Quote Originally Posted by Eden View Post
What this portends is endless violence, without ultimate victory or defeat, a new Hundred Year's War. Oh, there might be the occasional Agincourt, but mostly it means pointless conflict decided in the end more by geography and demographics than by military excellence.

Now, just because I don't like it, that doesn't mean it won't happen. What it does imply is the continuing 'de-professionalization of violence'. Whenever warfare is endemic, civil and military roles inevitably merge, the rules of civilized behavior change, and the innocent bystander becomes more and more the target of 'military' operations. Except the whole concept of innocent bystander becomes obsolete. This is why medieval warfare was mostly a matter of plunder, induced famine, assassination, rapine, raids, and ambuscade, with the odd stand-up fight thrown in every other decade or so. Who's to say that the American public, after ten or twenty or fifty years, might not decide to use similar tactics against someone who can't be defeated any other way?
(SNIP)
Mostly, I want all the deep thinkers to either stop shying away from the implications of what they are forecasting, or spare the rest of us their repackaged revolutions.
Eden,

Well said.

However, I suspect that a better parallel is the 30 Years War rather than the 100 Years War. 4GW folks point to the Peace of Westphalia as a watershed point that ushered in what these theorists describe as 3GW. I suspect that instead it represents a point in time that "civilized people" chose (after facing the chaos you described--"plunder, induced famine, assassination, rapine, raids, and ambuscade, with the odd stand-up fight thrown in") to revisit how to organize themselves to protect the innocents of the world. I would not be surprised that we are at another such watershed moment, when the innocents (or their representatives) decide that it is time to shake up the folks who are running their current "protection racket."

I am reminded of the poles represented by Sheriff Bart and Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles. When folks get fed up enough, they don't "vote the rascals out." Instead, they get more physical. They ride the rascals out of town on rails or worse. Then they set up a new sheriff or turn to the county marshall to protect them. If the county marshal was the problem, they are probably going to look more locally. If the source of the trouble was the local authorities, they may go for a more regional security approach to limit the local abuse of power. I suspect we are just seeing a swing of the pendulum between two focal points of power--one is centralized and the other is decentralized (or local) protection.