2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
The end of the 20th century and the first decades of the next, will be a period of transition - with all the accompanying uncertainties. Global peace has arrived, and a peace dividend is expected, but all the military machines are still in place - with a life of their own. What is more, the military structures are now - after the end of the Cold War - pointing at the wrong enemies - and, very embarrassingly, everybody realizes this. In the early 1990s, for instance, the NATO strategists were forced to admit, albeit in private, that they no longer had a strategy!
For half a century, the military-industrial complex has been identified as a major element within the economy; in the US at least. It would be unrealistic to expect this position to be dismantled in just a few months. It will be resolved over a decade or so; but, until that happens, tensions will emerge from time to time - as the old strategies, and deployments, fail to match the new realities.
Global peace has caught the military-industrial complexes of the major nations on the hop. Their strategies are no longer viable. This problem will, over a decade or so, eventually be resolved; but, in the meantime, the mismatches will occasionally result in tensions.
The exception, of course, has been the US! Under Bush, and especially the right-wing, neo-con clique which has captured the defence department, the Pentagon has found new enemies which demand ever more money be spent; even resuscitating star wars, which Reagan abandoned, and finishing the Iraq war that Bush’s father failed to complete.
16 May 2003
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