GENERATIONS OF WRITERS have described the horrors and exhilaration of war--from the ever-present fear to the intense camaraderie that binds fellow warriors. But for those of us who watched the Gulf War from the comfort of our sofas nearly seven years ago, Desert Storm looked less like the heroic battles of yore than an arcade-ready video game. Has the face of battle changed forever? Or is the essence of war the same, its new high-tech trappings merely disguising some immutable, dark impulse that lies at the core of human nature? how does war arise in the first place--and is it inevitable?
To find out, we brought together two authorities for what turned into a nearly four-hour debate. First to arrive was Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and researcher who coined the term "virtual reality" and who has turned down military funding for his work. Joining Lanier was George Friedman, coauthor with his wife Meredith of The Future of War (Crown) and chairman of Strategic Forecasting, in Baton Rouge. Fittingly, Friedman and Lanier's exchanges occasionally seemed on the verge of escalating into warfare itself.
PT: Let's start with a big question. How is war changing, and how has it stayed the same?
FRIEDMAN: I think the personal and psychological aspects of war remain the same. War is about killing and dying. A man or woman stands at the post and there is a very real possibility of dying in the next five minutes. Whether he dies or not depends partly on him and partly on luck, and yet he must continue to function. It's an extraordinary condition to be in--to be, for example, in the combat information center of a warship [and behaving] as though you were merely processing credit card applications. [Instead,] the information you're processing is that an incoming missile is 15 kilometers away, now 10 kilometers away, now 5 kilometers. You have to separate yourself psychologically from the fact that your mortal existence may well end. That is the ancient reality of war.
PT: You've been in combat. What did you learn from your experiences?
FRIEDMAN: The important thing is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it. If you lose yourself to rage in the complexity of battle, you are going to be lost. The warrior must continue to make decisions in the face of extreme circumstances. He cannot afford to get angry or frightened.
PT: You've told us what hasn't changed. What is different?
FRIEDMAN: There is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.
The way we compensated for this inefficiency was to have a lot of people fire at the same time. So we made larger armies. Also, we had to build factories to produce the guns. By the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot. The British bombed German cities [during World War II] to keep the workers awake at night. So instead of dropping one bomb, we sent a thousand planes and, yes, we took out the factory sometimes, but we also took out the city. It reached the point where we wanted more efficient ways to destroy a city. The result was nuclear weapons.
What is revolutionary today is that we're using precision-guided munitions. And instead of building individual weapons, we are building an industry and a philosophy, the culture of precision. You saw Desert Storm. Precision works.
LANIER: I have a question about that. There's been widespread disputation of the accuracy that's been claimed for these weapons, and allegations of fraud.
FRIEDMAN: The General Accounting Office (GAO) study?
LANIER: Yes.
FRIEDMAN: The General Accounting Office study is a typical accountant's study. The Air Force claimed that one out of every two weapons was on target, and the GAO said it was no better than one out of eight. That totally missed the point. For the first time since the introduction of explosive projectiles, it was possible to be almost certain that a particular target at a particular place and time would be destroyed.
So in the first days [of the war] we took out the [Iraqi] air defense system, the telecommunications system, their electrical grid...everything. The society collapsed. But there were hardly any civilian casualties. The General Accounting Office came in and said, It was not one out of two. That was a sort of cynicism: knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
LANIER: Where do you think the next major war will be?
FRIEDMAN: The important question is, will China break into civil war? The most horrible sort of war is civil war.
LANIER: Would a civil war be confined to China?
FRIEDMAN: Yes, for geographical reasons. There's not much around them. The Chinese have a long history of slaughtering each other without bothering their neighbors.
Tags:
5 kilometers,
Bosnia,
camaraderie,
China,
coauthor,
Combat,
combat information center,
computer scientist,
credit card applications,
desert storm,
exhilaration,
fellow warriors,
future of war,
george friedman,
gulf war,
incoming missile,
jaron lanier,
morality,
psychological aspects,
sofas,
trappings,
War,
warship
