A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (24 page)

In Shiite Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini sought from the early sixties to impose the idea of war as a tool of conversion, and hailed martyrdom, suicide, and the
chadid.
“The sword,” he wrote, “is the key to Paradise.”

For others still, war must target the whole world. The empire of Islam must spread all over the planet,
without a center or a dominant nation, to make of it a kind of theological empire.

Supporters of this Islamic war for reconquest of the Caliphate and conquest of the world today define a three-stage military strategy: “In territories where it is still in a minority, Islam must practice ‘provisional peace,’ which can be denounced at any moment.

“In territories where it will have converted or expelled a significant fraction of the population, it must install a Dar al-Harb, or ‘war zone.’ The last believers in other monotheisms will provisionally be tolerated there, with an inferior status — that of
dhimmi
(‘protected’). Believers in other philosophies and atheists will be expelled.

“In territories where Muslim power will have become totally dominant, all believers in another monotheism must be converted or expelled: the Jews, because they did not accept the Koran in Medina; the Christians, because they place Jesus above Muhammad. All ‘infidels’ there will be declared enemies, because ‘un-belief is a single nation.’”

Some groups adopting this strategy — as al-Qaeda did when it was created in 1996 — will first of all seek to drive Christian troops from the vicinity of Mecca, where they have been stationed since 1991 — even if they have to fight Arab regimes to do it. The
fitna
(“discord”) between Muslims will thus be salutary for them. Next they will want to eliminate Christians and Jews from the Holy Places of Iraq and Jerusalem, then take power in Lebanon, in Egypt, in North Africa, in Central Asia, in Indonesia, and Pakistan. After that, they will seek to expel all believers in Judeo-Greek philosophy from lands
earlier conquered in part by Islam, ranging from Spain to China.

Other groups, like al-Qaeda today, will advocate (even before attempting to restore Muslim Europe) an immediate holy war against the American empire, Israel, Europe, the market, and democracy. Like late-nineteenth-century nihilists, they will seek only to destroy, without the aim (even utopian) of substituting another society for the one they condemn. Besides, al-Qaeda will soon be but one movement among others, the inspirer of countless tiny groups arising from local initiatives.

Other belief systems (and these are the most numerous) will put Islam at the service of nationalist claims, as Islam’s ideologues have always ended by doing. This embraces the twelfth-century Almohades, all the way down to the eighteenth century, then Turkey’s Rafah movement, Algeria’s Front Islamique de Salut (FIS), Palestinian Hamas, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The Asian world, which will soon contain a majority of the world’s population, will itself be concerned by these challenges. Although no one wages war in the name of Buddhism, Confucianism, or Hinduism, Islam will try to gain absolute power in every Asian country where it is already dominant, from Pakistan to Indonesia. In those countries very numerous extremist religious schools are to be found.

Moreover, a number of national cultures will use the religious weapon to defend themselves (like the Tibetans) and to regain a lost national identity.

Finally, diverse sects of variegated origins, like those of Moon in Korea, Falun Gong in China, and the
Church of Scientology in the United States, will develop thanks to the spiritual and moral void create by super-empire. There are already more members of Falun Gong (whose leader, Li Hongzhi, is reputed to have saved twenty-four worlds . . .) than members of the Chinese Communist Party! And some of these sects will also forge alliances with very questionable partners to hurl themselves into the melee, armed to the teeth.

In all ages, the outcome of wars has been decided by possession of new arms and by the price attached by each belligerent to the lives of its own soldiers. In their time, the archers at the battle of Crécy, the tanks of the First World War, and the atomic weapons of the Second World War decided the fate of battles.

In all ages, new weapons have appeared, at once the products and the midwives of civilian technologies: the propeller was born with the lever, firearms with mechanization, tanks with the automobile. Inversely, it was in the armed forces that the telegraph, the radio, energy, the nuclear weapon, and the Internet were born alongside many other technological innovations.

In the next fifty years, new technologies will be developed by armies before being used on the civilian market. For defense or police needs, governments will finance the research needed for perfection of the technologies of hypersurveillance and self-surveillance. Inversely, these technologies will then have civil applications.

In fact, these future weapons will essentially be founded on the concept of surveillance. Armies will at once develop digital infrastructures of nomadic ubiquity, surveillance systems for suspect movements, the means of protecting strategic installations, and a network of economic intelligence. Robots (concealed in enemy territory) and drones (flying robots) will relay data, detect chemical or biological agents, and serve as scouts ahead of infantry detachments faced with mined areas or blind spots. Software simulating battle will be permanently updated as close as possible to the battlefields.

Furthermore, new combat units will be integrated with the means of simulation, surveillance, and striking. New networks and instruments of nomadic ubiquity will allow combatants to stay connected and simulate every kind of situation. Intelligent clothing will serve to manufacture new uniforms; new materials will make it possible to design new shields. Three-dimensional simulation technologies will help prepare and carry out combat missions, while robots will work as substitutes for real fighters. Electronic systems (e-bombs) will be able to destroy communications grids and leave an opposing force blind and deaf.

Marines will play a new part in the fight against traffickers, in emigration surveillance, and in the protection of strategic straits. Fighter aircraft will no longer be as useful as today, and will lose their influence over staff thinking and military budgets.

New, so-called conventional weapons will be all the more necessary as unconventional weapons (nuclear and other) become more and more widely disseminated.

The five great powers authorized by treaty to
possess nuclear arms will deploy for a long time to come more than five thousand nuclear warheads, most of them aboard submarines and launched by ultra-precise ballistic missiles. Among these five powers, some will reserve for themselves the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons — in other words short-range weapons destined for operational use and no longer as instruments of deterrence. These could even be miniaturized to the point where they would be usable by a single combatant, as was already the case during the cold war. India, Israel, and Pakistan, nuclear powers for the past thirty years, will also equip themselves with nuclear submarines able to launch nuclear-capable ballistic missiles designed to reach any potentially hostile or rival capital. North Korea, too, which launched its first nuclear-weapon test in the mid-2000s, will acquire ballistic missiles with a range of about five thousand miles, its declared motive being to forearm itself against any attempt to destabilize its regime. Faced with this threat, Japan will not hesitate much longer to equip itself with arms of the same type to counter the weapons Pyongyang’s leaders might launch against it. Four months will suffice, from the moment the decision is taken, for it to acquire the weapon. Iran, obviously, will do the same or come very close to it — unless a clash (which we shall later discuss) takes place. Others will follow along the same path. First it will be Egypt and Turkey, then (probably) Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. By 2040 or 2050, a total of more than fif-teen countries will openly possess nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Shortage of oil will also impel the most diverse
countries toward the production of civil nuclear power stations. This will lead them to use recycled wastes, known as MOX, for fuel — further multiplying the risks of proliferation and also of “disappearance” of wastes (during the transfer of these radioactive materials). Such wastes could then be used to manufacture radiological weapons mingling nuclear wastes and conventional explosives.

Other weapons — chemical, biological, bacterio-logical, electronic, and nanotechnological — will then appear. As with the new civil technologies they will prefigure, scientists will strive to increase their power, their miniaturization, and their accuracy. Chemical arms will be capable of seeking out and killing leaders without being detected; pandemics could be ready for unleashing at will; complex genetic arms may one day be directed specifically against certain ethnic groups. Nanorobots as small as a mote of dust, known as gray jelly
,
could carry out stealth surveillance missions and attack the cells of enemy bodies. Then, once animal cloning techniques have progressed, cloned animals could well carry out missions — living animal bombs, monsters out of nightmare.

These weapons will not be developed solely in the military laboratories of powerful countries but also by big businesses, “circus businesses,” which will find new markets for them. As always, armaments will remain at the heart of the industrial apparatus, and until super-empire is here, public markets will be essentially oriented toward the armaments sector. Big insurance firms and mercenary companies will then pick up the torch.

Most of these weapons will be accessible to small
nations, to nonstates, to corsairs, to pirates, mercenaries, maquisards, mafias, terrorists, and every kind of trafficker. In the not distant future, for example, it will be possible to make an e-bomb for $400 from a condenser, a reel of copper wire, and an explosive. Chemical, radiological, and biological weapons will thus be affordable to everyone. Killing more and more people with rudimentary means will become a sad possibility. In cities and on mass transport, crowding will multiply the effectiveness of the most primitive weapons.

Finally (and perhaps especially), since no war can be won unless the peoples waging it believe it just and necessary, and unless the loyalty of citizens and their belief in its values are maintained, the chief weapons of the future will be the instruments of propaganda, communication, and intimidation.

Confronted with these multiform threats, directed chiefly against them, the market democracies (particularly the masters of the polycentric order) will realize that they can no longer react effectively in dispersed order. They will realize too that defense budgets would be better used if their equipment were technically and mutually compatible, and placed under coordinated command.

The United States will continue to modernize all its weapons systems — conventional, electronic, nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological. A new unit of the U.S. Army, the Future Combat Systems, will soon be composed of highly mobile ground troops, equipped with
high-precision conventional weapons, a communications grid, the means of dissimulation, and robots and air units — with or without pilots. This unit could be deployed anywhere in the world within four days. The delay between detection of a target and its destruction will thus be close to zero, whereas it was three days during the Gulf War and five minutes in Iraq. Such a system will be meaningless unless the United States, using a satellite network, equips itself with a digital planetary infrastructure.

The cost of these new weapons will be enormous, with the United States expending $500 billion on them. A million American soldiers will remain temporarily deployed on four continents, supported by thousands of aircraft and ships, before withdrawing to the exclusive defense of American national territory. For the next forty years, defense will continue to represent more than a quarter of the American federal budget — sometimes with enormous wastage caused by the need to create jobs in every electoral constituency for the congressmen whose voice will be essential during the vote on the defense budget.

The Europeans — who together spend five times less on their defense than the United States today — will themselves, after much criticism of American belligerence, be forced to find ways of financing digital infrastructures and the new weapons systems. To do this, they will create increasingly overlapping armed forces and police, harmonize their equipment, and coordinate with the United States, if only for communications and data exchange.

China and India will also increase their military
budgets (now fifteen times lower than that of the United States) to reach at least French or British levels. They will acquire the same weapons, most of them home-manufactured. Japan and Russia will do the same.

To share these mushrooming costs, several of these nations will pool a part of their units in a military force serving the international community and mingling conventional troops with police forces. They will thus form (at first occasionally, then institutionally) an alliance against pirates and enemies of the mercantile order. NATO, founded to counter the Soviet threat, will perhaps become the foundation of this unified force, which will sometimes also serve as part of the United Nations armed forces. In certain cases, India, China, and several of the Eleven will join them.

The Alliance will one day expand to include the biggest firms of super-empire, particularly the military ones. It will then incorporate national armies and privately owned mercenary forces under one flag.

All members of the Alliance will be concerned to monitor “the friends of our enemies.” The Muslims of Europe, America, or China, for example, may one day be required to supply proof that they are unconnected with this or that hostile entity, as the Japanese had to do in the 1940s or the Communists in the 1950s. Similarly, if Mexico one day comes to be considered by the United States as a dangerously revolutionary country, the increasingly numerous Latinos will be subject to strict surveillance.