Future war

First, a simple question to Alan Spectors who wrote - or rather it seems a
simple question but I'm pretty sure Mikhail Sergevitch Gorbachev would ask
precisely  this question to Spectors too:
>
I  truly wish it was coming down to the end game as Andy suggests, with a
united global revolutionary egalitarian (I still like Marx' use of the
word communist) movement preparing to battle a global capitalist class.

So - who guarantees this end-game won't be a very real end-game - for
humanity that is - for being fought with nuclear weapons ?

Same question to Austen:
>
>"That the globalization of the capitalist mode of production creates the
>objective possibility for socialism in no way guarantees socialism -- we
>have to make socialism happen."
>
So - what if global revolution leads to global war and to equally global
extinction of mankind?

This was precisely the conundrum the Soviet leadership was in from the
1960's -  should we EITHER promote global revolutionary class-struggle -
with the possibility of this leading to nuclear war - OR should we say the
struggle for peace has precedence over the class-struggle - so that we MUST
come to some arrangement with capitalism.

Again - don't dismiss this as merely `dated' rhetoric - there is a very
real, very urgent question, here: any real all-out `core war' (a la World
War I and World War II) which some of you are so eagerly discussing and
predicting - would most likely lead to the extinction of all higher forms of
life on the planet.

There are still more than enough nukes around to destroy the earth 300
times - even a minor nuclear power like Britain could kill 130 million
people in a few minutes and likely destroy much of the earth's atmosphere in
the process.

Worse, even real all out 'total' war between a `core' and a `peripherial'
power in the very near future will involve numbers of casualties which would
make World War II pale by comparison.

Suppose, just suppose, the US would perform an all-out attack on North
Korea - now, who can guarantee the North Koreans wouldn't retaliate to
US-carpet bombing and napalm-ing of Pyongjang with loading one of their
long-range missile with a biological weapon and directing it say on Tokyo -
or with bombing nuclear plants in South Korea ? Although as far I know
nobody has ever brought that up - I still wonder to what extent the sudden
end of the Gulf war was prompted by a -well grounded fear - that if the
US-army would have marched on Bagdad and tried to topple Saddam he might
well have loaded his skud-missiles with biological and chemical warheads and
direct them to Tel Aviv ...

In my humble opinion, major war is becoming `obsolete' both among
core-powers and even between peripheral powers for the simple reason that it
amounts to mutual national suicide.

What we are going to witness instead is increased resorting towards limited
war - limited use of force to obtain limited goals - fought through the
media and economic infliltration as much as by arms - and covert war - that
is support of separatist and terrorist groups in the enemy country - with
the aim of toppling the enemy government or weakening its state to a point
of near-collapse. That is really a continuation of the cold war with other
means and with far more players - IMHO the 21 st century will see as much
bloodshed as the second half of the twentieth but like in the second half of
that previous century WITHIN rather than BETWEEN countries.

The problem being that models such as the one presented by the `world
system' theorist Chase Dunn here are still built on the classic model of
inter-state conflict rather than WITHIN the state conflict, which IMHO
exactly WST could well accomodate. To that extent Chase Dunn still
unwittingly pays homage to the classic `realist' model of international
relations - which was really an attempt to explain the origins of World War
I in retroperspective - and which was based on a model of interacting
`autonomous' states.

Instead, to theorize this new kind of war, we would have to work with a
model starting on the one hand with relations within states and on the other
hand between states and international organisations such as the UN and
between states and transnational organisations, which would include CNN as
much as trans-national `terrorist' and `mercenary' bodies; `executive
outcome' as much as Bin Laden's organization or the Russian and Columbian
maffia.

For it is very likely much of the future warfare will be waged by such
trans-national (and often high-tech) `sellers of violence', who are cheaper
than regular armies and can easily be hired and dismissed by states.

In retrospect we can now see that twentieth century warfare was not presaged
by the then high-tech and highely trumpeted French-Prussian war of 1870 but
instead by an other war which European army then saw as primitive and
low-tech: that is the American Civil War.

Likewise, I would predict in 2050 historians might well say the first
`modern' war was NOT the Gulf war or Vietnam but that it was the civil war
in Lebanon - a jiigsaw of fighting factions with (relatively) low
tech-weapons - Lebanon had modern rocket-launchers, hand-weapons and
portable SAM's but no use for high-tech gadgetry from aircraft to APC's -
not `officially' supported by states but instead covertly supported and
supplied by secret services of many, many different countries and with
secret contacts with hosts of other countries (I recall the Druze militias
used weapons from twenty different countries). The conflict sometimes
spilling over into other countries - without being acknowledged as such -
and with war imperceptibly shading-off into non-war; and trans-national
business (make that heroine) booming all the while.

And, my dear US-readers, as the fighting in Lebanon was concentrated in
certain war-zones, especially the slums of Beirut, and normal life simply
went on outside the war-zone, it is well possible such Lebanon-style
conflict might spill over from the Caribbean and Latin America into the US
as well. For after all - the US does have its ready-made candidate-Beiruts
within its own borders: inner-city Washington say .. or what about Miami ...

To mention a favorite future scenario of dear Nikolai - (a US-China 'covert'
war) what would happen if China would start arming crack-gangs in central LA
with portable SAM's, grenade-launchers, Anti-Tank missiles and heavy
machine-guns - what's the US-government then going to do  .. carpet-bomb or
nuke Los Angeles ??? See what I mean ...

Now, when I wrote something like this last year somebody objected "history
teaches that IF you have weapons they are going to be used'. Albeit - the
historical experience suggests rather something different: namely that the
twentieth century `model' of `the nation in arms' is historically something
very a-typical and that instead war was always an affair of a small group of
specialists selling protection to society at large - mostly foreigners at
that - and that war never involved the entire economy. Also regulated wars
with a clear difference between peace and war have historically been the
exception
To this extent this model is not unthinkable at all - the problem is that
for models pretending to explain the twenty-first century we really remain
stuck with models which explain 1914 but may not apply to 2014 at all.

Best wishes to all -

and let me emphasize again - this is not what I would LIKE to happen,
although I would surely prefer this scenario to Spectors' `endgame' (and so
would any statesman or revolutionary for the very simple reason it would
mean their certain death too).

R.J.Barendse