Setting Just Limits to
New Methods of Warfare
Robert
Hickson
In light
of the history of warfare – both the discovery and development
of new armaments and the passionate use of “armed ideologies” –
it is a moral certitude that unexpected new combinations of
advanced science will be applied technocratically in future
forms of war. These new weaponized technologies – in both lethal
and non-lethal forms – will also, most probably, be used in
police work, peace operations, and “neo-imperial constabulary
actions” along the borders of Empire, on the ambiguous frontiers
of conflicting and alien civilizations and religious cultures.
It will be very difficult to set and keep humane moral limits in
such a fevered dialectical context of ideology and technology.
The long-developing and self-destructive movement towards “total
war” – or what some recent Chinese military thinkers have called
“unrestricted warfare” – will take us to the foundations of our
existence.
A
strategic-minded British general saw this with piercing clarity
more than a half-century ago. Almost five years before his death
– after a long, active, and reflective life – Major General
J.F.C. Fuller (1878–1966) published The Conduct of War,
1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and
Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct.[1]
It is a far-sighted and paradigmatic book, which General Fuller
himself was inclined to consider as the most important he had
written.[2]
It
examined the long-growing and destructively cumulative
developments in society towards new forms of war – forms that
were increasingly unlimited, ambiguous, and intentionally
undefined; and, hence, more and more coldly abstract and
impersonal and altogether conducive to barbarism and
civilizational disaster. Moreover, he saw these great evils
growing within the feverish atmosphere and manipulated
mass-psychology of “democratic governance,” further exacerbated
by revolutionary new techniques and purposes of total wars that
required the humiliating unconditional surrender of a defeated
people. That “absolute surrender” of a whole people (not just of
their government) was preparatory to their protracted
“re-education” (Umerziehung in German). It was as if a
defeated criminal nation (ein Tätervolk) needed
social-engineering or a demiurgic transformation into something
“new,” which was often then euphemistically called
“nation-building.”
For
example, General Fuller’s important Chapter XI, entitled “Soviet
Revolutionary Warfare,” speaks about the Soviets’ deceitful use
of “Peace as an Instrument of Revolution.” This could also be
applied today to new forms of American “Messianic Democracy” and
its policies abroad of so-called “creative destruction” and
“democratic transformation” abroad.
Based
upon the twin premises that there are no technical solutions to
moral problems, and that whoever is himself morally and
spiritually uprooted tends to uproot others, we shall examine in
this essay the moral difficulty of setting and preserving
properly proportional limits in the just conduct of modern war.
It is
certainly the case that setting moral limits is always a
profoundly human problem, and so is the keeping of proper limits
in war – especially under the stress of war. And here is where
the self-understanding provided by the virtues becomes
important. For it a function of the four cardinal virtues –
prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance – to foster wise
limits and to develop dispositions or habits of promptness,
constancy, and fitting moderation. There are, however, no
“techniques” that can be truly substituted for the virtues,
which are themselves ordered perfections of common human
potentialities (powers or capacities). And the virtues
themselves presuppose human free will and voluntariness, and, as
a consequence, moral responsibility and moral accountability.
Setting
just limits in the matter of going to war (ad bellum) and
in the matter of the conduct and fitting conclusion of war
(in bello) is, indeed, a great challenge to our intellectual
and moral life, especially amidst the changing conditions and
experimental atmosphere of modern science and technology. The
French, Industrial, and Bolshevik Revolutions, so keenly
analyzed by General Fuller, have disposed us more and more
towards “total war.” But applied modern science now goes even
further.
For
example, if a country decides to use, as an offensive weapon, a
“computer network attack” against an opponent, what constitutes
a legitimate military target? Moreover, in long-range
“strategic information warfare,” what constitutes a licit
military target? Can one attack an enemy’s financial
institutions or stock market? Who is a combatant and who is a
non-combatant in the new field of “modern information warfare,”
which according to an unclassified definition of the U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA), entails “disruption,
destruction, or deception in information systems”? And how does
one know when one is even under attack in “strategic information
warfare”? What, indeed, are the “indications and warnings” of an
actual or impending assault? What is our criterion of judgment
so as to aid our just response according to the principles of
discrimination and proportionality?
To shed
further light on some of these matters, we may well apply the
concept of General Fuller’s finely differentiated book, not only
thereby to illuminate certain contemporary developments in
warfare, but also to anticipate its likely future forms. Just as
the science and technology of the Industrial Revolution was
resourcefully applied to warfare, so, too, will our own more
advanced (and less respectful) culture of science and technology
be further applied to war – for example, in the
military-strategic application of the “information sciences,”
and of neuroscience, psycho-neurolinguistics, biotechnology,
nanotechnology, micro-encapsulation, and robotics – and often
in combination or by way of “consilience” (which is the more
technical concept for “combination” used by Professor E.O.
Wilson, the emeritus Harvard sociobiologist). Just imagine how
difficult it will be to set and to keep humane, moral limits in
the application to warfare of “the Revolution in Molecular
Biology,” especially when its subtle means of manipulation in
genetic engineering are applied against soft economic targets
such as crops, livestock, and vulnerable agricultural
infrastructure.
Consider,
for example, how new methods of direct and indirect
strategic warfare could be applied, not only against the “soft
agricultural targets” of a prosperous and peaceful nation, but
also against the illegal drug crops of certain
“narco-democracies” and their para-militaries (or well-armed,
narco-criminal organizations). To what extent would a
camouflaged, subversive attack on the three main illegal drug
crops (poppy, coca, marihuana) be a legally and morally
permissible form of warfare, even as a new form of biological
warfare or “biological police work”? Or, would this subtle form
of indirect subversion be considered by the “narco-trafficantes”
(and their money-launderers) as an act of war – at least an act
of economic or financial warfare – that would provoke their
reprisals, even their reckless vengeance? For example, what if
these foreign “narco-trafficantes” were in turn to attack the
United States’ geographically concentrated (but not very well
protected) veterinary breed stocks of pigs or cattle and the
like? If there were such a reprisal, it would certainly be
exponentially destructive of the American economy and its
international trade.
And let
us consider another trenchant example: the ambiguous phenomenon
of “bio-remediation.” Since bio-remediation is now not only
permissible and legal, but also warmly approved, even by the
global Green Movement, we may now unexpectedly face a new and
dangerous dual-use technology.
Because
bio-remediation has greatly helped in environmental clean up and
the dissolution of large amounts of normally insoluble trash, we
are much less cautious about its potential for misuse.
Bio-remediation makes use of very potent and specially
engineered micro-organisms, which are very effective in cleaning
up the contamination from large oil slicks or spills, as well as
in helping to dissolve the almost intractable amount of world
trash and other forms of contaminated waste.
However,
these same, very potent solvents of trash and of oil spills
could also be put to other uses: for example, as an
“anti-materièl biological weapon” against private or commercial
vehicles, or against buildings or other forms of a society’s
critical infrastructure. How does one defend against such actual
or potential threats? How does one even speak about them without
producing what we are purportedly trying to defend against,
namely moral paralysis and inaction, or a self-sabotaging sense
of futility and despair? These are indeed very difficult
matters, which take us to the deeper roots of our common life
together in this fragile and vulnerable, and often precarious,
world.
The use
or abuse of bio-remediation depends upon the intention and the
moral purpose of the user. Bio-remediation certainly is an
equivocal “dual-use” or “multiple-use” capacity. But how should
one – how could one – even legislate against its potential,
easily performed, misuse? Indeed, there are no technical
solutions to moral problems. And there are no litigious
solutions to moral problems. (As the Greek dramatist,
Aristophanes, saw many years ago during the tragic Peloponnesian
War (431–404 B.C.), a society which primarily relies upon
litigious sanctions alone is deeply disordered, decadent,
and doomed.)
In more
concrete terms, let us imagine that the U.S Government had the
hostile desire to go after a belligerent foreign leaders’s
private bank accounts, which are located in a third country that
is far away from the one he currently rules. For example,
imagine that a Serbian leader had bank accounts on the divided
Greco-Turkish island of Cyprus, in neutral Switzerland, and in
one or more of the African or Caribbean “offshore islands.”
Would any of the bank accounts of this leader – or those of any
of his close friends – be a proper (i.e., legitimate) military
target? Would this not be a special way of influencing this
foreign leader (and his friends) in an efficient and
“non-bloody” manner, by snatching or destroying their cherished
personal (and perhaps ill-gotten) assets? Should the United
States be allowed – or allow itself –with or without the
permission of its “coalition partners,” to use its “special
technical operations” and subtle “information warfare tools”
against such soft financial targets in a non-cooperative and
non-consenting third country? Even in a historically neutral
country, like Switzerland, which has very strict bank privacy
laws and protections of anonymity?
What are
the morally and legally permissible Rules of Engagement (ROE)?
And who sets them, and by what authority? For example, if the
United States is acting as part of a coalition, who finally
establishes the just “rules of engagement” in a timely
way – and on what grounds? What are the criteria and standards
of judgment? Moreover, may one country in the coalition – a more
technologically advanced country, for example – take the
initiative to operate unilaterally? Or, would going after a
foreign leader’s civilian bank accounts be, indeed, a “war
crime”?
That is
to say, may one country’s “technological crown jewels,” i.e.,
its special technical operations (STO), be used against an enemy
leader’s personal “crown jewels”? Or is this form of
attack another promiscuous opening to “unrestricted warfare,”
indeed a further development of self-sabotaging “total war”?
Furthermore, if, in waging modern war as part of a coalition of
multi-cultural allies, the United States will soon be legally
and politically required to establish and sustain
interoperability with its less technologically sophisticated
partners, what then? Will the U.S. – should the U.S. –
have to “dim down” and “dumb down” its own sophisticated
technological capacities in order to be more co-operative and
“inter-operative”? But, if the U.S. “dumbs down,” can it then
reliably fight with the same precision and combat efficiency,
and with the same discriminating care for an enemy’s
non-combatant population and other non-military
targets? On the premise that “we fight the way we train,” how,
therefore, should the United States train? Should we train for
“coalition warfare” with our more unsophisticated, low-tech,
multi-cultural (or multi-religious) partners? However, if we
“dumb down” too much, we will then become more un-coordinated,
disarticulated, and clumsy, if not effectively paralyzed or
catatonic.
But if
the U.S. does not “dumb down” its capacities, but, rather, tries
to operate most efficiently, humanely, and discriminatingly, it
will probably be seen as operating with “arrogant unilateralism”
– not only by its enemies, but also by its coalition partners.
Indeed, the emerging “American Imperium” will be then regarded
more and more as a “rogue superpower” which intends to inflict
upon others its own essentially unaccountable ROE; and to claim
special immunities from criminal prosecution, for example, at
the International Criminal Court. (Indeed, the United States,
like China, does not at all endorse, and has emphatically not
ratified, the International Criminal Court as it now stands,
because of its arguably promiscuous and unbounded claims for
retroactive legal jurisdiction in “war crimes” and other acts of
purported criminality.)
Under
modern conditions of war and peace, moreover, there is an
unmistakable “seam” between war and criminality. This was true
historically of the relationship – or seam – between piracy and
irregular (or unconventional or privateer) naval warfare, as
with the British operations against the Spanish Empire. Are
“privateers” pirates, or unconventional “special operations
forces” of a naval power?
As a
contemporary example of this “seam” between war and criminality,
let us consider what might happen if the Colombian
“narco-trafficantes” are found to be using nuclear submarines,
and operating off the coast of California in order to ship their
drugs into the Western Hemisphere. What if these nuclear
submarines are not operated by Colombian crews, but by foreign
mercenary crews (e.g., Russians)? Is this a matter for
law-enforcement agencies alone, or is it also a matter of
national security, thereby requiring the actual or potential
engagement, and the permanent attentiveness, of our armed forces
– including our own naval Special Operations Forces?
And there
is a further challenge. Given the new missions of the U.S.
Northern Command (which includes NORAD – the former North
American Aerospace Defense Command – and therefore our Canadian
allies, as well as many of our own new “space assets”), to what
extent is it permissible for the Commanding Officer of Northern
Command (a four-star general or admiral) to conduct
military-intelligence operations within his own assigned
(and presumably legitimate) “Area of Responsibility” (AOR),
since most of his AOR is within the continental United States?
Can he, for example, legitimately use the National Security
Agency (NSA) domestically, even with a cover from the
FBI?
That is
to say, to what extent is such a military commander still
restricted by the strict prohibitions of the U.S. Constitution
concerning domestic military and intelligence operations?
And how far should he be limited or hampered in his newly
assigned military and counter-terrorist missions? For it is
indispensably important to a military commander that he not be
“blind” or “deaf” about what is happening in his assigned AOR,
especially when he is expected, and obligated, to conduct
sensitive military operations within that same territorial (or
geographical) area. This is a very serious matter. Like reality,
it will not go away, even when we stop thinking about it.
There is
a further difficulty for a military commander today when faced
with the phenomenon of terrorism. To what extent is terrorism
itself an act of war – indeed, an act of irregular,
subversive, “asymmetrical” warfare – as distinct from an act
of criminality? And what are the military commander’s proper
ROE, especially on U.S. territory, as in the case of the
assigned missions of Northern Command, whose headquarters are in
Colorado Springs, Colorado? How is a country to have national
security under the conditions of modern technology and travel
without becoming an asphyxiating, intrusive police state? Modern
criminal syndicates and para-military “terrorist networks,” for
example, often have very sophisticated encryption systems (as
well as deceptive new forms of “stegonography”) that, perhaps,
only NSA can detect and break!
Setting
and keeping just limits in the combat against terrorism is also
made difficult by the abstractness and equivocal nonspecificity
of the term. Terrorism is certainly much more undefined than,
for example, the strategic and psychological method of German
warfare known as “Blitzkrieg.” In World War II, however,
it would have been very strange indeed if we had called our
intervention a “Global War on Blitzkrieg.” So,
too, it is strange and confusing to speak now of a “Global War
on Terrorism” (GWOT). For terrorism, like Blitzkrieg, is
a method and strategy of warfare – and terrorism itself
is a form of political struggle and psychological
warfare. But, we may ask, how is one ever going to defeat
“psychological warfare” or the method of “terrorism”? And
how will we know we have won – what is our measure of victory?
Conversely, how will we know whether we have lost, or whether we
even seem to be losing? What are our proper criteria and
standards of judgment? Furthermore, what kind of war is
this “war against terrorism”? Carl von Clausewitz profoundly
observed that the most important question to be soberly
asked and honestly answered before one deliberately enters into
a war – or after one unexpectedly discovers himself already at
war – is, “What is the kind of war we are in”? For it is
true that if someone is at war with you – even if you don’t know
it – you’re at war! Reality is that which does not go away, even
when you stop thinking about it.
So in
this purported GWOT, who is the enemy? What are we trying to
protect, and why? What can we afford to lose, and how much will
it cost us? Furthermore, what is our measure of “cost” – and not
just of the material cost, but also of the moral
cost, and the long-term spiritual cost?
Moreover,
one cannot evaluate the appropriateness of one’s means towards a
specific and just end when one does not have any clarity about
the end itself, or the objective one is pursuing. What, for
example, is the specific objective – the specific end – of this
GWOT, and what are the most appropriate and well-disciplined
means towards this end? To what extent, for example, will
covert, pre-emptive, counter-terrorist operations (hence
preventative, aggressive “interdictions”) further conduce to
“total war”?
In the
long and articulate Western doctrinal tradition of just war, it
is essential and indispensable to have, first of all, clear,
specific, and finite aims in order to evaluate whether or not a
particular war is morally just. If these aims are undefined,
vague, or even intentionally equivocal and ambiguous, then one
cannot rationally measure how one’s chosen means are conducive
to achieving those ends. How can one measure the rightness and
the efficacy of one’s means for attaining a good end when the
end itself is often so suspiciously – even irrationally –
undefined? Especially when that end is remote, receding,
changing, and very vaguely open-ended? Such a capriciously
amorphous end appears to be a method of evasion, and may
constitute what the Germans lucidly call “eine Flucht nach
vorne” (“a fleeing forward”). Such an evasion of hard
thinking and clarity is an act of grave irresponsibility, if not
also an intrinsic act of irrationality.
It is, in
any case, hard to pass the test of a just war, to meet all
of the criteria. It is even harder to pass the test when the
test keeps changing. That is to say, when the criteria
themselves are ambiguously and equivocally manipulated, and when
we employ the presumptuous and dishonest “shifting-standards”
approach, i.e., applying a laxer standard to ourselves, and a
stricter standard to others.[3]
It is an act of cynicism, indeed, a cynical flippancy; and it is
always a temptation (an alluring incentive to evil and to
consequent disorder) to respond to the stresses of war by
saying, with a Machiavellian smirk: “Well, if you can’t pass the
test, change the test!” Yet it is a temptation to say just that:
“If we can’t pass the test, we’ll change the test.” (A
temptation wouldn’t be a temptation if it weren’t attractive!)
Our current GWOT has provided an example of, and altogether too
much “maneuver room” for, such cynical manipulations of
language. And it has led to our self-sabotaging over-extensions
of self-deception and blinding intellectual pride, whereby we
may soon be further “strutting to our confusion.”
For
example, by attacking Iraq the U.S. has actually aided Osama bin
Laden. If he is still alive (perhaps somewhere in Pakistan or
western, Muslim-permeated China), he must be very happy about
how the United States took the “bait” and helped him radicalize
the Muslim world against us. By our attacking into Iraq and
removing the regime of the secular Arab Ba’athists, the U.S., it
would seem, aided and abetted Osama bin Laden’s long-range
plans. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively acted as a proxy force –
though perhaps unwittingly – to advance the military strategic
and grand-strategic plans of bin Laden and his collaborators.
The United States’ pre-emptive intrusion into Iraq has fomented
a global Islamist insurgency against the United States and its
allies. It is now likely that the United States is even more
hated and despised in the Muslim world than the Israelis, and we
are also perceived to be more vulnerable to attack.
Furthermore, as a result of our “GWOT,” in combination with our
aggressive war against Iraq and our precarious occupation, the
United States is now even more centrifugally over-extended
abroad and at home. And we are thereby more multifariously
vulnerable to a wide range of “asymmetrical attacks” by way of
reprisal and vengeance. The Muslims know that if they do certain
things to Israel directly, Israel will turn Mecca and Medina
into dust! The Muslim world, however, does not fear such
desecrating responses or vengeful reprisals from the United
States.
Indeed,
the United States is perceived by many in the Muslim world (as
well as in China) to be truly weak and incapable of long-range,
sustained operations. In Fritz Kraemer’s memorable words, the
United States is perceived to have the problem of “provocative
weakness” – i.e., we are so weak (or are perceived to be
so weak) that we are provocative to others! Just as China has
long called the United States a “Paper Tiger,” so, too, we are
seen to be a “Rogue Superpower,” but with clay feet.
Such a
vulnerable strategic and moral position, whether actually or
only seemingly so, will likely make it more difficult for the
United States to set just limits in the conduct of its various
wars and expeditionary interventions. Moreover, to the extent
that the increasingly secularized, feverishly messianic, but
post-Christian and apostate United States wages large-scale
“cultural warfare,” or engages in the “clash of civilizations,”
against a growing, global Islamist insurgency, it will be even
more difficult for us to set and to keep just limits both in our
initiation and in our conduct of war. Many latent religious (or
ideological) passions will be inflamed in combination with
dangerous new forms of high-technology weapons.
Such a
war will likely be a long-range religious war – and not just a
“Hundred-Years War” – at least on the Muslim side. And if
someone is at war with you – especially if he is in a religious
war with you – even if you do not know it, you are at
war! Remember, reality is that which does not go away even if
you stop thinking about it. (Trotsky is supposed to have said:
“You might not be interested in war, but war is very interested
in you!”) An increasingly secularized American political
culture, moreover, cannot easily take the measure of foreign
religious cultures or “world-views” – an incapacity which might
produce very tragic results.
The
cultivation of the four traditional cardinal virtues – both
intellectual and moral virtues – may at least alleviate the
grave intellectual astigmatisms of the United States in its
current grand-strategic vulnerability.
Also by
way of strategic anticipation, one wise way to set and to keep
limits in the conduct of war – whether one consciously chooses
to enter into war or finds oneself already at war – is to
cultivate the largely forgotten and often misrepresented
first cardinal virtue of prudence (in Latin, Prudentia).
This indispensable intellectual and moral virtue is rooted in
“the knowledge of reality,” and no better introduction can be
found to it than Josef Pieper’s little book, entitled,
Prudence.
[4]
As Dr.
Pieper says:
To begin
with, only the prudent man can be brave. Fortitude [i.e., the
third cardinal virtue] without prudence is not
fortitude.... To mention fortitude and prudence in the same
breath seems in a measure to contradict modern man’s notion of
prudence and also of fortitude. This is partially due to the
fact that current usage does not designate quite the same thing
by “prudence” as classical theology understood by prudentia
[i.e., the virtue of far-sighted, practical wisdom] and
discretio [i.e., intellectual discernment, tact, and
disciplined discretion]. The term “prudence” has come to
mean rather the slyness which permits the cunning and “shrewd”
tactician to evade any dangerous risk to his person, and thus
escape injury and even the possibility of injury. To us,
prudence seems to be the false “discretion” and “cool
consideration” conjured up by the coward in order to be able to
shirk the test. To “prudence” thus conceived, fortitude seems
plainly unwise or stupid (emphasis mine).[5]
Properly
understood, the cardinal virtue of prudence means that truth
must not be taboo – no matter where the truth comes from.
For the truth is a “report from reality.” The virtue of prudence
is rooted in “the knowledge of reality,” which is then
morally converted to “the realization of the good” – and hence
to the realization of the “common good” (the Bonum Commune),
which is radically distinct from the mere “public interest”
or the “national interest.” The good, as such, is
much more inclusive and much more important than mere interest.
“In
truth,” says Josef Pieper, “fortitude [especially in a
protracted war!] becomes fortitude only through being ‘informed’
by prudence.”[6]
That is to say, by the specific reality of things, the specific,
concrete actualities of the real situation – without distortion
and in proper proportion. True prudence, in its perception of
reality, is not distorted by fevered (or messianic) ideologies
or sentimentalities.
Because
there is today so much manipulated selectivity, “spin,” and
subtle censorship (as well as “self-censorship,” which is both
fear-driven and intellectually stunting) in our public discourse
about matters of great moment, the indispensable pre-conditions
for truly practical wisdom are too often not existent. The
exercise of the cardinal virtue of prudence is thereby stunted
and stifled. It is a revealing sign, indeed, of the
decomposition of discourse, and the pervasiveness of sophistry,
and the subversion of Logos itself.
Others
may give us an example of virtue, to inspire our own resilience
and recovery. As a highly intelligent and robustly candid
Israeli Jewish author recently said in his book, Flowers of
Galilee: The Collected Essays of Israel Shamir, we must
strive not only for “the liberation of Palestine” but also for
“a broader goal as well: that of the liberation of Public
Discourse.”[7]
Shamir also introduces his own central thesis: “These essays
attempt to prove the inherent connection between two liberation
movements” (i.e., the liberation of Palestine, and the
liberation of Public Discourse from the Lie, from one lie after
another[8]).
He, like Josef Pieper, strives to attain to and communicate the
“knowledge of reality,” without lies, without deception, without
specious sophistry. The realization of the good – the true
common good – must be founded upon the knowledge of reality.
Wherever
the truth is taboo, however, it will be even harder to
set and keep just limits in war, especially in view of the
alluring and often tempting, advanced methods and technologies
of modern warfare. And sometimes – and increasingly so today it
would seem – certain truths are so taboo, that you even
can’t say that they’re taboo!
But,
without our liberation from the lie, without the liberation of
public discourse and a deeper respect for the Logos, we
shall not only not set just limits to the new methods and
weapons of war, but we shall also painfully perish from the
asphyxiation of untruth.
As
Alexsander Solzhenitsyn so courageously said, and vividly lived
out in his own life, we must “come out from under the rubble,”
and, even though we can take only one step at a time, “we must
not participate in the lie.” The lie must not advance because of
our co-operation or our negligence. Even if the truth is taboo,
we must not be in complicity with the lie.
With
respect to war and its moral limits, the burden of proof – the
moral and legal onus probandi – must be on those who
would destroy moral limits, on those who would remove limits or
weaken any sense of a just moral limit in war and its aftermath.
Truth matters – and so does the sober truth about modern weapons
and methods of war, so many of which derive from our advanced
sciences, often in “synergistic” combination or “consilience.”
And their sophisticated technological applications and
manipulations also include some very frightening, so-called
“non-lethal weapons.”[9]
The
combination of these new technologies with the intense passions
of religious and cultural warfare could easily constitute a very
dangerous and self-sabotaging “binary weapon.” If other
ingredients are added – such as the new materialist ideologies
of neuroscience and its applied eugenics of genetic engineering
– this “binary weapon” could become a “ternary weapon” or a
“quaternary weapon,” and therefore prove to be even more
intractable and dangerously “self-replicating” – another
contribution to the danger of “total war.”
After
World War II, the French dramatist and philosopher, Gabriel
Marcel, wrote a profound little book entitled, The Decline of
Wisdom. In the year 2004, the decline has gone even further.
Given this manifest decline of wisdom on many fronts, it is even
more important for us today that our focus be on the matter of
limits. And, once again, the burden of proof must be on those
who would weaken or remove limits.
A few
years ago, I visited a famous biological scientist, in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, in order to discuss with him various issues of
advanced biological warfare. That man was Dr. Stuart Kaufman,
who is also a scholar and theoretician of advanced “complexity
theory.” He said to me, during our visit, “A signal can easily
be turned into a poison.” Dr. Kaufman was speaking about the
risks of a very steep “slippery slope” – a “biological slippery
slope.” It includes the danger, at the “nano-scale level,” of
ungovernable “self-replication,” especially in the manipulations
of “molecular electronics.” And these new nanotechnologies are
already being applied in preparation for future forms of warfare
– a very dangerous development indeed.
Let the
civilian lawmakers and warriors beware!
Let us
come out from under the rubble and not live the lie. Let us
refuse the sophistical seductions or prohibition of discourse
that would deceive us and lure us to cross gravely perilous
thresholds – irreversibly.
Modern
military officers must have a very high standard of prudence and
fortitude. They must not allow truth to be taboo. They must
resist the lies and seductive sophistries of their civilian
masters and their sometimes-fevered ideologies, which are
“mind-forged manacles.” They must resist the lies and seductive
sophistries that come sometimes even from their own fellow
military leaders. And their public accountability must be kept
very high, given the easily intractable effects of modern war
and its fevered propensities to crack and to break limits; and
to do it, often enough, with immoral and reckless abandon.
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