The desert of the real and the simulacrum of war

Abstract

As the global war on terror bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new inter-and intra-service struggle emerged within the military, between what we might call the ‘transformationists’ and the ‘neotraditionalists’. The transformationists put their faith in network-centric warfare and precision munitions to resolve the intractable political, civil and religious conflicts of the twenty-first century. The neotraditionalists, in contrast, go back to the future for lessons, to the ‘low-intensity conflicts’ of Malaya and Vietnam, the ‘small wars’ that Marines fought in Central America in the interwar period, and even the instructions given to American servicemen deployed to assist the British occupation of Iraq during the Second World War. Lumped together under the rubric of ‘irregular warfare’, two new watchwords have had emerged from the neotraditionalist camp: ‘counter-insurgency’ and ‘cultural awareness’. As the neotraditionalists reach out to social scientists to assist them in their efforts, a secondary civil war has erupted in the universities over whether academics should become involved in the new war efforts. Based on a week spent embedded with the 1/25th Marines at 29 Palms and extensive interviews with key proponents and critics, this article maps (and reflexively questions the practice of mapping) the future of warfare as it is planned, taught, gamed and operationalized by the US military.