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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill?
In this illuminating new book Christopher Coker takes us on an incredible journey into the future of warfare. Focusing on contemporary trends that are changing the nature and dynamics of armed conflict, he shows how conflict will continue to evolve in ways that are unlikely to render our century any less bloody than the last. With insights from philosophy, cutting-edge scientific research and popular culture, Future War is a compelling and thought-provoking meditation on the shape of war to come.
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Seitenzahl: 132
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Notes
1 Evolution
Ubiquity
Diversity
Complexity
Notes
2 Culture
War is not an idea
Cultural enhancement
Dying to be equal
Notes
3 Technology
Specialization
‘A short-sighted vulgarity’
War by algebra
Is war getting smaller?
Notes
4 Geopolitics
The state, market and international order
The new geopolitical thinking
A multiplicity of spaces
Great power war?
Notes
5 Peace
Kant’s wager
Peace as a contested concept
Notes
6 Humanity
Sportive monsters
The human predicament
The evolution of free will
Notes
Further Reading
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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‘Christopher Coker’s new book is a masterpiece of erudite concision in which I learned something new on every page. He is not only Britain’s leading philosopher of warfare, but a prolific historian who puts the competition to shame.’
Michael Burleigh, author ofSmall Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World
‘From pre-modern city-state to post-modern cyberspace, Christopher Coker reminds us that war is a natural part of our human condition. In a concise study, but one informed by an erudition drawn from philosophy, literature, history and cultural criticism, the author meditates on the melancholy reality that we are, as a species, fated to endure rather than eliminate war. Both idealists and realists will benefit from reading this small gem of a book from an outstanding scholar of the role of war in the history of ideas.’
Michael Evans, General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies, Australian Defence College
‘With searingly elegant prose, Dr. Coker brings a vast array of ideas and event to bear on one of the most pressing issues of this or any other time. A must-read book.’
Steven Metz, Director of Research, U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute
Global Futures
Mohammed Ayoob, Will the Middle East Implode?Jonathan Fenby, Will China Dominate the 21st Century?
FUTURE WAR
Christopher Coker
polity
Copyright © Christopher Coker 2014
The right of Christopher Coker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0235-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
War: thunder against it.
Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas
Prologue
It is the summer of 1983 and Major-General Albert Stubblebine III, the US Army’s recently appointed Chief of Intelligence, with no fewer than 16,000 soldiers under his direct command, finds himself confounded by his failure to walk through the wall of his office. One day, the ability to pass through office walls will be a common tool in intelligence gathering, he surmises, and when that day dawns it will surely herald a world without war.1
The story appears in The Men Who Stare at Goats, a book by Jon Ronson, which was later turned into a popular movie with George Clooney in the starring role. But the soldiers trained on the US Army’s Parapsychology Program did not think they were precursors of peace. Large amounts of money were spent on parapsychology, both by the Soviet Union and by the United States, in the latter half of the Cold War in the vain attempt to reboot war for a new age. This is the dynamic of war: every time you think you have invented a technology that cannot be used, soon enough you find it can.
Parapsychological warfare may stretch the limits of the imagination, but does it necessarily stretch the limits of our understanding of war? The short answer is no. In truth the research was a sideshow of the Cold War – the Americans pushed on largely because the Russians took it seriously, and what an enemy takes seriously, you must too. As for the future, one psychic spy believes that the Chinese government is currently investing in parapsychological warfare in preparation for a future war against the United States.2
The programme aptly captures what Barbara Ehrenreich describes as war’s iron grip on culture. She considers war to be a ‘self-replicating pattern of behaviour’.3 When considered as a ‘selfprogramming cultural activity’, it would appear to be one of the most robust social activities of all. Take the Serbian criminal groups who at the height of the conflict in the Balkans ran a profitable side-line in military tourism. For a fee, wealthy tourists could spend an afternoon sniping at the citizens of Sarajevo, lobbing mortar bombs into the marketplace of Mostar or firing artillery into a medium-sized city. The Russian avant-garde writer Edouard Limonov was actually captured on video enjoying this ultimate human safari. And then there were the American volunteers who joined paramilitary groups, claiming to be professional mercenaries, or ex-US Rangers, or even Green Berets. Many, in fact, only knew of war from what they had watched on TV. In other words, some people were prepared to go to great lengths, at some risk to themselves, to experience war. In this particular case, to invoke Clausewitz, we could say that war had become ‘the continuation of tourism by other means’.
Even in cyberspace war is continuing to evolve in new and unexpected ways. Take Second Life, an on-line virtual world which was designed to help architects and digital designers to build virtual properties and which now offers an alternative life for those who have yet to get one. It mimics everything in the real world; it has its own economy and currency. A few years ago Nissan allowed its users to virtually test drive one of its new models on Second Life before it became available in the real world. But these kinds of developments have also generated a self-organized Second Life Liberation Army which has staged virtual world terrorist attacks against Nissan and other popular brand names. The point about virtual worlds is that they allow players to escape the bleakness and pointlessness of their own lives; players can play many roles, and even play at war, even though the designers never intended it to be part of the program.
In a word, war is remarkably resilient. It has always changed colour in the available light. War, wrote one of our most distinguished military historians, ‘is a protean activity … like disease, it exhibits the capacity to mutate, and it mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it’.4 Most recently it has even regained a new lease of life in fresh dimensions, including cyberspace, while robotics promises to reduce its ‘human space’ still further. Defining resilience, maintain Andrew Zolli and Anne-Marie Healy, is complicated by the fact that the term means different things in different fields. In engineering it generally refers to the degree in which a structure can return to a baseline state after being disturbed. In psychology it signifies the capacity of an individual to deal effectively with trauma. In business it is often used to mean putting in place back-ups (of data and resources) to ensure continuous operation in the face of natural or manmade disasters. But Zolli and Healy’s preferred definition is worth taking to heart: ‘the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person, to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances’.5 Such has been the history of war since we emerged from the hunter-gatherer stage of our development, and there is no reason to doubt that war will prove any less resilient in the future. In this brief essay I will argue that, contrary to what many would argue, war is not pathological, any more than it is socially dysfunctional, and it most certainly is not just a bad idea that we can cash in for a better one, peace. It has played such a central role in the human story because it is embedded in our cultural evolution and, unfortunately, this is likely to remain the case for some time yet.
Notes
1
. Jon Ronson,
The Men Who Stare at Goats
(London: Picador, 2002), p. 1.
2
. E.D. Dames and Joel Henry,
Now Tell Me What You See
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
3
. Barbara Ehrenreich,
Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of War
(London: Virago, 1997), p. 235.
4
. John Keegan,
War and Our World
(London: Hutchinson 1998), p. 72.
5
. Andrew Zolli and Ann-Marie Healy,
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
(London: Headline, 2012), pp. 6–7.
1Evolution
About 100,000 years ago human beings began to evolve in a way that was not true of any other species – our social practices began to replicate, mutate and accumulate just as genes had been doing for billions of years. The key was our own exceptional neural plasticity, which significantly increases our adaptability. It is the foundation for the skills which are unique to us such as language, self-awareness and self-control. The term we use for the ability to pass on social skills such as collaborating and communicating via speech or Facebook is a very simple one: culture.
In Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan-Wilson offers a very persuasive example of cultural evolution with respect to religion, one of the most important cultural phenomena of all. He describes it as an adaptive product whose function is to facilitate co-operation in larger units. Religion, Wilson insists, appears to be ‘designed’ to minimize internal competition within groups and maximize the competitive advantage of a particular group.1 It establishes social norms as well as penalties against those who break them; it also promotes group selflessness – in binding people together it makes them put the group’s interests ahead of their own.
The same dynamic would appear to be also operative in the case of war. Like religion it had adaptive value – it protected us against the murderous in-fighting of tribal groups and it helped us to avoid characterizing out-groups as non-human, in contrast to the characterization of other tribes. The names that hunter-gatherer tribes call themselves tell their own story – ‘the People’, ‘the Good Ones’ or ‘the Fully Complete Ones’. Primitive warfare is particularly murderous, for that reason, and mortality rates are astonishingly high. Some of the battles in hunter-gatherer societies have a death rate of 0.5% of the population per year. If that had been true of industrialized warfare in the twentieth century 2 billion people would have died instead of the 100 million who actually did.2 Had that dynamic been maintained over the centuries you probably wouldn’t be reading this book.
Generally speaking, the more co-operative a species is within the group, the more hostility there is between groups. When there is a very variegated society, such as in New Guinea, which has more than 800 languages, out-group enmity can be fierce. That is why Robert Wright believes that religion was essential for early states to keep war within bounds. The relationship between the two is a dialectical one. The gods (in his felicitous words) were ‘geopolitical lubricants’ who made possible rudimentary international law; divine authority policed treaties between tribes and later hereditary chiefdoms. The problem, of course, was that the gods also sanctioned war, and still do.3 Think of the suicide bomber in today’s Middle East. The point is that religion is still deeply entrenched in human life. Schopenhauer thought we would outgrow it as we do our childhood clothes, but the failure of the ‘new atheism’ to make much of an impact suggests that we need to go back to humanity’s childhood to see why it still has ‘an iron grip’ on us all; and if that is true of religion, it is surely also true of war.
Now, of course, this is an unashamedly group selection thesis and it assumes that warfare is the natural state of human existence. Fortunately, however, group selection is now coming back into fashion after being challenged in the 1960s. The neo-Darwinian evolutionists who still reject it, claims Mary Midgley, have simply misread Darwin.4 And although there are many anthropologists who still question whether aggression has always been rewarded and can often be inherited, here too the tide is turning (Jared Diamond’s The World until Yesterday [2012] makes short work of the traditional idea that primitive societies are innately peaceful).
What is important about evolution is that it is an active agent in increasing the options, choices and possibilities of the different species, organisms or societies in which it is the life principle. It promotes among other things ubiquity, diversity and complexity. The fact that all three show continued development would suggest that war is continuing to evolve, and that it is unlikely to be eliminated until such time as its evolutionary possibilities have finally been exhausted.
Ubiquity
The evolution of war, writes Edward O. Wilson, was an auto-catalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally would have been fatal.5 ‘War is not the best way of settling differences, but
