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Carnage and Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional Military Power

Online ISBN:
9780190618513
Print ISBN:
9780190264857
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Carnage and Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional Military Power

David Betz
David Betz
King's College London
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Published online:
19 May 2016
Published in print:
15 November 2015
Online ISBN:
9780190618513
Print ISBN:
9780190264857
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the disorienting impact on war of the burgeoning connectivity of ideas, people, and things. It argues that the Western perception of warfare has shifted from one of occasional and distant occurrences of well-defined conflicts to a stream of more connected and ill-defined wars and disasters. War in itself has not changed but warfare — “how we fight” — continues to transform. The book focuses on the technological motor of this transformation, of which the putative information age is the latest, aggressive, but not unique phase. The obsessive pursuit by an array of actors in the military and political fields of a “fantasy of war”, seduced by the information technological logics of speed, precision, and absolute victory is the primary source of the diminution of war’s utility. The reality of warfare in the past, today, and over ever-extending horizons is inconclusiveness, uncertainty, and chance.

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