Or, is it global corporatism? Donald rumsfeld's idealogue writes book, explains some things. Is this the theory behind current us force?
Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld has a "strategy guy" whose job is to teach this new way of warfare to high-level military officers from all branches of services and to top level CIA operatives. Thomas Barnett is a professor at the Navy War College in Rhode Island. He is author of the controversial book The Pentagon's New Map that identifies a "non-integrating gap" in the world that is resisting corporate globalization.
In what Barnett calls a "Grand March of History"
Grand march of history indeed. A little history. Prechristian empires were just flashes in the pan compared to what the romans built w christianity. Catholicism was used to forge the various european tribes into a more or less unified entity. However, capitalism was kept suppressed under this system. It took protestantism, which gave birth to calvinism to create the avaritious corporation.
America was the soil in which the corporation passed from infancy to adolescence, and into adulthood. The original american establishment put heavy controls on the corporation, keeping it in the corral, so to speak. However, in the 19th century, it broke out, freed itself to have all the rights of a human individual. It took little time for it to turn the tables on its creators, fencing in it's makers. And there we are today.
In what Barnett calls a "Grand March of History" he claims that the U.S. military must be transformed in order to preemptively take control of the gap, so the U.S. can "manage" the global distribution of resources, people, energy, and money.
Barnett predicts that U.S. unilateralism will lead to the "inevitability
of war." Referring to Hitler in a recent presentation, Barnett reminded his military audience that the Nazi leader never asked for permission before invading other countries. Thus, the end to multi-lateralism.
Barnett argues that the days of arms talks and international treaties are over. "There is no secret where we are going," he says as he calls for a "new ordering principle" at the Department of Defense (DoD). Barnett maintains that as jobs move out of the U.S. the primary export product of the nation will be "security." Global energy demand will necessitate U.S. control of the oil producing regions. "We will be fighting in Central Africa in 20 years," Barnett predicts.
In order to implement this new military vision," Barnett maintains that the U.S. military must move away from its often-competing mix of Air Force-Navy-Army-Marines toward two basic military services. One he names Leviathan, which he defines as the kick ass, wage war, special ops, and not under the purview of the international criminal court. Give us your angry, video game-playing 18-19 year olds, for the Leviathan force, Barnett says. Once a country is conquered by Leviathan, Barnett says the U.S. will have to have a second military force that he calls Systems Administration. This force he describes as the "proconsul" of the empire, boots on the ground, the police force to control the local populations. This group, Barnett says, "will never come home."
Barnett¹s plan is essentially underway today. New fast, flexible, and efficient projection forces with "lily pad" bases are now being developed for control of the gap. Over the next decade, the military will abandon 35% of the Cold War-era bases it uses abroad as it seeks to expand the network of bare-bones sites in the gap. The planned changes, once completed, will result in the most profound "reordering" of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements were set 50 years ago.
Role of Space Technology
The Bush administration is also exploring the possibility of expanding the emerging missile defense system into Eastern Europe as an element in the strategic containment of Russia, China and the Middle East. The Pentagon has been negotiating with Hungary, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic about one or more of them hosting new missile defense bases. Oil-rich Iran is to be encircled by missile defense posts in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In order to pull all of this together the Pentagon claims it will need "a God's-eye view" of the world. A new "internet in the sky" is now being built for the wars of the future. Costing well over $200 billion, the new web would give war machines and military forces a common language, instantly emitting an encyclopedia of lethal information about all enemies.
According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war." The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the time," says one Pentagon insider. Military intelligence including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the Earth will be posted on the war net and shared with troops. "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that."
Thus U.S. military and economic control of the gap will be dependent on a system of networked computers. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a global network what the military calls net-centric warfare will, they say, change the military in a way the Internet changed business and culture.
Iraq is not the first holdout against this march of global capitalism. Nor is it the first to pay the price. The iraq war has served to bring this corporatist gospel more fully into the light/into action.
http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/newsletter/gnnews16.htm#one
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