Technology
and War and Government
Lecture
9/15/03
Today
we are going to finish talking about war and start to talk about government. We
discussed last week how there were different ways of representing war,
1.
the
simulating/abstracting way and
2.
the
emotional/feels-like-you-are-there way.
Both
are frequently used in reporting about war and the use of some technologies to
report on war can push reporters to adopt one of these ways over the other. For
example: The hand-held video camera encourages you-are-there point of view and
the use of computer simulations encourage the abstracting point of view.
Now
we will discuss another way in which some other technologies being applied to
war (and prominently mentioned in the reporting on that war) might change how
we think about war and possibly affect the public’s willingness to have their
country go to war.
David Perlmutter’s book Visions of War
mentions the memorial column to the Roman leader Trajan where there are many
images of Roman soldiers doing unexciting tasks preparing for battle. Bridges
and fortifications are constructed, weapons sharpened, and so on. This was
unusual because most such memorials from the ancient world showed battle itself
or victory after battle. So why was this memorial different?
It may have had to do with Trajan’s strong belief in
military discipline. Mutiny and pillaging of captured cities reached a historic
low under Trajan’s command. The preparations for war are always more orderly
than the battle or the pillaging that follows, so Trajan’s Column reflects what
Trajan thought was good, what was important to remember, about Rome’s success
in his time.
Today we see a similar de-emphasizing the chaos and
suffering of war and emphasizing the weapons and equipment used to fight the
war. Chaotic elements are excluded (note Bruce Sterling’s description of the
utter precision and accuracy of the simulation of the battle of 73 easting
being the antithesis of the traditional experience of war as something
fundamentally chaotic and hard to describe).
Meanwhile the more pleasing aspects are emphasized
which reinforce what the viewer wants to believe. Some Romans may well have
wanted to believe that victory in war was simply about having superior
engineering ability and more disciplined soldiers. Americans, similarly, may
want to believe that victory in war was simply about technological superiority,
firepower, and having better trained soldiers.
Typical Americans and Romans would likely rather
think about those things than the consequences of choosing to go to war. Both
Romans and Americans could be expected to be receptive to imagery that presents
war in terms of the terms that make them feel confident of victory and directs
attention away from aspects of war that disturb them.
This suggests that focusing on the high technology
used to fight wars may encourage the use of force by playing up the elements of
war that make American viewers feel good (excited, powerful, in control) while
concealing the elements of the war that might make them feel bad (guilty,
powerless, out of control).
So
in addition to the military technologies of the twentieth century, when used in
reporting, allowing the public to…
1)
Avoid
thinking about the existence of the enemy and civilians (via long range weapons
and bombing).
2)
Avoid
acknowledging the humanity of the enemy who suffer by thinking of the enemies
as abstractions (via cybernetic technologies that simulate the enemy in order
to defeat them)
…
the adoption of very recent technologies for war can actually play upon the
American public’s belief that they possess certain virtues in their use force.
This has been supplemented by Americans’ desire for
revenge after the attacks of 9/11. The
American public response to that attack allowed the advocates for war in
Afghanistan and Iraq to define these wars as a combination of self-defense and
righteous retribution.
That sounds at first like a bit of a return to the
very old tradition of building support for war by encouraging people to
conceive of the enemy as irrational barbaric ethnic groups (see earlier lectures
on war). But this “barbarian” argument for war had to be modified from the
pre-WW1 version.
Such claims had to be modified because of changes in
America’s demographics brought about by immigration, which cheap international
transportation made possible.
There are now millions of Muslim Americans who are
of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. Many Americans have had peaceful
personal contact with those Muslim Americans. Remember that (as Perlmutter points
out) after WWI there was no more U.S. “barbarian” propaganda against Germans,
because too many Americans had gotten to know real life Germans by that point
to accept it.
So, an attempt to demonize Muslims as a group in the
present day U.S. could backfire horribly. It could have led to violence within
the U.S. by particularly angry and racist American civilians against innocent
people living in the U.S. who happened to also be Muslims.
This would shock the U.S. public and lead them to
protest this way of justifying the decision to go to war. Even the fear of
violence against innocent Americans of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent
could cause a substantial number of all Americans to protest this way of
justifying the decision to go to war.
So while extremist groups and certain governments
like in Afghanistan or Iraq are called evil (implying that U.S. motives for
fighting them are purely good) most of the people running the U.S. government
are careful to not demonize Muslims as a whole.
An aside: There are, however, borderline cases. Bush used the word “Crusade” to refer to the war on terrorism and to get people to think about that conflict in a certain way. “Crusade” is a term originating at a time when Christian Europeans were demonizing Muslims, and the idea of “Crusade” was important to the mobilization of large-scale violence by Christians against Muslims. Bush’s use of the term “Crusade” offended many Muslims, making them even more suspicious about the current Bush administration’s motives.
One
set of technological changes have made the possible and some others have
made it necessary:
Why
“virtuous” war is possible
In
the 90s we developed not only technologies for customized, small volume, production
of things in computer controlled manufacturing, order-taking, and inventory
systems. We also developed customized small volume destruction of things
with precision guided weapons. Some weapons don’t even use explosions at all to
do their damage.
One
such weapon was a bomb that only shoots out long conductive streamers to short
circuit high-voltage power lines and destroy the infrastructure for generating
electricity.
We’re even beginning to see the development of non-lethal chemical, biological, kinetic, and microwave weapons for peacekeeping and military occupation use against civilians who are acting in a threatening manner towards our troops or but whom it is a very bad idea to open fire upon with guns because of the escalation of violence that would result.
·
undermining
treaties banning chemical and biological weapons (since many of the most developed
non-lethal weapons are chemical or biological), and
·
making
the military more willing to coerce angry people in occupied countries rather
than modify policy in that country get the protesters to calm down by
addressing their demands.
An aside: The U.S. government has been genetically engineering fungi (a biological weapon) that can be dropped from the air and used to destroy current crops and prevent future growth of entire crops of Coca and Poppy plants, the raw material for Cocaine and Heroin. See:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/publications/bk/bk3en.html
This sounds like a perfect technological fix to the Latin American supply of Drugs to the U.S. but the development of some of these weapons my well have unintended consequences, including:
·
undermining
treaties banning chemical and biological weapons (since many of the most developed
non-lethal weapons are chemical or biological), and
·
damage
to other plants, animals, and maybe people once the engineered fungi gets into
the wild.
·
aggravated
poverty for the huge number of small farmers who cannot make enough to survive growing
any crops but Poppy or Coca because of the low prices for food crops on the
world market. Those low prices are due to subsidies paid by the
US/European/Japanese governments to their farmers.
Why
“Virtuous War” is necessary:
1)
End
of the Cold War means that American fear of the expansion of Soviet power also
ended. That fear can no longer be used to get the public to agree to the use of
force and all of its associated bad consequences of death and maiming
2)
The
American public at least potentially can see far more of those bad consequences
of using military force in war in real time, soon after it happens. This is
because of communication satellites and ever cheaper and lighter equipment for
transmitting reports to those satellites to be relayed back to the TV network.
So there is more likely to be political backlash when wars start causing people
(i.e. U.S. troops and civilians) to die while the “you-are-there” kind of TV
coverage focuses people’s attention on that and starts making people feel
guilty and powerless.
Conclusion:
So
we have a U.S. public that is
·
(anger
and panic after 9/11 aside) sensitive to seeing other people or U.S. troops
getting hurt,
·
more able to see people being hurt in far-away places (as new organizations’ communication
tech. gets better), and
·
harder to persuade that it’s necessary to hurt people than it was in the Cold War
era.
So
a U.S. government that wants to do things that require hurting lots of people,
but do so without paying a huge political price, will fight wars in such a
way to make it at least appear virtuous, as if people aren’t being hurt (much) because
·
the
U.S. is using high-tech precision bomb/missile or non-lethal weapons (ex. Kosovo
and Iraq air campaigns), or
·
lots
of people in the enemy country will be better off in the long run after the
U.S. takes it over and removes its government (Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Women
in Afghanistan, lots of groups in Iraq)
·
the
people hurt in the fighting on the ground are killed away from reporters where friendly
local troops (or U.S. Special Forces troops) do the fighting so the public
learns little about what is going on (ex. Afghanistan).
Of
course there may be a significant gap between the appearance and the reality of
the situation, but it is the maintenance of these appearances that is important
while the fighting is going on and the press is paying attention. Contemporary
anti-war activists and some reporters make it their job to seek out and expose
to the public the differences between these appearances and the accompanying
reality of the situation.