The world of achilles: Ancient soldiers, modern warriors.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.

NOTHING IS great, writes Seneca, "which is nor at the same time calm." (1) In contrast to warriors, gladiators, he goes on to say, "are protected by skill but left defenseless by anger."

We should pay attention to Seneca, because the American statesmen of the future will need to control their emotions--for there will be much to be angry about. States and other groups that refuse to play by our rules will constantly be committing outrages. (*) After all, the terrorism that will arise from increased economic disparities, combined with social and cultural dislocation, will enjoy unprecedented access to technological resources. Overreaction to terrorist outrages will exact a terrible price, as technology allows us to more easily reach, and be reached by, the Middle East than ever was the case between the Middle East and Europe for all the centuries gone before. Every diplomatic move will also be a military one, as the artificial separation between civilian and military command structures that has been a feature of contemporary democracies continues to dissolve. We are reverting to the "unified" leaderships that characterized the ancient and early-modern worlds, reflecting what Socrates and Machi avelli recognized as a basic truth of all political systems: whatever the labels those systems claim for themselves, war and diplomacy are two facets of the same process.

The split between civilian and military commands emerged only in the 19th century with the professionalization of modern European armies. In part because the Cold War went on for so long, it created a military establishment too vast and well informed to retreat to the margins of policymaking. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is now a veritable member of the president's cabinet. The regional U.S. commanders-in-chief in the Middle East, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas are the modern-day equals of Roman proconsuls, with budgets twice those of the Cold War era, even as State Department and other civilian foreign policy budgets have dwindled.

The commingling of military and civilian high-technology systems, which increasingly puts the military at the mercy of civilian experts and vice versa, will magnify this trend. The short, limited wars, special forces operations and rescue missions with which we shall be engaged will go unsanctioned by Congress and the citizenry; so, too, will pre-emptive strikes against the computer networks of our adversaries and other defense-related measures that in many instances will be kept secret from the public. Collaboration between the Pentagon and corporate America is necessary, and will grow. Short of a response to the occasional outrage perpetrated against us, going to war will be less and less a democratic decision.

In an age when it took weeks to mobilize and transport armored divisions across the seas, it was possible for American presidents to consult the people and Congress about doing so. In the future, when combat brigades can be inserted anywhere in the world in 96 hours (and entire divisions in 120 hours), and with the majority of our military actions consisting of lightning air and computer strikes, the decision to use force will be made autocratically by small groups of civilians and general officers, the differences between them fading as time goes on.(2) Already, the difference in knowledge between generals, the most prominent of whom operate almost as politicians, and civilian specialists, who function in effect as military officers, is often insignificant.

Even if international law should continue to grow in significance through trade organizations and human rights tribunals, it will play less of a role in the conduct of war because war will increasingly be unconventional and undeclared, and fought as often within states as between them. The concept of "international law" promulgated by Hugo Grotius in 17th-century Holland, in which all sovereign states are treated as equal and war is justified only in defense of sovereignty, is fundamentally utopian. The boundaries between peace and war are often unclear, and international agreements are kept only if the power and self-interests of the parties are there to sustain them. In the future, wartime justice will not depend on international law; as in ancient times, justice will depend upon the moral fiber of military commanders themselves, whose roles will often be indistinguishable from those of civilian leaders.

THE TERRORIST nature of future outrages, the collapse of the distinction between military and civilian decision-making, the truncation of democratic deliberation over the use of force, and the vitiation of the laws of war, taken together, promises to make future war more like ancient war than anything Americans and Europeans have witnessed for many centuries. More specifically, the ancientness of future wars has three dimensions: the character of the enemy, the methods used to contain and destroy him, and the identity of those beating the war drums.

National security analyst Colonel Ralph Peters has written that American soldiers "are brilliantly prepared to defeat other soldiers. Unfortunately", he goes on, "the enemies we are likely to face ... will not be 'soldiers'", with the discipline and professionalism which that word implies in the West, but "'warriors -- erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order."(3)

There have always been warriors who, as Homer wrote in The Iliad, "call up the wild joy of war", but the collapse of Cold War empires and the disorder it has engendered--along with the advance of technology and poor-quality urbanization--has provoked the breakdown of families and the renewal of cults and blood ties. The latter includes both a more militant Islam and Hinduism. The result is the rise of new warrior classes as cruel as ever, and better-armed. This phenomenon embraces armies of murderous teenagers in West Africa; Russian and Albanian mafiosi; Latin American drug kingpins; West Bank suicide bombers; and associates of Osama bin Laden who communicate by e-mail. Like Achilles and the ancient Greeks harassing Troy, the thrill of violence substitutes for the joys of domesticity and feasting. Achilles exclaims,

You talk of food?

I have no taste for food--what I really crave is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men! (4)

Today's warriors come often enough from the hundreds of millions of unemployed young males in the developing world, angered by the income disparities that accompany globalization. Globalization is Darwinian. It means the economic survival of the fittest--those groups and individuals who are disciplined, dynamic and ingenious will float to the top, while cultures that do not compete well technologically will produce an inordinate number of warriors. I have seen firsthand the creation of warriors at...