:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Thursday, September 09, 2004 ::

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: Gaming War in the Context of Everything Else:

"The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a glimpse of what 'asymmetrical warfare' in the 20th century is going to be all about. It won't just be some other great power or some regional rogue keeping America from accessing some future battlespace they hope to own, because frankly, there ain't no such thing as a conventional battlespace anywhere in the world that our military force cannot access. Asymmetrical warfare in the future is going to feel more like you're trying to play football while the other guy has decided to play soccer. In other words, you won't be playing the same game, with the same rules, or even the same scorekeeping.

Great power war effectively died with the realization of mutual assured destruction thanks to nukes. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state war is going the route of the dinosaur: basically no one engages in it anymore. What's left is plenty of violence within states and non-state actors looking to hijack societies from globalization's creeping embrace so they can disconnect those societies from the global grid and have their way with the captive population. Increasingly, the most motivated non-state actors will employ terrorism to scare off advanced states from caring about those societies they seek to hijack from history. That's basically the al?Qaeda's game, and if it reminds you of a similar movement of a century earlier (Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks), then you were paying attention in history class. "

I'm reading this guys new book called The Pentagon's New Map: War and peace in the twenty-first century....

:: Jim Nichols 9/09/2004 09:54:00 PM [+] ::
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