The End of Gasoline Warfare

Last week’s discussion of American military vulnerabilities touched on one of the major issues that ought to be giving Pentagon officials sleepless nights—but only one of them The military downsides of America’s obsession with high-tech gizmos, in a world where complexity just gives the other guy more opportunities to mess with you, are no small matter, to be sure, but those downsides are taking shape in a wider context that has its own bad news to deliver to fans of US global dominance.

To make sense of that context, though, it’s going to be necessary to return briefly to a point I’ve made here more than once before, which is the pervasive misunderstanding of evolution you’ll find straight across the cultural landscape of today’s America. Since Darwin first proposed his eminently simple theory more than a century and a half ago—“How stupid not to have thought of it before,” Thomas Henry Huxley is reported to have said—the great majority of Americans, believers and critics alike, have insisted on redefining evolution as progress: what is “more evolved” is better, more advanced, more progressive than the competition.

Not so. Evolution is adaptation to changing circumstances, and that’s all it is. In some cases, evolution moves organisms in the direction of greater complexity, but in plenty of other cases it’s gone the other direction. Over the two billion years or so since the first self-replicating organisms first appeared on this planet, the no-holds-barred wrestling match between genetic variation and a frighteningly unstable environment has turned out some remarkably weird adaptations—pterodactyls, uintatheria, Khloe Kardashian—but they aren’t the organisms that endure over the long term.  The dragonflies who visit my backyard regularly haven’t changed much since the Devonian, the box turtle we see at intervals out front had relatives munching slugs in the Cretaceous, while the adolescent bat who got lost and ended up in our bedroom one morning a few weeks back would not have been out of place in the forests of the Eocene.  They and organisms like them are survivors because they found a good stable adaptation and stuck with it; while other organisms adapted in ways that turned out to be dead ends.

It’s precisely because evolution is adaptation to circumstances, no more and no less, that it’s possible—and indeed easy—to find precise analogues to Darwinian evolution in fields far removed from biology. War is one of these. Seen from a systems perspective, nations competing for survival, prosperity, and power show plenty of equivalencies to species doing the same thing for the same reasons, and war—now as always, the final arbiter of national survival—follows patterns of adaptation that a Darwinian analysis explains well.

The collapse of Bronze Age chariot warfare discussed a few posts back offers a useful example.  The chariot armies of the late Bronze Age were superbly adapted for their military environment, but like so many highly specialized life forms in evolutionary history, their adaptations limited their ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.  That limit proved to be fatal to many societies along the eastern Mediterranean littoral, and might well have done so even for Egypt if that ancient society had not been willing and able to return to an older and more resilient set of military adaptations.

Our chances are fairly high of witnessing an even more striking example of the same process in the not too distant future.  As discussed a while back in this series of posts, the current American way of war was originally pioneered by the German and Japanese militaries in the years before the Second World War, as both nations explored the extraordinary new possibilities that petroleum had opened up in war.  The destruction of the French army in the spring of 1940 by a German invasion force that had fewer men, cannons, and tanks than its Allied opponents put the world on notice that the old ways of war no longer mattered; the Japanese conquest of the entire western Pacific in a few weeks at the end of 1941 made that memo impossible to ignore, and the United States—to the lasting regret of Germany and Japan—proved to be a quick learner. 

The new warfare depended on the mobility that planes, tanks, and trucks made possible, but it had another dimension that is not always recognized.  The German conquest of France in 1940, for example, did not succeed because the Germans met and crushed the Allied armies in a head-on battle.  Rather, the panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht dodged the big battle the Allies wanted to fight on the plains of Belgium, and cut across France south of the Allied forces, breaking their communication and supply lines, while the Luftwaffe carried out air strikes to disorganize Allied units and crippled their ability to respond to a rapidly changing situation. Compare it to the US invasions of Iraq in 1990 and 2003 and it’s hard to miss the precise parallels; in both these cases, as in 1940 France, what handed a quick victory to the invaders was a strategy that focused on shredding the enemy government’s and military commanders’ ability to respond to the invasion.

The aftermath, though, is telling.  In 1940 as in 2003, the invader’s victory was followed promptly by a sustained insurgency against the occupying forces.  (The only reason that didn’t happen in 1990 was that the elder Bush and his generals had the great common sense to declare victory and get out.)  The same thing has happened far more often than not whenever gasoline warfare on the blitzkrieg model has taken place in the real world.

There are good reasons for that.  Military theorists have postulated any number of conditions that define victory in war, but in practice these all come down to one requirement, which is that the losing side has to be convinced that giving up the fight is the best option it has left.  That was the point of the old-fashioned pitched battle, in which one army offered battle at a chosen location, the other army accepted the invitation, both sides got into position, and then they hammered away at each other for a day or two until one side or the other had the stuffing pounded out of it.  After a few battles of that kind, everyone from the king to the lowliest foot soldier knew exactly which side was going to keep on beating the other if the war went on, and so a peace treaty was normally negotiated in short order. 

Gasoline warfare rarely has the same result.  For those on the losing side—I’m relying here especially on accounts by French and British officers who were in the Battle of France in 1940—the war is a roller-coaster ride through chaos; many, sometimes most, ground units never have the chance to measure their strength against the enemy in combat, because the other side has gone right past them and is deep behind their lines; orders from their own commanders are confused, contradictory, or never arrive at all; and then suddenly the war is over, the government has surrendered, and the other side is parading through Paris or Baghdad.  So there you are; your government’s will to resist may be broken, but yours isn’t, and pretty soon you’re looking around for ways to carry on the fight.  That way lies the French Resistance—or, for that matter, the Iraqi one.

This is why resistance movements sprang up so promptly in every nation conquered by Nazi Germany, and why insurgencies have done the same so often in nations conquered by the United States. It’s the natural result of a way of war that’s very good at bullying governments into fast collapse but very poor at convincing the ordinary grunt in uniform, or for that matter the ordinary person on the street, that the other side’s triumph ought to be accepted without further fuss. (Attentive readers will note here that the logic of the blitzkrieg is weirdly similar to that embraced more recently by believers in the sudden collapse of industrial society; in both cases, the words “what happens next” play an insufficiently large role in planning, and the possibility that people affected by a sudden collapse might do something to respond to it rarely seems to get a look in.)

It’s here that the Darwinian analysis of war mentioned earlier is most relevant, because insurgency is not a fixed thing.  It evolves over time, as different insurgent groups try new tactics, strategies and weapons, and draw on the experience of past insurgencies.  The evolution of insurgency, as it happens, dates from before the birth of gasoline warfare; it emerged as opponents of European colonial regimes in the Third World began to adapt the methods of European revolutionary warfare to the distinctive conditions of their time.  The new model of insurgency saw its first trial runs in South Africa and the Philippines right around 1900; both insurgencies were eventually defeated, but not without serious cost to the two imperial powers in question, and the lessons learned in those wars spread widely—it’s not accidental, for example, that the word “commando” entered military parlance in the very early 20th century from Afrikaans, where it was used for Boer insurgent groups fighting the British.

The evolutionary struggle between gasoline warfare and insurgency has been much discussed in recent years in military journals, although the label that’s been given to state of the art insurgency—“Fourth Generation warfare,” or 4GW for short—confuses far more than it reveals. The notion that military history can be divided into a set of neatly defined generations, each one of which supersedes the one before it, simply restates the contemporary myth of progress in another guise, and is just as arbitrary as narratives of progress normally are; though the technologies differ, 4GW was practiced by Elamite hill tribes against Babylonian armies more than three thousand years ago, and will doubtless still be being practiced by peoples on the periphery of empires as long as human societies are complex enough to support urban imperial centers. 

Despite the problems with the term, and with a good deal of the thinking that’s gathered around it, the debates aroud 4GW have brought up a crucial issue, which is that today’s insurgent groups have been at least as quick to innovate and to adopt the latest technology as their well-funded opponents in the Pentagon and its equivalents elsewhere. Darwinian selection works just as effectively on insurgencies as on species, and the mechanism is much the same—a constant pressure on ecological boundaries, which sooner or later stumbles across every available option for greater success at the hard work of survival.  So far, the military bureaucracies in the world’s great powers have been able to stay more or less abreast of the resulting transformations, but their situation has a lot in common with that of physicians today faced with antibiotic-resistant bacteria:  you can keep on inventing new antibiotics for a while, but the law of diminishing returns is always working against you, the germs are gaining ground, and you know that sooner or later something lethal, communicable, and resistant to all known antibiotics is pretty much certain to make an appearance.

Exactly what form the next military revolution will take is an interesting question.  Some days I suspect that a first draft of it was field-tested by the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon in 2006. To deal with an invasion by an Israeli Army as thoroughly committed to gasoline warfare as any army on earth, Hezbollah adopted a strategy that could probably be called preventive insurgency.  Soldiers, weapons, ammunition and supplies were carefully stashed in underground hideouts all over southern Lebanon in advance of the Israeli invasion, where they could wait out the aerial bombardment and the initial assault, and then popped up unexpectedly behind Israeli lines with guns and antitank rocket launchers blazing.  While both sides claimed victory in the resulting struggle, the fight was nothing like as one-sided as Israel’s two earlier invasions of Lebanon had been Could the same strategy be taken further, and turned into a wickedly effective defense in depth against a conventional invasion?  I suspect so.

On other days, I remember the war between Libya and Chad in 1987, when Libya was a client state of the Soviet Union and had an extensive army and air force equipped with secondhand Russian tanks and planes, and Chad had an army equipped mostly with Toyota pickups packing 50-caliber machine guns, rocket launchers, and half a dozen infantrymen in back.  The Chadian forces won an overwhelming victory, whipping around the Libyan forces via goat trails in the mountains and leaving the plains of northern Chad littered with burning Libyan tanks.  Those armed pickups are called “technicals” in African jargon, and it’s a term you may want to remember; for decades now, they’ve been standard military vehicles all over the continent, and my guess is that it’s only a matter of time before they start being used elsewhere in the world.  Could an army equipped with technicals, and with antiaircraft and antitank rocket launchers a little more sophisticated than the ones in common use just now, copy the Chadian victory against a major power?  Again, I suspect so.

Whether or not these speculations have any bearing on the way things work out, though, the age of gasoline warfare that began with Stukas screaming out of the sky in the spring of 1940 is guaranteed to come to an end sooner or later.  There are two reasons that can be said with a fair degree of assurance. First, of course, is the simple fact that every way of making war eventually runs into something it can’t handle.  If military history shows anything, it’s that the invincible army of one era is the crow food of the next, and far more likely than not the switchover has nothing to do with technological progress; it simply takes a certain amount of time for potential enemies to stumble on whatever trick or tactic will do the job. 

Still, even this factor is less certain than the other, which is that gasoline warfare is only possible in the presence of ample supplies of gasoline. More generally, the contemporary American way of war can only continue if huge amounts of relatively cheap energy can be provided, not only to fuel planes and tanks and ships, but to support the immense infrastructure that makes modern war possible. As that surplus of energy wanes, so will gasoline warfare, and the successful military powers of the future will be those that can figure out ways to project power and win battles with less of an outlay of energy and raw materials than their rivals.

To be sure, some amount of gasoline or the equivalent will be going into war for a very long time to come—the advantages provided by the internal combustion engine are real enough that gasoline will probably still be being used for military purposes long after the private automobile has retreated into legend. My guess, though, is that the last gallons of gasoline to used in warfare will be fueling technicals, not tanks—and long before that happens, a way of war dependent on the extravagant consumption of energy and raw materials will have gone whistling down the wind alongside a civilization that tried to support itself on the same unsustainable basis.

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It has been three years now since I took a break from these weekly essays, and for a number of reasons, now’s a good time not to take that any further. The fictional scenario that was going to be the last post in this series of three has unexpectedly grown into an extended narrative five posts long, one that needs to be filled out by a good deal of further research; I also have a contract, finally, for the Green Wizardry book project, and a major writing project on the other side of my career, both of which could use some concentrated attention just now.

This will therefore be the last Archdruid Report post until the beginning of October. I’ll be responding to comments on this post for the next week or so, but after that, you’re on your own for the month of September. Put the time you’d spend reading these essays into digging in your gardens, building solar ovens, learning to brew beer, or in some other way developing skills that will help you weather the opening years of the deindustrial age, and you’ll be ahead of the game. See you again on October 3!

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And for those who are worried about missing their weekly dose of apocalyptic fantasy...

End of the World of the Week #37, #38, #39, #40, and #41

Until recently, at least, the usual way to come up with an apocalyptic prediction was to figure out first how the world was going to end, and then try to figure out the date when that would happen. The current 2012 hysteria has taken the opposite approach, first choosing a date and then trying to find some cataclysm or other to justify it—but it’s not quite the first time this latter method saw use.

No, that honor belongs to the redoubtable Charles Berlitz, one of the leading authors in the rejected-knowledge field in the late 20th century.  Berlitz was the man who invented the Bermuda Triangle and rescued the supposed Roswell flying saucer crash from oblivion, so he unquestionably had the skills needed for his apocalyptic magnum opus, Doomsday: 1999 A.D..

How would the world end that year?  Berlitz was nothing if not open-minded.  A convulsion at the earth’s core might cause cataclysmic earthquakes, or an overload of ice at the South Pole might destabilize the crust and send it skidding over the mantle, moving all the continents into new positions and causing earthquakes and floods; a sudden ice age might sweep the globe, plunging much of the northern hemisphere into a deep freeze; there might be a nuclear war, or the earth might get swatted by an asteroid or a really big comet. Hey, it could even be more than one!

Now of course there was no reason to think that any of these things were more likely to arrive in 1999 than in any other year, and with three of the five, there are very good reasons to think that they can’t happen at all. Still, it made for a very successful book—until 1999 came and went uneventfully, that is—and the same logic Berlitz offered is being used today to argue that one or more of an even more diverse flurry of world-ending events will infallibly arrive on December 21 of this year. 

—for more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse Not

The Monkeywrench Wars

Among science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s many gifts was a mordant sense of humor, and a prime example of that gift in action was his 1951 short story Superiority. It’s the story of a space war told by the commanding general of the losing side; he is explaining to some interstellar equivalent of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal how his forces managed to lose. 

The question is of some interest, as the space fleets and resources of the losing side were far superior to those of the victors. So, however, was their technology.  "However" is the operative word, for each brilliantly innovative wonder weapon fielded by their scientists turned out to have disastrous downsides when put into service, while the winning side simply kept on churning out unimaginative space battleships using old but proven technology.  By the time the losing side realized that it should have done the same thing, it was so far behind that only a new round of wonder weapons seemed to offer any hope of victory—and a little more of that same logic finished them off.

It’s been suggested by more than one wit that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life. The United States military these days seems intent on becoming a poster child for that proposal. Industrial design classes at MIT used to hand out copies of "Superiority" as required reading; unfortunately that useful habit has not been copied by the Pentagon, and as a result, the US armed forces are bristling with brilliantly innovative wonder weapons that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.

The much-ballyhooed Predator drone is one good example among many.  For those who don’t follow military technology, it’s a remote-controlled plane designed to fly at rooftop level, equipped with a TV camera and missiles.  The operator, sitting in an air-conditioned office building in Nevada, can control it anywhere on Earth via satellite uplink, seek out suspected terrorists, and vaporize them.  Does it work?  Well, it’s vaporized quite a few people; the Obama administration is even more drone-happy than its feckless predecessor, and has been sending swarms of drones around various corners of the Middle East to fire missiles at a great many suspected terrorists.

You’ll notice that this has done little to stabilize the puppet governments we’ve got in the Middle East these days, and even less to decrease the rate at which American soldiers are getting shot and blown up in Afghanistan.  There’s a reason for that.  The targets for drone attacks have to be selected by ordinary intelligence methods—terrorists don’t go around with little homing beacons on them, you know—and ordinary intelligence methods have a relatively low signal-to-noise ratio.  As a result, a lot of wedding parties and ordinary households get vaporized on the suspicion that there might be a terrorist hiding in there somewhere.  Since tribal custom in large parts of the Middle East makes blood vengeance on the murderers of one’s family members an imperative duty, and there are all these American soldiers conveniently stationed in Afghanistan—well, you can do the math for yourself.

Thus the Predator drone isn’t a war-fighting technology, it’s a war-losing technology, pursued with ever-increasing desperation by a military and political establishment that has no idea what to do but can’t bear the thought of doing nothing.  The same logic drove the policy of torture so disingenuously defended by the Bush administration.  (Yes, waterboarding is torture. Anyone who wishes to disagree is welcome to undergo the procedure themselves and then offer an informed opinion.) Beyond the moral issues, there’s a practical point that’s far from minor:  torture doesn’t work.  It’s not an effective way of extracting accurate information from prisoners; it’s an effective way of making prisoners say what the torturer wants to hear—I recall the comment of the elderly Knight Templar, after his session on the rack, that in order to get his torturers to stop he would readily have confessed to murdering God. 

Thus torture is another war-losing technology.  Technically speaking, it’s a good way to maximize confirmation bias, which is what cognitive psychologists call the habit of looking for evidence that supports your presuppositions rather than testing those presuppositions against the real world.  It appeals powerfully to the sort of squeaky-voiced machismo that played so large a role in the Bush administration’s foreign policy, but wars are not won by imposing one’s own delusions on a global battlefield; they’re won by figuring out what’s out there in the world, and responding to it.

They’re also won by remembering that what’s out there in the world is also responding to you.  To grasp how this works, it’s going to be necessary to talk about systems again—specifically, about the three ways a system can mess you over.

There may be official names for these somewhere, but I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing terminology from Discordianism, and calling them chaos, discord, and confusion. For a timely example of chaos, it’s hard to do better than Tropical Storm Isaac, which is churning its way into the eastern Caribbean as I write this. As systems go, a tropical storm is a fairly simple one—basically, a heat engine in which all the moving parts are made of air and water, with a few feedback loops linking it to its environment.  Those loops are what make it chaotic; a tropical storm’s behavior is determined by its environment, but its environment is constantly being reshaped by the tropical storm, so that perturbations too small to track or anticipate can spin out of control and drive major shifts in size, speed and direction.

Thus you can never know exactly where a tropical storm is going to go, or how hard it’s going to hit. The most you can know is where, on average, storms like the one you’re watching have tended to go, and what they’ve done when they got there.  That’s chaos:  unpredictability because the other system’s interactions with its environment are too complex to be accurately anticipated.

If we shift attention from Tropical Storm Isaac to the latest recall of bacteria-tainted produce, we move from chaos to discord.  Individually, bacteria are nearly as dumb as storms, but a species of bacteria taken as a whole has a curious analogue to intelligence.  All living systems are value-oriented—that is, they value some states (such as staying alive) more than other states (such as becoming dead) and take actions to bring about the states they value.  That makes them considerably more challenging to deal with than storms, because they take active steps to counter any change that threatens their survival.

That’s the factor that drives the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, for example. Successful microbe species maintain a constant pressure on their ecological boundaries via genetic variation.  The DNA dice are constantly rolling, and it doesn’t matter if the odds against the combination of genes they need to survive in an antibiotic-rich environment  are in the millions-to-one range; as long as they aren’t driven to extinction, they’ll roll boxcars sooner or later.  That’s discord:  unpredictability because the other system is constantly modifying its own behavior to pursue values that conflict with yours.

Compare bacterial evolution to the behavior of a tropical storm and the difference between chaos and discord is easy to grasp.  Tropical storms aren’t value-oriented; they simply respond in complicated ways to subtle changes in environmental conditions they themselves play a part in causing.  Imagine, though, a tropical storm that started seeking out patches of warm water and moving away from wind shear, so it could prolong its own existence and increase in strength.  That’s what all living things do, from bacteria to readers of The Archdruid Report.  Tropical storms don’t, which is a good thing; there would be a lot more cataclysmic hurricanes if they did.

To go to the next level, let’s imagine an ecosystem of living tropical storms: seeking out the warm water that feeds them, dodging the wind shear that can kill them, and competing against other storms.  That’s all in the realm of discord.  Imagine, though, that a storm that achieves hurricane status becomes conscious and capable of abstract thought.  It can think about the future and make plans.  It becomes aware of other hurricanes, and realizes that those other hurricanes can frustrate its plans if they can figure out the plans in time to do something about them. The result is confusion:  uncertainty because the other system is deliberately trying to fool you.

It’s crucial to grasp that what I’ve called chaos, discord, and confusion are fundamentally different kinds of uncertainty, and the tricks that will help you deal with one will blow up in your face if you apply them to the others. Statistical analysis, for instance, can give you a handle on a chaotic system:  meteorologists trying to predict the movements of a storm can study the trajectories of past storms and get a good idea of where the storm is most likely to go. Apply that to bacteria, and you’ll be blindsided sooner or later, because the bacteria are constantly generating genetic novelty and thus shifting the baseline on which the statistics rely.  Apply it to an enemy in war, and you’ve made a lethal mistake; once your enemy figures out what you’re expecting, they’ll play along to lull you into a sense of false security, and then come out of the blue and stomp you.

This bit of systems theory is relevant here because American culture has a very hard time dealing with any kind of uncertainty at all. That’s partly the legacy of Newtonian science, which saw itself—or at least liked to portray itself in public—as the quest for absolutely invariant laws of nature.  If X occurs, then Y must occur:  that sort of statement is the paradigmatic form of knowledge in industrial societies.  One of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century was the expansion of science into fields that can only be known statistically—quantum mechanics, meteorology, ecology, and more. Even there, though, the lure of the supposedly invariant has been a constant source of trouble, while those fields that routinely throw discord and confusion at the researcher are by and large the fields that have remained stubbornly resistant to scientific inquiry and technological control.

It also explains a good bit of why the United States has stumbled from one failed counterinsurgency after another since the Second World War.  There’s more to it than that—I’ll explain next week why the American way of war guarantees that any country invaded and occupied by the United States is sure to pup an insurgency in short order—but the American military fixation on certainty and control, part and parcel of the broader American obsession with these notions, has gone a long way to guarantee the litany of failures. You can’t treat a hostile country like a passive object that will respond predictably to your actions.  You can’t even treat it as a chaotic system that can more or less be known statistically. At the very least, you have to recognize that it will behave as a discordant system, and react to your actions in ways that support its values, not yours: for example, by shooting or blowing up randomly chosen American soldiers to avenge family members killed by a Predator drone.

Still, it’s crucial to be aware of the possibility of the third level of uncertainty, the one that I’ve called confusion. Any hypothesis you come up with, if it becomes known or even suspected by the enemy, becomes a tool he can use to clobber you.  The highly political and thus embarrassingly public nature of American military doctrine and strategy pretty much guarantees that this will happen—does anyone really believe, for example, that the Taliban weren’t reading online news stories about the upcoming American "surge" for months before it happened, and combining that with information from a global network of intelligence sources to get a very clear picture of what was coming and how to deal with it?

So far, the consequences of confusion have been limited, because the United States has been careful to pick on nations that couldn’t fight back.  We could pound the rubble in Vietnam and Iraq, invade Panama and Grenada, and stage revolutions in Libya and a bunch of post-Communist nations, because we knew perfectly well that the worst they could do in response was kill a bunch of American soldiers. Several trends, though, suggest that this period of relative safety may be coming to an end. 

The spread of digital technology is part of it—the ease with which Iraqi insurgents figured out how to use cell phones to trigger roadside bombs is only the first foreshock of a likely tectonic shift in warfare, as DIY electronics meets DIY weapons engineering to produce cheap, homemade equivalents of smart bombs and Predator drones.  The United States’ increasing dependence on the rest of the world is another part—the number of soft targets that, if destroyed, would deal a punishing blow to America’s economy has soared in recent years, and a great many of those targets are scattered around the world, readily accessible to those with a grudge and a van full of fertilizer. Still, there’s a third factor, and it’s a function of the increasingly integrated and highly technological American military machine.

As the most gizmocentric culture in recorded history, America was probably destined from the start to end up with a military system in which most uniformed personnel operate machinery, and every detail of making war involves a galaxy of high-tech devices.  The machines and devices have been so completely integrated into military operations that they are necessities, not conveniences; I’ve been quietly informed by several people in the militaries of the US and its allies that a failure of the GPS satellite system, for example, would cripple the ability of a US military force to do much of anything. It’s far from the only such vulnerability.  Today’s US military is tightly integrated with a global technological infrastructure of fantastic complexity.  That structure is immensely powerful and efficient...but longtime readers of this blog will recall that efficiency is the opposite of resilience.

That’s why I discussed the abrupt termination of Bronze Age chariot warfare by javelin-throwing raiders in last week’s post.  If you have to fight an enemy armed with an extremely efficient military technology, one of the most likely ways to win is to find and target some previously unexploited weakness in the technology itself.  Complex as they were by the standards of the time, chariots had a very modest number of vulnerabilities, one of which the Sea Peoples attacked and exploited. By contrast, the hypercomplex American military machine is riddled with potential vulnerabilities—weak points that a hostile force might be able to monkeywrench in some unexpected way.

Surely, you may be thinking by this point, the Pentagon is thinking about this as well. No doubt they are, but the famous military penchant for endlessly refighting the last really successful war and the tendency for weapons systems to develop political constituencies that keep them in service long after they’re obsolete militate against a meaningful response.  US military planners in recent decades have followed the lead of the sciences to embrace the form of uncertainty I’ve called chaos, and so you get plenty of scenarios of future war that extrapolate current trends out fifteen or fifty years, with a few new bits of gosh-wow technology and a large role reserved for weapons systems such as carriers with constituencies that have enough clout.  The thought that hostile forces may be evolving resistance to our military equivalent of antibiotics rarely gets a look in, and the thought that at least some of those hostile forces may be reading those same scenarios and brainstorming ways to toss a monkeywrench into the machinery—well, let’s just say that making such suggestions will be about as helpful for the career of a military officer today as the same habit was for Col. Billy Mitchell back in the day.

This is one reason why I have come to believe that of the shocks that could cause the US empire to collapse, one of the most likely is a disastrous and unexpected military defeat.  At this point, very nearly the only thing that maintains US power, and the disproportionate share of the world’s wealth that is the payoff of that power, is our eagerness to pound the bejesus out of Third World nations at the drop of a hat.  If we lose that capacity, we could end up neck deep in kim chee very quickly indeed.

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End of the World of the Week #36

There’s a tendency to assume that people who buy into end-of-the-world prophecies are, shall we say, a couple of horsemen short of an apocalypse. History, though, shows that it’s entirely possible to be very bright and still buy into the apocalypse meme. Among the leading examples is the redoubtable John Napier (1550-1617), who combined a fascination with apocalyptic prophecy with a well-earned reputation as one of the great mathematicians of all time.

Does that latter description sound exaggerated?  It isn’t.  This is the man who invented the decimal point. Oh, and logarithms. Not to mention one of the first practical mechanical calculating devices, the once-famous Napier’s Bones. We won’t even get into his remarkable innovations in spherical trigonometry. The point that matters for this discussion is his very careful, elegant, mathematically exact calculations of the end of the world.

Like nearly everyone in 16th-century Scotland, he took the Book of Revelations seriously, and turned the same penetrating intellect on its mysteries that he used with better results on the properties of numbers. After years of careful calculation, he determined that the Second Coming of Christ would occur either in 1688 or in 1700.  Fortunately, Napier’s reputation rests on more durable grounds, for both years passed without the faintest sound of Gabriel’s trumpet.

—for more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse Not