It was a real pleasure Steve invited me to be part of the blogger mafia. It is a pleasure to get information about some of the things I know about out there to the blogoshpere. It may seem a little depressing to start my first blog on the site with a posting about warfare and geopolitics, but if you take the time to read it you will see that in fact it is not depressing at all, it the technical and social equivalent of 1776.There is a technological revolution going on in both culture and warfare that are highly and I fear will only become more significant in each of our lives as the years go on and I want you to read about them here where freedom of speech and moral conscience are an absolute right. With that let me begin and say welcome to all of you used to reading Steve’s magnificent work! I hope that you enjoy my posts and Tyler's excellent work.
Now that the introduction is over, I would like to ask a question. Do you ever wonder about the future of culture and warfare? Well, I do. And given our non-libertarian political culture, the answers I am coming up with are making me cringe.
If anyone has ever watched the movie the Matrix, you know that things have changed in the way Hollywood does things. The same is true in culture and warfare; that technology and technical innovation continue to serve as an engine of culture and warfare is a part of all culture.
I hope every person here reads Unrestricted Warfare. Written in 1999, by two Chinese senior colonels, it offers a view of warfare as a dynamic process. As it is too long to post here I am posting a link to it: http://www.terrorism.com/documents/TRC-Analysis/unrestricted.pdf
Once you have read it think of creative ways in which this is at work now in our culture and between our culture and China. And ask our representatives why they are not adopting this strategy to handle complex issues like terrorism, or geo-politics?
My own work on the subject is called “Zen and art of Constitutional Warfare” makes the technical portions of this look like what a blunderbuss would look like to a frequency wave weapon. But until we take a defensive posture toward the world and start playing this game, we are going to have serious problems in terms of management styles and business and warfare. As the authors of Unrestricted Warfare note, nationalistic libertarianism is the best philosophy to fight and win a modern war. Makes you think. Makes Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu proud for sure.
It seems more than a little Ironic-with a capital I- that it was this nation and its people that invented that idiosyncratic fighting style during our revolution, and modified it to suit actual conditions. John Paul Jones took it to a whole new level in 1777 when he bombarded the English coast, and Washington and his generals made it new way of fighting. It will be interesting to see if our unwieldy bureaucratic structures can handle this type of conflict because frankly they remind me of the little formal square European armies fighting in the three dimensional American zone circa 1781. How often have we gone from starting with one set of weapons and technologies and moved to a whole new set? How often do we beat our swords into plowshares to make the types of fighting we do more humane? And how often do massive power structures do all they can to make it that much less humane?
This is a very interesting report coming from a Communist country that has typically never embraced libertarianism, but which selectively awards libertarian rights to bright young people in its culture.
Please read it and enjoy it and ask yourself in wonder, did our current batch of planners ever get this memo? Think to yourself, as they sit in rigidly hierarchical bureaucracies, with rigidly ideological ways of thinking, the Chinese who wrote this have already developed a maglev train and are developing technology with Tesla coils that makes deep space travel a real possibility. Think of it and think about the innovation it took to make the Matrix, and imagine what Libertarians at war can do for this nation.
I am filled with admiration and respect for Chinese scientists and artists; and I always wonder why our government and industries are not encouraging us as younger people the same way.
If they ever let us do so and harnessed our free-wheeling thought to science, put on the 1812 overture, and start ringing the liberty bell.
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