---
This process began in Korea after 1950, where the war ended in a standoff despite the nominal vast superiority of the United States' military power, and the Pentagon discovered that great space combined with guerrilla warfare was more than a match for it in Vietnam, where the US was defeated. Both wars caused the US military and establishment strategists to reflect on the limits of high-tech warfare, and for a time it seemed as if appropriate lessons would be learned and costly errors not repeated.
The conclusion drawn from these major wars should have been that there were decisive limits to US military and political power, and that the United States should drastically tailor its foreign policy and cease intervening anywhere it chose to. In short, it was necessary to accept the fact that it could not guide the world as it wished to. But such a conclusion, justified by experience, was far too radical for either of the United States' two main political parties to embrace fully, and military contractors never ceased promising the ultimate new weapon. America's leaders and military establishment in the wake of September 11, 2001, argued that technology would rescue the country from more political failures. But such illusions - fed by the technological fetishism that is the hallmark of their civilization - led to the Iraq debacle.
There has now been a qualitative leap in technology that makes all inherited conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy, utterly irrelevant, not just to the US but to any other nation that embarks upon it.
Technology is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences - not to mention traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and US experts believe that the Iranians compelled the group to keep in reserve the far more powerful and longer-range cruise missiles it already possesses. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these missiles, and US experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying aircraft-carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable. <1>
---
Asia Times
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
