Podcast 9: Wars of the Future and the future of war
The future of war…is peace
Tyrannosaur Queen mentions a future controlled by the “Econ-peace,” and makes a parallel between the abolition of slavery and of war. If we listen to people like Steven Pinker, the world may indeed end up that way. Why? Because:
Stronger international economic ties increase the cost of war to the point where it’s in nobody’s interest.
Spreading education and literacy make populations more aware of the alternatives to war.
International media saturation makes it harder to get away with atrocity.
Democratization…might do something good too
All lead to a future where the invasion of one country by another doesn’t make any sense.
In this conversation with renowned artist and researcher C. M. “Memo” Kosemen, we talk about the future of war, the reasons we fight wars, and the technology that we might use to fight work in the future.
One possibility is theatrical war, where rather than actual soldiers killing each other, war is waged by remote-controlled drones shooting each other down. Memo asks us to imagine something like a little robot bird that flies into the engines of the big drones. Bruce Stirling has written about something similar.
What kind of drones? Well you got lots of fancy things come out of DARPA. Like Big Dog! Creepy!
Memo talks about a “gravy train” of peace-time military funding. Do we really need all those aircraft carriers? They didn’t do so well in Millennium Challenge 2002, after all.
Then there’s war-time weapons development. Look at the Manhattan project or mine-resistant personnel carriers (I think he’s talking about the MRAP).
War as a means of conspicuous consumption. Look how much tax-money our government can waste on drones for you to shoot down. Live on TV!
We may not have seen the invasion of once country by another in Europe in a generation, but what about the rest of the world? What about places that “aren’t worth it for the global powers to look into”? Civil wars in places like Syria, where nasty situations force people to be nasty. Or simply places with nothing much to lose no police systems where the only way to get justice is “the old way.”
The War Nerd talked about Egypt and how they use the Roman Testudo Formation.
Terrorism/anti-globalists might become a greater threat as the means of destruction become cheaper, putting WMDs in the hands of tribalists.
Someone might out a competitive alternative to global society, and we get a situation like NATO versus Warsaw Pact. But even the Cold War never actually went hot. Perhaps that was chance, and the next time we won’t be so lucky, or perhaps cooler, more rational heads will prevail, just like they did in the 1950s-80s.
Tune in next week for more!
And get more Memolishious goodness at his youtube channel and deviantart page.
