Analysis: The 21st Century: Opus Three

The modern, neo-conservative view of politics embraces the philosophy of the 20^th Century philospher Leo Strauss, who drew upon writings of Plato to justify using the "noble lie" to obtain approval from the governed under less than totalitarian conditions. Plato endorsed the use of prevarication because of his belief that the world was divided into classes of men who, by their very nature, differed in their abilities: the men of gold were born to lead and to govern, whereas men of lesser metals simply could not and, by extension, would not be able even to understand what was required of leaders. Hence, from Plato to Strauss, and finally to the neo-conservatives of today, descends a philosophy of governance that designs policy that is, in both motivation and architecture, beyond the grasp of the body politic. Under these conditions, a lie is noble if it is to the end of a better world, even if the means would be reprehensible and unacceptable if presented unvarnished for the democratic process.

The first part of this series surveyed the working document, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, now being used by the Pentagon to build the military readiness for this new century. In that first part, nations and coalitions of nations were glossed in their responses to the emerging conditions of this world and the presence of the United States as the dominant force in it. That working document—a product cut from the whole cloth of neo-conservative work embodied in the Project for the New American Century—envisions a somewhat friendly but competitive tension between the United States and Europe, with the latter following the former into an economy based upon military/industrial production that moves the manufacture of consumer goods fully into the Third World, leaving both the U.S. and Europe to focus on their assumed, shared comparative advantage in the production of weaponry, security, and projection of political power through military and economic force. Certain emergent alliance structures were set forth that will shape the global balance of power for the coming decades. In the second part of this series, details of the four-part mission of the United States armed forces were set forth, in their broad scope rendering evidence of ambition of global empire that provides permanent security for and domination of nation-states around the world, while pinning down and boxing in potential economic competitors like Europe.

The Doctrine of Overwhelming Expenditures
The neo-conservative plan holds to the largely unquestioned myth that the Soviet Union collapsed because it tried to match the build-up of the United States armed forces during the Reagan Administration. To this day, it is widely believed that the Soviet Union drove itself into financial ruin trying to match and even exceed the huge military expenditures of the U.S. during the 1980s.

That the Reagan Administration attempted to re-align domestic spending away from social programs and toward defense is without doubt. That it failed miserably to do so is also not in question. The result was a string of huge budget deficits the likes of which were not seen again until the current Bush Administration. Ambitious and largely derided military initiatives of the Reagan Administration—plans like the so-called "Star Wars" all-sky umbrella against intercontinental ballistic missiles—did indeed garner the attention of the Warsaw Pact, but little evidence exists that the dire financial condition of the Soviet Union was made materially and consequentially worse by reactive escalation in defense spending.

Nevertheless, armed with the belief that potential adversaries will have to make the choice of spending themselves into bankruptcy or submitting to American dominance, aggressively increasing the amount of domestic spending on the military is very high on the neo-conservative agenda. The dismantling of the so-called "welfare state" is merely a convenient philosophical argument for what is more aptly described as a re-assignment of priorities away from inward looking care of the citizenry to outward looking reach of empire.

But expenditures alone are not enough. Four parts of the deterrent effect must all be in place:

Overwhelming Extent
Even though other factors do come into play mightily, there is no substitute for sheer amount of hardware. Even though Defense Secretary Rumsfeld envisions a force structure comprising small, rapidly deployable units, the number of those units and the equipment they can field in totality must be quite large in scale so that operations can be conducted not just in multiple theatres of operation, but also simultaneously within any given theatre. This ensures a pervasiveness of presence that prevents pockets of resistance from festering for any period of time long enough for insurgency to establish a staging area for operations. In this regard, the lesson of Falluja has not been lost on the neo-conservatives.

Technological Sophistication
The weapons systems must be irreproducible by adversaries and friends alike. Complexity of design must dovetail with subtlety and nuance of capability to construct an overwhelming imposition of power through design and implementation. Many are the stories throughout history of brute force overwhelming far greater sophistication in technology, but such examples are the exception, not the rule. The Roman Empire literally obliterated resistance from one side of its empire to the other with weapons systems that enemies had never seen and for which no effective countermeasures could be developed and deployed quickly enough to avoid defeat.

Variety of Means and Tools
An enormous force using only one strategy and one weapons system is weak, even if its weapons system and strategy of choice are highly sophisticated. By building many different systems pressing into service a variety of technological innovations, the task of any putative competitor is increased many fold, since responsive development and useful implementation of any one or several American war machine weapons programs does nothing to counteract the extensive variety of possible machines of war that the empire could employ in any theatre or on any given battlefield.

Human Combatants Management
Here is where the picture becomes somewhat bifurcated. The traditional battlefield has at least two broad categories of combatants: those who are to be preserved and those who are to be neutralized. Traditionally, these matters were black and white: keep the friendlies alive so they can fight another day and then go home, and kill or maim the enemy soldiers so that, not only are they no longer effective combatants, but they might also present a logistical drain on battlefield and peri-battlefield resources before becoming a social burden to the enemy that dared to field them. Those almost obvious guidelines are not quite so clear for the Pentagon of this century, however.

First, with respect to American soldiers, the Pentagon is working quietly and quite seriously on programs with names like "Persistence in Combat," which contemplate pharmacological and biomechanical enhancements to soldiers that will allow them to continue fighting even when they are severely—possibly mortally—wounded. Such technology is not revolutionary; it is the logical extension of centuries of efforts to maintain effectiveness of soldiers long after exhaustion and other factors would set aside civilians.

With respect to enemy combatants, a number of programs are now in development or field tests to the goal not of killing enemy soldiers and insurgents, but rather of rendering them entirely ineffective as threats. This has two purposes: it reduces the cost of managing the dead and wounded of defeated enemy states; and far more importantly, it evicerates the enemy of its will to fight. The humiliation of surrendering a fight because he is writhing in temporary pain depletes an enemy of the ancient bravado and martyrdom of honorable death in battle. Ultimately, such people who were once violent and dangerous become nothing more than seething, castrated, and docile.

The Economics of Response
Although a competing sphere of influence may engage a tactical approach of either ignoring or condemning the United States for its plans, no prudent nation-state can long decline to react fiscally to the threat the United States will present. This is precisely what the neo-conservatives envision: nations that wish to compete must do so at the same or greater financial level, and only a few of the world's states can do so for any length of time and to any meaningful extent. Sweeping alliances of nations will be difficult to construct, given that the U.S. will have already selected its alliance structure. It is no coincidence last week that news media reported talks between China and India, two countries that were not long ago rather bitter rivals. The United States has actively engaged both of these partners, with India being a pivot in an axis that includes Israel, Taiwan, and Brazil. With China in the grouping, the United States will have a coalition that literally girds the Northern Hemisphere of the globe, with Southern Hemisphere spurs in both South America and Australia. It is unlikely, then, that any meaningful economic collaboration of competing nations can build a financially competitive franchise that would closely resemble the muscle in the American cauldron. Europe, then, will be left with scraps in the Middle East and possibly Africa with which to work as a countervailing force, and this will not be enough, particularly if Europe is unwilling to use military force to secure oil fields, transport routes, and telecommunications linkages.

As far as space is concerned, the Europeans are easily decades behind the U.S. in the weaponization of near-Earth orbit. This obviously makes the U.S. all the more attractive to China, whose nascent space program is even further behind than Europe's. By the time the Europeans grasp the danger that space-based weapons pose to its safety and security, it will be far too late: the U.S. will not hesitate to develop predatory patrol vehicles whose express purpose will be to "keep space safe" from other nations' weaponry being deployed up there.

It is unlikely, though, that the Europeans and such Arab and Persian nations as will oppose U.S. hegemony will simply surrender. This is where the Reagan myth returns to be tested. As the Europeans and such other nations as might wish to engage in the arms race begin to re-align their economies toward military/industrial production and away from consumer goods and social programs, the neo-conservative model comes to infect the entire planet. But as the Europeans lose this race and watch their economies rapidly collapse as did the Soviet Union's, they will already have put in place the neo-conservative political doctrines that will make them compatible as subordinates to the American version of empire that has finally completed the process begun fitfully in the last half of the 20^th Century. And with that capitulation of the last resistance to American empire, the thousand year reign can begin.

The Final Look
In the closing part of this series, attention will turn to what can go wrong. Necessarily, this will entail surveying twilight scenarios, any one of which is of extraordinarily low probability, but the body of which, taken in aggregation, becomes almost certainty. And it will be on this note that the series closes, as it may very well be on the note of a known but discounted catastrophic error in calculation that the American Empire ends before it has truly begun.


The Dark Wraith will conclude with Opus Four next week.

---

Go to The 21^st Century  Opus 1  Opus 2  Opus 3  Opus 4