| US
Army War College Quarterly Carlisle,
Pensylvania, Summer 1997
Constant
Conflict A
look behind the philosophy and practice of
Americas push for domination of the worlds
economy and culture. First published From
Parameters, http://carlisle-www.army.mil/
Summer 1997, pages 4-14: US Army War
College THERE will be no peace. At any
given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there
will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around
the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the
headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will
be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de
facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep
the world safe for our economy and open to our
cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair
amount of killing. We have entered an age of constant conflict.
Information is at once our core commodity and the
most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now,
history has been a quest to acquire information;
today, the challenge lies in managing information.
Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and
apply relevant knowledge soar -- professionally,
financially, politically, militarily, and socially.
We, the winners, are a minority. For the world masses, devastated by information
they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life
is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The
general pace of change is overwhelming, and
information is both the motor and signifier of
change. Those humans, in every country and region,
who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot
profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot
reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become
the violent enemies of their inadequate
governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and
ultimately of the United States. We are entering a
new American century, in which we will become still
wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly
powerful. We will excite hatreds without
precedent. We live in an age of multiple truths. He who
warns of the "clash of civilizations" is
incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see
higher levels of constructive trafficking between
civilizations than ever before. The future is
bright -- and it is also very dark. More men and
women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever
before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if
only because of the ferocity of demographics. There
will be more democracy -- that deft liberal form of
imperialism -- and greater popular refusal of
democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the
future will be the conflict between information
masters and information victims. In the past, information empowerment was largely
a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as
the division of society into the literate and
illiterate. While superior information -- often
embodied in military technology -- killed
throughout history, its effects tended to be
politically decisive but not personally intrusive
(once the raping and pillaging were done).
Technology was more apt to batter down the city
gates than to change the nature of the city. The
rise of the modern West broke the pattern. Whether
speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations
caused in Europe through the introduction of
machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great
age of European imperialism, an explosion of
disorienting information intruded ever further into
Braudel's "structures of everyday life."
Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance
is no longer possible, only error. The contemporary expansion of available
information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and
destructive to individuals and entire cultures
unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists --
the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral
terrorist on the right or the dictatorial
multiculturalist on the left -- are all brothers
and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of
the future, and alienated by information they
cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions.
They ache to return to a golden age that never
existed, or to create a paradise of their own
restrictive design. They no longer understand the
world, and their fear is volatile. Information destroys traditional jobs and
traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet
remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the
information others have turned upon you? There is
no effective option other than competitive
performance. For those individuals and cultures
that cannot join or compete with our information
empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note,
the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected
what the United Nations is to marginal states: it
offers the illusion of empowerment and community).
The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from
modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse
still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information,
from the internet to rock videos, will not be
contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its
children. Our victims volunteer. These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of
Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of
our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are
under assault; their cherished values have proven
dysfunctional, and the successful move on without
them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America
and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are
brothers in suffering. It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th
century the income gap between top and bottom
narrowed, whether we speak of individuals,
countries, or in some cases continents. Further,
individuals or countries could "make it" on sheer
muscle power and the will to apply it. You could
work harder than your neighbor and win in the
marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and
it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is
dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle
power in an age of labor-saving machines and
methods. In our own country, we have seen
blue-collar unions move from center stage to
near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At
the same time, expectations have increased
dramatically. There is a global sense of promises
broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the
planet believe they have played by the rules laid
down for them (in the breech, they often have not),
only to find that some indefinite power has changed
those rules overnight. The American who graduated
from high school in the 1960s expected a good job
that would allow his family security and reasonably
increasing prosperity. For many such Americans, the
world has collapsed, even as the media tease them
with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world
from which they are excluded. These discarded
citizens sense that their government is no longer
about them, but only about the privileged. Some
seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain
law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do
not. The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan
African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a
teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from
the profits of the corruption distorting his
society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility
of marriage, and a deluge of information telling
him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the
West lives. In this age of television-series
franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this
young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us
from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from
satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we
dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of
serious consideration as factors influencing world
affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the
power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where
Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable
to touch the reality of America, is touched by
America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he
sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual,
terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world
of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own
poverty. Most citizens of the globe are not economists;
they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a
zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the
screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be
because America has looted one's own impoverished
group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive
dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square
the perceived moral corruption of America, a
travesty of all he has been told to value, with
America's enduring punitive power. How could a
nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert
Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a
demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and
oppression in which his own secular, disappointing
elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's
desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America,"
but America is far away (for now), so he acts
violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept
no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear
the possibility that his culture "doesn't work."
The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of
victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon,
and it is a source of dynamic hatreds. It is fashionable among world intellectual
elites to decry "American culture," with our
domestic critics among the loudest in complaint.
But traditional intellectual elites are of
shrinking relevance, replaced by
cognitive-practical elites -- figures such as
Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or
our most successful politicians -- human beings who
can recognize or create popular appetites,
recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary
American culture is the most powerful in history,
and the most destructive of competitor cultures.
While some other cultures, such as those of East
Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught
by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius,
the secret weapon, of American culture is the
essence that the elites despise: ours is the first
genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and
convenience -- ease -- and it generates pleasure
for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream,
and his nightmare. Secular and religious revolutionaries in our
century have made the identical mistake, imagining
that the workers of the world or the faithful just
can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the
Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali
Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured
it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing
our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder
even those cultures we do not undermine. There is
no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military)
department. Our cultural empire has the addicted --
men and women everywhere -- clamoring for more. And
they pay for the privilege of their
disillusionment. American culture is criticized for its
impermanence, its "disposable" products. But
therein lies its strength. All previous cultures
sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might
endure in static perfection. American culture is
not about the end, but the means, the dynamic
process that creates, destroys, and creates anew.
If our works are transient, then so are life's
greatest gifts -- passion, beauty, the quality of
light on a winter afternoon, even life itself.
American culture is alive. This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in
our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate
solutions, only constant improvement. All previous
cultures, general and military, have sought to
achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in
cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have
always embraced change (though many individuals
have not, and their conservatism has acted as a
healthy brake on our national excesses). American
culture is the culture of the unafraid. Ours is also the first culture that aims to
include rather than exclude. The films most
despised by the intellectual elite -- those that
feature extreme violence and
to-the-victors-the-spoils sex -- are our most
popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged
nearly everywhere. American action films, often in
dreadful copies, are available from the Upper
Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than
our music, because they are easier to understand.
The action films of a Stallone or
Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely
on visual narratives that do not require dialog for
a basic understanding. They deal at the level of
universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most
fundamental impulses (although we have yet to
produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad).
They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be
defended or won -- and violence and sex. Complain
until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity
abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far
more about humanity than does a library full of
scholarly analysis. When we speak of a global information
revolution, the effect of video images is more
immediate and intense than that of computers. Image
trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers
remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order
skills: computers demarcate the domain of the
privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth,
power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop
culture. If religion is the opium of the people,
video is their crack cocaine. When we and they
collide, they shock us with violence, but,
statistically, we win. As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by
information, or dispossessed by the effects of
information-based technologies, there will be more
violence. Information victims will often see no
other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those
who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting
reason. We will see countries and continents divide
between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century
economic trends. Developing countries will not be
able to depend on physical production industries,
because there will always be another country
willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate
and strive to attack the haves. And we in the
United States will continue to be perceived as the
ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage
or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond
traditional crime, terrorism will be the most
common form of violence, but transnational
criminality, civil strife, secessions, border
conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to
plague the world, albeit with the "lesser"
conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its
interests, its citizens, its allies, or its
clients, the United States will be required to
intervene in some of these contests. We will win
militarily whenever we have the guts for it. There will be no peace. At any given moment for
the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple
conflicts in mutating forms around the globe.
Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but
cultural and economic struggles will be steadier
and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of
the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe
for our economy and open to our cultural assault.
To those ends, we will do a fair amount of
killing. We are building an information-based military to
do that killing. There will still be plenty of
muscle power required, but much of our military art
will consist in knowing more about the enemy than
he knows about himself, manipulating data for
effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar
advantages to our opponents. This will involve a
good bit of technology, but the relevant systems
will not be the budget vampires, such as manned
bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to
buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the
lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most
important technologies will be those that support
soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate
command decisions, and that enable us to kill
accurately and survive amid clutter (such as
multidimensional urban battlefields). The only
imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will
be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and
turn the boats into low-income housing. There will
be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at
all. For a generation, and probably much longer, we
will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies
will challenge us by other means. The violent
actors we encounter often will be small, hostile
parties possessed of unexpected, incisive
capabilities or simply of a stunning will to
violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign
fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the
global landscape is a greater threat to our
operations than any extant or foreseeable military
system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik,
but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions,
sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred,
jealousy, and greed -- emotions rather than
strategy -- will set the terms of the
struggles. We will survive and win any conflict short of a
cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But
the constant conflicts in which we selectively
intervene will be as miserable as any other form of
warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The
bayonet will still be relevant; however,
informational superiority incisively employed
should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to
defeat some -- but never all -- of our enemies
outside of bayonet range. Our informational
advantage over every other country and culture will
be so enormous that our greatest battlefield
challenge will be harnessing its power. Our
potential national weakness will be the failure to
maintain the moral and raw physical strength to
thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart. Pilots and skippers, as well as defense
executives, demand threat models that portray
country X or Y as overtaking the military
capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years.
Forget it. Our military power is culturally based.
They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise
competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on
our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the
playing field away from military confrontations or
turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of
assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish
will fight fair. The threat models stitched together from dead
parts to convince Congress that the Russians are
only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are
only a few miles off the coast of California
uniformly assume that while foreign powers make all
the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly,
and continue to achieve higher and higher economic
growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On
the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States
is wide awake and leading a second "industrial"
revolution that will make the original industrial
revolution that climaxed the great age of
imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only
the United States has the synthetic ability, the
supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain
at the cutting edge of wealth creation. Not long ago, the Russians were going to
overtake us. Then it was oil-wealthy Arabs, then
the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even
calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate
the next century (a sure prescription for boredom,
were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis. No
doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon
find a reason to fear the Galapagos. In the
meantime, the average American can look forward to
a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free
membership in the most triumphant culture in
history. For the majority of our citizens, our
vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the
greatest engine of positive change in history. Freedom
works.In the military sphere, it will be impossible to
rival or even approach the capabilities of our
information-based force because it is so profoundly
an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based
Army will employ many marvelous tools, but the core
of the force will still be the soldier, not the
machine, and our soldiers will have skills other
cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence
analysts, fleeing human complexity, like to project
enemy capabilities based upon the systems a
potential opponent might acquire. But buying or
building stuff is not enough. It didn't work for
Saddam Hussein, and it won't work for Beijing. The complex human-machine interface developing
in the US military will be impossible to duplicate
abroad because no other state will be able to come
from behind to equal the informational dexterity of
our officers and soldiers. For all the complaints
-- in many respects justified -- about our public
school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature
of education in our society and culture is
imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a
second-nature grasp of technology and the ability
to sort and assimilate vast amounts of competitive
data that no other population will achieve. The
informational dexterity of our average middle-class
kid is terrifying to anyone born before 1970. Our
computer kids function at a level foreign elites
barely manage, and this has as much to do with
television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque
video games as it does with the classroom. We are
outgrowing our 19th-century model education system
as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In
the meantime, our children are undergoing a process
of Darwinian selection in coping with the
information deluge that is drowning many of their
parents. These kids are going to make mean
techno-warriors. We just have to make sure they can
do push-ups, too. There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage
war immer so ernst," that translates very freely as
"The sky has always been falling." Despite our
relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most
powerful, robust culture on earth. Its
discontinuities and contradictions are often its
strengths. We are incapable of five-year plans, and
it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption,
technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength
our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move
very fast. At our military best, we become Nathan
Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we
insist on buying into extended procurement
contracts for unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon
systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility.
Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent
defense purchases that will not begin to rise to
the human capabilities of tomorrow's service
members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving
systems into our inventory that will be no more
relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven bombers
would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow's
military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the
most humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing
our best to shut it inside a technological
straight-jacket. There is no "big threat" out there. There's none
on the horizon, either. Instead of preparing for
the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the
constant conflicts of richly varying description
that will challenge us -- and kill us -- at home
and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the
beloved dinosaurs are dead. We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be,
outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think
them, too. But our military must not embark upon
the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models.
Our national appetite for information and our
sophistication in handling it will enable us to
outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures,
information-controlling societies, and rejectionist
states. The skills necessary to this newest
information age can be acquired only beginning in
childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that
fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of
information simply will not be competitive. They
might master the technological wherewithal to watch
the videos, but we will be writing the scripts,
producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our
creativity is devastating. If we insist on a
"proven" approach to military affairs, we will be
throwing away our greatest national advantage. We need to make sure our information-based
military is based on the right information. Facing this environment of constant conflict
amid information proliferation, the military
response has been to coin a new catchphrase --
information warfare -- and then duck. Although
there has been plenty of chatter about information
warfare, most of it has been as helpful and
incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high
school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody
has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense dollars to
contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we
already knew. Studies study other studies. For now,
we have decided that information warfare is a
matter of technology, which is akin to believing
that your stereo system is more important to music
than the musicians. Fear not. We are already masters of information
warfare, and we shall get around to defining it
eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to
our technology (and all technology is military
technology) the Russians can't produce it, the
Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast
enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman,
China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because
the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial
revolution with a billion-plus population. Without
a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of
free information in a society, China will peak well
below our level of achievement. Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their
threatened identities -- usually with marginal, if
any, success -- and yes, they are attempting to
escape our influence. But American culture is
infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't
have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in
your integrity or competitiveness. The very
struggle of other cultures to resist American
cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies
from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear
the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist
regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their
peoples' failure, while further increasing our
relative strength. It remains difficult, of course, for military
leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or
otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is
"preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede
bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our
declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield
victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the
US military around the world is not only a
deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is
constantly at work in the minds of real or
potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the
image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in
the field, doing more to soften them up for our
ground assault than did tossing bombs into the
sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really
believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If
the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in
battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede
McCaffrey's tanks. Our unconscious alliance of
culture with killing power is a combat multiplier
no government, including our own, could design or
afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it
that way. Within our formal military, we have been moving
into information warfare for decades. Our attitude
toward data acquisition and, especially, data
dissemination within the force has broken with
global military tradition, in which empowering
information was reserved for the upper echelons.
While our military is vertically responsible, as it
must be, it is informationally democratic. Our
ability to decentralize information and appropriate
decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary
breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans
decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but
only within carefully regulated guidelines -- and
they could not enable the process with sufficient
information dissemination). No military establishment has ever placed such
trust in lieutenants, sergeants, and privates, nor
are our touted future competitors likely to do so.
In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion
of power within our military (in the Army and
Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic
behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such
as divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the
old names, but the behaviors are changing. What,
other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have
in common with the division of World War II? Even
as traditionalists resist the reformation of the
force, the "anarchy" of lieutenants is shaping the
Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not
understand what their lieutenants are up to, and
generals would not be able to sleep at night if
they knew what the battalion commanders know. While
we argue about change, the Army is changing itself.
The Marines are doing a brilliant job of
reinventing themselves while retaining their
essence, and their achievement should be a welcome
challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy
remain rigidly hierarchical. Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military
services, and individual soldiers are products of
their respective cultures, and they are either
empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the
world's inhabitants are prisoners of their
cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies
they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape.
The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders
about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability
of American culture is reminiscent of nothing so
much as of the ranting of Japanese militarists on
the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that
any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us,
only that they are wrong. Liberty always looks like
weakness to those who fear it. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some
commentators declared that freedom had won and
history was at an end. But freedom will always find
enemies. The problem with freedom is that it's just
too damned free for tyrants, whether they be
dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or
abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing
orders, exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and
demands personal responsibility. What could be more
threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of
this new information age has opened a fresh chapter
in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It
will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of
computer-smashing and head-bashing. The number one
priority of non-Western governments in the coming
decades will be to find acceptable terms for the
flow of information within their societies. They
will uniformly err on the side of conservatism --
informational corruption -- and will cripple their
competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is
programmed. The next century will indeed be American, but it
will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in
constant conflict, much of it violent. The United
States Army is going to add a lot of battle
streamers to its flag. We will wage information
warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we
will always surprise those critics, domestic and
foreign, who predict our decline. Major (P) Ralph Peters is
assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of
Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible
for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign
Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively
at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the
US Army Command and General Staff College and
holds a master's degree in international
relations.Over the past several years, his professional
and personal research travels have taken Major
Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia,
Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia,
Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the
Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos,
Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries
of the Andean Ridge. He has published widely on
military and international concerns. His sixth
novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released
by Avon Books. This is his eighth article for
Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the
importance to this essay of discussions with
Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie
Henley, both US Army officers. 
Statistics: The
burden of Empire: countries with a US military
presence
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