An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-was
written when no one anticipated a conflict involving American
troops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic arguments
regarding the institution of the military in the civilization of
illiteracy were tested in the flesh and blood of confrontation,
probably well beyond my, or anybody's, expectations or wishes.
The Gulf War reported by the media resembled a computer game or
a television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone had
lifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. The
story made for great headlines; but out of context, or in the
context of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overall
meaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended up
trivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Other
reports related the frustration of the troops with the limited
number of phone lines. The reports also commented on the
replacement of the traditional letter by videotape as the
preferred method of communication. We also heard about an almost
magical device, called CNX, used to help orient each person
involved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heard
about the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food,
about the pastimes of the troops.
The context started coming into focus. This was to become the
first war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient
(the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here)
activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallel
practical experiences. These required precise synchronization
(each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemistically
called "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intense
mediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. These
characteristics embodied an ideology of relative value
disengaged from political discourse, and even more from moral
precepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow
(documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences in
language), or even the wheel (originating in the practical
experience of populations whose home was the territory where the
fighting took place). It is possible that some of the military
personnel had heard about the book entitled The Art of War
(written by Sun Tzu in 325 BCE or earlier), or about the books,
some of undisputed notoriety, filling the libraries of military
academies and the better research libraries. But this was not a
war fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran or
Bible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the Gulf
War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the
rules on war-or did away with them.
All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are
retraceable in the practical experience of today's military:
highly mediated praxis through electronic information storage
and retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity to
a war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift from
war based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiring
incursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion of
image, and the corresponding technology of image processing;
shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authority
and command to a relatively loose line of context dependent on
freedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; a
discipline of austerity and isolation from the non-military
(conditions accepted in the past as part of a military career)
replaced by expectations of relaxation and enjoyment, derived
from the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction of
society at large. That some of these expectations could not be
fulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts of
the American army live by different standards. Muslim law
prohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms of
entertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a land
claiming to be holy.
The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict of
irreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. It
was a conflict between an artificially maintained civilization
of literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer from
efficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and another
civilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society and
an energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics of
high efficiency.
It might well be that the final attack reminded experts in war
history, military strategy, or evolution of tactics of the
surprising maneuver tried by Epaminondas, the Theban commander
(371 BCE) in the battle of Leuctra: instead of a frontal assault,
an attack on one flank. General Schwartzkopf is not Epaminondas.
He succeeded in his mission by allowing for task distribution in
an international army-more of a pain than a blessing-that
resulted in many flanks. Helmuth von Moltke, in the exhausting
Franco- Prussian War (1870-1871), changed the relation to his
subordinate commanders by letting them operate under broad
directives. The generals and commanders of the many armies
involved in the Gulf War took advantage of the power of
networking in order to orchestrate an attack that tested
extremely efficient, and costly, annihilation technology under a
plan that today's computers have simulated many a time over.
But once I confessed that I wrote much of this chapter three
years before the Gulf War, the reader might question whether I
looked at the war through the spectacles of my hypothesis,
seeing what I wanted to see, understanding events as they fit my
explanatory model. I asked myself the same questions and
concluded that presenting the argument as it stood before the
war would shed light on the question and ultimately qualify the
answer.