Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy :: Warfare Violence Essays

Infrastructural Warf ar and the Conditions of Democracy When political leaders refer to the folk 11th attacks in New York and Washington as war, what do they mean? It used to be that our concept of war was defined by a set of boundaries. Nation-states fought wars to defend their borders. They fielded armies, and those armies fought along front lines. Soldiers were separate from civils, and the legions domain was separate from the civilian domain. Soldiers ran the war from day to day the civilian leadership gave the big orders and sat back. Those boundaries no longer apply, as much(prenominal) evidence shows (1) If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you get into their infrastructure. You dont have to be a nation state to do it, and if your enemy retains any might for retaliation then its probably better if youre not. (2) Because the fighting is all on television, the fine details of the fighting become political matters. Soldiers complain bitter about politicians interferen ce, not understanding that technology has eliminated their zone of professional autonomy. The politicians are *right* to be interfering. (3) The US military thought that the Republicans would save them from the Democrats boundary-breaching conceptions of the twenty-first century world, but Donald Rumsfelds abortive reform efforts -- which are really attempts to change by reversal the traditionally narrow view of military affairs into a science-fiction secernate -- have only clarified how archaic the traditional conception of state of war really is. (4) During the campaign, George W. Bush harshly criticizied the nation-building activities to which military personnel have been charge in Kosovo and elsewhere. The truth was that nation-building is a geopolitical necessity in a totally wired world, and that the soldiers themselves *like* serving in Kosovo -- they know that they are doing something useful for once. The nation-building goes on. (5) In the old days, the industry that p roduced military equipment was almost completely separate from the industry that produced civilian equipment. But economies of scale in the production of technology, especially information and communications technologies, have grown so slap-up that the military must buy much of its equipment from the civilian market, even though the civilian equipment is not hardened for military purposes (or even, in the case of estimator security, for civilian purposes). (6) Even airplane hijackings have lost their old boundaries. It is change state clear that the people in the plane that crashed in rural pappa had extensive communications to the ground, and knew about the first attack on the terra firma Trade Center.