Technological and/or Organizational changes in Militaries: What's it all mean?

16 posts / 0 new

Thu, 2009-12-24 14:31

N.Beltov

The topic was a suggestion by Webgear ... from another thread on technology and consumerism, etc. I've guessed about where to put this thread.

Quote:
Webgear:I have quickly read a few letters; Marx appears to have a good understanding of the general principals of war.

The difference in types of warfare (mobility, defensive. counter-insurgent), do have similar principals however it's the degree of each principal that make understanding war interesting to understand.

These principals of war are constantly changing, depending on political and military leaders, equipment and the enemy, and are not even standardized in some countries (for example Canada) or armies.

Interoperability is not new; one could argue that European interoperability has gone back to the first crusades if not back to the Greeks and Romans before that. In which charters were establish to create large complex armies, defining such items shield production, arrow lengths, the number of horses per class of soldier.

A common problem with United Nation peacekeeping missions is that there are always yearly lessons learned on the principals of communications. Commanders need radios that are able to communicate with all his forces. The African Union is having this trouble right now in Sudan, too many nations with different radios.

Note: I am being very general in my thoughts; one could spend years just discussing one type of principal on one type of warfare.

2nd Note: I think we should start a new thread and maybe focus on a few letters to discuss.

I had, previously, provided a link to some letters from Marx and Engels on War and Military Science.

I had tried to make the point that Marx had, AFAIK, made use of changes that he noted in military technology and organization to back up his claims about how societies change in general (his theory that came to be known as "historical materialism") but I couldn't find an exact quote. Hence the link.

This is an open discussion so if others want to throw in their two bits, please feel free to do so.

Fri, 2010-07-09 15:11

N.Beltov

hah. You're like a dog with a bone. In a good way. I wish more people on the left were like that.

Anyway, the Marxists want to focus on the social relationships that change over time. The tech change is usually put into that context. What new relationships "happen" due to the new technology of the introduction of the rifle, eg? The military is good for studying change in society for a bunch of reasons.The military gets the attention of governments. The history gets documented. Its' a "sexy" and interesting subject. The relationships associated with new technology can provide a key to what the future may hold. And its very, very important to understand that it is those relationships, not any technology, that is the key to genuinely Marxist views. Some people are poor Marxists or do a caricature of it and present the whole doctrine as a kind of technological ddterminism. If you read more Engels and Marx you will find this contextualizing the tech change in terms of human relationships. . Mind you, they wrote over 100 years ago ... and the technology they were writing about was older still. But its' still interestein.g

I'm surprised you don't read more of Hugo Chavez. Mind you, I don't know how much his military experience affected his political thinking, but he certainlly began his political life by forming a (secret) group of reform minded officers in Venezuela. When the poor people rioted, Chavez and his like minded soldiers took notice, changed theri views, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Thu, 2010-08-26 20:25

Webgear

Thu, 2010-08-26 20:26

Webgear

Thu, 2010-08-26 20:27

Webgear

Thu, 2010-08-26 20:28

Webgear

Thu, 2010-08-26 20:58

writer

What's happening to Webgear?

Fri, 2010-08-27 01:38

RevolutionPlease RevolutionPlease's picture

That was a pretty quick wipeout of posts. All the times seem the same - a minute here and there if you look around.

Fri, 2010-08-27 02:02

Fidel

Langoliers? Or werewolves of London, one or the other. I saw one walking with a Chinese menu in his hand just last night.

[url=http://www.technofascismblog.com/2010/05/28/us-dept-of-defense-wants-aut... Dept of Defense wants autonomous robot army by 2034[/url]

Quote:
According to an article in Military Aerospace, former U.S. Air Force (USAF) Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley said, “We’ve moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper.” Currently, the U.S. Air Force’s fleet stands at 195 Predators and 28 Reapers.

As the armed forces rapidly move toward greater use of these robotic warriors, one can only wonder what this horrific automated battlefield will look like twenty years from now. Fortunately for us, there is no need to speculate about the future role of killer robots. We have only to look at one of the military’s playbooks for the development and deployment of robotic systems: the [url=http://www.jointrobotics.com/documents/library/UMS%20Integrated%20Roadma... Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap”[/url] released by the U.S. Department of Defense.

"The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." - John Connor, T-III

Fri, 2010-08-27 22:12

#10

Fidel

It looks like WW III might not be waged with nuclear weapons after all. I think warfare research is going small scale into chemical and biological, or a synthesis of a number of scientific disciplines. Nanotechnology is expected to produce a wide range of possibilities for attacking living things at the cellular levels and even smaller at the atomic level. Self replicating necrotizing bacterias are being studied in military type labs around the world. The blob? Of course there would have to be a counter-blob or good blob to control its exponential growth capabilities and prevent it from becoming Steven King's Langoliers eating everything there is. Yes our best and brightest are being paid to think small and be small-minded for the sake of creating the deadliest biological and chemical WMD ever conceived. And then there could be cyborg soldiers in the interim period before fully synthetic kind arrive on battle fields. Imagine nano 'respirocytes' ingested by the soldier of tomorrow that allows him(or her or even 'it' eventually) to breathe underwater for several hours on end. This is the kind of thing that people doing incredibly small minded research are up to these days.

Fri, 2010-08-27 22:15

#11

N.Beltov

The best and the brightest don't believe in that shit, Fidel. Maybe they're babble lurkers.

Fri, 2010-08-27 22:21

#12

Fidel

Am I off topic?

Fri, 2010-08-27 22:31

#13

N.Beltov

Nah, you're just wrong. The best and the brightest aren't going to be drones for the status quo. They're going to see around the corner and, therefore, they'll be on the left or they'll be on the right asking difficult questions.

Sat, 2010-08-28 00:28

#14

Fidel

Well, what I should have said is that best and brightest are either encouraged to work in business and finance devising new and better financial weapons of mass destruction, or they tend to be working in military research of some capacity. They haven't been encouraged to do nuclear power physics into new and better energy sources for peaceful purposes. The best and brightest haven't been directed toward studying sustainable economic theory, because we would have started down the road following some contingency plan or another decades ago.

Marx was right. The capitalist long game is more war and resource grabs. And according to the US Military's contingency planning, they want to be able to field permanent armies of eco-friendly, self sustaining predator machines on the battle lines by 2034. They want Terminator-like hunter-killers on the ground. And orbiting in space, they want the capability to rain down high tech WMD on millions of people should their elected governments defy global diktats of a future capitalist invisible hand-god.

And why are there bright people doing this kind of research today? The government guys tell them they are working toward foiling terrorism and enemies of democracy. That and hefty pay incentives. When the pay is right, anyone can be made to believe in the unseen invisible enemy that does not actually exist. Bright people are full capable of paying lip service to false gods of peace and prosperity, too.Afterall, we have nuclear WMD today, do we not?

And that's three paragraphs of highly speculative bullshit just for you, mr Wordsmith.

Sat, 2010-08-28 01:35

#15

Fidel

[url=http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/4337160?na... Strangelove wants AI and nano-WMD sooner than later[/url]

Poopular Mechanix wrote:
But I wonder if that's such a good idea. Destructive technologies generally seem to come along sooner than constructive ones--we got war rockets before missile interceptors, and biological warfare before antibiotics. This suggests that there will be a window of vulnerability between the time when we develop technologies that can do dangerous things, and the time when we can protect against those dangers. The slower we move, the longer that window may remain open, leaving more time for the evil, the unscrupulous or the careless to wreak havoc. My conclusion? Faster, please.

Terminator, 1980 wrote:
Sarah Connor: H-K's?
Kyle Reese: Hunter-Killers. Aerial and ground patrol machines built in automated factories. Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal.

Quote:
"The object of the WWF is to 'conserve' the system as a whole; not to prevent the killing of individual animals. Those who are concerned about the conservation of nature accept... that most species produce a surplus that is capable of being culled without in any way threatening the survival of the species as a whole." -- HRH Prince Philip, founder of WWF,

Phil Windsor on culling the herd.

Sat, 2010-08-28 04:06

#16

Fidel

[url=http://exposureroom.com/members/Durruti/f8bb07c6a12646e199602f6d16d53d55... - the real battlefield is the mind[/url] a full length film

Quote:
This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.