Military Officer - January 2006 - (Page 69)

The real revolutionaries of the past century weren’t Che Guevara, Mao, or Lenin, but middle-class Americans going about their daily lives. males in tradition-bound societies — especially those of the Middle East. To a degree we fail to comprehend, the great contest between the West and the societies of the Middle East is a struggle over women’s freedom. We would never express it so, but the enduring, unorthodox war between our military and Islamist terrorists is best symbolized by the contrast between the burka and the two-piece women’s business suit. Yet, the extensive participation of women in the workforce is only one of the multiple American revolutions of the past 50 years. Racial integration, arguably more advanced here than anywhere else on earth, introduced another ﬂood of previously unavailable talent into our society and economy. While much is made of the technological revolution of our times, equally signiﬁcant is the changing role of older citizens in our country. Two generations ago, men and women aged in chronic pain, dying at ages we now consider young. Bluntly put, they were resource consumers, a negative for the economy. Today, Americans not only are far healthier in their 60s, 70s, and beyond, but also continue to contribute to our national wealth and well-being in ways we have not yet learned to measure fully, from volunteer work in their communities to founding new businesses. At a time when, even in Europe, young university graduates cannot ﬁnd jobs and middle-aged employees who lose their positions cannot ﬁnd new ones, Americans well beyond formal retirement age continue to produce goods and provide services in our talent-hungry society. Many military retirees or reserve-component ofﬁcers reading these lines will be in the midst of their second, third, or even fourth careers. How on earth can a country such as Pakistan or, for all its oil income, Saudi Arabia begin to compete with us? They can’t. That’s the crux of the problem. The unspoken strategic factor underlying anti-American rhetoric and violence today often comes down to that primal human emotion, jealousy. Lagging societies cling to cherished but noncompetitive values while hating us because they feel humiliated by our success. Over the past half-century, we Americans have pioneered no end of other social revolutions that enhanced our power, and the effect is synergistic, not a matter of simple addition. Military ofﬁcers know very well how effective the GI Bill proved six decades ago. The revolution it spurred in democratizing higher education changed our country profoundly. In the same time frame, we saw a revolution in religious tolerance — a seismic shift in history that alarms bigots everywhere. We’ve had an efﬁciency revolution in our daily lives and even a revolution in health care (yes, it costs more, but I, for one, remember the primitive conditions in our hospitals as recently as the 1950s). No other country, not even Canada or Australia, rivals us in the combination of social revolutions, sound laws, entrepreneurial culture, and constructive values that are set to guarantee the acceleration of our wealth and power across the coming decades. B The new barbarians ut that future will not be peaceful. We are in the early stages of a third world war. This conﬂict may occasionally involve standing armies on both sides, but, more often, it will be fought asymmetrically, as in Iraq or Manhattan, with our enemies seeking to avoid our military strengths while capitalizing on the vulnerabilities inherent in a free society, on the irresponsible nature of our media, and on our great national weakness, impatience. The great wars of the last century, waged ﬁrst over empire, then over ideology, were more horriﬁc in the scale of their battles and the extent of their destruction than the cat-and-mouse struggle today. But the differences between the sides are even harder to reconcile. This struggle is about belief, something an order of magnitude more intractable than ideologies concocted by intellectuals. On one side, we Americans have our deep conviction that human freedom is of paramount value. Our enemies are convinced that the will of a punitive god is incontestable and that freedom cannot coexist with faith. Opponents suffused with a vision of a vengeful god whom they serve as executioners, men who regard death as a promotion and disdain the humane coexistence for which we stand, must be fought until their defeat is total. And that is far easier said than done. This will, indeed, be our longest war, if not our bloodiest. This isn’t just a war on terrorism. It’s a struggle between the future and the past, between liberating innovation and suffocating tradition, between reason and JANUARY 2006 MILITARY OFFICER 69

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Military Officer - January 2006

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