Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict

Population growth, industrial expansion and communication proliferation are, according to Gray (editor, The Cyborg Handbook), combining to create new wars. Nuclear, chemical and biological technologies are developing and proliferating, making it highly probable that they will be used in regional or terrorist conflicts. At the same time, theorists predict the coming of ""cyberwar"" and armed forces seek to integrate soldiers ever more closely with machines. This ""technophilia,"" according to Gray, represents an effort to manage war scientifically while also limiting causalities. Its ultimate consequence, however, is to conflate total and limited war. In the cyber age, domestic dissent and external conflict are handled by essentially the same methods. Gray is most effective when he describes the evolution of planning and management concepts in the U.S. military after WWII. His demonstration of the emotional relationship between humans and ""technoscience"" is provocative. His assertion that war has a life of its own will hardly surprise his readers--who may be limited, as his analysis of postmodern war is written in postmodern style, making it inaccessible to most anyone without a good command of cyber-age and deconstructionist vocabularies. Gray's final conclusion, that war can be ""deconstructed"" by restructuring its discourse through verbal and physical intervention, invites dismissal as a restatement in contemporary language of the 1960s mantra ""give peace a chance."" Even linear thinkers unimpressed by his call for a paradigm shift will, however, find in it an incentive to expand their definitions of reality. (May)