The Age of Inequality: The Philosophy of American Military Power in the 21st Century

Events and developments over the past 30 years have changed the face of warfare forever. The wisdom provided by the classicists such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu could not have conceived (and did not speak about) the kind of warfare that American forces now experience. A serious reexamination of American military philosophy is needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century, challenges that the classics could never have dreamed of.

Since the 19th century, historians have referred to the various periods of human development by a shorthand borrowed from the geologists -- the Age. These ages were so named mostly to teach students what followed what, to provide a framework for history. However, in fact, they hide a great deal of truth about the Western world (America included) and its attitude towards the rest of humanity. The ages are named to reflect levels of learning, and of understanding the world. Until the beginning of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the levels of learning were about on par between Europe, the Orient and the Islamic world of the Middle East. Up until then most of the world in communication (this excludes the many aboriginals) was on about the same technological footing. When the industrialization of Europe and North America began in the 1700s they leapt ahead technologically at a much faster pace than the rest of the world. Here, for the purposes of this paper, the Unequal Age began.

All of humanity started in about the same place but at one point certain parts of the world began to pull away physically, economically and technologically. The primates that would later become men originated in one place and spread outward, mostly towards the north out of what is now Africa. When proto-people reached the Fertile Crescent of the eastern Mediterranean they discovered a great deal more cereals, domesticable animals and hospitable climate than they had found anywhere else. Many stayed, some moved further away on the supercontinent of the forming land, much still ravaged by sheets of ice.

From the Fertile Crescent came the farm, and animal domestication, and ideas of property. Close proximity with animals bred diseases. Diseases hardened the individuals who survived, who often created early religions to explain the world. But with domesticated animals they could also develop surpluses of food and soon, of people. Tensions developed and feuds broke out. Feuds and plagues welded or destroyed social groups. Some groups joined together to form larger groups, and soon they built communal structures, first for self-defense, then for asset protection.

But for those without domesticable plants or animals, wherever they ended up, the story was different, their disease resistance was completely different, and the groups were somewhat smaller because they had no surpluses. Without domesticated draft animals there was no need for a wheel, and there was no follow-on technological development, and no metals. The whole of the Western Hemisphere and the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa were like this. In comparison to these even the Bronze Age Greece of Homer was like another planet.

As Europe and the Mediterranean basin developed from this womb of science and farming it perfected the arts of killing as no others could. In time the Europeans, having grown crowded into a small corner of a supercontinent, made compasses and stern-post rudders and took their iron cannons to the far reaches of the earth, encountering many of the peoples who had developed outside of the European hothouse. The Europeans brought disease, scientific inquiry, the written word, gunpowder weapons, crude medicines, and a measure of social justice developed over centuries of feuding (primarily for themselves) that was incomprehensible to most of the other civilizations they encountered. As the Europeans discovered these peoples they first exploited, then victimized, and finally absorb them, just as the countries of Europe had absorbed many hundreds of civilizations before.

In North Africa and the Mesopotamian subcontinent a new warlike faith emerged in the 7th Century, one that advocated conquest of unbelievers. Islam boiled out of central Arabia and was at the gates of Paris in less than two centuries, but was turned back at least three times. It seethed in the margins of the technologically advanced world and had much to learn and to give to human civilization, but somehow, somewhere, something when wrong.

By 1540 it was illegal to own a printing press in the Ottoman Empire, making sharing and preserving information somewhat problematic. The Muslim sailors and even the captains at Lepanto in 1571 were considered slaves of the sultan, property to be disposed of at leisure. It was here, probably, that European civilization began to pull away from the Islamic portion of the descendants of the Fertile Crescent civilizations. It was here that the Unequal Age began for the Islamic world.

Enter fundamentalist Islamists at the end of the 20th Century, and suddenly the West is confronted with a conflict that its military is not set up to engage. Islamic fundamentalists, many from middle-class backgrounds, hate long, hard and well. Their hatred is based in large part upon their frustration that their arts, sciences and culture are being subsumed by the more successful Euro-American influences. Starting in the 1970s fundamentalist imams of Islam began advocating a return to a golden age of Islamic learning and culture, somewhere around the 13th century. To this end they began to selectively interpret their holy writings as advocating not only murder, but also suicide as a means to commit murder. In an effort to further their ends, their ideology now preaches that ideas such as freedom, capitalism, democracy and even Christianity are illusions that will be replaced by Islam.

One of the stated goals of Islamic terrorists before and since 9/11 has been to gain sympathy of world opinion. Indeed, one of the reasons that women and children are being used as suicide bombers is to emphasize, for the benefit of the Western media, the apparent desperation of the struggle. This for them is essential, since it wins public opinion for their stated causes. Unfortunately they do not state many of their other goals to the mass media, but keep the truly inflammatory rhetoric to themselves. Bald statements of contempt such as "The Western woman works more with her breasts than her hands...Where is the liberation in...women wearing trousers that reveal their thighs...?" are restricted to sermons in Arabic. It is here that Islam clashed with the remaining superpower of the West: The United States.

American military organizations have been present for the destruction of the greatest empires of its time. America broke the back of the pre-revolution French empire before it was even a nation, defeated Britain twice, destroyed the Mexican empire, crushed the nascent imperial system of class and race superiority of the Old South, outproduced the Indians, finished off Spain, was in on the kill for the Hohenzollerns, Ottomans and Hapsburgs, incinerated the Nazis and the Japanese militarists, stopped the Asian communists (or at least slowed them down), and finally outspent the Soviet system. In doing this America developed a murderous power and warfighting philosophy the like of which the world has never seen.

Since the first of Columbus's crewmen were left behind in the New World, the American strategic imperative has been survival and the protection of the means of survival. From its beginnings as a citizen's militia just a step above a feudal levee the American military has fought as if the survival of the nation depended on the outcome, for often it did. At least until the French and Indian war, the viability of Europeans and their African slaves on the North American continent was in some doubt. But with the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham the greatest supply source for the Indians that contested encroachment on their territory also was defeated, and the British colonies were safe.

Eighteenth century wars in Europe were a lot of marches between magazines, formal sieges and the occasional set-piece battle. At this time the Americans were fighting savage, if small, battles with their Indian enemies in a kind of war that knew no honor in the European sense. The Indians learned to adopt European ordnance into their own warfare, which was based primarily on the raid rather than the stand-up fight. The British militia tradition of volley-and-bayonet was devastating in open battles; so the Indians avoided them, learning to build extensive fortresses when they could not hide or avoid combat. This meant that if the Americans were to defeat the Indians in battle the Americans had to destroy Indians whenever they were found.

During the war for independence the Americans mixed British militia tradition with woodland warfare methods learned from the Indians, added Prussian drill and French maneuver. The resulting combination created one of the few military doctrines in the industrialized world that only knows victory by annihilation.

America has built a military organization unlike any other. Today their simulations and exercises all have one thing in common: the opposing forces are instructed (or programmed) to fight to the last bullet and the last drop of simulated blood, unlike any opponent on Earth: They may as well train against the Terminator, because American forces conduct operations in a manner reminiscent of the movie cyborg. To US Grant, the earliest practitioner of this doctrinal philosophy, this is the acme of American warfighting: Win by obliterating the enemy. The classics such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu would be aghast.

This attitude of all-out war has manifested itself in nearly every conflict that the United States has fought, and has nearly always resulted in determination to fight and win conflicts 1) overseas, and 2) quickly. The two-ocean Navy (that Alfred Thayer Mahan did not advocate but whose theories and American geography required) fairly well ensured much of the first. An emphasis on building up a large army of volunteers spurred by conscription, equipped with the most ordnance possible, has made most of the last possible.

Despite its key role in the nation's birth and its survival, the American military has always stood in an uncomfortable twilight world between being wanted but not needed, needed but unwanted, necessary but a burden. The why of this apparent paradox reaches into some of the reasons behind the Revolution, but mainly rests on the habits of thought that the military was a repository of idle second sons (the officers) and the sweepings from jails (the men). This attitude has changed little in two centuries.

The society that this savage waring doctrine has been used to protect was formed from a polyglot of influences from six continents and every culture surviving until at least the 19th century. People from all over the globe have wanted to come to America, and many millions still do. The mystery of the fabled land, a largely empty land of vast resources, and the unique civic freedom to succeed or fail of their own accord has attracted people to brave the most shark-infested stretch of water in the world (the Florida Straits) on inner tubes and rusty barrels.

The resources that America has at its disposal are far more than just an open society. It has the largest, strongest and deepest economy in human history, and the volume of its available capital and fully capitalized investments exceeds those of the next three countries combined. It is the world leader in the production and development of light metals, helium and other noble gases, recycled (from scrap) iron, silicon products, petrochemical products including plastics, and new computer software design. It makes or licenses manufacture of fully 55% of the combat and combat support aircraft types in the world. It also possesses the only deep-water fleet capable of credible force projection. No nation is, and few alliances, are its equal in military or economic power.

To this day the armed forces of the United States could be sent home with a single vote from the Congress, as the country wanted as little as possible to do with a standing army as possible and wrote this sentiment it into the very framework of its laws. After the revolution there was to be no standing national army in the Confederation (and no means to pay for it), but when Shays Rebellion in 1786 was met so poorly by the state militia, the new Constitution of 1788 made a small provision for it-- but that was all.

The military population of the United States has always been somewhat problematic. With only relatively brief exceptions, the military has depended on volunteer since the end of the revolution. With the advent of gender equality under the law in the 1980s the military population could be roughly double whatever it may be in a given planning cycle if a draft were to begin without gender discrimination. But American uniformed services keep women out of direct combat roles, unlike those who hate America and much of its freedom, who use women and children to emphasize the desperate nature of the struggle. American political interests are polarized on the issue of women in combat, and this leaves a renewed draft in a great deal of doubt. The first drafted man could, under US law, sue for sex discrimination since his neighbor of equal age and eligibility doesn't even have to register, the only reason being gender. Any draft starting up after a thirty-year hiatus will have to meet that reality.

Philosophically the American military has always gone its own way, while paying nodding homage to what are now called the foundations of military thought. Until 1870 the French were thought to be the armies to emulate, at least in conventional warfare. Jomini was popular for those who could read French fluently (which was not all soldiers by any means). But the American conventional war strategy was primarily of delay and making invasions costly (the Mexican War was an exception), not for Jomini's formalized marches between magazines. By the time Clausewitz was available in English the Civil War had become the formative military experience, and Clausewizian principles were too complex for the simple Grant/Sherman formula of direct battles of annihilation. American fighting philosophy may be simple and somewhat savage, but it can make for relatively quick wars.

The American military establishment serves a full-bodied engine of dissent, one that believes it has little use for militaries at all. Throughout its history America has been a nation of dissenters, and indeed its culture revels in it. The Constitution allows for petitions for redress of grievances, peaceable assembly and freedom of expression. All of these have been used to protest American military policies at various times, but none had ever actually stopped a conflict until, arguably, Vietnam. It is this tradition of civic audit, in part, that has kept America and other descendants of the Greek polis as powerful and as successful as they are.

The War of 1812 was seen as "Mr. Madison's War" by those who had no interest in the frontiers; the Civil War was "Lincoln's Folly" to the New Yorkers who sold guns from Britain to both sides; WWI was "Wilson's War" that was really the end of the European dynasties; WWII was all the fault of the bankers and the "Jewish Lobby" who made up those filthy lies about the Germans.

This attitude has meant that the United States has been unprepared for nearly every conflict it has ever entered into. There was practically no preparation made for a war in the North before Ft. Sumter was fired on in 1861, as opposed to the South which had started seizing arsenals in December of 1860. Three American destroyers were torpedoed in the Atlantic by 1941 and still America would not move into the ever-growing global conflict. After 9/11 the American government mobilized some of its assets, but its intelligence services spent time making diversity quilts as late as October 2001.

Modern dissent has its roots mainly in American victory. The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki came none too soon for most, but for a few that they came at all was too much. Such power in the hands of anyone was, for some Americans, a great evil. Many of those who thought this way were academics at the universities. Others were in the mass media.

During Gulf War I, a small phenomenon started that grew more imperative as the decade wore on: the 24-hour news cycle. Cable-access television had started a number of small news operations, and to beat the big networks they were pressured into reporting news faster. To help do this they sought commentators that would help fill in what would otherwise have been dead air time replaying old footage. Soon the larger networks were doing the same, and before long the commentators were in short supply. Rather than cut down on airtime with erosion of audience share, the new outlets started to get commentators from other fields, including academics. Some of these were well meaning people, who began to speak of thing that they had no direct knowledge of. Others started with their own theories and prejudices, and before long the "news" became something of a distortion. But the cycle continued, and the cable networks grew, and was soon joined by the World Wide Web.

After 1991, the United States was attacked in 1993 with the bombing of the World Trade Center. Two embassies were bombed in August 1998. In October 2000 USS Cole was attacked by a suicide bomber that killed 17. The United States did not respond significantly to any of these attacks, and the few critics of this non-response were referred to as racists and warmongers by the mainstream press. The perpetrators were all Islamic extremists.

By 2001 there were two sources of dissent in the United States, and they had combined to make the dissent look common. The Democratic Party felt robbed by the results of the 2000 national election and the academia/media/entertainment axis were willing to do anything to fill their 24-hour news cycles. By this time the "man-bites-dog" formula for news wasn't enough: the story had to be "man-raises-dogs-to-be-bit." Any story had to have enough "legs" to attract public attention and hold it, whether there was any substance to the story or not.

As the Trade Towers crashed into a heap and the Pentagon blazed on September 11th 2001, television cameras rolled everywhere to pick up the reaction of "the man on the street." Amid the horror and shock, there were university academics who quipped that anyone who attacked the Pentagon was on the right track. Other universities declared themselves draft amnesty zones. Virtually from the beginning of the conflict there were rumors of conspiracies, of certain people evacuated from the target buildings. It appeared as if dissent was a part of the national reaction: it was now, apparently, mainstream.

The Islamic fundamentalists who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 rely on small arms, explosives, and surprise in what they perceive as an all-out war for survival. The United States relies on heavy infantry, carrier air groups, air supremacy, and the ferocity of maneuver warfare in citizen-soldier armies, fighting in what they perceive as a fight for a survival of their way of life and civic freedom. Their warfighting philosophies could not be more similar despite their technological disparity and philosophical polarization.

Between the collapse of Saigon and the first rumblings of war in Kuwait, the US military looked back on itself and wondered what went wrong between 1945 and 1975. They decided that attrition, the "strategy" that they used in Vietnam, was wasteful of resources, and determined to reinstill maneuver warfare into the fabric of American warfighting. Rather than seeing attrition as a mechanism (as they had in 1950 and 1967), they called it a form of warfare. The American military establishment embraced Clausewitz and studied Sun Tzu assiduously. Papers were written and briefings were given. Much heat was made in the interim period until a "new" American warfighting doctrine was developed.

However, in fact, the "new" fast maneuver doctrine they created is about as new as the US military itself. But 9/11 started the US in a conflict where the carrier group is just a mobile airfield, and the M1A is only a tank destroyer. The Terminator-like qualities of American military power have caused an implacable foe -- the Islamist -- to simply avoid fighting on their terms.

As the inheritors of the dubious mantle of superpower, and as the only nation left with a credible force of projection, America must look in completely new places for guidance. The current challenges that it faces are not only unconventional; they are a part of its liberal democratic tradition. Yes, Pogo, the enemy is at least a part of us. No military philosopher before the 20th Century envisioned this.

The American military, an unwilling partner in the social revolution that is American society, has to find ways to meet the apparently asymmetrical threats to American interests. Unfortunately it has to find these solutions on its own, and cannot look to unsuitable, inappropriate and ambiguous classics such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu for guidance. The American military now stands at the crux of an Age of Inequality, protecting a society that does not believe it needs protecting, standing against an enemy whose warfighting philosophy is remarkably similar but with far different means (and ends) at its disposal. The intelligence, financial and public-relations forms of warfare that America must invent to meet these threats will not come from any military classic, and may not come from the field of military philosophy at all.