What's in charge here?
Cook, Robert Alan
POSTMODERN WARFARE WHATS IN CHARGE HERE? MACHINES WILL MAKE THE CHOICES Now that we're accustomed to the disconnect-edness of life, amply reflected in art and liter-ature-the condition of...
...In postmodern war hardware will make policy, dictate its own use, start and finish the thing...
...Indeed, the notion that hardware determines strategy is already well established in the exotic regions inhabited by nuclear war theorists...
...Postmodern wars will be swiftly prosecuted, and in the America of the four-minute attention span, bygones instantly become bygones...
...He thought it would come from a surfeit of policy-"ambitious policy"-but as it turns out, a surfeit of hardware works just as well...
...Troops appear by the thousands, bearing smaller machines, sometimes looking themselves like machines in their gas-protective suits...
...In the early nineteenth century the Prussian military thinker Karl von Clausewitz reckoned that the world might one day see the advent of "absolute war"-war devoid of the guidance and restraints of policy, war fought for the sole purpose of destruction...
...In postmodern war we won't worry about future allegiances of foreign masses...
...Hardware will fight simply because alien hardware exists...
...The wars of today and tomorrow are likely, I submit, to provide fine illustrations of Jacques Ellul's dictum that technique, now a virtually autonomous force, "elicits and conditions" political change...
...Electoral victory, everyone knows, depends entirely on television-hardware-which lives by soundbites, not memory...
...the fighters streak out over the arid plains, announcing themselves, advertising their capabilities, searching for others of their kind, however inferior...
...If their hardware is insignificant, they will be insignificant...
...If they possess or acquire serious hardware, ours will seek it out when necessary and repeat the agreeable exercise...
...The era of the disjointed narrative, of channel-hopping, of Alvin Toffler's "blip culture," of shriveled attention spans, has clearly arrived...
...It's all a bit eerie...
...these take up positions opposite the alien machines, sight them in, prepare to do automated battle...
...Everything else is mere propaganda, the girding of Teflon, as it were, for the quadrennial soundbite wars...
...Yes, of course, it will be a human being somewhere "in the loop" who will send the signal...
...In a sense, however, Clausewitz had it dead right, for today policy and hardware are one...
...Day by day, as I write, the hardware piles up in the sands of Saudi Arabia...
...In the age of technical dominance that question reduces to one of assessing the comparative qualities and quantities of machinery and the probability of success in pre-emptive attack...
...With a little luck war can meet the new standard, and the Persian Gulf presents excellent prospects for a test case...
...But what will decide for him-or rather his technicians-for or against battle...
...MACHINES WILL MAKE THE CHOICES Now that we're accustomed to the disconnect-edness of life, amply reflected in art and liter-ature-the condition of so-called postmoder-nity-perhaps we should consider the prospects for postmodern war...
...Postmodern war will be simply war-disconnected war, war without discernible political purpose, war divorced from policy...
...But have faith...
...Fighters, bombers, and fighter-bombers arrive from distant bases...
...We're probably still some small distance from the pure case of postmodern war...
...we'll get there...
...Missile-firing machines, ocean-going machines, bombing machines, shelling machines: all are programmed and positioned to destroy the enemy machines whenever the signal is sent...
...Robert alan cook Robert Alan Cook is a free-lance writer who is working on a book on theories of war...
...Great ships and cargo planes disgorge tanks, field guns, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers...
...Hardware, then, in this brave new world, will rightly identify alien hardware as its true enemy and seek only to annihilate it...
...And if tears are shed in this country for the dead and the maimed, they will not likely count for much in the next election...
...Nothing else will matter, and woe unto the national leader who imagines it could be otherwise...
...There remains in high places some visible, if faint, concern for matters apart from hardware and technology, perhaps even some for the opinions of others...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
