Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology.
Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large
armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries,
and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest
weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can
offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all
markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of
affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human
genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some
countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or
two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.
Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated
technology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of a
rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically
questioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) to
the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women.
Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott
provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the
military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist.
After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individual
loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet
language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change
this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's
description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure,
but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in
the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all
professionals, does not choose to lose literate language
proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for
attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really
understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their
recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate
warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills
dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and
sex education in concentrated doses. The situation is
paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the
military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking,
distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional
expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and
discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics
stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the
human condition associated with them is frightening.
Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to
the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to
be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed:
faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands,
messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets
moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by
literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital
eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear-
cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function
effectively. Centralized military experiences based on
structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in
actual conflicts of complex dynamics.
The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war,
instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down
to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war
Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was
effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that
proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson
of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in
Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of
confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.
Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one
example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the
government and the military kept from the public essential
information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many
human lives meaningless.
The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers
to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the
previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior
is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons
are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels
of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are
withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the
military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social
texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military
in the network of assignments and purposeful functions of the
pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor
worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective)
to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500
years gone by, but, more important, new forms of
self-constitution, and hence identification, became necessary
and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at
Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the
Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes
into producing new chemical and biological means used in high
efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical
and biological weapons of mass destruction.
This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of
great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in
favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it
sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the
structural background against which, whether we like it or not,
the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the
stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the
military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can,
or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating
mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for
achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated
by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to
believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being
proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the
illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or
who enlisted as a mercenary.
Current military research attempts to remove human beings from
the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing
affects public support for military action more than body-bags.
These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide,
the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo
War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their
reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly
efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not
relate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the
machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination
expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis
requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans
who constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human
perception and control; space expands beyond what a person can
conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are
placed in outer space and synchronized by extremely
time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed
Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial
systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a
matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing
motivation, and for projecting a rational image of
irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and
precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and
strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information
systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently
not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic
processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are
fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a
soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger,
not to mention waiting for the command to fire.
The complexity of war machines is such that even their
maintenance and repair requires means independent of the
language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It
should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already
appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book
is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed
book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an
airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship,
the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to
support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane
grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require
reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the
book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer,
displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make
recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as
possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection
of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear
reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate
page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to
the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously,
the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from
the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who
know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts.
Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required
operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the
feedback from the machine. Under these circumstances,
efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a
luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits
that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is
already a reality.
The electronic book-here presented in an application of military
relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example
from the many that can be given regarding how our good old
verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books
constituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide
range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military
experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to
an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to
collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these
requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as
a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of
individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically
military component that carries over from previous experiences
of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the
patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods
are different in that more initiative than ever before is
required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in
alternate means of expression and communication.
In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of
distributed tasks and massive parallel computation replace
literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits
flying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of the
human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When
reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate
movements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal.
But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since
there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat
detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing
machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change
the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again,
these languages make the participation of literate language less
and less significant.
Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected
coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed,
loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the
many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous
systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the
Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years
ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace,
and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive
discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent
forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything
liberated from language and literacy, military practice was
dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its
more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in
factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs
endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than
literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and
language's participation in it, are the new languages embodied in
the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or
target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of
precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be
repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills
expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely
productive technology deserves attention and thought.
Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the
language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired?
Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether
a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the
time of its use, circumstances would speak against destroying it
on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be
answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude,
according to which military praxis is one of command and
execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction.
Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by
many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed
assignments. If military experiences were to remain
literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different
pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate
efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the
military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative
expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other
countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and
dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the
expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt
essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting
coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network
of different assignments. In the partial literacy of the
military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the
pursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocation
of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural
disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of
self-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis.
The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism
seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of
highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian
public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war
of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules
and no higher authority.
No army could have changed the world more than the new system of
human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency
corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying
their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never
before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities,
as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as
the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and
all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of
praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human
practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent
on personal performance.