Before, it was the 'long war'. Now, the term seems to be 'persistent conflict' or so it appears in a reflective and disturbing piece in the Washington Post on the change in the mission and attitude of the US military in the last decade.The story, by Greg Jaffee, however, is more truthful in its language right at the start:
This is the American era of endless war.
'Endless war'. 'Persistent conflict'. 'The long war'. But what is most disturbing of several disturbing themes Jaffee discusses is the normalization of the idea of endless war, enshrining it in military theory and in even in architecture.
The Warrior Transition Battalion complex boasts the only four-story structure on the base, which at 105,000 acres is about twice the size of Washington, D.C. The imposing brick-and-glass building towers over architecture from earlier wars.
“This unit will be around as long as the Army is around,” said Lt. Col. Bill Howard, the battalion commander.
As the new complex rises, bulldozers are taking down the last of Fort Campbell’s World War II-era buildings. The white clapboard structures were hastily thrown up in the early 1940s as the country girded to battle Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Each was labeled with a large letter “T.” The buildings, like the war the country was entering, were supposed to be temporary.
The two sets of buildings tell the story of America’s embrace of endless war in the 10 years since Sept. 11, 2001. In previous decades, the military and the American public viewed war as an aberration and peace as the norm.
Today, radical religious ideologies, new technologies and cheap, powerful weapons have catapulted the world into “a period of persistent conflict,” according to the Pentagon’s last major assessment of global security. “No one should harbor the illusion that the developed world can win this conflict in the near future,” the document concludes.
Among the strategic elites, 'peace' is now being excised from the military Newspeak dictionary.
“Peace,” meanwhile, has become something of a dirty word in Washington foreign-policy circles. Earlier this year, the House voted to cut all funding for the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace.
Although the money was eventually restored, the institute’s leadership remains convinced that the word “peace” in its name was partially to blame for its woes. The word is too abstract and academic, said Richard Solomon, the institute’s president.
Solomon suggested one alternative: the U.S. Institute for Conflict Management.
Almost a quarter century ago, in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy wrote of imperial overstretch ---the way that empires in the past had hollowed themselves out by attempting to extend military control too far. It seems as if our current military theorists took parts of Kennedy's book to be a 'how to' manual, forgetting to read the parts about how these empires collapsed.
(cross posted at Possible Experience)