The nature of warfare and application of violence in the world is changing in a fundamental ways. Professional soldiers are concerned about the nature of the coming conflicts. The church, for the most part, is blind to it. Military, journalistic and academic establishments are aware of these changes but have yet to incorporate them into their thinking.
Service members will cope with the change with courage and as much wisdom as they can muster. They will do this in spite of the failure of the institutional church to provide moral guidance on the most important question of our time.
The most striking, and underreported, aspect of the change is that wafare has been delcining for the past twent years. This does not mean that peace has broken out.
The end of the cold war and the lethality of large scale mechanized warfare make big wars unlikely. Capitalist democracies avoid war with one another. They are unwilling to put their people and economies at risk. Other countries and groups lack to conventional military power to challenge the Western Democracies. Fueled by zeal, they mount unconventional threats to conventional power. In military terms this is known as an asymmetric threat.
Professional soldiers are coming to grips with this reality. Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, has realized that the religious aspect of this conflict may be intractable.
Retired Army Col. Ralph Peters writes about the nature of organized violence and how it is misunderstood. (Be warned, Peters is intelligent and blunt. You may not want to read this before bedtime.)
REVOLUTIONS NOTORIOUSLY IMPRISON THEIR MOST committed supporters. Intellectually, influential elements within our military are locked inside the cells of the Revolution in Military Affairs--the doctrinal cult of the past decade that preaches that technological leaps will transcend millennia-old realities of warfare. Our current conflicts have freed the Pentagon from at least some of the nonsensical theories of techno-war, but too many of our military and civilian leaders remain captivated by the notion that machines can replace human beings on the battlefield. Chained to their 20th-century successes, they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities. Meanwhile, our enemies, immediate and potential, appear to grasp the contours of future war far better than we do.
The religiously motivated warrior mounts an asymmetric threat.
Not a single item in our trillion-dollar arsenal can compare with the genius of the suicide bomber--the breakthrough weapon of our time. Our intelligence systems cannot locate him, our arsenal cannot deter him, and, all too often, our soldiers cannot stop him before it is too late. A man of invincible conviction--call it delusion, if you will--armed with explosives stolen or purchased for a handful of soiled bills can have a strategic impact that staggers governments. Abetted by the global media, the suicide bomber is the wonder weapon of the age.
This threat is motivated by religious zeal, yet few are willing to face this fact:
One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuitive recognition of our enemies. Our rear-guard rationalists range from those convinced that every security problem has a technological solution, if only it can be found, to those who insist that members of al Qaeda and its affiliates are motivated by finite, comprehensible, and logical ambitions that, if satisfied, would make our problems disappear.
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A dangerous asymmetry exists in the type of minds working the problem of Islamist terrorism in our government and society. On average, the "experts" to whom we are conditioned to listen have a secular mentality (even if they go to church or synagogue from habit). And it is a very rare secular mind that can comprehend religious passion--it's like asking a blind man to describe the colors of fire. One suspects that our own fiercest believers are best equipped to penetrate the mentality--the souls--of our Islamist enemies, although those believers may not be as articulate as the secular intellectuals who anxiously dismiss all possibilities that lie outside their theoretical constructs.
Those who feel no vital faith cannot comprehend faith's power. A man or woman who has never been intoxicated by belief will default to mirror-imaging when asked to describe terror's roots. He who has never experienced a soul-shaking glimpse of the divine inevitably explains religion-driven suicide bombers in terms of a lack of economic opportunity or social humiliation. But the enemies we face are burning with belief, on fire with their vision of an immanent, angry god. Our intelligentsia is less equipped to understand such men than our satellites are to find them.
Soldiers put their physical and moral lives at risk. Many of them rely on their chaplains for comfort and guidance. Chaplains rely on the just war doctrine.
Due to the changing nature of conflict, traditional just war criteria are not easy to apply. Terrorists do not recognize the just war principle of non-combatant immunity. The specter of a terrorist attack with Weapons of Mass destruction has led the Bush administration to a posture of pre-emptive attack, calling into question the just war criteria of last resort. Of their very nature, preemptive attacks must be launched in secret, calling into question both the just war criteria of legitimate authority and constitutional questions of separation of powers.
From a military point of view, the religious motivation for terrorism is the center of gravity. It is beyond the reach of weapons and technology. The battle is ideological and religious in nature. Unfortunately the Islamic approach to scripture allows no flexibility of interpretation. Orthodox Christians understand that Scripture must be interpreted in context and doctrinal development occurs in dialogue with the modern world. According to a Hugh Hewitt interview with Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, Cardinal Ratzinger is pessimistic about the prospect for meaningful dialogue with Islam.
One hopes that the church will search for means of dialogue, reexamine the just war theory, and pray first for peace and second for service men and women who are putting their physical and moral lives on the line. Warfare has changed. The tendency to violence has not.
I hope that you didn’t read this before bedtime.
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