FOR FIVE CENTURIES only a state could destroy another state. And for five centuries, states have developed means of defeating other states. Entire worlds of diplomacy, international law, alliances, and naval, air, and land warfare are all predicated upon conflicts among states. Only states could marshal the resources to threaten the survival of other states; only states could organize societies to defend themselves against such threats. Only states could bring about peace congresses.
We are entering a period, however, when very small numbers of persons, operating with the enormous power of modern computers, biogenetics, air transport, and even small nuclear weapons, can deal lethal blows to any society. Because the origin of these attacks can be effectively disguised, the fundamental bases of the State will change.
During the second half of the hegemony of the order of nation-states—a period, that is, immediately following Hiroshima—many persons, including Albert Einstein, believed there would be either “one world or none.” Fearing a nuclear holocaust, they hoped that strategy could be subordinated to world law. This fear has largely dissolved with the end of the Long War and the strategic triumph of one version of the nation-state, liberal parliamentarianism. Yet we may again soon hear this dated slogan because we will confront dangers every bit as great as we did then.
For the end of the Long War created a set of new challenges, and today a question descended from this conflict confronts the constitutional order. It is whether and how states can continue to exist with ever more ubiquitous and powerful technologies that can alter or destroy our entire environment. These technologies include weapons of mass destruction and biogenetic and cybernetic techniques. The legal institutions of the triumphant parliamentary states are committed to the protection of individual rights and civil liberties. To protect these institutions in the face of these new challenges will require a strategic ingenuity that would tax the gifts of the historic innovators described in this volume.
When a disguised attack with these new weapons occurs, and its author is not definitely identified, three deadly risks will arise: (1) a state that is unwilling or unable to suppress the elements believed to be responsible will forfeit its sovereignty and be subject to attack and even occupation; (2) a state that is the subject of an attack will sacrifice its constitutional institutions and turn on its own people—or a discrete minority within—with violence and despotic police methods; (3) a state, though disavowing responsibility, will be deemed the author of the attacks through unknown agents, and will become the target for retaliation. All three of these scenarios fall along the seam of sovereignty that separates law from strategy, and all three are laden with peril. Any one of these scenarios could lead to war, as the targets of retaliation resist.
In fact it is sometimes hard to separate the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and cyberattacks, because so many of the techniques of any one of these is useful to the others. A coordinated biological attack is the dream of many terrorists; such scenarios are espe-cially horrific when the means of coping with them, which are highly dependent on rapid information transfer, are also attacked. Furthermore, an adversary state might well want to shield itself from retaliation by operating not through its armed forces—arrayed invitingly across a desert frontier—but through shadowy agents posing as terrorists or acting through the infinitely extendable arms of the Internet.
Similarly, within a state,
the knowledge and techniques for making biological super-weapons will become dispersed among hospital laboratories, agricultural research institutes, and peaceful factories everywhere. Only an oppressive police state could assure total government control over such novel tools for mass destruction. In a free and open democracy, those who wish to destroy the political order that they despise will inevitably find ways to acquire these tools.1
Such attacks will not arrive with labels that tell us whether they are the result of a terrorist's attack, or a strategic assault by another state, or just the afternoon diversions of a teenager in California. Therefore we must have governmental structures that are supple and flexible enough to react in an environment of unprecedented uncertainty. Above all we must avoid the paralysis that can seize a government when the jurisdictional lines along which we habitually act do not neatly correspond to the known facts of an incident.
Strategically the important thing to appreciate about such attacks is their essential ambiguity. Because it may not be possible to determine the source of the incursion, strategies of retaliation and deterrence, which have served us well in the past, become less useful. In such a world we must move our thinking from threat-based strategies that rely on knowing pre-cisely who our enemy is and where he lives, to vulnerability-based strategies that try to make our infrastructure more slippery, more redundant, more versatile, more difficult to attack.
National security will cease to be defined in terms of borders alone because both the links among societies as well as the attacks on them exist in psychological and infrastructural dimensions, not on an invaded plain marked by the seizure and holding of territory. The line between the public and the private that has been the essential division between state and society has been partly effaced because most of the critical infrastructures are in the hands of the private sector. We shall have to take in new national security partners drawn from the private sector in order to protect the public good. Those states that defy this development by attempting to hold on to state-owned enterprises will steadily impoverish themselves at a rate that is slower, perhaps, but surer than those that risk vulnerability through competition and growth.
There will be no final victory in such a war. Rather victory will consist in having the resources and the ingenuity to avoid defeat.
So long, however, as states rely on a deterrence-and-retaliation model for their strategic paradigms—that is, a model that requires a threat-based analysis—they will inevitably neglect those steps, including enhanced intelligence collection, pre-emption, the development of defensive systems (including sensors), vaccinations, the prepositioning of medical supplies, and advanced methods of deception that provide the basis for operating within a different paradigm, one that relies on a vulnerability analysis. So long as states rely on a nation-state model for their international order, fruitlessly attempting to cope with new problems by trying to increase the authority of treaties, multistate conventions, or formal international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, the society of states will fail to develop practices and precedents for regional, consensual, and market-driven arrangements that do not rely on law for enforcement. Constitutional orders that protect human rights and liberties can coexist with the consequences of the Long War only if they revolutionize their military strategies; states will only be able to pursue military strategies that enable collaboration and international consensus if they revolutionize their constitutional orders, away from the national, law-centered methods of the nation-state and toward the international, market operations of the market-state.
We are at the beginning of the sixth great revolution in strategic and constitutional affairs. The revolution in military affairs and the market-state are entering the twenty-first century together. For every state there are profound choices to be made: which military revolution to pursue (because this will affect the nature of market-state one gets, whether it is repressive or protective or aggressive); and which kind of market-state to pursue (managerial, entrepreneurial, or mercantile) because this will affect what kind of strategic capability is sought (nurturing collective goods and defensive systems, developing ever more lethal retaliatory abilities, or equipping large standing forces with global power projection). As in the past, revolutions in military affairs are symbiotically connected to transformations in the constitutional order, but neither are mechanical. Each depends on human decisions.
Because the nation-state puts so much reliance on law, one might conclude that in the coming era the market will replace law as the partner of strategy. That conclusion would be a mistake. Law will change, and the use of law as regulation, so favored by the nation-state, will lessen. Nevertheless the State will continue to rely on law to shape its internal order, even if the legal rules derived tend to be rules that recognize a larger role for the market. Only the State can promulgate laws. Therefore it will be crucial to develop legal processes that provide orderly and peaceful means of reflecting the popular will. Otherwise, the operations of the market-state will be reduced to the market itself. This will invite revolt.
The central point in recognizing the emergence of the market-state is not simply to slough off the decayed nation-state. It is also to emphasize the importance of developing public good2—such as loyalty, civility, trust in authority, respect for family life, reverence for sacrifice, regard for privacy, admiration for political competence—that the market, unaided, is not well adapted to creating and maintaining. The market-state has to produce public goods because that is precisely what the market will not do. This need for qualities of reciprocity, solidarity, even decent manners, domestically, mirrors the need for collective goods, internationally, and thus represents not only a challenge but an opportunity for leadership.
Law and strategy will continue to be key instruments of the State. It is folly to consider steps in one of these dimensions without a sensitivity to the other. But the new context of the market-state will treat these interconnected dimensions in ways that are dissimilar to the worlds of legal regulation and strategic deterrence we are accustomed to in the nation-state. In 2001, the first year of the second Bush administration, the United States underwent a long-overdue defense review under the direction of Andrew Marshall. Its recommendations—on missile defense, force sizing, the “two and a half” war strategy, cyber and infrastructure protection—were the focus of intense scrutiny and, like the proposals in the present work, many of which they resemble, were controversial. But virtually no one in that debate observed that the profound changes urged in the Marshall Report will have equally profound consequences for the constitutional make-up of the country. Similarly, in Britain the government has pursued constitutional innovations like the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, a closer relationship with the European Union (including the possible adoption of a European currency), and even proportional representation in Parliament. These ideas were hotly debated in the 2001 election, and dissected in the political conversation that goes on after the election results are in, but there was little mention of how such changes will affect the willingness of citizens to volunteer for wars, to pay for expensive military technologies like missile defense, or to want to engage in expeditionary force initiatives.
When the best commentators look at the future, they seem to divide between two expectations: some, like John Keegan, expect that states will master the arts of peace and that war will wither away3; others, like Martin van Creveld, believe that war will degenerate into civil chaos, fought by stateless gangs.4 One might say that the former see a future of law without war, and the latter a future of wars without law. My own view, of course, is that law and war will persist because they are mutually supportive. And this is not the worst dynamic equilibrium: a state without a strategy for war would be unable to maintain its domestic legitimacy and thus could not even guarantee its citizens' civil rights and liberties; a lawless state at war could never make peace and thus would be trapped in the cycle of violence and revenge.
The parliamentary nation-state has emerged from the Long War as triumphant. Nevertheless, we should not expect that either this form of the constitutional order or the Peace that recorded its ascendancy will be eternal. Mindful of the past, we can expect a new epochal war in which a new form of the State—the market-state—asserts its primacy as the most effective constitutional means to deal with the consequences of the strategic innovations that won the Long War. To shape, if not permanently forestall, this war to come, the society of states must organize in ways that enable it to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to treat expeditionary interventions as opportunities for consensus-creating coalitions, and to share information as a means of defense against disguised attacks. By these means, the next epochal war can be converted into a series of interventions and crises, instead of a world-shattering cataclysm or a stultifying and repressive world order.
It is a cliché that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one. But if it is such a cliché, why haven't the generals heard it—that is, why do we persist in modeling the future on the past?
The past, it turns out, is all we know about the future. Things are usually pretty much the way they have been. About modern warfare we can say three things based on the past: that it pits one country against another; that it is waged by governments, not private parties; that the victorious party defeats its adversary.
Now it happens that we are living in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past. Indeed the three certainties I just mentioned about national security—that it is national (not international), that it is public (not private), and that it seeks victory (and not stalemate)—these three lessons of the past are all about to be turned upside down by the new age of indeterminacy into which we are plunging.
The Shield of Achilles
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
—W.H. Auden