Thursday, February 08, 2007
Disaster In The Desert
I remember a story that came out of Afghanistan shortly after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. A reporter was stricken by how quickly the Taliban forces folded under Western air power, to which the expert in the field made an assertion that it wasn’t the firepower of US weapons that did it so much as their pinpoint accuracy. What the high-tech air war did was create a psychological advantage, effectively scaring the enemy shitless. Once the enemy believes he has no safe haven, that unknown enemies are observing his every move even in the relative safety of a concrete and steel bunker, he has lost. The mind cracks. The army folds.
I imagine that’s what Rumsfeld meant by shock and awe. Or so we dream. I have my doubts. There were a lot of specialty forces and intelligence agents working on the ground in Afghanistan, a lot of imaginative westerners blending forces with a well-established opposition. Shock and awe always seemed a fantastic construct, an opportunity to assert one’s will around the world without tainting one’s culture.
We wish to fight without risk, to fight disembodied battles through well-planned schematics plotted well in advance and executed by sophisticated technology that minimizes human error. Perception is everything, and those that control the conventional wisdom control the world. And when we dominate like we did in Afghanistan the spectacle is overwhelming.
But every strategy succeeds at the expense of another. The world is not a video game. EA Sports, easy sports, dreams. From the cradle of football, the most American of sports, somewhere along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, certain unwritten beliefs were laid out: work and toil, muscle and bone.
Our service economy forgets. Greenspan sits incredulous testifying before a row of senators. Isn’t this what you want? This wealth? This is why I am here. Why else was I born?
So we move to Florida, drain the swamps and send the gators scurrying to the safety of nuclear cooling pools. Our football flips finesse. Go over the top. Five wideouts, an empty backfield. Good protection. Nickel defense. Dime defense. Blitz the corner and drop a linebacker into coverage.
The NFL lost me years ago, back when free agency meant the heroes were nomadic, no longer familiar armies of well-embedded foot soldiers but well-paid mercenaries. Marketing transformed the game from homegrown to processed. The worker became the product.
Yet I could still find beauty in college football. Local traditions evolved over generations. Kids grew into men over a few short years. Not every player made it to the pros, in fact very few, and on any given Saturday you could find one unknown kid assert himself with a surprising play or game. The league, made up of 119 teams, was grotesquely ordered, more concerned with preserving a stable relationship with the past than an easily digestible bite of present entertainment. Championships were decided as best they could, but disputes were accepted. People moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world.
But it’s over now. Gone is the war in the trenches, the blunt clash of 2nd-generation warfare. Football has caught up to 1939: speed thrills, speed kills. And our defense industry continues to fight World War II. We’re trapped in it. We saw a defense industry blossom, a homeland population largely unthreatened, a weakened enemy that couldn’t possibly win a technological race. Our crowning achievement was the Bomb, that lovely demolition of the game itself. Shock and awe, shock and awe.
In the Arizona desert I watched a team, as physically prepared as any, unprepared to match nuke for nuke. They hadn’t played in a month and a half. Medals of honor had been bestowed, but there was one final clash, and as it turned out those who deliver shock and awe are particularly vulnerable to it.
These kids. How on earth, in this tangle of media messaging, while the hands of commerce grasp greed and jerk them about, can they possibly concentrate? A tempest of distractions. What gives a man who puts on a suit and makeup and sits in a studio the right to proclaim how things should be? Who is it that’s selling the false goods? What lasts? A trophy? A spread in a magazine? Where does the Mission Accomplished banner reside now, gathering dust in the possession of some hapless dreamer?
I imagine that’s what Rumsfeld meant by shock and awe. Or so we dream. I have my doubts. There were a lot of specialty forces and intelligence agents working on the ground in Afghanistan, a lot of imaginative westerners blending forces with a well-established opposition. Shock and awe always seemed a fantastic construct, an opportunity to assert one’s will around the world without tainting one’s culture.
We wish to fight without risk, to fight disembodied battles through well-planned schematics plotted well in advance and executed by sophisticated technology that minimizes human error. Perception is everything, and those that control the conventional wisdom control the world. And when we dominate like we did in Afghanistan the spectacle is overwhelming.
But every strategy succeeds at the expense of another. The world is not a video game. EA Sports, easy sports, dreams. From the cradle of football, the most American of sports, somewhere along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, certain unwritten beliefs were laid out: work and toil, muscle and bone.
Our service economy forgets. Greenspan sits incredulous testifying before a row of senators. Isn’t this what you want? This wealth? This is why I am here. Why else was I born?
So we move to Florida, drain the swamps and send the gators scurrying to the safety of nuclear cooling pools. Our football flips finesse. Go over the top. Five wideouts, an empty backfield. Good protection. Nickel defense. Dime defense. Blitz the corner and drop a linebacker into coverage.
The NFL lost me years ago, back when free agency meant the heroes were nomadic, no longer familiar armies of well-embedded foot soldiers but well-paid mercenaries. Marketing transformed the game from homegrown to processed. The worker became the product.
Yet I could still find beauty in college football. Local traditions evolved over generations. Kids grew into men over a few short years. Not every player made it to the pros, in fact very few, and on any given Saturday you could find one unknown kid assert himself with a surprising play or game. The league, made up of 119 teams, was grotesquely ordered, more concerned with preserving a stable relationship with the past than an easily digestible bite of present entertainment. Championships were decided as best they could, but disputes were accepted. People moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world.
But it’s over now. Gone is the war in the trenches, the blunt clash of 2nd-generation warfare. Football has caught up to 1939: speed thrills, speed kills. And our defense industry continues to fight World War II. We’re trapped in it. We saw a defense industry blossom, a homeland population largely unthreatened, a weakened enemy that couldn’t possibly win a technological race. Our crowning achievement was the Bomb, that lovely demolition of the game itself. Shock and awe, shock and awe.
In the Arizona desert I watched a team, as physically prepared as any, unprepared to match nuke for nuke. They hadn’t played in a month and a half. Medals of honor had been bestowed, but there was one final clash, and as it turned out those who deliver shock and awe are particularly vulnerable to it.
These kids. How on earth, in this tangle of media messaging, while the hands of commerce grasp greed and jerk them about, can they possibly concentrate? A tempest of distractions. What gives a man who puts on a suit and makeup and sits in a studio the right to proclaim how things should be? Who is it that’s selling the false goods? What lasts? A trophy? A spread in a magazine? Where does the Mission Accomplished banner reside now, gathering dust in the possession of some hapless dreamer?
Labels: afghanistan, football, iraq, shock and awe, war
