■"Energy beam weapon may lower Iraqi civilian deaths: Seen as way to avoid checkpoint shootings," by Steven Komarow, USA Today, 25 July 2005, p. 1A.
■"Pentagon deploys array of non-lethal weapons: New devices are being tried in Iraq to protect troops and civilians," by Steven Komarow, USA Today, 25 July 2005, p. 14A.
■"Torpedoed ship survivors reunite: Sixty years after tragedy, ex-sailors keep story of USS Indianapolis alive," by Ken Kusmer, USA Today, 25 July 2005, p. 14A.
■"Uniform Sacrifice: Americans are fighting, but the country is not at war," op-ed by David Douglas Duncan, New York Times, 25 July 2005, p. A23.
■"The Best Army We Can Buy: We've lost the link between citizenship and service," op-ed by David M. Kennedy, New York Times, 25 July 2005, p. A23.
■"Suicide Bombings Bring Urgency to Police in U.S.: 'It almost seems to be a question of when in this country, not a question of if,'" by Sarah Kershaw, New York Times, 25 July 2005, p. A14.
■"In Most Cases, Israel Thwarts Suicide Attacks Without a Shot," by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 25 July 2005, p. A11.
The SysAdmin force is waking up to non-lethals in a big way. This is a "new development" and a "revolution in thinking" and a host of other superlatives that indicate that most journalists' sense of history is frighteningly thin.
All this non-lethal stuff began in our experience in Somalia, and specifically with CENTCOM chief General Tony Zinni's frustration at doing SysAdmin work out there armed with bullets, which present a rather binary rheostat, as in, use 'em or don't, shoot 'em or don't, and go kinetic or don't.
So Zinni was the bureaucratic push within the Marine Corps to start the Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate down in Quantico, Virginia. I'm familiar with that effort, which later morphed into the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, because I, along with Gen. Paul Van Riper and John Nelson, were part of a group of consultants that the Directorate used in the late 1990s to engage in strategic planning, under the guidance of a charismatic former Marine-turned-analyst called Butch Foley. It was during that effort that I finally found an audience for my alternative global futures brief that later morphed into my Y2K brief, and later my NewRuleSets.Project brief, and later my Office of Force Transformation brief, and later The Pentagon's New Map. No Butch Foley and Tony Zinni and the Marines' thinking about non-lethals, and I'm probably still in DC slaving away as an anonymous analyst.
What was the upshot of all the alternative global futures work I did? We came to a firm conclusion: you could not imagine a future world scenario in which NLTs (non-lethal technologies) wouldn't be both useful and represent a huge return on investment. But the world future in which they would be most useful would be one where there wasn't any bipolar standoff, nor any great-power free-for-all, but rather lots of low-level terrorism and failed states.
The work was summarized in a series of unclassified Center for Naval Analyses reports, and it was well received by the Marines. Problem was, it didn't serve them well at all in the budget battles that lay ahead, so right through 9/11, the Defense Department as a whole was spending almost nothing on NLTs. This is what I mean by buying one military and operating another, and it's what I mean when I say that Pentagon strategists basically blew it on their strategic forecasts, because if the right ideas had prevailed, our SysAdmin troops would have had these technologies in abundance going into the Iraq occupation.
So we learn through error, which is natural. And we adapt ourselves to the new struggle, which is also natural. And we fight a global war against terrorism with a force that looks more and more SysAdmin and less like your dad's military, and that is also natural.
Yes, yes, there are many who will bemoan this "mercenary army," which is an idiot's phrase if ever there was one. It's a professional army, just like a professional police force. Why doesn't anyone ever bemoan America's "mercenary police"? I mean, those guys just do it for the money, right? And doesn't having "mercenary police," largely drawn from lower and middle classes I remind you, somehow diminish the links between citizenship and security in the U.S.?
Hmmm. Maybe we should arbitrarily assign people from all socio-economic classes to such security jobs as the government sees fit. That would make for a better citizenry in the United States.
No, wait a minute. The Soviet Union tried that for decades and it was called communism.
Damn! I hate when that happens!
Ah, but I'm describing something so different from what cops do here in the U.S. In Iraq, we're talking about guarding people and places, stopping bad guys from committing wanton acts of violence and seeking, through that violence, to intimidate a population. Cops don't do anything like that here in the States. Plus they never get killed in the line of action. And if they did, certainly their sacrifices wouldn't compare whatsoever to our loved ones trying to bring similar benefits to postwar Iraq.
So cops here at home are good, and even if we pay them, they're certainly not "mercenary." And even if most come from families (typically not rich) with long histories of being cops, then that form of social specialization is good. Whereas if similar trends appear with military families (also typically not your wealthiest clans), and if we're so crude as to pay them for such services, then this is clearly a "mercenary force" that diminishes the bonds of citizenship for us all.
Americans are SysAdmin'ing the Middle East, but the country is not at war. Get used to it. Cop families got used to it a long time ago in our various "wars" on crime, drugs, etc. And military families got used to it a long time ago in our various SysAdmin jobs across the length of the post-Cold War era.
True, there are many old-timers who do not recognize themselves in this SysAdmin force, nor in the nation-building efforts it so routinely undertakes. But guess what? It isn't my daddy's international security system, and thank God for that. Because that system was good for little except generating great power wars.
I know, I know. WWII was a "good war." Almost a quarter million American dead. That was a good war, my friends. We're still at less than 2k combat deaths in this Global War on Terrorism, but naturally, this war can't be a good one. No, good wars involve "uniform sacrifice" where we kill off far larger segments of our population. The Civil War, in this regard, was the "best war," which is why we engage in such idiotic romanticism regarding it.
I met a survivor of the USS Indianapolis today on my plane out of Indy. He doesn't remember the war being "good." About 800 guys on his ship didn't survive. Somehow being part of a "citizen army" didn't make it any better for him. It became a "good war" only when it ended.
The Indy delivered the components for the first atomic strikes on Japan. The mission was so secret, it steamed without escort. We dropped the bomb, killed huge numbers of Japanese civilians, and spared probably just as large a number of U.S. troops from deaths in trying to take Japan city by city. One of those troops might have easily been my Dad, who instead had a fairly quiet time in his Landing Craft Infantry (Large), or LCI(L).
Yes, yes, the good old days of good old wars.
So I guess we just need to get more Americans killed faster, so we can have a draft, and so we can engage in "good war" that leads to "good citizenship."
No, wait a minute. That was Nazi Germany and fascism.
Damn! I hate it when that happens!
Will this war come to our shores again? Only the most optimistic think we'll be spared forever. But it's interesting that since we go on the offensive and take the fight to the places where it truly belongs (the Middle East, because this terrorism isn't about changing governments here in the States), we haven't seen a major strike or even the rise of suicide bombings here (What's wrong with American Muslims anyway? Are they integrating themselves too successfully in our economy and society? And if they are, shouldn't we put a stop to that "infiltration").
No, wait a minute. That was McCarthyism and anti-communist fear-mongering here in the 1950s.
Damn! I hate when that happens!
So maybe working to keep our country open and welcoming to the world's Muslims could be a good thing, so long as we have a police system that's smart enough and resourced enough to detect and weed out the bad apples who seek to do us harm.
No, wait a minute. That's Israel for the last several decades.
Geez! I love it when that happens!
So Israeli cops are the hot ticket item for U.S. police commissioners trying to gear up their systems for the inevitable attempts by the global Salafi jihadist movement to strike against the Distant Enemy (us). The Israelis have been doing SysAdmin work for years now in two of the toughest neighborhoods in the world: Gaza and the West Bank. While they've kept the violence down to acceptable levels, the Israelis haven't yet cracked the military-market nexus of fostering broadband economic connectivity for these regions with the outside world. So they remain isolated, poor, and full of pissed-off young men.
So let's not assume that getting more Israeli-like in our domestic SysAdmin force called the police will be the only answer or even the best answer to stemming any onslaught of suicide bombers here in the States. If we provide Muslim immigrant families with real opportunity for economic connectedness, by and large they will police their own, leaving the jihadist professionals to our SysAdmin professionals to handle (cops here at home and in conjunction with others cops across the Core, and the U.S. military in the Gap).
And no, none of this activity constitutes being a "merc." It's a job. A dangerous job. A job with real honor and commitment. These jobs don't make you better Americans than anyone else. This isn't "Starship Troopers." This is a real world, a real global system, and it needs administering both here and abroad, and the dirty work will get done by professionals-as it should be.
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