Technology, total war and creative destruction

An illusion hovers over the first world, that war is somewhere else, in spatial and temporal terms. It happens on the fringes of civilization and does not concern “our world” and “our generation,” raised in the prosperity, progress, and globality of the western destiny. And if it should “happen,” it happens differently, since the astronomical-scale technologization of military might makes war surgical, precise, a finely tuned instrument for imposing the “good,” without unnecessary bloodshed and ruin. The rest are merely “accidents,” “human errors,” “collateral damage,” glitches in the war megamachine that will surely be fixed and eliminated in the next wave of technological advancement. Happy are those who bask in the warmth of this illusion. For they ignore that human destructiveness is the chief creator of technology, and remain blind to the danger signals emitted by the past and the present.

messages from the past

Total war—the transformation of the entire society of the enemy into a target, without distinction between combatants and non-combatants—is not a recent historical phenomenon, confirming Clausewitz’s claim that war by its very nature is driven compulsively to the extreme. Yet capitalism is the first social system that not only adopted the doctrine of total war but also revolutionized it, redefining the grammar of military conflict. Whereas in the past total destruction emerged as the ultimate method for achieving the complete and final subjugation of the enemy, under capitalism the reverse occurs. Complete and final victory over the enemy is the necessary condition for achieving the primary objective: destruction itself. For capitalism is the system that, in the final analysis, can cure its crises only through destruction and is unable to survive otherwise. For this very reason, every war under capitalism is an ongoing total war and leads to large-scale destruction. The history of the last century is irrefutable proof of this thesis.

At the foundations of capitalism rests its basic antinomy: on the one hand the socialisation of production and on the other the privatisation of the wealth produced. It is an antinomy that runs through all social activities, reproduces itself in every field and spawns a multitude of its own variants: between the increasing productivity of labour and the intensifying devaluation of workers; between what is possible to produce and thus secure surplus-value in the hands of the bosses and what is possible to consume and thereby realise that surplus-value; between the systematic devaluation of the creativity of the proletarians and the systematic commodification of their needs and desires… This antinomy is simultaneously the reason for capitalism’s existence and the womb of its crises (and the present crisis has exactly such an origin). As capitalism develops, its fundamental antinomy simultaneously grows, to the point where the entire system is threatened with collapse; and then a large-scale catastrophe becomes the only alternative.

Already in the 19th century, the Communist Manifesto had clearly described this process:

A social epidemic breaks out that, in other times, would have seemed sheer madness: the epidemic of overproduction. Suddenly, society has relapsed into a state of instantaneous barbarism. One might think that all means of subsistence had been cut off, by some famine or some exterminatory war. And why? Because society has too much civilization, too many means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

How does the bourgeoisie overcome crises? On the one hand, by forcibly destroying a mass of productive forces. And on the other, by conquering new markets and exploiting the old ones more intensively and extensively.

Until the 19th century, capitalism could, broadly speaking and not absolutely, “control” its antinomy and deflect crises basically by following the second method: expansion and conquest of new markets. Through imperialism and colonialism it could export its problems to the four corners of the globe and import wealth and stability into the metropolises. But this process had limits, because even for capitalism the planet was already geographically finite. Although expansion never stopped—via the colonization by the commodity of ever more areas of social life—capitalism turned decisively to the first method, destruction, and heavily invested in technology, making it the principal instrument of discipline and control for “peaceful” periods and the primary machine of destruction for periods when the crisis was becoming uncontrollable. For the capitalist system, destruction is not an accidental by-product of war. It is not a consequence of savagery, incompetence, or weakness of one side or the other, but an objective from the very outset, the unacknowledged goal, and technology is what can supply the means for such an objective. The historical experience of the three previous world wars is revealing.

the three world wars

For almost a century, from the Napoleonic Wars to 1914, capitalism experienced the longest period of relative calm in its history, with armed conflicts that did not assume global dimensions. This era came to an end when crisis erupted, despite the widespread illusion that the then “globalization” would prevent any clash. After decades of growth, the gap between what could be produced and what could be consumed was so vast that not one but two world wars—an unprecedented destruction of people, infrastructure and commodities in history—were required to restore a new balance.

In other words, the highly productive labor force, since it could not be utilized as a “peaceful force,” was turned into labor of high destructiveness, so as to open the way for a new cycle. Without the hyper-intensive application of ever more, ever newer technological means, this process would have been impossible to complete. Through the first two world wars, technology became the “global constant” of creative destruction.

The intensive use of technology in WWI marked the violent transition into the era of industrialization and mass production. When it began, the popular imagery of the war was that of cavalry and the dashing officer with his sword; when it ended, the battlefields – and now the whole world – were dominated by artillery, poison gas, chemical weapons, oil, submarines, airplanes, meteorology, advanced engineering and, of course, the crown jewel of modern times, the internal-combustion-engine vehicle. When the war started, everyone believed it would be a matter of weeks and “the soldiers would be home for Christmas”; by the fourth year, every available resource and productive capacity had been placed under war planning. Entire societies on both sides had been mobilized for the war effort. In a sense, the First World War was a conflict between the technologies of the 20th century on one side and the productive forces and relations (and military practices) of the 19th on the other.

Despite the hecatomb of victims, WWI left behind unresolved problems and pending issues, inevitably leading to a new cycle of confrontation and destruction two decades later. In the meantime, the forces of science and technology were mobilized almost exclusively for military purposes, especially toward the end of the interwar period. The main characteristic of WWII and the factor that exponentially increased its destructive productivity was the fact that the technological paradigm at the war’s end was overwhelmingly different from that at its outset.

Indeed, when the fighting began, most armies were using technologies that had scarcely changed since World War I—or even since the nineteenth century (trenches and even cavalry appeared at first). The catalyst was the Nazis’ “lightning war” (Blitzkrieg)—essentially the intensive mechanization of assault forces—which rendered every previous tactic and practice obsolete and forced the opposing sides into technological leaps. In just six years, from the moment the Polish cavalry had to face German tanks, the combatants had at their disposal jet aircraft, modern radar, ballistic missiles, wireless technologies, computers—even nuclear weapons.

In a hypothetical showdown between an army from 1939 and a comparable one from 1945, the latter would prevail overwhelmingly. Meanwhile, the assembly line and mass production inaugurated by WWI became permanently entrenched thanks to WWII (and along with them, the military-industrial complex became equally entrenched). Indicatively, the USA alone between 1939 and 1945 built 100,000 tanks, 800,000 artillery pieces, 36 billion shells, 41 billion cartridges, and 500,000 combat aircraft. The Soviet Union achieved similar levels of weapons production, especially in the final war years. Out of the ashes and devastation of the two world wars, the modern world now rose.

The final act of the Second World War was the first of the Third: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the dropping of atomic bombs. The “Cold War,” as it is officially called, lasting from 1945 to 1991, was in every respect the third in the series of world wars. Indeed, it was a confrontation of global scope, involved most of the planet’s states and was total, since all productive forces were mobilised in a coordinated way for its conduct and its target was the entire structure of the opposing societies. Ultimately (and we will explain this) the devastation it caused was of such magnitude that it can only be compared with the previous world wars. And all this without, technically, a single shot being fired between the two official opponents, the USA and the USSR. Moreover, the Third World War displayed novel characteristics that were bequeathed intact to the new-era warfare of the 21st century.

Already by the end of World War II, technological development had acquired its own self-sustaining momentum. Research and investment in new advanced systems, which had been sporadic before WWI and more systematic before WWII, became during the Cold War a fundamental feature of warfare, to the extent that we can consider technology itself as a strategic battlefield, with victory in it being of decisive importance. The “arms race,” as the continuous technological upgrading of military means was called, did not simply aim at superiority, but at bringing the adversary to his knees by exhausting his resources. Technology ceased to be a means of war and became war itself.

The third world war is the war of nuclear technology; for the first time in history the belligerents possessed the technical capability to deliver a crushing blow to the enemy, to level it and consequently—because of retaliation—bring about the total destruction of the planet. It was a unique condition with paradoxical results. Defense in the classical military sense had lost its significance, and the destructive power of nuclear technology had reached such an extreme degree of effectiveness that it practically ended up negating itself. The result was that the Third World War took on the character of a protracted siege of total nature, which, without activating nuclear weapons and making extensive use of propaganda, sabotage, provocation, economic warfare, and proxy conflicts, aimed at exhausting and bringing about the internal collapse of the enemy.

When the war ended with the defeat of the Eastern Bloc, neither Europe—the beloved continent of destruction—had been reduced to a pile of rubble, nor had any army been decimated, nor had any humiliating treaty been signed. It looks as though a total war had concluded without the requisite epilogue of large-scale devastation. But this is a misleading picture. In reality, what happened was the relentless accumulation of destructiveness behind the scenes for four decades and its violent eruption in a second phase. Let the chronologies not deceive us. The confrontation may have ended in 1991 with the fall of the Wall, but the Eastern Bloc experienced collapse and destruction afterwards, on such a scale that it still has not fully recovered to this day. In 1991, Russia and Eastern Europe were transformed into an immense social desert.

fourth-generation war

The third world war, because of the inflexible nuclear treaty, had posed a thorny question to the military staffs: how could a war be fought if even the slightest military mobilization could lead to nuclear destruction? In other words: how could war be “disguised” so as not to trigger nuclear escalation? The answers given and the trends that began to take shape may not have determined the outcome of the third war, but they had a great influence on the war that was to follow.

In 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years before World War III finally ended, the American military newspaper Marine Corps Gazette published a theoretical paper titled The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation. The authors were a group of analysts and officers of the U.S. Army. Their intention was to outline—or rather to explore—the shape of warfare in the near future. On the basis of their approach, they identified three generations of war. The first was that of large military formations marching in coordinated fashion against the enemy. The second was that of massive firepower. The third began with the German blitzkrieg and emphasized penetration into the enemy’s rear. Examining the characteristics of previous generations in combination with technological developments, the authors tried to form a picture of a possible fourth-generation war. In fact, they began to describe what an informal global war in the 21st century might look like:

We see two critical catalysts for change in the previous generational shifts: technology and ideas. What perspective do these prior shifts open for us as we look toward a possible fourth generation of war?

Previous paradigm shifts, especially from the second to the third generation, were marked by an intensifying focus on certain central ideas. Four of these appear likely to continue into the fourth generation and will in fact gain even greater prominence.

The first is the commands. Every generational shift has been marked by an ever-greater dispersion on the battlefield. The battlespace of the fourth generation is likely to encompass the entire society of the enemy. Such dispersion… will require even the lowest echelons to act flexibly according to the intent of the command.

The second is the reduced dependence on central supply…

The third is the greatest emphasis on maneuvers. Massed power, whether of men or fire, will no longer be a decisive factor… Small, highly mobile, offensive forces will tend to dominate.

The fourth is the objective of collapsing the enemy from within rather than their physical destruction. The objectives will include things such as undermining the population’s support for the war or the culture of the enemy.

Generally speaking, fourth-generation war appears likely to be widely dispersed and extremely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will blur to the point of disappearing. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the extent of having no defined battlefields or fronts at all. The distinction between “civilian” and “soldier” may vanish. Actions will occur simultaneously throughout the entire depth of the opponent, including society as a culture and not merely as a physical structure…

If we combine the above general characteristics with the new technology, we can discern a possible outline of the new generation… The development of robotics, remotely controlled vehicles, the low probability of communication interception, and artificial intelligence may offer the possibility of a radical transformation of tactics… Small, extremely agile units composed of highly intelligent soldiers armed with state-of-the-art weapons may move over a wide radius searching for targets. The targets may be found more in the political than in the military sector. Terms such as “front – rear” may be replaced by the dichotomy “targeted – non-targeted”… The tactical and strategic levels will merge as the political structure and society of the adversary are turned into military targets. Extremely important will be the isolation of enemies who have infiltrated the rear, because even the smallest number of people can inflict the greatest damage in the shortest time.

Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of intervention in the media and information. Programmable bombs and computer viruses may be used to disrupt both political and military operations. Fourth-generation warriors will be specialists in media manipulation and in influencing local and international public opinion to such an extent that a successful psychological operations campaign will sometimes render the commitment of combat forces unnecessary. A major objective will be to secure the population’s support for its government and the war. Television news will become a more powerful operational weapon than fully-armored divisions.
…
Technology was the driving force of second-generation war; ideas were the driving force of the third. A fourth generation based on ideas is also conceivable.
For roughly 500 years the West defined warfare; for an army to be effective it generally had to follow Western models. Because the strength of the West is technology, we may tend to conceptualize the fourth generation in technological terms.

However, the West no longer dominates the world. The fourth generation may emerge from non-Western cultures, such as the Islamic or the Asian. The fact that certain non-Western regions, like the Islamic world, lack power in technology may lead them to develop a fourth generation through ideas rather than technology.
The birth of a fourth generation based on ideas may already be visible in terrorism. We do not claim that terrorism is fourth-generation war, but that elements of it may be signs pointing toward a fourth generation… The most successful terrorists appear to operate on broad guidance rather than specific orders. The “battlefield” is extremely expanded and includes the entire society of the enemy… Terrorism seeks the collapse of the enemy from within, as it has little capability to inflict widespread destruction. It aims to bypass the enemy’s army entirely and strike directly at the rear against political targets. Ideally, the enemy’s army is irrelevant to the terrorist.
…
Terrorism also seems to represent a solution to a problem created by previous generational shifts but solved by none. It is the contradiction between the nature of the modern battlefield and traditional military culture. That culture, with its hierarchy, salutes, uniforms, etc., is a culture of order. In the era when it developed, it was compatible with the battlefield because that too was dominated by order. Yet every new generation pushed the field further toward chaos, so military culture, which remained a culture of order, has become antithetical to the battlefield… The contradiction between military culture and the nature of modern warfare confronts traditional armies with a dilemma. The terrorists answer the dilemma by eliminating the culture of order…

We are not claiming that terrorism is the fourth generation… However, what results will we have if we combine terrorism with new technology? … To describe the potential fourth generation even further, what will happen if we combine terrorism with new technology and the following additional elements?

A non-national or transnational base, such as ideology or religion. Defense capabilities are designed to operate within a state framework. Outside this framework, they face tremendous difficulties…

A direct attack on the culture of the enemy that can bypass not only the enemy army but the state itself…

Highly sophisticated psychological warfare operations. Some terrorists already know how to play this game… If we bomb an enemy city, the images of the enemy’s dead civilians will be broadcast that very night on the news in every home and may turn a military success into a major defeat.

All these elements already exist. They are not products of “futurism,” nor are we seeing them through crystal balls. We simply ask what we will face if all these are combined… Our goal is to pose a question, not to answer it.

If, on one hand, we take into account the text’s twenty-five years of age and, on the other, the conditions in today’s war fronts, we must observe that the authors were remarkably prescient. So prescient that the question should seriously concern us: are we dealing with well-founded speculation and futurology, or with self-fulfilling prophecies, or with the revelation of already existing intentions, plans and practices? For the blueprint of “4th-generation war” both announces in advance the form of the “enemy” (“terrorism”) and the geographical locus of its hotbeds (the Islamic world and Asia), and reveals—by attributing them to the fabricated enemy—techniques and practices that the U.S. army has systematically applied during its operations for the past twenty years. Summarising the features of the fourth generation we arrive at the following: the transformation of the entire society of the adversary into a battlefield; the objective is the enemy’s collapse from within; an informal, undefined and extremely diffuse war; wide dispersion of fighting; a blurred or non-existent distinction between war and peace, military and political objectives, soldiers and civilians; central importance of propaganda and psychological operations; electronic warfare, and, finally, the fundamental role of technology and state-of-the-art automated, robotic weapons systems. If, therefore, we must draw a conclusion from the above, it is that the American state had already begun, during the 1980s, to manufacture the preconditions for waging a fourth-generation war. Because what the authors describe is the war that, fifteen years ago, was named the “war on terror”, and which, as it has unfolded and still continues, is revealed to be the most recent—the fourth in line—global war.

messages from the recent past, the present, and the ominous future

Even before the Third World War had officially ended (the USSR was dissolved on 25 December 1991), in August ’90 the USA began war preparations and in January of the following year invaded Iraq. The “Desert Storm” was a war waged by the USA with an army prepared for Cold-War battles against the Eastern bloc, which was off-loaded into the Middle East carrying all the related technology. The Iraqi army practically proved non-existent against its opponent, reinforcing the perception that a highly technologized army with a clear advantage over any adversary is, on the one hand, a guarantee of victory and, on the other, practically invulnerable and invincible.

This perception was reinforced even further by the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the USA and their allies literally had zero casualties. In the Balkans, moreover, the Western powers waged a war without even needing to set foot on the battlefields, relying exclusively on their overwhelming air superiority and the launching of missiles from the safety of ships or bases kilometres away from the “front” (in Kosovo alone, NATO carried out 38,000 air strikes). Many spoke at the time of a “sterile war”, of the technological ability to conduct a fully programmed conflict, carried out by high-fidelity machines against technologically inferior opponents, resulting in victory with the predictability of a routine surgical operation.

But this was a false image. In Iraq, the 1991 intervention and those that followed have created an ark of chaos, with untold destruction and victims that, according to some studies, reach one million. In the Balkans, while the epic of the “precision” air intervention was unfolding in the air, the worst massacre since World War II on European soil was taking place on the ground in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, more than 500,000 became refugees, abandoning their flattened homes.

A major influence on the shaping of modern warfare in the 21st century has been (and continues to be) exerted by Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Although the term “war” is perhaps a misnomer, insofar as we are dealing more with a unilateral, ongoing campaign of annihilation of the Palestinians and only occasionally with a genuine confrontation, in terms of tactics, means and objectives Israel’s actions in Palestine are an early example and microcosm of the Fourth World War. Formally and officially, this “war does not exist”, except when the Israeli state launches a large-scale invasion/bombing of the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. Conversely, thanks to an extensive, international media campaign, in an Orwellian-inspired distortion, the operations are presented as “self-defence against terrorists”. At the level of means and practices, the Israeli war machine makes systematic and intensive use of every cutting-edge technology, and the Israeli army is justifiably counted (or advertises itself) among the most technologically advanced. Finally, at the level of objectives, there is no distinction between military and social structures, between combatants and civilians; the applied tactic is that of systematic extermination. The result is the construction of a situation reminiscent of a protracted, informal siege (thus evoking the historical experience of WW III). The Palestinians are trapped in a vast prison that is their own country, enduring a permanent siege and the murderous, periodic attacks of a heavily armed enemy that acts (or believes it has the ability to act) with impunity thanks to its overwhelming superiority. None of this would be possible in such a manner and to such a degree if the “liberated genie” of technology did not provide the means. An informal prison, under informal siege, in an informal war, aimed at the physical and/or social extermination of an entire population; welcome to the model of the Fourth World War!

When the “war on terror” began (that is, the second phase of the Fourth World War, with the first being the invasion and occupation of Iraq), the concept of fourth-generation warfare had almost fully developed and all its central characteristics found a field of application. The battlefields were scattered across an area that started in sub-Saharan Africa, passed through the Middle East and ended in Central and South-East Asia (note the countries where official operations have been or are being conducted: Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Philippines, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Chad, Niger, Mauritania). For the past fifteen years this entire vast geographical zone has practically been under siege by an enemy that acts destructively, without constraints, as long as it possesses (or believes it possesses) technological superiority and supremacy (until, of course, some credible opponent appears to challenge that supremacy). The war is only occasionally and rarely officially declared, and for the most part it is waged unofficially behind the pretext of “humanitarian interventions”, instant strikes, “advisory” missions or the deployment of private military companies. Muslim societies, on the one hand, have been placed entirely and in their entire depth in the crosshairs, and on the other hand are constantly tested by Western, racist, anti-Muslim propaganda (conditions that have worsened after the “Arab Spring”). The distinction between military and political targets has disappeared, under the pretext of penetration or subversion by “terrorists” of social, political and economic structures. Finally, there is systematic use of hyper-advanced weapons systems that either operate automated and remote-controlled, or are fully autonomous and act based on their programming, without any human intervention.

We must, however, distinguish between two processes, two tendencies that initially appear incompatible. On the one hand, there is the hyper-intensive use of modern death machines (bombers and attack drones, robotic weapons systems, “smart” bombs, advanced surveillance and targeting systems…) that sharply increase casualties and wreak destruction while simultaneously keeping their operators invulnerable. On the other, private armies of mercenaries that take on operations on a contract basis, as well as armed organizations fabricated and supported by secret services, have assumed a leading role on the ground, causing destruction and spreading devastation in the most barbaric way (even turning the Mediterranean into a migrants’ graveyard should be attributed to this tendency). Why does the second tendency exist when the first has proved exceptionally effective in its lethality? Because they act complementarily, serving the same purpose: to create the greatest possible chaos. It is as though the organic growth of war capital is insufficient for war to yield its full “profits,” and a “counter-tendency” is required—less technological and incomparably cruder, a capital of intensity of destructive labour—to achieve the desired results.

first conclusions

The war epic of technology is still unfolding, without limits and without any visible end; related critical research must also continue. But based on the above, we can summarize four conclusions:

– Modern technology is neither “neutral” nor “biased.” Beyond such outdated categorizations, technology is a product of the battlefield and military priorities, and its development is intertwined with war. Every technological medium we use today bears the indelible mark of war, and its ultimate use will once again be military.

– Because of technology, the cycles of crisis / war / creative destruction are repeating ever faster. WW I began a century after the previous one; WW II, twenty years later; WW III at the same time WW II ended; WW IV before WW III even ended. Violence is accelerating and technology is one of its chief accelerators.

– New technologies are the quintessential tool of total war. Despite their supposed “intelligence” and “precision,” their use does not aim at the selective striking of military targets, but at targeting civilians, destroying vital infrastructure, and the complete disintegration of the enemy’s society. The ultra-advanced weapons systems do not merely increase military effectiveness, nor do they turn war into a programmed routine; the more technology, the more generalized, undifferentiated, mass destruction there is.

– New technologies neither marginalize nor cancel out; on the contrary, they foster the revival and development of even the most archaic and savage techniques of war. Raw brutality is the exhibitor of technology in the equation of creative destruction.

Harry Tuttle
cyborg #03 – 06/2015