Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

When political leaders refer to the September 11th 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 your enemy retains 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.