[In 1997, Barbara Ehrenreich went after the human attraction to
violence in her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions
of War. Now, in an updated, adapted version of an afterword, she turns
from the origins of war to its endpoint.]
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WAR WITHOUT HUMANS  
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Barbara Ehrenreich
August 20, 2023
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ In 1997, Barbara Ehrenreich went after the human attraction to
violence in her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions
of War. Now, in an updated, adapted version of an afterword, she turns
from the origins of war to its endpoint. _

Soldier Operates Wheel Barrow Mk 8 Counter IED Robot in Afghanistan,
Defence Imagery is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

 

For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997
work _Blood Rites_ ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested
that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon — honor,
courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful to
stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms.  After all, certain
species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that
play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement.

More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating
pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation.
In the human case, we know it is capable of spreading geographically
and evolving rapidly over time — qualities that, as I suggested
somewhat fancifully, make war a metaphorical successor to the
predatory animals that shaped humans into fighters in the first place.

A decade and a half later, these musings do not seem quite so airy and
abstract anymore. The trend, at the close of the twentieth century,
still seemed to be one of ever more massive human involvement in war
— from armies containing tens of thousands in the sixteenth century,
to hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth, and eventually millions in
the twentieth-century world wars.

Buy the Book
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It was the ascending scale of war that originally called forth the
existence of the nation-state as an administrative unit capable of
maintaining mass armies and the infrastructure — for taxation,
weapons manufacture, transport, etc. — that they require. War has
been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective
project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a
very different direction, one in which human beings have a much
smaller role to play.

One factor driving this change has been the emergence of a new kind of
enemy, so-called “non-state actors,” meaning popular insurgencies
and loose transnational networks of fighters, none of which are likely
to field large numbers of troops or maintain expensive arsenals of
their own. In the face of these new enemies, typified by al-Qaeda, the
mass armies of nation-states are highly ineffective, cumbersome to
deploy, difficult to maneuver, and from a domestic point of view,
overly dependent on a citizenry that is both willing and able to
fight, or at least to have their children fight for them.

Yet just as U.S. military cadets continue, in defiance of military
reality, to sport swords on their dress uniforms, our leaders, both
military and political, tend to cling to an idea of war as a vast,
labor-intensive effort on the order of World War II. Only slowly, and
with a reluctance bordering on the phobic, have the leaders of major
states begun to grasp the fact that this approach to warfare may soon
be obsolete.

Consider the most recent U.S. war with Iraq. According to
then-president George W. Bush, the _casus belli_ was the 9/11 terror
attacks.  The causal link between that event and our chosen enemy,
Iraq, was, however, imperceptible to all but the most dedicated
inside-the-Beltway intellectuals. Nineteen men had hijacked airplanes
and flown them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center — 15 of
them Saudi Arabians, none of them Iraqis — and we went to war
against… Iraq?

Military history offers no ready precedents for such wildly misaimed
retaliation. The closest analogies come from anthropology, which
provides plenty of cases of small-scale societies in which the death
of any member, for any reason, needs to be “avenged” by an attack
on a more or less randomly chosen other tribe or hamlet.

Why Iraq? Neoconservative imperial ambitions have been invoked in
explanation, as well as the American thirst for oil, or even an
Oedipal contest between George W. Bush and his father. There is no
doubt some truth to all of these explanations, but the targeting of
Iraq also represented a desperate and irrational response to what was,
for Washington, an utterly confounding military situation.

We faced a state-less enemy — geographically diffuse, lacking
uniforms and flags, invulnerable to invading infantries and saturation
bombing, and apparently capable of regenerating itself at minimal
expense. From the perspective of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
and his White House cronies, this would not do.

Since the U.S. was accustomed to fighting other nation-states —
geopolitical entities containing such identifiable targets as capital
cities, airports, military bases, and munitions plants — we would
have to find a nation-state to fight, or as Rumsfeld put it, a
“target-rich environment.” Iraq, pumped up by alleged stockpiles
of “weapons of mass destruction,” became the designated surrogate
for an enemy that refused to play our game.

The effects of this atavistic war are still being tallied: in Iraq, we
would have to include civilian deaths estimated at possibly hundreds
of thousands, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and
devastating outbreaks of sectarian violence of a kind that, as we
should have learned from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, can readily
follow the death or removal of a nationalist dictator.

But the effects of war on the U.S. and its allies may end up being
almost as tragic. Instead of punishing the terrorists who had attacked
the U.S., the war seems to have succeeded in recruiting more such
irregular fighters, young men (and sometimes women) willing to die and
ready to commit further acts of terror or revenge. By insisting on
fighting a more or less randomly selected nation-state, the U.S. may
only have multiplied the non-state threats it faces.

UNWIELDY ARMIES

Whatever they may think of what the U.S. and its allies did in Iraq,
many national leaders are beginning to acknowledge that conventional
militaries are becoming, in a strictly military sense, almost
ludicrously anachronistic. Not only are they unsuited to crushing
counterinsurgencies and small bands of terrorists or irregular
fighters, but mass armies are simply too cumbersome to deploy on short
notice.

In military lingo, they are weighed down by their “tooth to tail”
ratio — a measure of the number of actual fighters in comparison to
the support personnel and equipment the fighters require. Both hawks
and liberal interventionists may hanker to airlift tens of thousands
of soldiers to distant places virtually overnight, but those soldiers
will need to be preceded or accompanied by tents, canteens, trucks,
medical equipment, and so forth. “Flyover” rights will have to be
granted by neighboring countries; air strips and eventually bases will
have to be constructed; supply lines will have to be created and
defended — all of which can take months to accomplish.

The sluggishness of the mass, labor-intensive military has become a
constant source of frustration to civilian leaders. Irritated by the
Pentagon’s hesitation to put “boots on the ground” in Bosnia,
then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously demanded of
Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, “What good is this marvelous
military force if we can never use it?” In 2009, the Obama
administration unthinkingly proposed a troop surge in Afghanistan,
followed by a withdrawal within a year and a half that would have
required some of the troops to start packing up almost as soon as they
arrived. It took the U.S. military a full month to organize the
transport of 20,000 soldiers to Haiti in the wake of the 2010
earthquake — and they were only traveling 700 miles to engage in a
humanitarian relief mission, not a war.

Another thing hobbling mass militaries is the increasing unwillingness
of nations, especially the more democratic ones, to risk large numbers
of casualties. It is no longer acceptable to drive men into battle at
gunpoint or to demand that they fend for themselves on foreign soil.
Once thousands of soldiers have been plunked down in a “theater,”
they must be defended from potentially hostile locals, a project that
can easily come to supersede the original mission.

We may not be able clearly to articulate what American troops were
supposed to accomplish in Iraq or Afghanistan, but without question
one part of their job has been “force protection.” In what could
be considered the inverse of “mission creep,” instead of
expanding, the mission now has a tendency to contract to the task of
self-defense.

Ultimately, the mass militaries of the modern era, augmented by
ever-more expensive weapons systems, place an unacceptable economic
burden on the nation-states that support them — a burden that
eventually may undermine the militaries themselves. Consider what has
been happening to the world’s sole military superpower, the United
States. The latest estimate for the cost of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan is, at this moment, at least $3.2 trillion, while total
U.S. military spending equals that of the next 15 countries combined,
and adds up to approximately 47% of all global military spending.

To this must be added the cost of caring for wounded and otherwise
damaged veterans, which has been mounting precipitously as medical
advances allow more of the injured to survive. The U.S. military has
been sheltered from the consequences of its own profligacy by a level
of bipartisan political support that has kept it almost magically
immune to budget cuts, even as the national debt balloons to levels
widely judged to be unsustainable.

The hard right, in particular, has campaigned relentlessly against
“big government,” apparently not noticing that the military is a
sizable chunk of this behemoth. In December 2010, for example, a
Republican senator from Oklahoma railed against the national debt with
this statement: “We’re really at war. We’re on three fronts now:
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the financial tsunami  [arising from the debt]
that is facing us.” Only in recent months have some Tea
Party-affiliated legislators broken with tradition by declaring their
willingness to cut military spending.

HOW THE WARFARE STATE BECAME THE WELFARE STATE

If military spending is still for the most part sacrosanct, ever more
spending cuts are required to shrink “big government.”  Then what
remains is the cutting of domestic spending, especially social
programs for the poor, who lack the means to finance politicians, and
all too often the incentive to vote as well. From the Reagan years on,
the U.S. government has chipped away at dozens of programs that had
helped sustain people who are underpaid or unemployed, including
housing subsidies, state-supplied health insurance, public
transportation, welfare for single parents, college tuition aid, and
inner-city economic development projects.

Even the physical infrastructure — bridges, airports, roads, and
tunnels — used by people of all classes has been left at dangerous
levels of disrepair. Antiwar protestors wistfully point out, year
after year, what the cost of our high-tech weapon systems, our global
network of more than 1,000 military bases, and our various
“interventions” could buy if applied to meeting domestic human
needs. But to no effect.  

This ongoing sacrifice of domestic welfare for military
“readiness” represents the reversal of a historic trend. Ever
since the introduction of mass armies in Europe in the seventeenth
century, governments have generally understood that to underpay and
underfeed one’s troops — and the class of people that supplies
them — is to risk having the guns pointed in the opposite direction
from that which the officers recommend.

In fact, modern welfare states, inadequate as they may be, are in no
small part the product of war — that is, of governments’ attempts
to appease soldiers and their families. In the U.S., for example, the
Civil War led to the institution of widows’ benefits, which were the
predecessor of welfare in its Aid to Families with Dependent Children
form. It was the bellicose German leader Otto von Bismarck who first
instituted national health insurance.

World War II spawned educational benefits and income support for
American veterans and led, in the United Kingdom, to a comparatively
generous welfare state, including free health care for all. Notions of
social justice and fairness, or at least the fear of working class
insurrections, certainly played a part in the development of
twentieth-century welfare states, but there was a pragmatic military
motivation as well: if young people are to grow up to be effective
troops, they need to be healthy, well-nourished, and reasonably
well-educated.

In the U.S., the steady withering of social programs that might
nurture future troops even serves, ironically, to justify increased
military spending. In the absence of a federal jobs program,
Congressional representatives become fierce advocates for weapons
systems that the Pentagon itself has no use for, as long as the
manufacture of those weapons can provide employment for some of their
constituents.

With diminishing funds for higher education, military service becomes
a less dismal alternative for young working-class people than the
low-paid jobs that otherwise await them. The U.S. still has a civilian
welfare state consisting largely of programs for the elderly (Medicare
and Social Security). For many younger Americans, however, as well as
for older combat veterans, the U.S. military _is_ the welfare state
— and a source, however temporarily, of jobs, housing, health care,
and education.

Eventually, however, the failure to invest in America’s human
resources — through spending on health, education, and so forth —
undercuts the military itself. In World War I, public health experts
were shocked to find that one-third of conscripts were rejected as
physically unfit for service; they were too weak and flabby or too
damaged by work-related accidents.

Several generations later, in 2010, the U.S. Secretary of Education
reported that “75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17
to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have
failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are
physically unfit.” When a nation can no longer generate enough young
people who are fit for military service, that nation has two choices:
it can, as a number of prominent retired generals are currently
advocating, reinvest in its “human capital,” especially the health
and education of the poor, or it can seriously reevaluate its approach
to war.

THE FOG OF (ROBOT) WAR

Since the rightward, anti-“big government” tilt of American
politics more or less precludes the former, the U.S. has been
scrambling to develop less labor-intensive forms of waging war. In
fact, this may prove to be the ultimate military utility of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan: if they have gained the U.S. no geopolitical
advantage, they have certainly served as laboratories and testing
grounds for forms of future warfare that involve less human, or at
least less governmental, commitment.

One step in that direction has been the large-scale use of military
contract workers supplied by private companies, which can be seen as a
revival of the age-old use of mercenaries. Although most of the
functions that have been outsourced to private companies — including
food services, laundry, truck driving, and construction — do not
involve combat, they _are_ dangerous, and some contract workers have
even been assigned to the guarding of convoys and military bases.

Contractors are still men and women, capable of bleeding and dying —
and surprising numbers of them have indeed died.  In the initial six
months of 2010, corporate deaths exceeded military deaths in Iraq and
Afghanistan for the first time. But the Pentagon has little or no
responsibility for the training, feeding, or care of private
contractors.  If wounded or psychologically damaged, American
contract workers must turn, like any other injured civilian employees,
to the Workers’ Compensation system, hence their sense of themselves
as a “disposable army.”  By 2009, the trend toward privatization
had gone so far that the number of private contractors in Afghanistan
exceeded the number of American troops there.

An alternative approach is to eliminate or drastically reduce the
military’s dependence on human beings of any kind.  This would have
been an almost unthinkable proposition a few decades ago, but
technologies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan have steadily stripped
away the human role in war. Drones, directed from sites up to 7,500
miles away in the western United States, are replacing manned
aircraft.

Video cameras, borne by drones, substitute for human scouts or
information gathered by pilots. Robots disarm roadside bombs. When
American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, no robots accompanied them; by
2008, there were 12,000 participating in the war.  Only a handful of
drones were used in the initial invasion; today, the U.S. military has
an inventory of more than 7,000, ranging from the familiar Predator to
tiny Ravens and Wasps used to transmit video images of events on the
ground.  Far stranger fighting machines are in the works, like swarms
of lethal “cyborg insects” that could potentially replace human
infantry.

These developments are by no means limited to the U.S. The global
market for military robotics and unmanned military vehicles is growing
fast, and includes Israel, a major pioneer in the field, Russia, the
United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, and China. Turkey is reportedly
readying a robot force for strikes against Kurdish insurgents; Israel
hopes to eventually patrol the Gaza border with “see-shoot” robots
that will destroy people perceived as transgressors as soon as they
are detected.

It is hard to predict how far the automation of war and the
substitution of autonomous robots for human fighters will go. On the
one hand, humans still have the advantage of superior visual
discrimination.  Despite decades of research in artificial
intelligence, computers cannot make the kind of simple distinctions
— as in determining whether a cow standing in front of a barn is a
separate entity or a part of the barn — that humans can make in a
fraction of a second.

Thus, as long as there is any premium on avoiding civilian deaths,
humans have to be involved in processing the visual information that
leads, for example, to the selection of targets for drone attacks. If
only as the equivalent of seeing-eye dogs, humans will continue to
have a role in war, at least until computer vision improves.

On the other hand, the human brain lacks the bandwidth to process all
the data flowing into it, especially as new technologies multiply that
data. In the clash of traditional mass armies, under a hail of arrows
or artillery shells, human warriors often found themselves confused
and overwhelmed, a condition attributed to “the fog of war.” Well,
that fog is growing a lot thicker. U.S. military officials, for
instance, put the blame on “information overload” for the killing
of 23 Afghan civilians in February 2010, and the _New York
Times_ reported that:

“Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of
9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones
and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the
ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, get
directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets can be
so packed with data that some pilots call them “drool buckets”
because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.”

When the sensory data coming at a soldier is augmented by a flood of
instantaneously transmitted data from distant cameras and computer
search engines, there may be no choice but to replace the sloppy
“wet-ware” of the human brain with a robotic system for instant
response.

WAR WITHOUT HUMANS

Once set in place, the cyber-automation of war is hard to stop. 
Humans will cling to their place “in the loop” as long as they
can, no doubt insisting that the highest level of decision-making —
whether to go to war and with whom — be reserved for human leaders.
But it is precisely at the highest levels that decision-making may
most need automating. A head of state faces a blizzard of factors to
consider, everything from historical analogies and satellite-derived
intelligence to assessments of the readiness of potential allies.
Furthermore, as the enemy automates its military, or in the case of a
non-state actor, simply adapts to our level of automation, the window
of time for effective responses will grow steadily narrower. Why not
turn to a high-speed computer? It is certainly hard to imagine a piece
of intelligent hardware deciding to respond to the 9/11 attacks by
invading Iraq.

So, after at least 10,000 years of intra-species fighting — of
scorched earth, burned villages, razed cities, and piled up corpses,
as well, of course, as all the great epics of human literature — we
have to face the possibility that the institution of war might no
longer need us for its perpetuation. Human desires, especially for the
Earth’s diminishing supply of resources, will still instigate wars
for some time to come, but neither human courage nor human bloodlust
will carry the day on the battlefield.

Computers will assess threats and calibrate responses; drones will
pinpoint enemies; robots might roll into the streets of hostile
cities. Beyond the individual battle or smaller-scale encounter,
decisions as to whether to match attack with counterattack, or one
lethal technological innovation with another, may also be eventually
ceded to alien minds.

This should not come as a complete surprise. Just as war has shaped
human social institutions for millennia, so has it discarded them as
the evolving technology of war rendered them useless. When war was
fought with blades by men on horseback, it favored the rule of
aristocratic warrior elites. When the mode of fighting shifted to
action-at-a-distance weapons like bows and guns, the old elites had to
bow to the central authority of kings, who, in turn, were undone by
the democratizing forces unleashed by new mass armies.

Even patriarchy cannot depend on war for its long-term survival, since
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, at least within U.S. forces,
established women’s worth as warriors. Over the centuries, human
qualities once deemed indispensable to war fighting — muscular
power, manliness, intelligence, judgment — have one by one become
obsolete or been ceded to machines.

What will happen then to the “passions of war”? Except for
individual acts of martyrdom, war is likely to lose its glory and
luster. Military analyst P.W. Singer quotes an Air Force captain
musing about whether the new technologies will “mean that brave men
and women will no longer face death in combat,” only to reassure
himself that “there will always be a need for intrepid souls to
fling their bodies across the sky.”

Perhaps, but in a 2010 address to Air Force Academy cadets, an
under-secretary of defense delivered the “bad news” that most of
them would not be flying airplanes, which are increasingly unmanned.
War will continue to be used against insurgencies as well as to
“take out” the weapons facilities, command centers, and cities of
designated rogue states. It may even continue to fascinate its
aficionados, in the manner of computer games. But there will be no
triumphal parades for killer nano-bugs, no epics about unmanned
fighter planes, no monuments to fallen bots.

And in that may lie our last hope. With the decline of mass militaries
and their possible replacement by machines, we may finally see that
war is not just an extension of our needs and passions, however base
or noble. Nor is it likely to be even a useful test of our courage,
fitness, or national unity. War has its own dynamic or — in case
that sounds too anthropomorphic — its own grim algorithms to work
out. As it comes to need us less, maybe we will finally see that we
don’t need it either. We can leave it to the ants.

Copyright 2023 Barbara Ehrenreich

_BARBARA EHRENREICH (1941-2022) was the author of 17 books, including
the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent
contributor to Harper's and the Nation, she had also been a
columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine.  To listen to
the TomDispatch audio interview with Ehrenreich that accompanies
this piece, click here
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