Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...
Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...
Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...
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[ 162 ] The Past<br />
presents Technowar as a production system that can be rationally managed<br />
<strong>and</strong> warfare as a kind of activity that can be scientifically determined by<br />
constructing computer models. Increase their resources <strong>and</strong> the war-managers<br />
claim to know what will happen. What constitutes their knowledge<br />
is an array of numbers—numbers of U.S. <strong>and</strong> allied forces, numbers of VC<br />
[Vietcong] <strong>and</strong> NVA [North Vietnamese Army] forces, body counts, kill<br />
ratios—numbers that appear scientific, (pp. 155-156)<br />
There is also evidence here for theories like that of Robert Jay Lifton<br />
(1970, 1987), which argues that what is rationally repressed, the emotional,<br />
can return "in crazy or criminal acts." Consider these comments by William<br />
Bundy, Robert McNamara, John McNaughton, <strong>and</strong> Richard Helms about<br />
the rationale for the bombing of North Vietnam:<br />
the resumption of bombing after a pause would be even more painful to<br />
the population of North Vietnam than a fairly steady rate of bombing. ...<br />
. . . "water-drip" technique . . .<br />
It is important not to "kill the hostage" by destroying the North Vietnamese<br />
assets inside the "Hanoi donut"....<br />
Fast/full squeeze .. . progressive squeeze-<strong>and</strong>-talk . ..<br />
.. . the "hot-cold" treatment ... the objective of "persuading" Hanoi,<br />
which would dictate a program of painful surgical strikes . ..<br />
. . . our "salami-slice" bombing program . . .<br />
. . . ratchet. . .<br />
. . . one more turn of the screw . . .<br />
(all quotes from Ellsberg, 1972, p. 304)<br />
Daniel Ellsberg admits that he heard such talk all the time from these men<br />
<strong>and</strong>, while he often disagreed with the policies they advocated, he never saw<br />
what his wife did when she first read them: "It is the language of torturers"<br />
(304; emphasis added). Torture was the policy:<br />
By early 1965, McNamara's Vietnam strategy was essentially a conventional-war<br />
version of the counterforce/no-cities theory—using force as an<br />
instrument of coercion, withholding a larger force that could kill the<br />
hostage of the enemy's cities if he didn't back down. (Kaplan, 1983,<br />
p. 329)<br />
This strategy was based directly on Thomas Schelling s elaboration of<br />
game theory in the case of non-zero-sum games, which are those contests<br />
where there isn't one winner <strong>and</strong> one loser, but there's a chance to have a