Victor Davis Hanson and the new age of warfare.
VDH says we don’t have a new age of warfare. This war reminds him of the Peleponnesian War. (*) Limb-lopping, terrorism, hostage-taking, and more all happened before.
The reason we say this is a new age of warfare, though, is not that there are new tactics. Instead, we base the statement on the nature of warfare being linked to the form of the political state. New forms of warfare create a need for people to turn to new and different political entities to protect themselves from war. This is a simplistic statement derived from Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles.
Military theorists that speak of 4GW (Fourth Generation Warfare) tend to base their take on technological change over time. That turns out to not be terribly dissimilar from Bobbitt’s Shield theory.
The import is that Al Qaeda–a formless, shapeless ideologic-centric organization that nonetheless is capable of leveraging technology in the hands of a few to wreak destruction that previously only large armies could have done–may have found a way to defeat, specifically, the post-Cold War form of the parliamentary democracy. To translate broadly and imprecisely, it is possible that Western liberal democracy is headed for the chopping block unless we rethink and reconstruct the nation state into some other form of state that can defeat an Al Qaeda-like organization.
In Shield, Bobbitt proposes the market state. Here on this web log I’ve stated that I am skeptical of the market state concept, and that we therefore need to keep looking, and in the meantime pound Al Qaeda as hard as we can militarily to buy time to rethink and rebuild our defenses here in the free countries.