"Peace on Earth" proclaim the holiday cards adorning my mantelpiece this season. It's a heartfelt wish, if a slightly vapid one. Though the United States has troops spread around the globe, we're technically at "peace" right now. But the rest of the world is not. There are scores of wars currently raging, from Angola to Irelandto Zaire, and the number seems likely to grow as we spiral toward the next century.
Yet some Pentagon strategists sound optimistic. New, "non-lethal" weapons systems, "information war," and advanced computer technology, they claim, are innovations in military science that will change the way battles are fought. With more high-tech, sophisticated means at hand, they say future conflicts can be managed better - maybe even averted.
Can the technological changes that are revolutionizing our civilian society mean a change in the nature of warfare - away from the bloody mess it has been, and toward real peace on earth at last?
Unfortunately, when Pentagon strategists talk about the future of warfare, they often neglect to mention present warfare - which is omnipresent, dirty, and quite low-tech. Most of the world's people are currently content to hack each other to death with machetes or fire old shotguns at their neighbors, in local battles or unconventional guerrilla campaigns. These are what the military refers to as "low-intensity conflicts," and though the Pentagon admits these little wars are "the most likely form of conflict for the next millennium," they're not a favorite topic among prophets of the future.
Part of the reason has to do with Pentagon bureaucracy and congressional pork: Low-intensity conflicts generally do not require the kind of high-end gadgetry that plumps up R&D budgets. In terms of its impact on warfare, one of the most far-reaching technological inventions since World War II was probably nylon. ("Boots are life," as the old infantry saying goes, and before synthetics, troops lost limbs through rot or freeze acquired by wearing sodden all-leather shoes, and lost campaigns because they couldn't tote the weight of their supplies.) But compare the cost of that simple innovation to the billions required for Stealth bombers and Star Wars systems and the kind of new infrastructure required for "information war." In an era of cutbacks, if the Defense Department is going to keep its appropriations high, it's more likely to ask for satellites than sneakers.
But the other, more sobering reason low-intensity conflicts make bureaucrats nervous is that they do not automatically yield to high-tech solutions. Smart bombs, unmanned planes, and computer mapping do have their place in some conflicts - but in the messy little wars that preoccupy most of the world, the introduction of complex weapons systems is often counterproductive. As the United States found in Vietnam, or the Russians in Chechnya, the social and political dimensions of low-intensity wars are often much more important than firepower. Army brass in Vietnam who stepped up intense bombing campaigns, developed new chemical weapons, and conducted huge large-unit sweeps using the most advanced technology of the era were turned back by soldiers using sharpened bamboo stakes. The Vietminh had social support - and the more the air war escalated, the more the Americans lost the people they needed to win over. As Army Lieutenant Colonel James Taylor, a military historian, wrote, "The [generals] were so busy with quantifiable activities that they failed to notice who controlled the countryside when the sun went down."
If low-intensity conflicts are so stubbornly resistant to high-tech might, and they're likely to continue spreading inside nations and across borders, what advances can be used to usher in a more peaceful future?
"There are more dimensions of strategy than the technological dimension," argues Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "If technology was all that mattered, the Vietnam War probably would have lasted about six weeks. But there is another strategy ... using the social dimension."
That doesn't mean wars can be won just by changing minds. But the truly innovative military strategists aren't necessarily thinking about cyber weapons when they think of new technologies. In many cases, all-out conflict - as in South Africa in 1992 or Czechoslovakia in 1989 - has been averted by engaging and empowering civil society, so that conflicts can be worked through on a social rather than a military level. The real contribution new technologies make to resolving conflicts may not turn out to be through any futuristic military applications, but by enabling better education, broader access to information, and more open and democratic dialog in societies around the world.
