This post is not a consideration of how war has become more high-tech. That's an interesting topic, but I have nothing to add. These particular thoughts arose out of a discussion I had with someone (sparked by this essay on the Just War Theory), in which I tried to argue against the legitimacy of any military action. The thrust of my argument was the Marxist idea that wars serve bourgeois interests and are falsely justified as being a means to secure the freedom of ordinary citizens. This led to a discussion of the actual purpose of modern wars.
I think I had better start at the beginning, historically speaking. There was a time when wars served very concrete and easily discernible purposes. Wealth and power relations were more directly tied to the ownership of specific territories and the rights to the surpluses of the producing classes. Imperialism was purely an aim to acquire more territory (and to benefit from the resources therein), as well as to consolidate the social structures which generated surpluses and tributes.
In the modern era, when one envisions a war in the abstract, one has to wonder who really benefits, and how. I often come across geopolitical analyses that explain certain U.S. actions and attitudes as stemming from a drive to maintain global dominance or to prevent any oppositional regional powers from emerging. On the surface that seems plausible. But try to think of “American dominance” more concretely. Who represents the American interests, and who benefits from America’s dominance? The president (who is only in office for a handful of years)? Members of congress? Those in the military and intelligence communities? None of those players benefit directly from any sort of “American dominance.” Those at the helm of our structures of wealth extraction, the multinational corporations and financiers, are no longer tied to any particular territory. Indeed, their dominance defies territorial boundaries.
In the modern era, the objectives of war must be completely different. Territory is incidental. Resources are still important (although more instrumentally so), but so are markets, monetary policies, rents, wages, and production. Wars serve economic interests when they allow for the penetration of foreign capital and the emergence of neoliberal policies. (That is why modern warfare is so much more concerned with regime change.) The capitalist system depends on universal participation, particularly now that its functional requirements absorb existing global capacity. Its centripetal inertia creates a constant need for new markets, new sources of vital resources, “underdeveloped” locales to develop, and battered masses to submit to exploitation.
The problem for my position, though, is that it implies that “American dominance” is wholly inconsequential. However, if one looks at actual facts, it is clear that the U.S. has a disproportionate degree of influence and control over world affairs. And it is also appears that someone is trying to preserve this state of affairs (successfully or not we will see). One could argue that, despite globalization, the economic elite are primarily based in the U.S. and other Western nations. Thus, they have the most access to political and military levers of control in the U.S. This is plausible.
One could also argue that, in the international division of labor (which is a key feature of the global capitalist system), the U.S. has come to occupy the role of the “police man” on a global scale. Hence, it could be that the global forces of dominance have found it convenient to employ U.S./Western military resources in the service of their agenda (and of course this convenience could go back to the citizenship of many of the global elite, thus connecting this argument back to the first). In this paradigm, the preservation of U.S. dominance would be akin to securing the hegemony of the police force to monitor and suppress the activities of other citizens that undermine the capitalist order (protesters, bootleggers, etc.)
Still, though, I am unable to account for the factions within the U.S. military and intelligence communities that supposedly are driven purely by a desire to combat Islam and spread Western Enlightenment around the world. There are two possibilities here. Either the claims of the existence of these pure ideological motives are exaggerated or miss some important underlying reality, or else some people are impelled toward the same (or similar) ends as global capitalist interests, but for entirely different reasons. At this point, I think either is plausible. Certainly the more complexity, the more diversity and divergence of interests, that an explanation allows, the more accurate it is likely to be.
I think it is important to preserve some notion of “American dominance” (otherwise world events are nearly impossible to interpret); however, one must avoid its narrow definition solely by reference to nationalism and place it in the context of global capitalist relations.
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