Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed, loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace, and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything liberated from language and literacy, military practice was dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and language's participation in it, are the new languages embodied in the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely productive technology deserves attention and thought.
Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired? Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the time of its use, circumstances would speak against destroying it on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude, according to which military praxis is one of command and execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction. Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed assignments. If military experiences were to remain literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network of different assignments. In the partial literacy of the military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the pursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocation of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of self-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis. The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules and no higher authority.
No army could have changed the world more than the new system of human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities, as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent on personal performance.
The look that kills
Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-this description sums up the characteristics of new weapons on the wish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specific basis, defense officials have sketched some research and development objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject to obsolescence:
Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do not require main operating bases, including a force that is logistically independent for 30 days
Tracking of strategically relocatable targets
Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selected geographical areas and real-time information transfer to command authorities
Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration of enemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare
Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems