The main precedent for this looming war is the boundaryless pseudo-war against communism, and yet the precedent is misleading. The Cold War was a war of the mind at home and a war of the jungles in the distant locales where conflicts were conducted by proxy. Its foundation was the intellectual control that, for a time and to a remarkable degree still, prevented those proxy wars from registering in the minds of a populace that otherwise was fairly free. Infrastructural war is something quite different. The Cold War promoted a paranoia of a quite abstract sort: the hidden traitors that supposedly lay behind the social ideals of reformers. Infrastructural war promotes a paranoia of a different kind: the ramifying maze of blind spots in the security arrangements of a technological society which a highly skilled enemy might exploit. Thus the uncanny sense of violation that compounds the sheer violence of the attacks on the east coast, and thus on a less dramatic level the myth-making around security vulnerabilities in "cyberspace".
The Cold War's most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally misconstrues these dangers. The great drama of the Cold War was a supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization and decentralization. Never mind that the Cold War societies of the First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments; despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against dangers of many types. In reality, the infrastructure of our highly technological society is centralized in many ways. There are three economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone else. In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology of the Cold War would promote. The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets.
So what to do? First we need a new concept of war. This is not easy, partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy. It follows that we can't get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is dangerous in itself. The military intellectuals' new concept of war is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything else. Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world without clear boundaries. Instead of permanent, total war, conducted under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends squarely in view. Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion, of the conditions of democracy.
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Leaving aside the number of occasions in the Cold War and where both superpowers directly intervened in so-called proxy wars, there are plenty of modern wars that indicate the US generals were right and Rumsfeld was talking out of his ass.
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The Cold War's most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally misconstrues these dangers. The great drama of the Cold War was a supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization and decentralization. Never mind that the Cold War societies of the First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments; despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against dangers of many types. In reality, the infrastructure of our highly technological society is centralized in many ways. There are three economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone else. In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology of the Cold War would promote. The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets.
So what to do? First we need a new concept of war. This is not easy, partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy. It follows that we can't get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is dangerous in itself. The military intellectuals' new concept of war is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything else. Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world without clear boundaries. Instead of permanent, total war, conducted under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends squarely in view. Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion, of the conditions of democracy.
______________________________
Leaving aside the number of occasions in the Cold War and where both superpowers directly intervened in so-called proxy wars, there are plenty of modern wars that indicate the US generals were right and Rumsfeld was talking out of his ass.