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Militarisierung der Gesellschaft, zusammengefasst.
- To: debate@fitug.de
- Subject: Militarisierung der Gesellschaft, zusammengefasst.
- From: Kristian Köhntopp <kk@shonline.de>
- Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 11:41:50 +0100
- Comment: This message comes from the debate mailing list.
- Organization: SH Online Dienst GmbH
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Gefunden als comment in
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/12/18/2221244_F.shtml
Eine sehr schöne Zusammenfassung dessen, was hier unter "Militarisierung
der Gesellschaft" behandelt wird.
Kristian
This is worth it's own submission imho - but... (Score:1)
by David Rolfe (drolfe@nospam.unf.edu) on Saturday December 19, @02:27PM
(User Info) http://booty.mit.edu
This is my thoughts on the whole thing - This is a really far reaching
thread - I wonder why there are so few
posts!
>>Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 23:42:27 -0800 (PST)
>>From: Phil Agre
>>To: "Red Rock Eater News Service"
>>Precedence: Bulk
>>
>>Some notes about cyberwar, hyperreality, electronic commerce, and the
>>visual ethnology of entomophagy. And a couple of URL's.
>>
>>
>>I don't normally get emotional about political issues. I don't know
>>why, but I don't. Nonetheless, in October 1997 I heard something
>>that I found so disturbing that I haven't been able to write about
>>it until now. At the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference,
>>the conference organizers put together a plenary panel presentation
>>about so-called cyber war. The presenters were all US military guys,
>>both officers and military academy intellectuals, who have developed
>>what is apparently an entirely new US military doctrine for the cyber
>>world. I judged these guys to be honest about their reasoning, and
>>I was hardly alone in finding everything they said to be astonishing.
>>
>>Their starting point was military procurement. You are probably aware
>>that it has been US policy for several years to encourage the military
>>to buy its equipment from civilian sources whenever possible. In most
>>people's minds, this is a common sense policy that responds to the
>>recurring outrages over $400 wrenches and the like. In fact it is an
>>extremely important phenomenon that can be well understood in economic
>>terms. Although you wouldn't realize it from reading the newspaper,
>>the modern global economy does not remotely approximate the economic
>>vision of Adam Smith. The fundamental reason for this is information.
>>Adam Smith's economy -- the economy of efficient competition -- only
>>works right in the absence of large economies of scale. Economies of
>>scale arise when goods can be produced more cheaply after substantial
>>up-front investments, whether in factories, machines, or any other
>>cost that must be distributed across an entire production run. When
>>economies of scale are large, only large producers can prosper, and
>>when economies of scale grow, industries tend to become concentrated.
>>
>>The most important economies of scale derive from the information
>>content of a product, that is, the information work that is necessary
>>before the first copy of the product can be manufactured. Software is
>>famous for its extremely large economies of scale: almost all of the
>>cost goes into making the first copy of a given program, after which
>>successive copies can be manufactured very cheaply. This is one of
>>the several reasons why monopolies dominate so much of the computer
>>industry: a million companies make software, but with few exceptions
>>only one company ends up dominating each category of software once
>>the market in that category matures. Computer hardware exhibits large
>>economies of scale as well, inasmuch as computer chips have a large
>>information content. As more products start to have computers inside
>>of them, and as information technology is used more intensively in
>>the creation of other products and services, economies of scale that
>>affect information technology markets start to affect markets in those
>>other products as well.
>>
>>This is the military's dilemma: on the old model, the military could
>>support a parallel industry to produce things to its own specs. With
>>the growing pervasiveness of information technology, however, this
>>becomes impossible. As the military starts to represent a smaller
>>and smaller proportion of the market for goods with high information
>>content, military-only producers become radically less efficient than
>>civilian producers. As the ratio between the costs of military-spec
>>goods and civilian goods becomes overwhelming, the military has no
>>alternative to shutting down its parallel industrial system and buying
>>its equipment on the civilian market.
>>
>>And this is where the problems start. The military once maintained a
>>parallel industrial system for the simple reason that its requirements
>>really are different from those of the civilian market. The civilian
>>computer industry, for example, has steadily produced computer systems
>>whose security against intruders is just terrible. One reason for
>>these security problems is that the civilian market simply doesn't
>>need security beyond a certain point. Another reason is market
>>failure: because of network externalities, the market offers greater
>>rewards to companies with rapid time-to-market (and thus proportionally
>>lesser rewards to companies with other positive attributes) than an
>>efficient market probably would. Whatever the reason, the military
>>finds itself stuck in a very bad situation: they are obligated by both
>>economics and policy to acquire computer systems that cannot withstand
>>entirely plausible attacks.
>>
>>The gentlemen who presented the military's viewpoint on this subject
>>at TPRC were entirely forthright about the problem. They seemed
>>genuinely sad about it. But orders are orders, and they have followed
>>through on those orders by developing the military doctrine that would
>>seem logically to follow from them. And this is the doctrine that
>>I found so frightening. If the military is obligated to use public
>>communications networks, they observe, then national security requires
>>that those public networks be designed to military specifications.
>>That's the choice: either you build separate military communications
>>networks to military specifications, or you put the military on the
>>civilian networks and build those networks to military specifications.
>>And it's not just communications networks, but every last category of
>>products that the military is obligated to acquire from the civilian
>>marketplace.
>>
>>That's bad enough, but it's just the start. In the new world, the
>>military guys said, warfare is no longer conducted along borders
>>and boundaries, with front lines and supply lines and all of that.
>>Warfare, in fact, can no longer be comprehended in spatial terms.
>>To the contrary, in a world where communications infrastructure
>>is everywhere and every element of communications infrastructure
>>is a sensitive military target, war has no spatial limits. And when
>>terrorists can use public communications networks to conduct endless
>>low-level attacks anywhere in the world from anywhere else in the
>>world, war has no temporal limits -- they actually used the phrase
>>"permanent war".
>>
>>That's not all. War, on these guys' conception, is now conducted
>>in every aspect of society. Foreign manipulation of the content
>>of American news media, for example, is "cultural war". Taken all
>>together, the result is -- and this is their term -- "total war".
>>You might have thought that the Soviet Union had fallen, that the
>>United States was by far the greatest military power on earth, that
>>the heavy cloud of the Cold War had lifted, and that it was time for
>>the United States to stand down from its total mobilization, disband
>>the national security state, end the culture of secrecy, reshape the
>>military in some reasonable proportion to its plausible adversaries,
>>and get to work on the rest of society's problems. You might think
>>all of that, but you would be wrong. In the world of the Internet,
>>it would seem, things have only gotten worse. We are now in a world
>>of permanent, total, omnipresent, pervasive war. Cold War plus plus:
>>all war, all the time. They said this.
>>
>>The military guys' view of the emerging nature of war has numerous
>>consequences, and they spelled some of them out. They stated, for
>>example, that in the event of war it would create no precedent for
>>the government to take control of facilities that are sensitive from
>>a military perspective. But they asserted that war is no longer an
>>event but a permanent state, and they had also asserted that virtually
>>the entire productive infrastructure of the country was relevant
>>to war as it is now defined. During the question period, therefore,
>>I asked them where the boundary between military and non-military
>>facilities could be found, and they answered, with seemingly genuine
>>distress, that the boundary does not exist. The consequence, which
>>they did not spell out, is that the emerging economics of information
>>infrastructure have required the United States government to adopt
>>as official policy an authoritarian variety of communism.
>>
>>Precisely because this is all so shocking, I find it hard to take
>>as seriously I should. It's the sort of thing you hear on AM radio.
>>Describing it to you, I feel like one of those guys who has heard
>>somewhere that the United States government was officially abolished
>>sometime in 1933, and that some document somewhere proves this for
>>certain. ("No, it's true! I heard it!", they're all saying as they're
>>reading this, and if the past is any indication they'll tell me about
>>it in e-mail messages, all of which will sound impressively specific
>>and nailed-down, even though they don't quite provide me with the
>>information that I would need to verify their claims in any library
>>that I have access to.) I don't claim that the guys who presented
>>these novel military doctrine represent a perfect unanimity of opinion
>>within the United States Department of Defense and its constituent
>>branches of military service. But neither were they disgruntled
>>mid-level drones putting on baseball caps, lurking in bars, and
>>delivering packets of incriminating top-secret documents to David
>>Duchovny. They were serious people, they were saying scary things,
>>and they were doing an outstanding job of making these scary things
>>sound like the inescapably logical conclusions of well-known and
>>widely accepted premises.
>>
>>So what are we to make of this? The cyberspace ideology provides us
>>with two contradictory approaches to the question. One approach is
>>to laugh at the military guys and the rest of the big bad government's
>>anachronistic control freaks, all of whose efforts to rein in the
>>Internet are inevitably futile because of the inherent dynamics of the
>>technology. The other approach is, quite the contrary, to rage at the
>>military guys and mobilize political opposition to the dark ages that
>>they and their whole anachronistic control-freak cabal are trying to
>>substitute for the utopia that the Internet would otherwise bring us.
>>
>>You may recall that, as recently as a couple of years ago, proponents
>>of the cyberspace ideology filled the Internet with manifestos against
>>the Communications Decency Act and many other bad actions on the part
>>of the government. Where have those people gone? Some of them remain
>>in business, of course, including many of the sensible ones, but they
>>no longer come close to defining the Internet's culture. The Internet
>>is still an object of political controversy, but these controversies
>>now resembles all of the world's other political controversies in
>>their alignments of interest groups with their realistic understandings
>>of the political process. Much of the controversy has gone underground,
>>into whatever back room the computer industry is using to conduct its
>>negotiations with those parts of the military that have opinions about
>>the architecture of its products.
>>
>>What's not happening is any kind of broad-based public debate about
>>the honestly monumental consequences of emerging military doctrine.
>>Does anybody know that the government is moving toward a stance of
>>total, permanent war? Does anybody care? Do we retain the capacity
>>to pay attention to such things?
>>
>>At times like this I am reminded of the park rangers at the Grand
>>Canyon who are at their wits' end because people have been falling
>>into the canyon in unprecedented numbers, even if you control for the
>>increased absolute numbers of people who visit the canyon. The reason
>>why people keep falling into the Grand Canyon is officially a mystery,
>>but the real reason, in my opinion, is that Americans believe way deep
>>down that they are safe. War is now conducted by remote control. The
>>consumer protection movement has done its job, not least by instilling
>>the holy fear of lawsuits in businesses and governments of every sort.
>>Theme parks offer expensively simulated danger that can't possibly
>>hurt you. Fictional people are slaughtered by the thousands in mass-
>>marketed entertainments that go out of their way to numb any emotional
>>response to the carnage. Bombastic pundits systematically smear
>>anyone who believes that life is endangered by the side-effects of
>>industrial civilization. Crime is way down. The people who survived
>>the Great Depression and World War II are old, and the people who
>>lived through Korea and Vietnam don't talk about it. The news media
>>pretty much ignore the rest of the world. Danger, if the concept even
>>remains, is an abstraction, a symbol, something existentially far away.
>>
>>Perhaps as a consequence of all of this taken-for-granted safety,
>>it has become harder and harder for Americans to comprehend danger
>>- -- that is, to really *get* that by standing too close to the edge
>>of the Grand Canyon, one could actually fall into it and actually
>>die. Likewise with our political system. It is just *too* *weird*
>>to comprehend -- to really *get* -- that the United States Congress
>>is actually -- not in make-believe, not in the movies, but here, in
>>this reality -- impeaching the president for no honest reason besides
>>the maybe-or-maybe-not half-true answers he gave to a strangely worded
>>question about which parts of someone else's body he had touched.
>>And it is just too weird that the United States military establishment
>>is in the process of declaring the country to be in a state of total,
>>permanent war. We are numb. Please, someone, put us out of our misery.
>> ...
>>Digital Worlds Research Center
>>http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/
>>
>>article on Y2K and the far right
>>http://www.splcenter.org/klanwatch/kw-4h1.html
>>
>>end
>>
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