The Way We War -

The Way We War - Michael Barone, on how war has radically changed, even in the past decade:

The forces now gather- ing around Iraq are being marshaled by one of these "market-states." Industrial America fought its wars with industrial forces: huge armies and navies–15 million men in World War II–made up mostly of low-skill conscripts and equipped with relatively unsophisticated mass-production machines. The war was won with kids from Brooklyn and rural Texas and machines mass-produced in Detroit and Los Angeles. Today, postindustrial America is planning to fight its latest war with highly skilled professional soldiers and sophisticated high-tech machines. We need fewer people–and can expect far fewer casualties–to win quicker victories. Critics who look back at World War II with nostalgia and argue for shared sacrifice and a drafted military miss the point. We are no longer the kind of country that fights most effectively that way.

And I guess in a way I was one of those critics - not nostalgic for WWII, but definitely on board with the notion of a shared obligation to defend the country. My biggest qualm with the idea of National Service has always been that it's militarily redundant these days.

Here's the point that Instapundit found interesting enough to quote:

But the battleground is not just in the Middle East. Before 9/11, Bobbitt saw "the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses" and pointed out that "remote, once local tribal wars . . . have been exported into the domestic populations . . . through immigration, empathy, and terrorism." An open, high-tech society remains vulnerable to terrorism and cannot be entirely protected by centralized authorities. Our last line of defense must be those high-skill, high-tech, and high-initiative strengths. The heroes who brought down United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and the alert truck driver who engineered the capture of the alleged beltway snipers used cellphones and ignored centralized authorities' rules (the truck driver acted on leaked information) to stop determined killers. We can fight today's wars with fewer troops than we used to need. But every citizen should stand ready to fight at any time in any place.

As Glenn Reynolds says, this country needs to be less of a herd, and more of a pack.

Posted by Mitch at January 16, 2003 03:41 PM