‘Chaos is the enemy’

3 Responses to ‘Chaos is the enemy’

1. Synova says:

   February 27, 2008 at 11:13 pm

   Trying to second guess the future is human nature I suppose.

   But it’s true what they say about military preparedness preparing us for the last war, or in this case *this* war.

   Will the next war be the same? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

   We’re just getting our collective minds around the notion of war taking place between non-national groups. I’d suggest that dismissing the idea of an old fashioned war between nations in the future isn’t entirely wise.

   We really weren’t at war with the nation of Afghanistan. Not at any point. Nor were we really at war with Iraq. We made a very deliberate point of separating the idea of the nation from going to war with Saddam. (however well that worked, or didn’t work)

   What if we went to war with Iran?

   I think that it would be an entirely different sort of thing and likely, if it came to that, the appropriate method of warfare wouldn’t involve ground-troops or any sort of occupation at all. The services that are mostly playing support presently, the Navy and Air Force, may well be the most appropriate military tool for goals that would necessarily be very different than our goals in Iraq.

   It doesn’t really make sense to situate each service to the same role.

   I can’t really see us going to war with China, but I can conceivably see the need for long range strikes on locations, say, in North Korea.

   And then there is space.

   The ultimate high ground.

   I think that Obama is naive in the extreme (or just saying what his supporters want to hear) but I *want* us to have military dominance in space and capabilities to police and enforce whatever we darn well feel is necessary in space. It’s just too easy to drop things on people. The most promising and profitable things we can do in space, such as power production, involve building things that could be easily used as weapons, trivially easily used as weapons.

   That the war we’re fighting now, and likely will be fighting is in an entirely different realm doesn’t mean we should dismiss the possibility of something different. I can’t really see an old-fashioned ground war with masses of armies marching toward each other along a front. But that’s not the same as saying that counterinsurgent small wars are the only possibility.
2. Keith_Indy says:

   February 28, 2008 at 7:05 am

   “can/should the State Department be retasked to handle primarily nation-building, rather than diplomacy, while leaving the Army/Marine Corps to do the fighting?”

   I know this will sound like a broken record, but this is the concept that I think Barnett answers very well.

   We have a War (Defense) Dept, and a Peace (State) Dept, but for everything else, it’s catch-as-can. Nation building (post-conflict,) peace-keeping, disaster response, and security/infrastructure enhancement (through training and aid) should be a separate secretary level position.
3. Advanced Net Detective says:

   March 19, 2010 at 8:30 pm

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