Next Gen News

One factor driving this change has been the emergence of a new kind of enemy, so-called "non-state actors," meaning popular insurgencies and loose transnational networks of fighters, none of which are likely to field large numbers of troops or maintain expensive arsenals of their own. In the face of these new enemies, typified by al-Qaida, the mass armies of nation-states are highly ineffective, cumbersome to deploy, difficult to manoeuvre, and from a domestic point of view, overly dependent on a citizenry that is both willing and able to fight, or at least to have their children fight for them.

Consider the most recent US war with Iraq. According to then-president George W Bush, the

We faced a state-less enemy – geographically diffuse, lacking uniforms and flags, invulnerable to invading infantries and saturation bombing, and apparently capable of regenerating itself at minimal expense. From the perspective of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his White House cronies, this would not do.

The hard right, in particular, has campaigned relentlessly against "big government", apparently not noticing that the military is a sizable chunk of this behemoth. In December 2010, for example, a Republican senator from Oklahoma railed against the national debt with this statement: "We're really at war. We're on three fronts now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the financial tsunami [arising from the debt] that is facing us." Only in recent months have some Tea Party-affiliated legislators broken with tradition by declaring their willingness to cut military spending.

As the warfare state, the welfare state

If military spending still largely sacrosanct more spending cuts are needed to shrink "big government". And what remains is cutting domestic spending, particularly social programs for the poor, who lack the resources to finance politicians, and all too often the incentive to vote as well. Of the Reagan years, the U.S. government away to dozens of programs that get helped people who underpaid or unemployed, including housing benefits, state-supplied health insurance, lined public transport, social assistance for single parents, tuition aid, and inner-city economic development projects.

Also, the physical infrastructure - bridges, airports, roads and tunnels - used by people of all classes of dangerous levels of decline has been dropped. Antiwar demonstrators wistfully points out, year after year, which could buy the cost of our high-tech weapons systems, our global network of more than 1,000 military bases, and our various "intervention" when applied to satisfy domestic needs of the people. But no effect.

This ongoing care for victims of domestic military 'readiness "stands for the reversal of historical trends. Since the introduction of mass production armies in Europe in the seventeenth century, governments have generally understood, the underpayment and underfeeding one 's troops - risk that the gun is in the opposite direction - and the class of people, it supplies which to recommend what the officers.

In fact, modern welfare states, inadequate as they may be, are in no small part the product of war – that is, of governments' attempts to appease soldiers and their families. In the US, for example, the Civil War led to the institution of widows' benefits, which were the predecessor of welfare in its Aid to Families with Dependent Children form. It was the bellicose German leader Otto von Bismarck who first instituted national health insurance.

World War II spawned educational benefits and income support for American veterans and led, in the United Kingdom, to a comparatively generous welfare state, including free health care for all. Notions of social justice and fairness, or at least the fear of working class insurrections, certainly played a part in the development of twentieth century welfare states, but there was a pragmatic military motivation as well: if young people are to grow up to be effective troops, they need to be healthy, well-nourished, and reasonably well-educated.

In the U.S., the steady death of the social programs that could foster future troops is even, ironically, to justify an increase in military spending. In the absence of a federal jobs program, Congressional representatives have become fierce advocates for weapons systems that the Pentagon itself has no use for as long as the production of these weapons can provide employment for some of its constituents.

Thus, as long as there is any premium on avoiding civilian deaths, humans have to be involved in processing the visual information that leads, for example, to the selection of targets for drone attacks. If only as the equivalent of seeing-eye dogs, humans will continue to have a role in war, at least until computer vision improves.

"Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of 9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, get directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them 'drool buckets' because, they say, they can get lost staring into them."

What will happen to the "passions of war"? Apart from individual acts of martyrdom, the war is likely to lose its glory and splendor. Military analyst PW Singer cites an Air Force captain pondering over whether new technologies are "means that the brave men and women are no longer before the death in combat," just calm down, that "it will always be a need for intrepid minds are throwing their bodies across the sky ".

And can be in this our last hope. With the decline of mass armed forces and their possible replacement by machines, we can finally see that the war is not just an extension of our needs and passions, but the base or noble. Also, it is probably still a useful test of our courage, fitness, or national unity. War has its own dynamics, or - in case that sounds too anthropomorphic - to work out his own dark algorithms. Since there is less need for us, maybe we'll finally see, not that we don 't need it too. We are able to leave the ants.

Copyright 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich

• This essay is a revised and updated version of the afterword to the UK edition of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War