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The liberal world order, a euphemism for American global hegemony,
is crumbling at an accelerating pace. While its collapse is
tangible, the outcome of such a collapse remains a matter of
speculation and public debate. The US is desperately seeking to
preserve the status quo, which rests primarily upon recognition of
its military supremacy. For millennia, warfare has been a driving
force behind changes in the geopolitical status of power
configurations (whether of peoples, states or empires), and it
remains so, today. Accordingly, short of actual warfare, the
assessment (modeling) of relative military power plays an
inordinate role in the determination of national status. Models of
emerging changes in military capability range from relatively
simple to extremely complex ones. Viewing the evolution of the
current system of international relations outside the framework of
actual, rather than propaganda-driven, military capabilities is not
only useless, it is dangerous since states' mistaken assessment of
their own and other states' military power can lead to
misadventures and catastrophic mistakes. The United States' efforts
to preserve not just its dominance but the perception of its
dominance are bound to fail for many important reasons, none more
important than what is often misidentified in past American
military-theoretical hypotheses about the future of warfare, known
generically as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This book
explains why those hypotheses are failing and will continue to
fail, and addresses the real RMA. In the end, technological
development in weaponry as a response to tactical, operational and
strategic requirements defines not only a nation's geopolitical
status but determines the global order. Assessments of military
capacity, if reality-based, serve as good predictors of the level
of volatility in international relations and the level of violence
globally. This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons
and the way they influenced international relations in the 20th and
21st centuries. It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as
manifested via policy, politics, and technology. It reviews some
models which are useful in assessing the current geopolitical
situation. This book also tries to give a forecast of the future
development of warfare and the ways in which it is going to change
the whole system of international relations, hopefully towards a
new geopolitical equilibrium.
Our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air,
land, sea, space, and cyberspace,General Mattis said. And it is
continually eroding. American exceptionalist culture has deep roots
in the American founding, which even Alexis De Tocqueville observed
in his seminal work in 1837. While exceptionalism is not unique to
America, the intensity of their conviction and its global
ramifications are. This view of its exceptionalism has led the US
to grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative
factors of key events of the past two centuries. Accordingly, the
wrong conclusions have been derived, and very wrong lessons
learned. Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American
military thought and its actual application of military power. Time
after time the American military has failed to match lofty
declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre
record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War
the United States hasn't won a single war against a technologically
inferior, but mentally tough enemy. The technological dimension of
American strategy has completely overshadowed any concern with the
social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of
military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia
emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical
turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful
way—intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally—to
face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the
curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion
concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a
Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby,
which even today dominates US policy makers' minds. This book:
Explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US
approach to warfare, which manifests itself across the whole
spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective
national cultures. Illustrates the fact that Russian economic,
military and cultural realities and power are no longer what
American elites think they are by addressing Russia's new and
elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as
cyberwarfare and space. Studies in depth several ways in which the
US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be
done to avoid it.
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