“War as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.” Sir Rupert Smith, Deputy Commander of NATO during the 1998-999 Kosovo War
“If you treat debt as a weapon, the basic idea is that finance is the new mode
of warfare. That’s one of my chapters in the book. In the past, in order to take
over a country’s land and its public domain, its basic infrastructure and its mineral
resources, you had to have a military invasion. But that’s very expensive. And
politically, almost no modern democracy can afford a military invasion anymore.
“So the objectives of the financial sector – of Wall Street, the City of London or
Frankfurt in Germany – is to obtain the land. You can look at what’s happening in
Greece. What its creditors, the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) want are
the Greek islands, and they want the gas rights in the Aegean Sea. They want
whatever buildings and property there is, including the museums.” Michael Hudson on Parasitic Financial Capitalism, October 5, 2015, transcript of CounterPunch Radio – Episode 19 (originally aired September 21,2015).
“The most radical change is this: Standing armies can be sharply reduced in size,
if properly reconfigured and trained to fight in this manner. Instead of continually
“surging” large numbers of troops to trouble spots, the basic response of a swarm
force would be to go swiftly, in small numbers, and strike the attackers at many
points. In the future, it will take a swarm to defeat a swarm…. Such a military
would be smaller but quicker to respond, less costly but more lethal. The world
system would become far less prone to many of the kinds of violence that have
plagued it. Networking and swarming are the organizational and doctrinal keys,
respectively, to the strategic puzzle that has been waiting to be solved in our time.” John Arquilla, “The New Rules of War,” Foreign Policy, February, 2010.
“Terror creates fertile ground for the new forms of social control…. These drastic
elements of repression and terror provide the basis for the continuation and
intensification of capitalist expansion into Mexico and Central and Latin America.
States and transnational capital take recourse in repression through terror in
attempt to dispossess people from their communal lands and territories
throughout the Americas and the world.” Dawn Paley. Drug War Capitalism, 2014, p 18.
The US learned a hard lesson after the 2003 invasion of Iraq
The US military has unsurpassed powers to destroy a country to any degree they
want. However, the military simply is not capable of imposing a new social order. It
has never been able to establish a political resolution, even 16 years after invading
Iraq. For Transnational Capitalism, this is the real goal and objective of conflict in the
21st Century. For this reason alone, supported by many other objective changes, the
nature of war is changed in the 21st Century.
William Robinson identifies Transnational Capitalism (TNC) in “Global Capitalism and
the Global Police State: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism,”
Global Research, April 21, 2015:
“… the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial
system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated, either
directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and
regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated
international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each
more organically through the transnationalisation of the production process, of
finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation.”
Robinson’s analysis is included in the last section of this report. He includes an
analysis of the Transnational Capitalist Class – or global capitalists who rely on global
accumulation, rather than national accumulation – and the initial efforts towards a
Transnational State. Transnational corporations now compete for resources far more
than do national states. The Transnational Capitalist class subordinates national
policies to global finance and investment. Michael Hudson argues that the limited role
of planning for capitalism is devolving to global financial institutions.
Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means takes on specific meaning in
the new Post-Industrial world, driven by electronics and labor-replacing technology.
Imposing a new social order means that civilians, especially those outside of
production, must be controlled and organized, new technologies and capacities must
be harnessed, configured and directed, new institutions must be created. Forces other
than the military must be deployed to handle what essentially are police functions.
While many of these functions are carried out by State forces, increasingly capitalism
relies on a shadow state of illegal criminal paramilitaries to establish and maintain
capitalist relations of production.
By 2002, the US began to combine the death squad tactics from the Contra Era in
Central America and the War on Communism with the War on Terrorism and the War
on Drugs to develop a world-wide war on civilians. New technology such as drones
and global electronic surveillance are facilitating the process. All of this has been added to what the Pentagon calls “the revolution in military affairs” (the understanding
that new technology changes military doctrine) that began before the early 1990s after
the fall of the Soviet Union and the war to dismember Yugoslavia.
The result is that the US has changed the meaning of war. Many of these steps were
planned and developed prior to 911. The capitalists were merely waiting for the right
moment. The proof of this is that the US Patriot Act, hundreds of pages of detailed
language, was passed by the Congress within days of 911. Internally, the powers of
the military within the US have been dramatically increased. Externally, State forces
invented a new kind of borderless, pre-emptive war that has thrust the world into
endless cycles of violence.
In essence, this is organized warfare against the new global class of proletarians that are denied access to work by capitalism. Controlling this growing social force is what the Pentagon means when it discusses war in the 21st Century as principally an urban war.
New Era, New Forces, New Weapons
U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their
numbers to their budget. Critical is the exponential rise in special ops deployments
globally. This presence — now, in more than 70% of the world’s nations — provides
new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America
to Afghanistan, from missions with African allies to information operations launched in
cyberspace.
“A joint investigation by The Intercept and 100 Reporters reveals the chaotic and
largely unknown details of a vast constellation of global training exercises,
operations, facilities, and schools — a shadowy network of U.S. programs that
every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign
soldiers, police, and other personnel. The investigation exposes the geographic
and political contours of a U.S. training system that has, until now, largely defied
thorough description.” Douglas Gillison, Nick Turse, Moiz Syed, July 13, 2016.
The same article quotes Gordon Adams, formerly a senior White House official for
national security and foreign policy budgets: “What you have stumbled across is a
systematic lack of strategic thinking, a systematic lack of evaluation, but a massive
commitment of people and money and time in a growing number of countries.” The
article refers to a global training network “without any coherent strategy,” carried out
by scores of agencies and offices with no effective oversight, centralized planning, or
a clear statement of objectives. The naïve assumption here – that the US
incompetently or blindly operates in this fashion – is discussed below.
Since the G20 agreed in 2010 to implement austerity policies across the board, the
world has witnessed the largest wave of rebellions in world history, from Tunisia,
Egypt and the “Arab Spring” to massive uprisings in Britain, France, Greece, Spain,
Brazil, Mexico and Turkey, plus smaller rebellions in numerous countries, including the US.
This is worldwide war against popular insurgencies, whether they arerevolutionary or not. It is militarily managed low-intensity class warfare principally
against civilians, in other words, against the new class. Central to these rebellions is
the unity between college-educated workers, who are unable to work, and those who
eke out an existence on the street, in the informal economy. Tunis, for example,
where this all kicked off, has a large and well-organized mass organization of
unemployed university graduates.
The military emphasis is now on tactical deployments in local theaters to achieve
strategic goals. The “mission” now defines the action. New warfare goes way beyond
special ops to deployments of squad-level groups of armed men, both openly and
secretly, official and unofficial, overt and covert.
The modern US military deals principally with borderless, pre-emptive missions that
eliminate certain enemies or enemy capacities while often deliberately creating social
chaos that the military and diplomats can surf to US national advantage. Thus the
military now confronts far more complex situations and deals with a far wider range of
threats. In their own terms, the military needs to be more agile to respond more
quickly, and to coordinate more different types of actors. One effect of electronic
technology is that it provides far more critical information than one general, or a
general staff, can absorb.
Joining the official forces are a wide variety of paramilitaries, corporate-sponsored
religious armies in Africa, black ops and extraordinary rendition, openly-armed
corporate security forces, outside security contractors, secret and privatized prisons,
death squads, mercenaries, narcotraficantes, NGOs and “civilian personnel” to re-
arrange civilian affairs. US military strategists are quite clear that new technologies
qualitatively strengthen the military impact of small groups.
Israeli military theoretician, Martin van Creveld, accurately predicted these new
developments in his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, where he argued that
future war is not pitting conventional, modern forces against guerrillas and terrorists;
instead, as low-intensity conflict becomes the dominant form of armed violence, all
armed forces will move toward a guerrilla and irregular configuration.
Virtually every “new technology” is now employed in various combinations with armed
forces, now referred to as ”multi-spectrum” warfare or “hybrid war,” meaning the
interoperability of all manner of ways to apply force – cyber war, info war, net war,
intelligence, massive State data-mining and surveillance, all kinds of financial war,
drones, gas, depleted uranium, bio weapons, targeted assassinations, and, yes,
regular forces and nuclear weapons as well just to spice up the stew. In the US-
organized assault against Russia in the Ukraine virtually every aspect of multi-
spectrum warfare was employed, with the exception of the classic World War II
invasion by large-scale regular forces. In the US, the Pentagon long ago weaponized
Hollywood and is always unrolling the world’s most sophisticated Media Industrial
State. We all can see where this is going. Can they perhaps “weaponize” water… or
health care or education? The Israeli military already uses water as a weapon against the people of Gaza. The US already established the school-to-prison pipeline and the
Drug War.
When robots are cheaper than workers in production, then drones are cheaper than
soldiers in war. It’s certainly not industrial-era warfare anymore. Electronics and digital
technology have the same impact on warfare as they have on every other institution of
society. Just as a CEO in corporate headquarters can reprogram the production of a
single machine half-way around the world, so can a general use a robot to take out a
family at a wedding in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has spent huge resources to learn how to fight the wars of the future.
From Alberts and Hayes, Power to the Edge, Command and Control in the
Information Age, page 53, 2003:
“The 21 st century national security environment differs qualitatively from the
security environment that nations faced in the Industrial Age. Militaries now need
to respond to a wider range of potential threats, many that are difficult to assess
and many that cannot be responded to with conventional military tactics and
capabilities.”
“Industrial Age organizations are, by their very nature, anything but agile. Agile
organizations must be able to meet unexpected challenges, to accomplish new
tasks in new ways and to learn how to accomplish new tasks. Agile organizations
cannot be stymied when confronted with uncertainty or fall apart when some of
their capabilities are interrupted or degraded. Agile organizations need to be able
to tolerate (even embrace) disruptive innovation. Agile organizations depend on
the ability of individual members and organizational entities to get the information
they need to make sense of a situation and combine and recombine as needed to
ensure coherent responses. The lack of agility inherent in Industrial Age
organizations is more than simply a result of a systematic lack of interoperability,
although a lack of interoperability significantly impacts the agility of an
organization. This lack of agility stems directly from an Industrial Age belief in
optimization and centralized planning.” (pages 59 – 60.)
The same electronic technology that has revolutionized communications and warfare
has also revolutionized corporations. Corporations became lean and mean by the
‘90s. They are merging the resources of private corporate power with the ability to
concentrate the massive social violence of the State. Many of them are becoming
Transnational Corporations that operate to secure resources for capitalism that is
based on global ownership instead of national corporations. Electronics provides
qualitatively new means to turn public property and personal property into corporate
property. These transformations – driven by technology and by financial speculation –
have lead to the rapid privatization of social force and police powers by corporations.
From Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, page 417, 2007:
“Wherever the disaster capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a
proliferation of armed groupings outside the state…. The emergence of this parallel
privatized infrastructure reaches far beyond policing. When the contractor
infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole, what is seen is
a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual
state is frail and feeble [– referring to the ability of states and governments to help
the people – ed]. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with
public resources (90 percent of Blackwater’s revenues come from state contracts)
including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former civil servants, politicians and
soldiers). Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The
citizens who have funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its
resources. The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core
functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of date, and the
best experts have fled to the private sector.”
The merger of the State with corporations has been systematically advanced in the US
by the Department of Homeland Security since 911. DHS has used most of its $30
billion a year budget to privatize government and State functions by outsourcing specific
tasks to private corporations. The rise of digital technology is compelling laborless
production around the globe, replacing human labor with robots, computers and
software. This objective force is reducing manufacturing jobs and increasing human
participation in services. The enormous US military budget is well over a trillion dollars a
year, when all military activities are included, such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, ICE, etc. This is not the military budget of the 1980s
and before, which guaranteed corporate profit by purchasing hardware. Paralleling the
economy, the military budget today is shifting far more heavily into services provided by
corporations for profit.
One inevitable result is that corporations accrue police powers, which are protected as
private property. Corporations exert organized social coercion, violence and terror pretty
much as the capitalist State did in the Industrial Era, though not so openly.
“Given the nature of the State and its manner of operation, it simply isn’t possible for
any enterprise to become and remain notably successful … without becoming
enmeshed in the State apparatus. It’s possible that a company may escape more
complex involvement with the State in its early years, but if a company maintains its
dominance over a significant period of time, it necessarily must be the recipient of
State favoritism.”
Arthur Silber. “Intelligence,” Corporatism, and the Dance of Death” 18 June
2013
From Michael Hudson, “Quantitative Easing for Whom?” March 11, 2015:
“This financial warfare is trying to achieve the same thing that military warfare did in the past. Its aim is to grab the land, to grab control of the public infrastructure, to
grab control of governments themselves. But it’s doing it financially rather than
militarily.”
“Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and
its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large,
industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the
educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed
credit-card debt in 2012.) The weapon in this financial warfare is no longer military
force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with
debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack
the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land,
public infrastructure and other property in the public domain.”
Klein’s “parallel privatized shadow-state” takes many forms, many of which are still
emerging, including new military and police functions. While electronic technology has
created new challenges and possibilities – ones that must be dealt with dispersed
“smart” squads of armed men – the militarized, corporatized fascist State in no way
restricts these operations to “official” military forces.
To seize land and resources from the public, Transnational Capital relies on financial
maneuvers that are guaranteed by various paramilitary forces. By accomplishing their
missions, these groups engender the elimination of organized opposition and the social
chaos that Transnational Capitalism can surf in order to achieve its economic goals. The
Industrial Era necessity of conquering a country prior to seizing its assets is no longer
required. Given that their rule requires the implementation of labor-replacing technology,
the shadow State is used to impose the new social order and remove the unnecessary
population. In other words, it is dedicated to dispossession. Dawn Paley details this
function in Drug War Capitalism.
The Highlands Forum has played a leading role in defining the Pentagon’s entire
conceptualization of the “war on terror.” Long-time Highlands Forum delegate, Dr.
Thomas Barnett, outlined his strategy in The Pentagon’s New Map, which he presented
to high Pentagon officials in the mid ‘90s to rave reviews. This strategic view considers
the world divided into “The Core” – the US, Western Europe, Japan and wannabe
participants like Brazil and India – and “The Gap”.
“The Gap” is “a disparate wilderness of dangerous and lawless countries defined
fundamentally by being ‘disconnected’ from the wonders of globalization. This
includes most of the Middle East and Africa, large swathes of South America, as
well as much of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.”
Another key paragraph from Barnett summarizes this vision:
“America as global cop creates security. Security creates common rules. Rules
attract foreign investment. Investment creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates
access to natural resources. Resources create economic growth. Growth creates
stability. Stability creates markets. And once you’re a growing, stable part of the
global market, you’re part of the Core. Mission accomplished.”
The “global cop” relies, however, on far more than official State forces. The experience
of South Central Los Angeles is being replayed across the world as drugs, guns, illegal
gangs and the police combine into a single unified State force under the rubric of the
“War on Drugs.” A decade ago, the popular image of Mexico was of massive protests
marching down the freeways; today it is mass graves.
Just as electronics replaces human labor on a global level, global production is
reorganizing into various outsourced supply chains. These reach down into and colonize
the “informal economy,” itself an expanding realm of production. The rise of the
disposable worker and the temp worker requires new forms of labor control. As long as
this is formally done by the national State, the public has the capacity to demand
accountability and the end of abuse. This is not true with the shadow State.
Paley details how the shadow State functions. The US operates in and extends Drug
War policies to over 70 countries. In effect, it is a policy of deliberate paramilitarization:
“Armed groups attack the civilian population to strengthen territorial strongholds,
expand territorial control, weaken the support of the opponent, and accumulate
valuable assets (e.g., land or the extraction of natural resources). Forcing out
population as a war strategy aims at impeding collective action, damaging social
networks, intimidating and controlling the civilian population. By moving people off
the lands, new territories are opened up for these so-called frontier investments.”
(Paley. Drug War Capitalism, page 76.)
“One key element in understanding how drug wars strengthens irregular armed
groups is that these groups may begin providing drug traffickers with protection, but
later will work for whoever will pay them. At one moment in time they could be on
the payroll of drug traffickers, at another, paid by elites looking for executors of
extrajudicial repression…. As is documented in this book, structural factors are at
play, by which irregular armed groups are allowed near total impunity to carry out
extortion and acts of terror among populations when those acts tend toward
benefitting transnational capitalism or US foreign policy.” (Ibid, page 16.)
Capitalism’s expansion – leading to the direct seizure and privatization of resources by
finance or Transnational Corporations – is being organized through the new forms of
warfare implemented by Navy Seals and death squads, paramilitaries, Black ops, private
prisons, private police, etc. if speculation drives the economy, instead of industrial
production, then speculation likewise plays an increased role in war.
Summary of Paley’s overall argument:
** The modern, post-Reagan Drug War took off in parallel with NAFTA in 1994. In the
US, Clinton’s massive criminalization laws also followed NAFTA for the most part.
** These treaties finance the militarization of every country within which they operate.
The rise of narcos, paramilitaries and private, often corporate-sponsored, death squads
quickly follows. The lines between the State and privatized forces begin to blur as the
systems develop a division of labor in the use of social violence and terror.
** The result is the dispossession and policing, both formally and informally, of civilian
populations who are driven to become internal and then external migrants. In Mexico, for
example, the movement of Central American migrants across the country is organized
by narco paramilitaries.This is a process with specific stages: treaty, military aid, paramilitaries, organized murder, incarceration and dispossession, then privatization.This process develops to control working and new class populations, even as the same forces fight to open borders to the flow of capital and speculation.
** Global corporations quickly penetrate regions impacted by Drug War forces. These
corporations focus on privatizing large swaths of land (to grow, in one case, what now
has become a global scourge, the African oil palm), energy and mineral resources. They
bring in big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and giant mega infrastructural projects like
dams, cell phone tower systems and highways. The current phase is to globalize every
country so that transnational corporations can come in and privatize the resources now
held by the public.
Perhaps most important: Every characteristic of these new trends is strongly
established in the US, albeit with some differences in form, mostly due to the low level of
resistance on the part of the people. These include Drug Wars, mass incarceration and
police terror. National laws have been changed so State forces, supported with
militarized private forces, can play a role in using social violence to dispossess
communities and control those who do not work. Criminalization is now actively applied
in the US to spheres of society where it was unknown a generation ago.
This form of fascism goes far beyond the paramilitarization of the shadow State. The
purpose of these gangs is to control the new class of proletarians – those who work little
or not at all, those who at best do part-time work in the informal economy. The objective
is to keep these people from uniting politically with a common view of a new cooperative
society.
Globally this new class is of massive size and is the fastest growing new class in history.
It has already shown that it can lead rebellions, the Egyptian Spring being just one
example. In many countries the unity of educated people who cannot work with the
people of the street has been incendiary. The new class also includes the forced migrants from Iraq and the Middle East and Afghanistan. They will never work in the old way again.
Capitalism is not only producing a gigantic crop of external immigrants, who roam from
country to country, but large groups of internal migrants, who roam around within the
country. The internal migration in the US from the Rust Belt states to southern and
western states after 2008 significantly exceeded the migration of the Okies in the 1930s.
Most will never find sufficient work to raise a family. Whether victims of the corporate
seizure of traditional lands, or victims of increased roboticized production, internal
migrants are on the move. Capitalism intends to regulate and control this potential threat
to the new social order. Migrants, temp workers, outside contractors, disposable
workers, the dispossessed – all these are fleeing geographic regions, just as they are
fleeing devastated sectors of the economy.
The shadow State exists to control precisely this class. Police states commonly pass
laws to justify their authority within society. The new class is outside of capitalist
relations of production and is being forced out of capitalist civil society. Hence the
privatization, paramilitaries and secret operations directed at controlling them. As Arnold
Schwarzenegger once said, “Somebody’s gotta’ take out the trash!”
Parallel to the rural secret State, one that the US has engineered in Mexico, is the rise of
the urban form of the global State through the extension of US mass incarceration,
which is now rapidly being exported across the globe. Pailey, Robinson and others note
that new forms of social coercion are being organized across the globe:
“Militarized, control, of course, also encompasses penal incarceration. In many
nations, heavy prison sentences are now imposed for petty crimes, quality-of-life
incursions, protests and simple poverty. Whole swathes of the urban population are
being criminalized and incarcerated to protect the rest of the public from their
predicted future behavior. Indeed as Zygmunt Bauman argues, rather than being
organized for social rehabilitation, confinement now increasingly serves as ‘an
alternative to employment; a way to dispose of, or neutralize a considerable chunk
of the population who are not needed as producers.”
(Graham. Cities Under Siege – The New Military Urbanism, 2010; ital. in orig., page
109.)
“For the explosion of incarceration within the US is paralleled by the construction of
a global system of extraordinary rendition, incarceration and torture of Others, with
both systems using similar techniques, private security corporations, means of
abuse and legal suspensions.”
(Ibid., page 110.)
“.… the construction of such a transnational US war prison has the effect of clearing
the path for American capital investments abroad and neutralizing the resistance
waged in other lands against evolving US colonial governance…. regarding state
violence against the favelas of Rio or Sao Paulo, many states are resorting to a
strategy of ‘punitive confinement’ towards informal cities – ‘the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of
triumphant neoliberalism.” (Ibid., page 112.)
Here we see one impact of TNC militarized accumulation. Human labor is involved in
services, however minimally. These can include military, police and incarceration
services. The latter often introduces slave labor, in-sourcing labor, rather than
outsourcing it.
It is critically important to see that we are seeing the rise of a privatized, corporatized
State apparatus. This development is the logical progression of the process of
corporations merging with the capitalist State apparatus. As corporations continue to
develop the authority to use force and coercion – i.e., to accrue police functions, up to
and including the right to kill – it is helpful to keep this secret. What is happening
includes, but goes way beyond, the rise of private prisons and private security
corporations.
Though transnational capital demands the free-flow of capital around the world, nations
have a specific role – to block and contain the flow of displaced and dispossessed
people with national borders. This step reduces wages. Transnational capital does not
want nor need, at this point, a centralized global state, a global hegemon, that dictates
how social force is used. It is far more effective to turn this aspect of the State over to
the market.
The process is not yet complete, though it is being implemented at every turn. We see
the removal of the control of government and State-functions from the people through
privatization. This leads to establishing new forms of social violence. The politics of
domestic terrorism reflects the new disposability of labor and is employed against whole
communities and groups that are considered to be excess. Life is being devalued at a
rapid rate, matching the decreasing costs of the reproduction of labor.
Suddenly, local economies are being penetrated by transnational corporations and
financial capitalists, many not based in the US. Examples of this include the increasing
seizure of water in the US by European transnational corporations, such as Nestle and
Verola, as well as the massive waves of community gentrification, dispersal and
dispossession in US cities that is organized by finance capital.
Continue Reading:
Part 2 of War in the 21st Century:
Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Dominance
