CONSTANT CONFLICT: US Army War College- "To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing"

A look behind the philosophy and practice of Americas push for domination of the worlds economy and culture. First published From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College]

Constant Conflict

US Army War College Quarterly

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.

For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.

<snip>

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

Wow. What an amazing statement of the unquestioned assumption of superiority!

I absolutely reject this mindset. It is immoral, inhuman, and utterly disgusting. I don't know what else to say...

sw

Except that this guy appears to believe that it's an admirable thing to do...

It is nothing more nor less than the fundamental concept of the "Master Race" dressed up in subtler rhetoric.

sw

His claims during the "font controversy" regarding the Killian memo (Rather-'gate') were outrageous.

Peter's is out there and frighteningly reflects much of the military strategists ideas. he's just a bit more open and brazen.

In Praise of Attrition



RALPH PETERS

© 2004 Ralph Peters

From Parameters, Summer 2004, pp. 24-32.

“Who dares to call the child by its true name?”
— Goethe, Faust



In our military, the danger of accepting the traditional wisdom has become part of the traditional wisdom. Despite our lip service to creativity and innovation, we rarely pause to question fundamentals. Partly, of course, this is because officers in today’s Army or Marine Corps operate at a wartime tempo, with little leisure for reflection. Yet, even more fundamentally, deep prejudices have crept into our military—as well as into the civilian world— that obscure elementary truths.

There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error than our rejection of the term “war of attrition.” The belief that attrition, as an objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the moment, is secondary. And to kill the enemy is to attrit the enemy. All wars in which bullets—or arrows—fly are wars of attrition.

Of course, the term “war of attrition” conjures the unimaginative slaughter of the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last year, when journalists wanted to denigrate our military’s occupation efforts in Iraq, the term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the enemy is a bad thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industry’s claims, seconded by glib military careerists, that precision weapons and technology in general had irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the nature of warfare never changes—only its superficial manifestations.

The US Army also did great harm to its own intellectual and practical grasp of war by trolling for theories, especially in the 1980s. Theories don’t win wars. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing effectively. Yet we heard a great deal of nonsense about “maneuver warfare” as the solution to all our woes, from our numerical disadvantage vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the “active defense” on the old inner-German border was political tomfoolery and a military sham—and, frankly, the best an Army gutted by Vietnam and its long hangover could hope to do.

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/04summer/peters.htm

Folks should be aware of this stuff.

chop up a dozen or so nation-states as we see fit

and why do we never seem to run out of them? :banghead:

This is absolute brass-plated four-door INSANITY on stilts! This lunatic is not only a military man, but a strategist? :banghead: :scared: :wtf:

Orwell, sadly, was prescient beyond his deepest fears.