Re. the earlier discussion about whether or not the US was an imperial
power, or whether or not some saw the US this way. Note this:
Ted Morgan
-------- Original Message --------
> (From Harvard Magazine.)
>
>
> The Future of War and the American Military
>
> Demography, technology, and the politics of modern empire
>
> by Stephen Peter Rosen
> The people who run the American military have to be futurists, whether
> they want to be or not. The process of developing and building new weapons
> takes decades, as does the process of recruiting and training new military
> officers. As a result, when taking such steps, leaders are making
> statements, implicitly or explicitly, about what they think will be useful
> many years in the future.
> The soldier as "fighting system," outfitted in "Land Warrior" gear.
> Courtesy of United States Department of DefenseIt is not easy being a
> futurist. The first effort by the Bush administration to review defense
> policy, in 2001, did not change much. It was "conservative," and assumed
> that the world would change slowly and incrementally. Sometimes it does,
> but often it has not, as events at the end of the Cold War and in
> September 2001 demonstrated. In 2002, the war in Afghanistan will
> encourage a harder look at that conservative approach. Yet it is not easy
> to think clearly about how to change. Often, when we think we are making
> bold leaps of imagination, we are only projecting the recent past out into
> the indefinite future. Before September 11, much of the thinking in the
> Pentagon about the future anticipated replays of the 1991 war against
> Iraq, along with limited peacekeeping operations. After September 11, we
> now act as if the future of war will be dominated by the fight against
> terrorism. In both cases, there was a powerful tendency to assume that
> what had happened most recently would continue to happen.
> How might we try to think differently about the future for military
> planning purposes? One useful way to begin is to identify trends^×ongoing
> processes that have considerable momentum^×that are likely to continue into
> the future with relatively limited, or only gradual, changes. Demographics
> is one of them. The demographic decline and collapse of public health in
> Russia are well underway, and it is hard to see how they could be reversed
> in one generation. This is a trend that makes a resurgence of Russian
> national power in the next 20 years unlikely. The aging and contraction of
> the population of Europe and Japan are also striking, and make them
> unlikely centers of power in the future. The position of Europe is
> particularly interesting, since the countries across the Mediterranean
> from Europe are growing in population, and there are already large Islamic
> populations in Europe with higher birth rates than the non-Islamic
> populations. The advances in information technology will continue, along
> with the diffusion of the ability to construct nuclear, biological, and
> chemical weapons. Politically, the dominance of democracies and
> international institutions in Europe seems likely to insure relative
> international peace, while the comparative rarity of stable democracies in
> Asia^×from Turkey to Korea^×together with the social dislocations associated
> with the process of industrialization and economic growth, suggest a more
> turbulent future for that populous continent.
> These observations have some obvious implications for defense planners.
> The United States has begun to shift its military focus away from Europe
> to Asia. The diffusion of technologies relevant to the construction of
> weapons of mass destruction was the driving force behind efforts to
> develop defenses against ballistic missiles, and the attacks of September
> 11 and the anthrax attacks will increase the effort to thwart less
> conventional ways of delivering these weapons as well. Countering such
> weapons will mean not only shooting down missiles, but also finding and
> perhaps destroying them before they are launched. Even before September
> 11, a group of officers and defense intellectuals existed who advocated
> military transformation, a "Revolution in Military Affairs," or RMA, a
> term coined by Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment
> in the Pentagon. That office, more than any other, tries to focus on
> long-term problems of analysis and planning. RMA advocates argued that
> rapid improvement in information technologies^×sensors, communications,
> data processing^×would make it possible to find most large military
> systems, such as air bases, aircraft carriers, and tanks, and to destroy
> quickly whatever you could find.
> Maximizing mobility: a prototype second-generation unmanned Predator B
> surveillance craft in test flight
> The General Atomic Aeronautical System, Inc.The events of September 11 and
> thereafter would appear to strengthen their case. The use in Afghanistan
> of small, covert teams of soldiers, supported by high-tech sensors and
> long-range, highly accurate missiles, was very much like what RMA
> advocates within the U.S. Marine Corps had proposed in 1994 in a concept
> called "Sea Dragon." The use of unmanned aerial vehicles armed with
> precision-guided munitions, another RMA concept, has actually been
> employed in Afghanistan. Combining data collected from a number of sources
> and sending it in real time to bombers in flight toward Afghanistan to
> attack hidden or mobile targets was yet another RMA concept that was
> accelerated as a result of the war. The possible need to find Pakistani
> nuclear weapons, if the government of Pakistan turns against the United
> States, will also increase funding for information technologies that can
> obtain data about hidden weapons. The desire to identify and track
> individuals who may be embarked on terrorist missions will also push
> information technologies, probably combined with biotechnology, to the
> point where specific individuals can be pursued. The fact that the United
> States has such impressive military technology will lead adversaries who
> cannot match our technology to find an equalizer. Terrorism may be one,
> and nuclear weapons another.
> But war is not primarily about geography and technology. War is about
> politics, and the second way to begin thinking about the future of
> America's wars is to see our political goals as clearly as possible. It
> can be difficult for the United States to see itself accurately and to
> state its goals objectively. Let us start with some basics. The United
> States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around the world. Our
> military spending exceeds that of the next six or seven powers combined,
> and we have a monopoly on many advanced and not so advanced military
> technologies. We, and only we, form and lead military coalitions into war.
> We use our military dominance to intervene in the internal affairs of
> other countries, because the local inhabitants are killing each other, or
> harboring enemies of the United States, or developing nuclear and
> biological weapons.
> Coordinating battlefield information in real time during training
> exercises, in a Humvee-mounted operations center
> Joe BarrantineA political unit that has overwhelming superiority in
> military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of
> other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek
> to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are
> an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is
> correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial
> position, and maintaining imperial order.
> Planning for imperial wars is different from planning for conventional
> international wars. In dealing with the Soviet Union, war had to be
> avoided: small wars could not be allowed to escalate, or to divert us from
> the core task of defending Europe and Japan. As a result, military power
> was applied incrementally. Imperial wars to restore order are not so
> constrained. The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly
> as possible for psychological impact^×to demonstrate that the empire cannot
> be challenged with impunity. During the Cold War, we did not try very hard
> to bring down communist governments. Now we are in the business of
> bringing down hostile governments and creating governments favorable to
> us. Conventional international wars end and troops are brought back home.
> Imperial wars end, but imperial garrisons must be left in place for
> decades to ensure order and stability. This is, in fact, what we are
> beginning to see, first in the Balkans and now in Central Asia. In
> addition to advanced-technology weaponry, an imperial position requires a
> large but lightly armed ground force for garrison purposes and as
> reassurance for allies who want American forces on their soil as symbols
> of our commitment to their defense.
> Finally, imperial strategy focuses on preventing the emergence of
> powerful, hostile challengers to the empire: by war if necessary, but by
> imperial assimilation if possible. China is not yet powerful enough to be
> a challenger to the American empire, and the goal of the United States is
> to prevent that challenge from emerging. China will be a major economic
> and military power in a generation, if it does not collapse into internal
> disorder as a consequence of economic, political, and religious grievances
> now clearly visible. If Chinese political reforms are successful, and the
> Chinese government ceases to be a dictatorship, it is likely that there
> will be a large-scale movement of power away from Beijing toward the
> provinces or regions that have their own ethnic or religious identities.
> The government of China will concentrate on improving the lives of its own
> people, and participating in the world order led by the United States.
> Canadian-model wheeled personnel carrier used to speed eight soldiers in
> combat
> Joe BarrantineIf, on the other hand, China continues to grow in power, but
> remains governed by a repressive dictatorship that sees enemies at home
> and threats abroad, it may try to intimidate Taiwan or Japan or India or
> South Korea. The United States could, if this problem emerged, wish to do
> what it does now: reassure its friends in Asia that we will not allow
> Chinese military intimidation to succeed. But this will be increasingly
> difficult, militarily, in the future, if China grows stronger, since China
> is geographically close to these countries, while the United States is far
> away. To make our Asian allies feel secure, defensive capabilities^×to
> neutralize offensive missiles, sea mines, and submarines, for example^×are
> likely to be especially valuable, despite the fact that the United States
> is now primarily in the business of generating offensive military power.
> Our country will need a strategy that enables it to demonstrate, as
> visibly as is possible, that it has the capability to defend its friends.
> We may also want unconventional weapons with which to remind China that
> activities that menace other Asian countries might do it more harm than
> good. For example, more sophisticated forms of information warfare,
> already visible in the interactions between Taiwan and China, might become
> an important component of the American arsenal.
> There is an alternative to empire. Instead of guaranteeing order around
> the world, the United States could help other countries defend themselves.
> The United States could, for example, decide that even though China should
> not be allowed to use its military capabilities to intimidate its Asian
> neighbors, we should not reassure those countries with American military
> power. But if we choose not to defend these countries, we cannot be sure
> they will continue to observe nuclear nonproliferation agreements. The
> United States now uneasily tolerates British, French, Israeli, Russian,
> North Korean, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear weapons. We may have to learn
> to tolerate nuclear weapons in the hands of one or more additional Asian
> democracies. In this world, the United States may choose to do less to
> safeguard the Asian balance of power, but will have less influence in
> Asia. Such a world may be riskier than the world we now live in.
> But as Pericles pointed out to his fellow Athenians, they might think it a
> fine thing to give up their empire, but they would find that empires are
> like tyrannies: they may have been wrong to take, but they are dangerous
> to let go.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Stephen Peter Rosen '74, Ph.D. '79, is Kaneb professor of national
> security and military affairs and director of the Olin Institute for
> Strategic Studies in the department of government.
>
>
>
> The Future of War and the American Military, page 29, May-June 2002,
> Volume 104, Number 5
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