"Kusanagi: I want a guarantee that I can still be myself."
Puppetmaster: Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." - Ghost in the Shell (1997)
"In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well. ... He will become, as the title of this article suggests -- the Strategic Corporal." - Gen. Charles C. Krulak
My last series covered the dialectic of the hollow-state. This series will take a look at the way we perceive the future of war, and the embedded assumptions and meanings within our discourse of future battle. The title is a refrence to literary critic Fredric Jameson's book about science fiction, which I highly recommend to anyone who considers themself a fan of sci-fi or speculative fiction.
COIN and Ludology
This is grist for a longer essay that I am developing. When we analyze military strategy, we look at a operations manual or a national security strategy by either examining the merits of the text itself in isolation to all other factors or through its relation to larger strategy as a whole. But we rarely look at assumptions, meanings, and ideologies buried within these military texts, or compare them to larger world-historical moments they coincide with.
What is so important about the COIN meta-debate on the Small Wars Journal is that military thinkers are, for the first time, deconstructing the texts and looking precisely for those things. If the larger debate on military affairs is a clash of closed narratives, SWJ is a ludic space where meaning is constructed from play, competition, and the continuing modification of narrative by all participants.
This sketch of military utopia is an attempt to grapple with some of the deeper elements under the superstructure of new military theories.
Approaching the Military Utopia
We can best understand the central ideas of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Network-Centric Warfare as a form of military utopia. What is a military utopia? No, for those gamers among my readers I'm not thinking of Outer Heaven in Metal Gear Solid. We think about utopian thinking as being a kind of ideal Panglossian state of being--like for example, Thomas More's Utopia or Karl Marx's notion of a classless society where automated labor frees the worker to do as he or she likes.
But we forget that utopia is also a radical claim made about a future state. Marx, for example, didn't see the classless society as being an ideal state that revolutionaries had to build up to. He saw it, like the good Hegelian he was, as the "end of history" that would result as an inevitable consequence of world-historical forces. Communism was in his view was merely a system of belief that reflected this inevitable reality. Unfortunately, as Richard Weaver famously said, ideas have consequences.
Network-centric advocates made such a radical claim about the future when they predicted the tremendous impact network power would have on warfare. Their radical claim about the future was that military technology would allow the US to make an unprecedented quantum leap ahead of its competitors, fielding "systems of systems" that could utilize "dominant battlespace knowledge" to drastically increase combat power and annihiliate its opponents before they could even blink. While its is unfair to say that NWC (and all of its variants such Rapid Decisive Operations or "Shock and Awe," expected to completely banish the Fog of War, they at least sought to reduce it to a cloud on a rainy day rather than a London mist. Such a shift could guarantee US geo-military power and keep peer competitiors wallowing in the mire.
Aside from the actual empirical military claims made here (which turned out to be highly exaggerated), what we can witness here are several different layers of meaning. There is the idea that military power is teleogical in nature, and that it is continuing in an upward trend that solidifies the ground for Francis Fukuyama's "End of History"--which also sees world-historical trends negating challenges to American liberal democracy and capitalism.
The second layer of meaning is the link to transhuman and posthuman philosophy. Posthumanists such as Ray Kurzweil also believe that machines are changing the nature of the world--and with computing power increasing rapidly we will soon find ourselves faced with truly intelligent AI. Humanity will be able to make a quantum leap ahead in its evolution through an event called the Singularity--in which the difference between man and machine is erased.
In both transhumanism and posthumanism there is a kind of contempt for the flesh, and a fetishization of man/machine interface. Paul Virilio has a vitrolic attack on this in his book The Information Bomb, comparing these "techno-cultists" to the Heaven's Gate suicide cultists. Likewise, one can also see in the RMA and network-centric warfare a fetishization of machines---through man/machine interface ("The System of Systems") the human soldier becomes omniscient and all-powerful. We also see in the various military experiments that Wired's Danger Room and Military.com's DOD Buzz chronicles a blurring of the boundaries between organic and tech.
The Military Utopia
Ultimately, the military utopia is a kind of science fiction proclaimed by transformation advocates as the inevitable future of war--a place where man/machine interface enables America to take a quantum leap ahead of its rivals to the End of History. The military utopia is, like Marxian utopianism, ultimately a claim about how the world should be rather than how it will be. It is not just a set of strategic doctrines but an ideology and grand narrative embedded within the hard power discourse of bombs and gigabytes.
But military utopias are not, on their own merits, a bad thing. Just because a doctrine contains certain underlying assumptions and ideologies we disagree with doesn't make it automatically wrong. Regardless of whether or not Joseph Conrad was a racist, we can still enjoy Heart of Darkness as one of the better Modernist novels of the 20th century. Likewise, being aware of the military utopia allows us to modify or reject the text---assuming, of course, one is allowed to.
Rumsfeld's DOD was a place where dissenters, to paraphrase our president, were smoked out from their holes. If Gates (or his sucessor) want to win wars, they need to continue to reward those who rejected the failed grand narratives of the past and struck out on their own terms.
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