THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  National security will cease to be defined in terms of borders alone because both the links among societies as well as the attacks on them exist in psychological and infrastructural dimensions, not on an invaded plain marked by the seizure and holding of territory. The line between the public and the private that has been the essential division between state and society has been partly effaced because most of the critical infrastructures are in the hands of the private sector. We shall have to take in new national security partners drawn from the private sector in order to protect the public good. Those states that defy this development by attempting to hold on to state-owned enterprises will steadily impoverish themselves at a rate that is slower, perhaps, but surer than those that risk vulnerability through competition and growth.

  There will be no final victory in such a war. Rather victory will consist in having the resources and the ingenuity to avoid defeat.

  So long, however, as states rely on a deterrence-and-retaliation model for their strategic paradigms—that is, a model that requires a threat-based analysis—they will inevitably neglect those steps, including enhanced intelligence collection, pre-emption, the development of defensive systems (including sensors), vaccinations, the prepositioning of medical supplies, and advanced methods of deception that provide the basis for operating within a different paradigm, one that relies on a vulnerability analysis. So long as states rely on a nation-state model for their international order, fruitlessly attempting to cope with new problems by trying to increase the authority of treaties, multistate conventions, or formal international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, the society of states will fail to develop practices and precedents for regional, consensual, and market-driven arrangements that do not rely on law for enforcement. Constitutional orders that protect human rights and liberties can coexist with the consequences of the Long War only if they revolutionize their military strategies; states will only be able to pursue military strategies that enable collaboration and international consensus if they revolutionize their constitutional orders, away from the national, law-centered methods of the nation-state and toward the international, market operations of the market-state.

  We are at the beginning of the sixth great revolution in strategic and constitutional affairs. The revolution in military affairs and the market-state are entering the twenty-first century together. For every state there are profound choices to be made: which military revolution to pursue (because this will affect the nature of market-state one gets, whether it is repressive or protective or aggressive); and which kind of market-state to pursue (managerial, entrepreneurial, or mercantile) because this will affect what kind of strategic capability is sought (nurturing collective goods and defensive systems, developing ever more lethal retaliatory abilities, or equipping large standing forces with global power projection). As in the past, revolutions in military affairs are symbiotically connected to transformations in the constitutional order, but neither are mechanical. Each depends on human decisions.

  Because the nation-state puts so much reliance on law, one might conclude that in the coming era the market will replace law as the partner of strategy. That conclusion would be a mistake. Law will change, and the use of law as regulation, so favored by the nation-state, will lessen. Nevertheless the State will continue to rely on law to shape its internal order, even if the legal rules derived tend to be rules that recognize a larger role for the market. Only the State can promulgate laws. Therefore it will be crucial to develop legal processes that provide orderly and peaceful means of reflecting the popular will. Otherwise, the operations of the market-state will be reduced to the market itself. This will invite revolt.

  The central point in recognizing the emergence of the market-state is not simply to slough off the decayed nation-state. It is also to emphasize the importance of developing public good2—such as loyalty, civility, trust in authority, respect for family life, reverence for sacrifice, regard for privacy, admiration for political competence—that the market, unaided, is not well adapted to creating and maintaining. The market-state has to produce public goods because that is precisely what the market will not do. This need for qualities of reciprocity, solidarity, even decent manners, domestically, mirrors the need for collective goods, internationally, and thus represents not only a challenge but an opportunity for leadership.

  Law and strategy will continue to be key instruments of the State. It is folly to consider steps in one of these dimensions without a sensitivity to the other. But the new context of the market-state will treat these interconnected dimensions in ways that are dissimilar to the worlds of legal regulation and strategic deterrence we are accustomed to in the nation-state. In 2001, the first year of the second Bush administration, the United States underwent a long-overdue defense review under the direction of Andrew Marshall. Its recommendations—on missile defense, force sizing, the “two and a half” war strategy, cyber and infrastructure protection—were the focus of intense scrutiny and, like the proposals in the present work, many of which they resemble, were controversial. But virtually no one in that debate observed that the profound changes urged in the Marshall Report will have equally profound consequences for the constitutional make-up of the country. Similarly, in Britain the government has pursued constitutional innovations like the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, a closer relationship with the European Union (including the possible adoption of a European currency), and even proportional representation in Parliament. These ideas were hotly debated in the 2001 election, and dissected in the political conversation that goes on after the election results are in, but there was little mention of how such changes will affect the willingness of citizens to volunteer for wars, to pay for expensive military technologies like missile defense, or to want to engage in expeditionary force initiatives.

  When the best commentators look at the future, they seem to divide between two expectations: some, like John Keegan, expect that states will master the arts of peace and that war will wither away3; others, like Martin van Creveld, believe that war will degenerate into civil chaos, fought by stateless gangs.4 One might say that the former see a future of law without war, and the latter a future of wars without law. My own view, of course, is that law and war will persist because they are mutually supportive. And this is not the worst dynamic equilibrium: a state without a strategy for war would be unable to maintain its domestic legitimacy and thus could not even guarantee its citizens' civil rights and liberties; a lawless state at war could never make peace and thus would be trapped in the cycle of violence and revenge.

  The parliamentary nation-state has emerged from the Long War as triumphant. Nevertheless, we should not expect that either this form of the constitutional order or the Peace that recorded its ascendancy will be eternal. Mindful of the past, we can expect a new epochal war in which a new form of the State—the market-state—asserts its primacy as the most effective constitutional means to deal with the consequences of the strategic innovations that won the Long War. To shape, if not permanently forestall, this war to come, the society of states must organize in ways that enable it to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to treat expeditionary interventions as opportunities for consensus-creating coalitions, and to share information as a means of defense against disguised attacks. By these means, the next epochal war can be converted into a series of interventions and crises, instead of a world-shattering cataclysm or a stultifying and repressive world order.

  It is a cliché that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one. But if it is such a cliché, why haven't the generals heard it—that is, why do we persist in modeling the future on the past?

  The past, it turns out, is all we know about the future. Things are usually pretty much the way they have been. About modern warfare we can say three things based on the past: that it pits one country against another; that it is waged by governments, not private parties; that the victo
rious party defeats its adversary.

  Now it happens that we are living in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past. Indeed the three certainties I just mentioned about national security—that it is national (not international), that it is public (not private), and that it seeks victory (and not stalemate)—these three lessons of the past are all about to be turned upside down by the new age of indeterminacy into which we are plunging.

  The Shield of Achilles

  She looked over his shoulder

  For vines and olive trees,

  Marble well-governed cities

  And ships upon untamed seas,

  But there on the shining metal

  His hands had put instead

  An artificial wilderness

  And a sky like lead.

  A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

  No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

  Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

  Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

  An unintelligible multitude,

  A million eyes, a million boots in line,

  Without expression, waiting for a sign.

  Out of the air a voice without a face

  Proved by statistics that some cause was just

  In tones as dry and level as the place:

  No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

  Column by column in a cloud of dust

  They marched away enduring a belief

  Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

  She looked over his shoulder

  For ritual pieties,

  White flower-garlanded heifers,

  Libation and sacrifice,

  But there on the shining metal

  Where the altar should have been,

  She saw by his flickering forge-light

  Quite another scene.

  Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

  Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

  And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

  A crowd of ordinary decent folk

  Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

  As three pale figures were led forth and bound

  To three posts driven upright in the ground.

  The mass and majesty of this world, all

  That carries weight and always weighs the same

  Lay in the hands of others; they were small

  And could not hope for help and no help came:

  What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

  Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

  And died as men before their bodies died.

  She looked over his shoulder

  For athletes at their games,

  Men and women in a dance

  Moving their sweet limbs

  Quick, quick, to music,

  But there on the shining shield

  His hands had set no dancing-floor

  But a weed-choked field.

  A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

  Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

  Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

  That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

  Were axioms to him, who'd never heard

  Of any world where promises were kept,

  Or one could weep because another wept.

  The thin-lipped armorer,

  Hephaestos, hobbled away,

  Thetis of the shining breasts

  Cried out in dismay

  At what the god had wrought

  To please her son, the strong

  Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

  Who would not live long.

  —W.H. Auden

  Postscript

  The Indian Summer*

  I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope to us now utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead…†

  —Joseph Conrad

  WAR IS NOT a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided. As we have seen in the preceding pages, and as Conrad also wrote, “the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.”‡ On September 11, 2001, the nascent community of market-states came to this knowledge as every society of states that preceded it has: through violence. In New York and in Washington, we slept that night among our own dead who were interred beneath rubble, as if on a battlefield.

  The September attacks on the United States provide that country and its allies with an historic opportunity, even while they have dealt America an historic wound. That opportunity is the moment and the context in which to organize a grand coalition of states, with many of whose policies other than counterterrorism the United States differs. Such coalitions, whose precise composition will shift from time to time and threat to threat, can be created and managed to fight a new epochal war composed of interventions against a variety of challenges that include terrorism—both within the State, as in the example of Serbia, and against the State, as in the case of the September attacks, and even by one state against its neighbor, as in the case of Iraq's aggression against Iran and Kuwait.

  If a coalitional war against international terrorism prompts the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies to conduct cooperative operations at the leading edge of modern technology this war could forestall the cataclysmic conflicts among great powers that modern technology makes possible. Indeed I would say that there can be no higher priority for the United States and the United Kingdom than to strengthen cooperation with Russia in a league against international terrorism, even to the extent of transforming NATO. NATO could become the meeting ground for coalitional warfare against this lethal, global menace, and could include Russia as a full member. The September attacks can be understood as the first battle in this new war. If, as some historians argue, the twentieth century began in August 1914 it may be that the twenty-first century will be said to have begun in September 2001.

  The multinational mercenary terror network that Osama bin Laden and others have assembled is a malignant and mutated version of the market-state. Like other emerging market-states, it is a reaction to the strategic developments of the Long War that brought forth cultural penetration, the liberalization of trade and finance, and weapons proliferation, on an unprecedented scale. Like other states, this network has a standing army; it has a treasury and a consistent source of revenue; it has a permanent civil service; it has an intelligence collection and analysis cadre; it even runs a rudimentary welfare program for its fighters, and their relatives and associates. It has a recognizable hierarchy of officials; it makes alliances with other states; it promulgates laws, which it enforces ruthlessly; it declares wars.

  This network, of which Al Qaeda is only a part, greatly resembles a multinational corporation but that is simply to say that it is a market-state, made possible by advances in international telecommunications and transit, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. Lacking contiguous territory, Al Qaeda is a kind of virtual state, which means that our classical strategies of deterrence based on retaliation will have to be rethought. That is another way of saying that even when Afghanistan is conquered and pacified, the war against terrorism will go on.

  Deterrence, assured retaliation, and overwhelming conventional force enabled victory for the coalition of parliamentary nation-states in the war that began in 1914 and only finally ended with the Peace of Paris in 1990. These strategies cannot provide a similar victory at present becau
se what threatens the states of the world now is too easy to disguise and too hard to locate in any one place. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity or location is unknown to us, and the very massiveness of our conventional forces makes it unlikely we will be challenged openly. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from the sole reliance on target, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies.

  Realizing that we are fighting a virtual state and not just a stateless gang helps clarify our strategy. For one thing, it suggests that controlling and diminishing the revenue stream to bin Laden's network is far more impor-tant than capturing or killing any individual. For another, it clarifies the line between mere crime—which we use law, after the fact, to prosecute—and warfare, which we use strategy, before the fact, to anticipate.

  The United States is at war no less than when a conventional state launched a surprise attack in 1941, and the assault this time has come for much the same reason. Now, as then, the United States aroused fear that her global presence would threaten the ambitions of a messianic state bent on regional subjugation and domination. Then as now the alliance of which the United States is a part faces a long and bitter struggle.

  The world community faces its own historic challenge in creating a constitution for the international order that will emerge from this war. Will that community—the society of states—use the discredited multilateral institutions of the nation-state as a way of frustrating action in order to control the acts of its strongest member, the United States? Or will that society simply expect every state to defend itself as best it can, spiraling into a chaos of self-help, ad hoc interventions, and sabotage? Or will that community consist of islands of authoritarianism, whose institutions focus only inward in an attempt to prevent violence by harsh police methods? Or can we learn to produce collective goods—like shared intelligence and shared surveillance information from shared nanosensors and shared missile and cyber defenses? Indeed the production and distribution of collective goods*—such as the coalition against international terrorism itself—may be the only way for a market-state to forestall peer competition and defeat international terrorism at the same time.