Correspondence
Correspondence Revolution in Military Affairs Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. ("How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007," Jan. 29) sets up a familiar image of the future enemy not just as stranger, but as...
...Their ethnic enclaves and low-priced suburbs have been the victims of urban renewal, Section 8 housing, and massive influxes of impoverished immigrants-all of which combine to deprive these citizens of any vestige of continuity, community, or safety...
...Patrick D. Maines President, The Media Institute Washington, DC...
...Mike Mason Alexandria, VA Your editorial points out that state sponsorship gives gambling a sanction it does not deserve, but it neglects the most significant difference between public and private betting: Casinos give the gambler a much better deal...
...Conservatives should be saddened when our intellectuals pour their energies into government, that bureaucratic sinkhole of human hopes...
...Dunlap invokes a foreign Great Satan: to motivate us, to get our blood up...
...Information warfare seeks to control the information battle-space, denying the enemy critical information...
...The state is selling false dreams...
...Todd Seavey New York, NY Free Speech on the Right Adam Wolfson's review ("Speaking Too Freely," Dec...
...leaders have failed to recognize and prepare for a war in which our adversary does not grant us the luxury of fighting with our strengths...
...Because of those principles, Buchanan believes that the American worker's family is every bit as important as the American investor's portfolio...
...Afghanistan did it to Britain in 1841 and Russia in 1989...
...This decade has seen a growing awareness of how subtle and chaotic life is...
...This image is embedded in the American imagination...
...The money raised may be spent on good causes, but that cannot justify vigorish at a rate that would embarrass a bagman for the numbers racket...
...It is a motivational, cautionary tale tied to a hereditary, and intensely romantic, read of the American ethos...
...Buchanan is an intellectual with convictions derived from principles- from pre-Vatican II Catholic social teaching, in case you were wondering...
...Just because some people can't control themselves, my grandmother should be barred from dropping quarters into the slot machines on the riverboats in Vicksburg, Mississippi...
...It is important for the country because, if conservatives will not champion free speech, who will...
...It is the nightmare of being attacked in our beds, on the bloody edge of the Indian frontier...
...But the notional adversary he created in his article is so capable of coordinating and conducting global military and paramilitary operations as to be incredible...
...Americans like this kind of lamentation...
...It's like a historical pep-talk...
...It is, for instance, flatly incorrect to suggest that it "takes a strong central government to enforce a broad right to freedom of speech...
...Jeff McKitrick Seth Weinberger McLean, VA In Defense of Buchanan Matthew Rees is shocked to discover that liberal journalists are taking seriously Pat Buchanan's ideas ("Buchanan's Unlikely Fans," Jan...
...As usual, if someone gets shot, the do-gooders want to ban handguns...
...What a long way we have come, when "conservative" magazines must take liberal journalists to task for paying too much mind to political philosophy, and not enough to the raw numbers of ephemeral polls...
...In some (e.g., blackjack, played well), the customer actually has a slight advantage...
...In casino games, the house edge is typically less than 5 percent...
...But Afghan high-technology weapons were imported, grafted onto their own cultural orbit, and did not emanate from it...
...What interests liberal journalists about Buchanan is the deep inner consistency of his ideas...
...Boo-hoo...
...Primitive warrior societies have indeed driven out bigger, more sophisticated invaders...
...Your gripe seems to be that it's the state selling the snake oil instead of some other hustler...
...Gambling is another area where government delivers a service at exorbitant cost compared with the private sector...
...The RMA is a potentially new way of conducting warfare, brought about not just by technological advancements, but also by changes in military doctrine and organizations...
...God forbid we should blame the sucker for his mistake, or our schools for failing to explain what "odds of winning 7.1 million to one" really means...
...Getting people to stop thinking that they do issue from government should be conservatives' long-term goal...
...The capos of the mob look after their people too, but that doesn't give them legitimacy...
...It shouldn't be the locus of our intellectual efforts...
...Dunlap's story ends up, not as a ringing indictment of technology, but as a recurring melodrama, with plot turns familiar to the first Americans...
...Dunlap recounts the failure of high technology on the battlefield, but his outcome relies on our loss of will...
...He represents both the economic interests and the cultural values of the working and lower middle classes...
...Unfortunately, U.S...
...Just as we should cringe when a lofty speech about renewing charity and generosity ends with a call for the creation of AmeriCorps, so too should we cringe when a subtle debate about character formation, ethics, or aesthetics terminates in a call for legislation...
...29) sets up a familiar image of the future enemy not just as stranger, but as the evil, alien other-tougher, crueler, all the more remorseless for being closer to nature...
...You have set yourselves up as arbiters of conservative principle and identity...
...In a conventional war in which the U.S...
...Just the opposite...
...Precision strike, conducted with stealth aircraft, will not target troops so much as an enemy's center of gravity (national leadership, key industrial nodes, and power grids...
...In state lotteries, the house usually keeps 50 or 60 percent of each dollar...
...It used to be Britain, Spain, and their savage Indian allies...
...Philip Chapman Scottsdale, AZ Keep Philosophy Pure David Brooks argues that concrete policy proposals keep conservative intellectuals grounded in reality ("Culture Equals Politics," Jan...
...Individuals from these classes, long scorned by both multiculturalist leftists and fiscal conservatives, are the patriotic rubes who sign up to fight wars to advance liberal and internationalist utopias...
...George Santayana, call your office...
...It takes a strong and intrusive government, plus a deferential judiciary, to undermine freedom of speech...
...But we should not expect to replicate the ratios of Desert Storm, in part because victory in future wars, as in past wars, may require more than attrition...
...then it was the slave power...
...They drag it down into the dirt...
...It is important for conservatives because if they choose to protect speech, both content and provider, they will become the leaders of a new media age, marked by news, information, and entertainment of a much wider and finer sort than any of us has known...
...Current RMA thinking holds that the revolutionary effect derives from the integration of information warfare and precision strike...
...Most appalling, in Rees's analysis, is that these writers are paying respectful attention to a candidate whose poll numbers are not high enough-even before the very first caucus or primary has taken place...
...To do otherwise would be irresponsible...
...Michael Vlahos Washington, DC Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.'s futuristic account offered a chilling glimpse into one possible outcome of the current "revolution in military affairs...
...It is to be believed that the next century will turn this awareness into a new interest in wrestling with deep, complicated problems of sociology, and civility...
...The reviewer is right about one thing, though...
...The unbounded, corrosive scorn which semi-demi-neo-pluto-conservatives of The Weekly Standard school heap upon Buchanan is cheap and unfair...
...Surely not liberals, for whom free speech seems to lose a little more luster with every passing day...
...Government can barely deliver mail...
...The virtues and the codes of civility that conservatives cherish, that civilization relies upon, do not flow from government...
...Dunlap believes we have lost our martial ardor, and certainly our civic ardor...
...He wants to set up our defeat at the hands of the warrior-savage ethos, and at the same time have us believe that same ethos encouraged such an intimate assimilation of technology that its capacity to put it to use surpasses our own...
...Wolfson's interest in slaying the libertarian dragon could probably find more relevant expression in a review of some other book...
...But inevitably some fool will win the state lottery...
...I'll say one thing: You people may not have grit, but you certainly have gall...
...They will almost certainly seek to employ asymmetric and highly leveraged operations against us...
...Speaking Freely was commissioned by the Media Institute to promote an expansive view of free speech among all conservatives-not as a showcase for libertarians...
...The "electoral triumph" of conservatism means that what conservatives think about free speech is of great importance-for them, and for the country as a whole...
...then Prussian militarism...
...25) is uninformed and wrongheaded...
...John Zmirak Baton Rouge, LA State, Expensive Bookie Just when I thought things were changing, just when steaks and big fat cigars are no longer socially unacceptable, you pencil-necks come out against gambling ("The State as Bookie," Jan...
...In the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq's crushing defeat was attributable to the fact that it chose to fight the United States on our own terms...
...It speaks to persistent fears for ourselves, rather than the future's fears for us...
...But Dunlap wants it both ways...
...There are other new warfare areas as well...
...Perhaps our insistent celebration of the tyrant-out-to-get-us shores up confidence in ourselves: that as we are marked by tyrants, and so threaten them, so we must remain true to liberty...
...Future wars will not be bloodless...
...The more irrelevant government is to such cultural debates the better...
...We will, of course, seek favorable loss ratios in future operations...
...military focuses on acquiring high-tech weapons systems, it neglects the possibility that a future adversary will set the terms of conflict...
...So what upsets you is that some poor people feel disappointed (sniffle) when they lose the game...
...Policy debates don't just tether philosophy to the earth...
...While the U.S...
...Michael P. Croissant Springfield, MO Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.'s view that the "revolution in military affairs" (RMA, for short) revolves around bloodless "cyber-war," called information warfare in the Defense Department, is incomplete...
...Dunlap is right to caution against mirror-imaging of adversaries...
...reigned supreme in the air, on the ground, at sea, and in space, America was able to score a quick and decisive victory...
...And of course they used high technology to victorious advantage...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 21
