Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology. Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries, and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.
Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated technology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of a rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically questioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) to the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women. Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist. After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individual loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure, but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all professionals, does not choose to lose literate language proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and sex education in concentrated doses. The situation is paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking, distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the human condition associated with them is frightening.
Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed: faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands, messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear- cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function effectively. Centralized military experiences based on structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in actual conflicts of complex dynamics.
The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war, instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the government and the military kept from the public essential information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many human lives meaningless.
The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military in the network of assignments and purposeful functions of the pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective) to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500 years gone by, but, more important, new forms of self-constitution, and hence identification, became necessary and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes into producing new chemical and biological means used in high efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the structural background against which, whether we like it or not, the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can, or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or who enlisted as a mercenary.
Current military research attempts to remove human beings from the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing affects public support for military action more than body-bags. These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide, the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not relate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans who constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human perception and control; space expands beyond what a person can conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are placed in outer space and synchronized by extremely time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing motivation, and for projecting a rational image of irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger, not to mention waiting for the command to fire.
The complexity of war machines is such that even their maintenance and repair requires means independent of the language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship, the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer, displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously, the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts. Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the feedback from the machine. Under these circumstances, efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is already a reality.
The electronic book-here presented in an application of military relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example from the many that can be given regarding how our good old verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books constituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically military component that carries over from previous experiences of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods are different in that more initiative than ever before is required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in alternate means of expression and communication.
In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of distributed tasks and massive parallel computation replace literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits flying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of the human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate movements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal. But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again, these languages make the participation of literate language less and less significant.