[RRE]Imagining the Next War

From: Phil Agre (pagreat_private)
Date: Thu Sep 13 2001 - 20:22:59 PDT

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      Imagining the Next War:
      Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy
    
      Phil Agre
      http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
    
      14 September 2001
      4300 words
    
    
    When political leaders refer to Tuesday's attacks in New York and
    Washington as "war", what do they mean?  It used to be that our
    concept of war was defined by a set of boundaries.  Nation-states
    fought wars to defend their borders.  They fielded armies, and
    those armies fought along front lines.  Soldiers were separate from
    civilians, and the military domain was separate from the civilian
    domain.  Soldiers ran the war from day to day; the civilian leadership
    gave the big orders and sat back.
    
    Those boundaries no longer apply, as much evidence shows:
    
    (1) If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you get into their
    infrastructure.  You don't have to be a nation state to do it, and
    if they retain any capacity for retaliation then it's probably better
    if you're not.
    
    (2) Because the fighting is all on television, the fine details of
    the fighting become political matters.  Soldiers complain bitterly
    about politicians' interference, not understanding that technology
    has eliminated their zone of professional autonomy.  The politicians
    are *right* to be interfering.
    
    (3) The US military thought that the Republicans would save them from
    the Democrats' boundary-breaching conceptions of the 21st century
    world, but Donald Rumsfeld's abortive reform efforts -- which are
    really attempts to transpose the traditionally narrow view of military
    affairs into a science-fiction key -- have only clarified how archaic
    the traditional conception of warfare really is.
    
    (4) During the campaign, George W. Bush harshly criticizied the
    "nation-building" activities to which military personnel have been
    assigned in Kosovo and elsewhere.  The truth was that nation-building
    is a geopolitical necessity in a totally wired world, and that the
    soldiers themselves *like* serving in Kosovo -- they know that they
    are doing something useful for once.  The nation-building goes on.
    
    (5) In the old days, the industry that produced military equipment
    was almost entirely separate from the industry that produced civilian
    equipment.  But economies of scale in the production of technology,
    especially information and communications technologies, have grown
    so great that the military must buy much of its equipment from the
    civilian market, even though the civilian equipment is not hardened
    for military purposes (or even, in the case of computer security, for
    civilian purposes).
    
    (6) Even airplane hijackings have lost their old boundaries.  It
    is becoming clear that the people in the plane that crashed in rural
    Pennsylvania had extensive communications to the ground, and knew
    about the first attack on the World Trade Center.  Boundarylessness
    in that sense actually defeated the hijackers, at least to that small
    degree.  We have become so accustomed to boundarylessness that we
    didn't find it even faintly odd that people in hijacked airplanes were
    have complicated telephone conversations with people on the ground,
    saying goodbyes to their families, and so on.  The whole institution
    of airplane hijackings now has a new script, replacing the one from
    the 1970s.
    
    Thus far, however, we have not been compelled as a society to define
    what we mean by "war" in this weirdly pervious world.  Of course,
    defense intellectuals have not been short on definitions.  Many of
    them claim to rue the loss of these boundaries, even as they embrace
    a conception of military matters that includes absolutely everything.
    War, on these expanded conceptions, no longer needs to be conducted
    between states.  Privately funded groups can wage war, "asymmetric"
    to be sure but destructive all the same.  Even lone individuals can
    engage in acts of "war", and the individuals who released the Code
    Red worms may have inflicted economic damage (at least according
    to reported estimates, and not including of course the damage in
    human terms) comparable to that of the people who attacked the World 
    Trade Center and the Pentagon.  The defense intellectuals have also
    expanded the definition of "war" to include many domains besides
    the mutual killing of soldiers and blowing up of ships and factories.
    One speaks, for example, of "cultural war".  Some military experts
    even lecture on political opposition as a form of "war", explicitly
    treating nonviolence within the same doctrinal framework in which
    they talk about invasion and bombing.
    
    War, in this broadened sense, is everywhere and everything.  It is
    large and small.  It has no boundaries in space or time.  Life itself
    is war.  The soldier's zone of autonomy returns, but nothing else
    is left.  Notice, however, that the defense intellectuals' conception
    of boundaryless war is not the only one possible.  It holds no place,
    for example, for "nation-building" activities, or for the integration
    of political and military concerns that military officers complain
    about.  Far from replacing the traditional conception of the military,
    the new conception generalizes it.
    
    Referring to the attacks on the east coast as "war" gives expression
    to our emotions about them, and feels proportional to the magnitude
    of the atrocity.  But if the definition of "war" has shifted beneath
    us, then a declaration of war is an even graver matter than it used to
    be.  Let us take a moment, then, to ask what we are getting ourselves
    into.  The Bush administration started using the language of "war"
    well before they were willing to say who they thought was responsible
    for the attacks.  That in itself is probably not unprecedented; the
    idea of something mysteriously blowing up is hardly new.  What is less
    precedented is the lack of any clear suspect who was either a foreign
    nation state or a domestic organization.  Suspicion from the beginning
    has falled on a man named Osama bin Laden, and reasonably enough given
    his involvement in earlier attacks.  But even to assign responsibility
    to this one man is entirely misleading, since bin Laden, at best,
    operates at the center of a far-flung and loosely-knit network of
    individuals who are united more by philosophy than by organization.
    They are certainly not a hierarchical military along the traditional
    lines -- lines that Western militaries have themselves long abandoned
    for many purposes.
    
    The problem posed by this nontraditional terrorist "enemy" has
    often been understood in purely military terms: how do you destroy
    something that has so little connective tissue?  If you blow it up,
    it just grows right back.  The United States has plenty of experience
    fighting loosely organized opponents, for example in Vietnam, and that
    experience is not good.  Nor was the Russian experience in Afghanistan
    any better.  But the new situation is even worse, and in several
    ways.  We are not going to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers
    to Afghanistan.  I'd be surprised if we send hundreds.  And whatever
    we do, every step will be on television.  Everyone involved will
    have cellular telephones.  We will be doing the messiest thing in
    the world, and we will be doing it in the most visible possible way.
    
    But we should also understand the problem in political terms.  What
    does it mean as a *political* matter to declare war on a network?
    This, it seems to me, is the greatest danger of all.  The only moral
    justification for war is to preserve the conditions of democracy.
    Revenge is not a sufficient motive, except insofar as it preserves
    the conditions of democracy by serving as a deterrent.  Otherwise the
    matter should be treated as a crime and handled by the institutions
    of the police and criminal courts.  Are the conditions of democracy
    in fact under threat?  It is possible that they are, and I would
    expect the government to present enough evidence of such a threat
    before placing the country in a condition of war.  The question of
    justification is particularly important in the present case given
    the dubious conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the office
    of the president.  His continued rule is also a significant threat
    to the conditions of democracy, even though his methods were largely
    nonviolent.
    
    Let us say, then, that George W. Bush commences a war against Osama
    bin Laden, or even against the greater abstraction of "terrorism".
    What happens then?  A state of war is a serious thing.  States of
    war have routinely been used to justify censorship, the curtailing
    of civil liberties, and the repression of dissidents.  States of war
    are also understood to require the opposition in the legislature to
    moderate its otherwise essential functions of criticism.  Calls are
    issued to stand behind the political leadership and to display unity,
    with the implication that the enemy is watching and that failure to
    unite is tantamount to treason.  These are not healthy conditions for
    a democracy; indeed, they are the opposite of democracy.
    
    War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that
    the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy
    would resume once their conditions had been reestablished.  Civil
    liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not
    entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their
    scope while retaining their same overall form.  Even in conditions
    of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and
    civilian sides of society are maintained.  But war, we are told, no
    longer works that way.  No such boundaries are possible.  It follows,
    therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning
    or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and
    civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice,
    not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually.  If we
    conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to
    declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy.  War, in this
    new sense, can never be justified.
    
    In reality, the problem here does not originate with technology
    and the military doctrines that respond to it.  It is in the nature
    of democracy that its conditions are contested.  The conditions
    of democracy are institutional, first of all, and institutions are
    human things.  They live nowhere but in people's minds, and in the
    language, artifacts, and practices by which people deal with one
    another.  Democracy, like every institution, is something that people
    collectively learn to do.  It is a skill.  Its central conditions are
    intellectual: people continually reproduce the skills of democracy
    if they continue to believe in it.  Democracy rests on beliefs.  Yet
    the beliefs at the foundation of democracy are themselves controversial.
    They are reargued most visibly when prominent legal controversies
    come before constitutional courts.  But they are also reargued every
    time that the institutions themselves are used.  Democracy is an
    institutional framework for the conduct of disputes among organized
    interests, and the groundrules that this framework provides must be
    interpreted and applied in the case of each dispute that comes along.
    
    The ideal of formal democracy as dispute within an agreed framework
    of rules is taught in school, but in the real world of democracy the
    combatants have fundamentally different visions of what that framework
    should be.  Democrats believe that the people can and should govern
    themselves, and that all institutions should be reformed to provide
    a high degree of access and participation to the people whose lives
    they affect.  Conservatives, by contrast, believe that society should
    be organized hierarchically and directed by a narrow elite, and that
    institutions should be invested with a high degree of authority to
    which the people reflexively defer.  Conservatives differ on the
    question of whether the formal institutions of democracy are valuable
    and should be retained, but their main emphasis is on circumscribing
    those institutions in both their processes and their powers.
    
    Conservatism has come in recent centuries to be overlaid with a
    liberal philosophy whose keyword is "freedom", and the conservative
    movement must continually renegotiate the borderlines between
    authority and freedom as organizing principles of society.  But the
    freedom that conservatism dictates is first and foremost the freedom
    of the market.  And conservatism in actual practice rarely conforms
    to idealized pictures of the free market, given that large business
    interests tend to be central to any conservative political coalition.
    The longstanding tradition of business rent-seeking under conservative
    rule reasserted itself from the opening days of the Bush government,
    in the guise for example of subsidies to the oil industry to promote
    energy development that the market was already providing for, and
    we can expect that rent-seeking to intensify in the conditions of
    intimate government-industry relationship that characterize war.
    Business managers, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to
    return profits to their stockholders by whatever means, whether
    legitimate commerce or lobbying, represents the best return on
    investment, and undermining the conditions of democracy has proven a
    solid investment over many years.  Libertarians who join conservative
    coalitions are simply trading one form of government interference in
    the market for another.
    
    The almost inherent crisis of democracy, and the actual nature of
    conservatism, become clearest in conditions of war.  The conditions
    of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism,
    and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the
    possibility of war arises.  Conservatism has always been profoundly
    opposed to the popular exercise of reason, supposing it to lead
    inevitably to tyranny, and wartime is ideally suited for the absolute,
    polarized, us-and-them forms of thinking that are the opposite of
    rational thought.  In this sense, democracy as such is profoundly
    threatened by an absolute evil such as Stalin's regime in the Soviet
    Union or the attack on the World Trade Center -- not because of the
    military danger it poses, real as that may be, but because of the
    danger that it poses to the collective reason of a democratic polity.
    Indeed, the depth of the danger was already clear before the attack,
    for example in Rush Limbaugh's astonishing argument that the leader
    of the democratic opposition, Tom Daschle, resembled Satan simply
    because he opposed all of George W. Bush's policies.  And it has
    become clearer since the attack in the argument by many prominent
    conservatives that the coming wartime condition will require a
    diminution of civil liberties.
    
    The new military doctrine of war as a total phenomenon -- war without
    boundaries -- is nothing except conservatism.  It is conservatism
    expressed in different language, rediscovered starting from different
    concerns, but it is the antithesis of democracy in the same way that
    conservatism is.  Yet military officers in democratic countries are
    often ambivalent about the new doctrine.  They understand that the
    legitimacy of the military as an institution rests on its claim to
    preserve the conditions of democracy, and they understand more clearly
    than most civilians the potential for institutional catastrophe that
    can never be far from the surface in a society with a standing army.
    That is why it is especially unnerving that the United States military
    in recent years has developed a culture that sees itself as separate
    from, and morally superior to, the supposedly decadent society that
    it supposedly defends.  Conservatives have energetically reinforced
    this tendency, portraying democratically minded governments as hostile
    toward the military and encouraging the military in its tendency to
    become a rent-seeking interest group like any other, to the point that
    the officer corps now skews very strongly Republican compared to even
    twenty years ago.
    
    The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden,
    then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society,
    and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will
    undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which
    democracy rests.  It will be war without end, without boundaries,
    without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression
    of an impulse to vengeance.  Far from the Gulf War image of televised
    war as a morbid video game, it will be what the defense intellectuals
    call infrastructural war, and in the most general possible sense: war
    that reaches into the finest details of daily life, reengineering the
    most basic arrangements of travel and communications in a time when
    everyday life in a mobile and interconnected society is increasingly
    organized around those very arrangements.
    
    The main precedent for this looming war is the boundaryless pseudo-war
    against communism, and yet the precedent is misleading.  The Cold War
    was a war of the mind at home and a war of the jungles in the distant
    locales where conflicts were conducted by proxy.  Its foundation was
    the intellectual control that, for a time and to a remarkable degree
    still, prevented those proxy wars from registering in the minds of
    a populace that otherwise was fairly free.  Infrastructural war is
    something quite different.  The Cold War promoted a paranoia of a
    quite abstract sort: the hidden traitors that supposedly lay behind
    the social ideals of reformers.  Infrastructural war promotes a
    paranoia of a different kind: the ramifying maze of blind spots in
    the security arrangements of a technological society which a highly
    skilled enemy might exploit.  Thus the uncanny sense of violation
    that compounds the sheer violence of the attacks on the east coast,
    and thus on a less dramatic level the myth-making around security
    vulnerabilities in "cyberspace".
    
    The Cold War's most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally
    misconstrues these dangers.  The great drama of the Cold War was a
    supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization
    and decentralization.  Never mind that the Cold War societies of the
    First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial
    structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments;
    despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated
    a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against
    dangers of many types.  In reality, the infrastructure of our highly
    technological society is centralized in many ways.  There are three
    economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote
    monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and
    institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and
    network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for
    everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone
    else.  In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of
    technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural
    framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly
    suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology
    of the Cold War would promote.  The more sophisticated our society
    becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets. 
    
    So what to do?  First we need a new concept of war.  This is not easy,
    partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of
    war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy.  It follows that
    we can't get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of
    democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is
    dangerous in itself.  The military intellectuals' new concept of war
    is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the
    logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything
    else.  Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a
    number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation
    between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world
    without clear boundaries.  Instead of permanent, total war, conducted
    under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its
    legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of
    permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends
    squarely in view.  Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion,
    of the conditions of democracy.
    
    Total security, however, does not mean total control of society by
    "security forces".  In an infrastructural world, security cannot be a
    force, something exerted from the outside, a lid kept down or a shield
    put up.  Instead, security is a matter of design.  Infrastructure
    is something designed, in the sense that it is a human artefact, but
    the infrastructure that our society possesses right now has not been
    designed with anything approaching a full conception of its relation
    to a democratic order.  When infrastructure is designed to serve a
    narrowly technical set of requirements, or, worse, when it accretes
    haphazardly in layers like the software code that we suddenly had
    to decompile en masse with the approach of Y2K, it becomes riven with
    blind spots, with vulnerabilities that, in the long run, only multiply
    the chaos that technology had always been thought to solve.  The fact
    is, our current infrastructures are profoundly insecure.  This has
    been documented over and over, and it is entirely absurd that we have
    learned to tolerate the worms that swarm continuously over the world's
    networked computers, trashing information and randomly broadcasting
    sensitive files.  These worms have not killed anybody yet, but the
    shoddy security systems in the country's airports are another matter.
    The catastrophe at the World Trade Center provides an opening for a
    period of real design -- design that adopts as its requirements *both*
    of the conditions of democracy: the closing of security holes and
    the protection of civil liberties.  The necessary designs are partly
    technical and partly institutional.  The current arrangement of having
    the airlines pay for the security personnel at airports, for example,
    has been comprehensively discredited, and even the strictest of
    opponents of centralized government appear to appreciate the need
    to federalize a system whose incentives have heretofore been set up
    exactly backward.
    
    But secondly, the conception of security that our democratic society
    needs must take seriously the all-encompassing nature of modern
    industrial society.  A technological society must be democratically
    legitimate, above all, because it cannot afford to have an outside.
    The people who conduct terrorist actions against the United States are
    fundamentally driven by a need to make us feel their pain.  Along with
    natural human sympathy and outrage, the people in many countries have
    responded to the attacks in New York and Washington by observing that,
    at last, the United States knows what it's like.  Media commentators
    in the United States have often asserted, no doubt without thinking,
    that the magnitude of the recent attacks has been without precedent
    in history.  This could not be more false, as the people of Nanking,
    London, Dresden, or Hiroshima could explain, or those of Hanoi,
    Baghdad, or Dili.  The United States' consciousness has been shaped by
    its geographic isolation, but now infrastructural warfare has provided
    an attacker of a way of piercing that isolation, and thus of piercing
    that consciousness, forcing upon the people of the United States the
    consciousness of a people who must fear, at one level or another, that
    they will be invaded and killed.
    
    Americans' imaginative distance from the rest of the world has been
    one reason why it has been so easy to keep from American public
    consciousness the nature and magnitude of the atrocities in which
    the American government and its close allies have unquestionably
    been culpable.  A large portion of the population of East Timor,
    for example, was slaughtered by the genocidal regime that ruled
    until recently in Indonesia with the active approval and support of
    the United States.  Counterinsurgency against a small and primitive
    peasant rebellion in Guatemala in the 1980s was conducted through
    a deliberate policy of simply killing large percentages of the
    population, with the active support of an American government that
    ridiculously claimed to have little knowledge of what was happening
    and no power to stop it, even as prominent religious conservative
    organizations in the United States praised the Guatemalan leadership
    for its claims to be acting in the name of God.  Israel constantly
    takes people's land away from them and treats them as second-class
    citizens in their own land, and no amount of bad behavior by them
    or their coreligionists in other countries can justify many of the
    Israeli policies, nearly all of which the United States supports both
    financially and diplomatically.
    
    None of this mitigates the attacks on innocent people in the World
    Trade Center, or even the attacks on military personnel in the
    Pentagon.  The people who conducted those terrorist attacks are
    entirely responsible for what they did.  They are evil, and they
    made themselves evil by choice.  Nearly as evil are the religious
    authorities who provided the ideological basis of this terrible
    self-making with their spurious justifications for suicide bombings.
    Yet the call to war is precisely a call for us, formerly citizens
    of a democracy, to remake ourselves in the image of that evil -- to
    ignore all evil deeds of our own, and instead to project all of our
    own failings into an enemy who grows ever bigger, ever more inhuman,
    with every exaggeration of the extent of the danger and the need for
    revenge.  The call to war is not legitimate: it is not capable of
    delivering what it claims to deliver.
    
    Should we go out and get the people who blew up our buildings?  Of
    course we should.  If we can't get them nonviolently law, should we
    start dropping bombs on impoverished countries?  Maybe we should, if
    it will actually achieve the stated goal.  A world that has graduated
    beyond the traditional conceptions of war may not be able to avoid
    military action, regrettable as it always is.  Evil is real, whatever
    excuse it might present.  The important thing is to draw a distinction
    between military action, as the exercise within a framework of
    international law of the power of a legitimate democratic state, and
    war, as the imposition of a total social order that is the antithesis
    of democracy, and that, in the current technological conditions
    of war, has no end in sight.  We can reorganize our infrastructure
    along more intelligent lines, and we urgently should.  But more
    fundamentally, war will end only when the rest of the world enjoys
    the same institutional conditions of justice and freedom that we
    do.  We can hasten that day by supporting civil society, education,
    reconciliation, institutional reform, Internet connectivity, and
    nonproliferation throughout the world.  Or we can retreat into a
    conservative conception of war as a way to live our lives.  That is
    our choice now, in our policies and in our hearts, as we decide how to
    act on the pain that we feel.
    
    end
    



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