Fighting For The Future - Review

Washington Monthly, April, 1999 by Ernest Blazar

FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE by Ralph Peters Stackpole, $19.95

IT SEEMS THAT RETIRED ARMY Lt. Col. Ralph Peters could have had a great pitching career. I don t know if he's ever picked up a baseball, but the way he heaves rocks indicates a strong arm. Peters takes aim at a number of targets in Fighting for the Future, a collection of previously published essays. He unloads on the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. defense industry, and some intelligence experts who couldn't sleuth their way out of an overseas hotel lobby. In the process, he attempts to chart the likely global security landscape of the early 21st century and cattle prod the United States into being prepared for the challenges that lie ahead. He defends his tough rhetoric. "You must pound bureaucracies and not stop," Peters writes. "You have to grind them down."

Grind away he does. And like the over-the-top assaults of the First World War and the Chinese en-masse charges of the Korean war, Peters' thoughts and writing style could benefit from greater finesse and economy. Which isn't to say he is wholly ineffective. One benefit of attacking a target-rich environment--like America's sclerotic national security structures and habits--is the good fortune of being able to bayonet more than a handful of sacred cows. This Peters does with flourish and obvious delight.

"Our Department of State is a magnificent tool for dealing with symmetrically structured, like-minded entities--but what has it accomplished in Somalia ... in Bosnia ... in Africa's ruptured Gold Coast territories?" he asks. "Again and again, we find that haM-won treaties mean nothing because we negotiated them with governments that have only nominal authority while the true sources of local power are asymmetrical to our own ... We are speaking Latin in the computer age."

Peters, who served as a foreign area expert while in uniform, has written a series of fictional books about the future security environment. He is a graduate of the Army's Command and General Staff College and traveled widely throughout the former Soviet Union during its implosive shakeup. In retirement he has made something of a career of jabbing a sharp stick at the Army.

During his fearless travels--this is a man who flew Aeroflot--Peters acquired a bleak view. America's enemy will come not clad in ceramic armor and the other trappings of a modern army. Nor is it an ascendant China or recidivist Russia. Rather, it exists in the various guises of Russian mobster, narcotraficante, terrorist, fundamentalist, treasury-looting financier, and Balkan nationalist. So vast and malevolent does Peters describe this group that it is as if the grotesqueries in Hieronymous Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" had come to life and occupied seats in the United Nations (a perspective undoubtedly shared by some U.S. ambassadors to that body). This loose cabal of international brigands will prey upon unfortunate nations--theirs and others--keeping a sizable portion of the world seething in its own misfortune. What is the United States doing to prepare itself for this? Besides comforting itself with Cold War-era diplomatic and military rituals that no longer suit the chaotic future, too damned little, in Peters' view. He says that U.S. diplomats' refusal to recognize the "fiction" of borders blinds us to the transnational threats freely breeding between time-zones. And when diplomacy fails and the U.S. military answers the call, our military is equally unprepared to rise to the occasion.

Not all of this is the military's fault, Peters hastens to add. Times have changed considerably from open contest between roughly symmetrical armies upon the even plains. Today, "there are often multiple warring parties, overlaid with civil factions, all interacting with multinational peace-keeping or peacemaking forces (often with radically different doctrines and agendas)." To appreciate his point one has only to review the countless extensions of the original 12-month U.S. military presence in Bosnia, or examine the empty strategy today masquerading as a blueprint for imminent U.S. involvement in Kosovo. The unanswered question is whether missions like these are the exception or the rule. Peters says get used to it; the future is already here.

That may be a hasty conclusion. Convinced of his own predictions, Peters often breathlessly imagines tomorrow's problems based on today's circumstances. This is the case, for instance, in his musings on urban warfare. "The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of our world," he writes. He goes on to conjure up a fantastical array of flying tanks and caterpillar-like machines that would navigate the sewer systems and ascend the skyscrapers of tomorrow's battlefields. Never mind that the cost of even distant relatives to the kinds of weapons he envisions would quickly deplete the Pentagon's account, leaving the nation unprepared for any other kind of war. Just imagine the circus-like Congressional hearings such plans would attract. The committee chairman bangs the gavel: "General, are you telling me that we should spend $10 billion of our precious taxpayer dollars on a troop-carrying armored caterpillar meant to go galloping up the side of skyscrapers ...?"