, has been accompanied by constant, intense, or perhaps even “total subterranean combat” in the spheres of politics, economics, culture and education. This constant non-violent combat, such as the Western media swarming whereby China is attacked via Tibet, is typical of twenty-first century warfare, as is the US legal and diplomatic attack on the Iranian financial system.

(36) Twenty-first century actual total war is kept out of common sightlines, while actual limited armed combat and constant statist rearmament are profiled highly. Real contemporary war takes place in factories, fields, research laboratories, conferences, meeting rooms, classrooms, homes, offices, on TV, over the Internet, in the movies and most importantly perhaps, in the minds of the mass of humans. Warfare today can be conceived of as a grand “psy-op” (psychological operation) fought on a seamless global electronically-enabled battlefield—a strategic shift of significance—concerning nothing less than control of the planet. A profound inversion may be evident, something akin to Baudrillard’s (1995) statement concerning the First Gulf War—that it did not happen (that is, the war as a media event much outweighed actual warfare in significance).

(37) While actual armed combat in the twenty-first century may be more limited in scope as compared to the century preceding, the scope and intensity of warfare, as this paper argues, in the spheres identified by Putin has increased greatly. This increased velocity and concentration is a function of new communications and surveillance technologies, whose initial development was funded almost exclusively by the US DoD. Might there be a correlation between a decline in the lethality of armed combat amongst combatants, if not non-combatants (civilians residing in actual war zones), and the increase in the intensity of the virtual (viral) war conducted in the other spheres of activity?

(38) French “poststructural” theorists extended the art of war much beyond Clausewitz’s concept of armed force massed at the opposite’s weakest point in structured statist warfare, to warfare everywhere, all the time. Following on their thought, contemporary warfare can be perceived as totally blended—evident in the transformation of the more limited military/industrial/educational complexes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the contemporary global military/educational/ industrial/political/financial/entertainment/communications/surveillance complex.

(39) The current complex developed and administered largely by the US, and now facing other such nascent complexes in India and Brazil for example, the current Western total war machine, is under constant attack in the new form of total warfare that it itself generated; complex ramparts may be breached at any time by highly skilled computer scientists and operators in China, Russia, India, Serbia, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East and Asia, the state owned oil companies of Russia and China, and the higher education of newly industrialized nations more generally, to name but a few of the threats to Western (US) hegemony. The French theorists, and again others as Friedrich Kittler (1999), have provided the conceptual tools whereby this form of total war is apprehensible.

(40) However, it is not as if the current electronically-based, multi-linear and multimodal warfare with deliberate destabilization as the common denominator suddenly arrived “full blown” in war theatres. The industrial nations of the nineteenth century, and indeed military leaders back at least to Alexander understood the strategic value of knowledge and education. Much more recently however, the post-WWII era saw quantitative change so vast in so many arenas of human endeavour that the change proved qualitative (Hegel), not least because of the development of the enabling technologies for “always-on” warfare.

(41) Peter Drucker, a “business” theorist and one of the many thousands of émigré scholars driven from Europe in the 1930s, was the first theorist to identify the phenomena that came to be characterized as “post-industrialism” or the “information age” and its education dependence. In Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957, 123–124), Drucker articulated what he termed The Educated Society and The Educational Revolution:

The higher education of a country controls its military, its technological and it economic potential. In an age of superpowers and absolute weapons, higher education may indeed be the only area in which a country can still be ahead, can still gain decisive advantage….The greatest impact of the educational revolution is therefore on international power and politics. It has made the supply of highly educated people a decisive factor in the competition between powers—for leadership and perhaps even for survival. The conclusion from this is as simple as it is new: Educational development becomes a priority of national policy (Italics in original).

Drucker played out Weber’s (1968, 225) assertion regarding Gesellschaft societies, “this means fundamentally domination through knowledge.” Yet, the strategic value of constant knowledge production was known since the nineteenth century. Knowledge production and knowledge delivery were weaponized at the same time as they were nationalized and industrialized. The results were evident in the War of 1870 (and the U.S. Civil War). The increased military power obtained then by the nascent industrial nations (including Russia and Japan) has however been augmented, extended and transformed, no longer as dependent on human beings, on massed force and conscription for example, but more singularly dependent on information and computing systems (ICT).

(42) Contemporary war as imposed by the US is a complex system, spectacularly activated for heuristic purposes in select theatres, all the peoples of the globe the target audience. The distinction between the civil and martial spheres, the basis of modern professional armies, is less prominent, with actual armed combat valued for its communicative abilities, as basic didactic instruction in economics, politics, culture and education. The object lesson of contemporary global warfare, actual or virtual, is the inalterability of current relations and structures of power, the acceptance of existing political and economic relations and structures as quotidian reality. Could it be the wars of politics, education, culture and economics when wrapped together constitute total strategic war, while wars involving Western armed forces, such as the current armed conflict in Afghanistan, are mostly tactical, one mode of war amongst many that functions partially as a diversion to protect other forms of war from common apprehension?

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 854