The Military in New Times: Adapting Armed Forces to a Turbulent World by James Burk

Author:James Burk [Burk, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780813319605
Google: ykyfDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 4261092
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1994-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Emerging Trends

Two other global trends are affecting the environment in which national security resides. The first is the result of the technological revolution, with profound effects on the structure and intertwining of world economies, the lethality and sophistication of military hardware and surrounding support, and the nature of global telecommunications. The second trend has to do with the growing importance of a number of transnational issues which have the effect of broadening conceptions of what constitutes national security.

The first set of factors is the result of the technological or Third Industrial Revolution: the quantum increase in the interrelated technologies of computing, telecommunications, and a series of derivative technologies.24 Each of these interact: computing break-throughs have translated into more rapid developments in telecommunication due to things such as digitization, miniaturization, and the like.25 In turn, these advances have been evidenced in derivative areas such as new materials science and fiber optics which increase both computing and telecommunications capabilities.

The cutting edge in the production of high technology resides largely in the triumvirate of economic superpowers: North America, the European Community (EC), and Japan.26 Indeed, much of the advantage that these first world areas have over the rest of the world is their ability to develop and commercially exploit emerging technologies, often by exporting manufacturing to near-first world states such as the Newly-Industrial Countries (NICs) of the Pacific Rim

There are several salient aspects of this phenomenon.27 First, because science and technology are inherently international enterprises, the global spread of technology is aiding in the emergence of the truly international economic system. Global business has become truly global in terms of the ownership, management, labor force, and product composition of those companies doing business. The stateless corporation is indeed the wave of the future;28 the recent furor over what is and is not an American automobile is just the most obvious manifestation of a trend which will in time cut across the productive spectrum.

This emerging international economy has some strong national security implicationn.29 For one thing, globalized production means hardly any nation makes everything it needs, including all the components necessary for its weapons inventory. The United States' success with smart weapons in the Persian Gulf would have been difficult or impossible without Japanese microchips in the guidance systems. The first world is becoming so economically intertwined that it would be virtually impossible for any of us to fight one another (if we wanted to). Increasingly, we are all in this together to the arguable point that "global interdependence is rendering it difficult to define just what constitutes the national interest."30 Talk about "economic warfare" is hyperbolic at best. Those outside the technological revolution are at a great disadvantage. Because technology fuels itself (this generation of computers creates the next one), if one is behind, the tendency is to fall further behind. As I have argued elsewhere, a prime reason that Mikhail Gorbachev felt the need to push reforms was the perceived need to knock down the barriers to participating in technology erected against an enemy.

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