This is not your father's war

One of the themes of my military analysis since 1991 has been the difference between modern war and post-modern war. Modern war, just all other phenomena of modern society, are preceeded by the word "mass". So when we speak of mass media, mass production, mass transit, or mass conscription, we are talking modernism. There are no clear boundaries to this period, since it was not ushured in by some revolutionary act, like the atomic age was, nor has it been displaced by some single event. Rather we should understand its rise and fall by analogy to its favorite fuel, coal. Coal was in use for a long time, for limited purposes, before becomming the fuel of mass production. Likewise we still use it a lot, though its importance has been eclipsed by oil. So we should see a gradual rise and fall of modernism in terms of the importance and prevelance of mass institutions. For example, before the modern age, entertainment was found in the home, often around the family piano or in group reading. Modern entertainments were unifying and conforming. We all listened or watched a small number of networks. While we many of us didn't tune in exclusively to the small number of networks, they were dominant culturally. The rise of FM, cable, and home playback (first as VCR's, then as DVD's, now TiVo) gave more power to the consumer and less to the producer, and this shift signals a problem for the modern producer and often heralds a shift to post-modern niche consumption. The Internet is the ultimate post modern media. Its the opposite of a conformity producing and unifying institution in which we all view the same websites. Rather its a huge variety of disparate kinds of experiences, from e-mail to expository sites to blogs written from as many perspectives as their are content producers (and according to PEW that's 44% of us). Without a group of editors responding to the same pressures, trainined in the same fashion, and often reflecting the same background and attitudes, there are few conforming pressures on the internet. Those that do exist tend to be in the nature of format, not content. There are standards, but they are mostly in terms of code, so that my machine can read your video file.

In terms of the military, the Great War is the quintessential modern war. Large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled soldiers, conscripted in mass, trained in mass, and deployed in mass. By WWII, we see more diversity in the kinds of jobs and the rise of highly trained specialists, like marines, paratroopers, tankers, special forces, and the normal jobs in the plain old infantry got more technical and complicated. Today, the doctrine of combat requires such highly trained soldiers that mass armies are obsolete. I posted on the draft specifically last August. Small highly trained forces are a smaller burden than large mass forces. The draft itself is only one example of this. The use of manpower no longer available to industry (because they are in uniform) is another.

The shift from sail to steam and then to dreadnaughts imposed two radical changes on seapower during the 19th century (which ends in 1914). Twice Britain was forced to rebuild her navy because new powers like Germany and America were able to build the new ships making the older ship's in Britain's fleet obsolete. Today, we have seen radical shifts in military practice, but one of the things that is most obvious is that no one but America is adapting to the new style of war. Where shifts in military technology not only helped challenge British sea power, and create powers who were willing to mobilize mass conscript armies, no one is poised to combine the high tech weapons with the tactical methods developed to produce the recently observed victories. There are no challengers to American military technique. This reinforces the notion that all future war will be asymetrical. The implications of this on American military planning are at least in part unforseen. As America takes the leading role in fighting asymetrical wars, this gap will grow.