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Military globalization

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Military globalization was defined by David Held as “the process which embodies the growing extensity and intensity of military relations among the political units of the world system … Understood as such, it reflects both the expanding network of worldwide military ties and relations, as well as the impact of key military technological innovations (from steamships to satellites), which over time, have reconstituted the world into a single geostrategic space."[1] Military globalization implies firmer integration of armed forces around the world into the global military system. For Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye military globalization entails “long-distance networks of interdependence in which force, and the threat or promise of force, are employed.”[2]

Held[3] divides the military globalization into three distinct phenomena:

1. The globalization of the war system. This refers to the “geopolitical order, great power rivalry, conflict and security relations.”

2. The global system of arms production and transfers, reflected in the global arms dynamics.

3. The geo-governance of violence, “embracing the formal and informal international regulation of the acquisition, deployment and use of military force.”

All three processes above “are connected to technological development, which made them possible in the first place. The result is increasing global interdependence and complexity."[4]

The process of military globalization starts with the Age of Discovery, when the European colonial empires began military operations on the global scale. Their "imperial rivalry led to the First World War, which was the first global conflict in world history."[5] Keohane dates military globalization at least from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests.[6]

World War II

After the Pearl Harbor attack the American policy-makers were convinced once and for all that political isolationism is no longer possible on this globe. President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged that hostilities in Europe, Africa, and Asia are parts of a single global war and added: "Our strategy and self-defense [therefore] must be global strategy."[7] Isaiah Bowman, known as "Roosevelt's Geographer"[8] and the most famous American Geographer, stated in 1942: "We are going to walk in gardens and enjoy culture only in snatches after we have toiled and bled on distant geographic frontiers. Our way of life is now planetary."[9] Roosevelt's rival in the 1940 elections, Wendell L. Wilkie, claimed on radio address of October 26, 1942: The "world has become small and completely interdependent... The myriad millions of human beings in the Far East are as close to us as Los Angeles is to New York... Our thinking and our planning in the future must be global."[10] In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, President Kennedy confirmed the fact of the global strategy: "The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe."

Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, recorded in his diary the day after the Pearl Harbor attack: “At the time ... I did not believe that war between the United States and Japan, separated as the two countries were by ... the Pacific Ocean, could be over as quickly as proved to be the case. My first reaction was: The war will now be endlessly protracted.” [11] Technology, however, overcame space, precluding the possibility of protracted wars between Great Powers. Twenty years after Pearl Harbor attack, Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson stated in ‘’Memorandum on Asia’’ to President John F. Kennedy: without maintaining the island outposts of Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, “the vast Pacific becomes a Red Sea.”[12]

The maximum acceleration was reached in December 1941. On December 7 the Japanese attacked the United States and Britain and proclaimed war on them and Canada; the next day the United States and Canada proclaimed war on Japan; on December 9 China declared war on Germany; the next day Germany and Italy declared war on the US; on December 12 the United States proclaimed war on the Axis; Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa on Japan; and during the week of December 11–18, the declarations of war by great powers were followed by reciprocal salvoes of declarations by their allies: four European states proclaimed war on the United States and nine Latin American nations and the Philippines proclaimed war on the Axis.[13] The War was globalized.

The battles of the War were synchronously fought amidst snow and ice and in the tropics half a globe apart.[14] A contemporary observer had stated in 1942: "The battle area is planetary in dimension."[15] Fronts of global dimension were formed. The German-Soviet front stretched for 3000 miles; the Pacific front from the Aleutians through the Solomon Islands to Burma. The two fronts represented the longest in history land-front and sea-front respectively. British and Japanese soldiers, representing eastern and western islands of Eurasia, collided on the Indian-Burmese frontier thousands of miles from their homes. In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Europe and Asia had become a single battlefield."[16] In 1945 on the Elbe River met soldiers some of whom were from the Pacific Western and Eastern shores.

With the War’s end, massive media efforts were made in America to emancipate the public from the concept of isolationism. In 1945, The Consolidated Voltee Aircraft Corporation contributed its part to the campaign with a booklet preaching the “new conception of global geography,” a vital one in if the peace is to endure:

For the countries of this sky-linked world are now bound together more closely, both geographically and physically, than our own states were at the turn of the century. Today, wherever you live, no spot of this once-wide globe is farther than 40 hours’ flying time from your local airport. This means that once distant nations are now, and will henceforth be, close friends – or close enemies… Realization of how the airplane has shrank the world is vital to straight thinking about the kind of peace that will endure. With this new conception of global geography, we see the world as it really is—a clustering of nations whose nearness makes them all members of the same Family of Nations. Without this conception of global geography, we are looking at a world that used to be—a world where nations lived in the fancied safety of remoteness, protected by distances that no longer exist and seas that have been narrowed to millponds.[17]

Cold War

The Berlin Wall and the 38th Parallel in Korea symbolized the bipolar phase of the political globalization—two remaining powers faced each other on the opposite sides of the globe. This was the culmination of the five-millennia process of the globalization of conflict. Beginning with the first recorded confrontation between two powers (Upper and Lower Egypt c. 3000 BC), the history of confrontations between ever-larger political units ends by the Cold War with almost the whole globe divided on two blocs.

The Truman Doctrine announced in 1947 represented a global extension of the Monroe Doctrine. US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in his Address on December 30, 1951, emphasized that the United States is "lying in both the Western and Northern Hemisphere."[18] American Historians and Geographers in the 1950s noted that "the fictitious boundaries of the Western Hemisphere have crumpled" and the concept of the "Western Hemisphere" was gradually replaced by that of the "Northern Hemisphere." The latter more and more captured the American political and strategic imagination. "In the restless years following the end of World War II, the United States had slowly and reluctantly adopted a global strategy of defense, thus repudiating conflicting defense theories, which were either continental or Western-Hemispheric in character."[19]

Hundreds of US military bases and installations,[20] and a network of military alliances (the Rio Pact, NATO, ANZUS, bilateral alliances with Japan and South Korea, and less formal arrangements with Taiwan, Gulf states, and Israel) spanned the globe. “George Washington’s dictum of avoiding entangling alliances was discarded as the United States contracted forty-four formal alliances and many other forms of commitment.”[21] In his New Frontier Speech in 1960 President Kennedy stressed: "Our frontiers today are on every continent."

Having inherited the British strategic position in the southern Asia and the Indian Ocean, the United States closed the circle around the Communist world. Having "globalized" the Monroe Doctrine, the US lines of national defense coincided at the opposite side of the globe. The Panama Canal declined in strategic importance in favor of the Suez Canal and the Malaccan Strait. Old World sea passages became more important in the age of US global strategy. For example, in 2001 the US Navy did not need the Panama Canal to move the fleet from the Far Eastern outpost in South Korea to the far western in Afghanistan; they used the Malaccan Strait for this purpose.

With all his insight for the future, Herbert Wells underestimated the pace of military globalization: "...Long before the year AD 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful airplane will have soared and come home safe and sound" (Anticipations 1900: 208). By the 1950s long-range strategic bombers with atomic weapons came "home safe and sound" having exceeded the speed of sound. Within the next decade, armed with hydrogen device, they exceeded the speed of sound twice. This technological leap strongly favored integration over sovereignty. The proposal of French President Charles de Gaulle regarding NATO to substitute cooperation for integration “in the control of aircraft travelling at twice the speed of sound has posed an almost insoluble military problem.”[22]

Despite all the progress of long-range bombers, already by the 1960s they declined in importance and many projects, such as B-70, were cancelled as anachronistic due to the advent of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile.[23] The ICBMs could strike anywhere in the world within 40 minutes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy expressed: “You may say it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.”[24] In the article titled "Illusions of Distance" (1968), Albert Wohlstetter wrote: "In the case of nuclear relations, the defects of the old geopolitical treatment of distance are striking." Technology changes the world in the direction “that makes the new isolationism pure nostalgia.”[25] A decade earlier, Acheson had described the idea of disengagement as another "illusion" and "the same futile--and lethal--attempt to crawl back into the cocooon of history." The process of military globalization proved to be irreversible. "For us, Acheson wrote, there is only one disengagement possible—the final one, the disengagement from life, which is death.”[26]

With the advent of long-range bombers and missiles, the American policy-makers realized that not only the Pacific and Atlantic but even the Northern Ocean does not protect. With the Cold War yet in sight, the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 9, 1945 demanded that "our defensive frontiers be well advanced in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the shores of the Arctic."[27] The Northern Ocean, now labeled "the Arctic Mediterranean,"[28] became the third frontier between the superpowers. Strategic Air bases and radar network (DEW) stretched through Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. Dean Acheson contemplated the new Arctic frontier: “Here there are daily contacts on a thousand radarscopes, and doubtless the same is true on the other side of the screen.”[29]

Ancient Romans believed in a legendary Ultima Thule in the northern end of the world which can be perceived but not approached (Vergil, Georgics, 1:25-31). Today in Greenland amidst permafrost there is place named Thule. It hosts the US strategic base (Thule Air Base). Another Classic Tacitus described the Roman expedition to the North Sea: the sailors did not “lack daring,” but the Sea blocked them from investigating. “Soon ... we stopped trying, and it was deemed more reverent and more pious to believe in the works of the gods than to know about them” (Germania, 34). Eventually Polaris submarines, with their crews preferring to know rather than believe, sailed underneath the polar ice. Finn Sollie remarked in the 1970s: "Where Fridtjof Nansen's Fram drifted with the ice in the Arctic Ocean for three years (1893-96), submarines now navigate under the ice..."[30]

Another dimension introduced into strategy was space, with orbit becoming a new frontier. At this stage the military globalization actually proceeded beyond the globe. Historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote about the Cold War: "And it was a rivalry that even extended, at one point, beyond the bounds of earth itself, as human beings for the first time left this planet."[31] In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union deployed the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System. A nuclear warhead, placed in low orbit, had no range limit and could hit any location on the globe within a “few minutes.”[32] The FOBS opened a fourth frontier between the superpowers—over the South Pole, hitting targets from the south, which is the opposite direction from which NORAD early warning systems are oriented. At this point, the two remaining superpowers faced each other on four fronts, across all four oceans. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. Nicknamed Star Wars, the SDI designed a global shield in space against ballistic missiles. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, described the idea as a Maginot line in space.[33]

In the beginning of the Cold War, the US Air Force compiled The Bombing Encyclopedia of the World. “The database soon became global..."[34] Using this Encyclopedia, the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP-62) designed to hit 1080 targets in Eurasia from East Europe to China in a single massive attack, involving 3423 nuclear warheads of total 7847 megatons. Such an attack would kill nearly a quarter of the population and destroy half of industry of world's largest land mass.[35] To coordinate among themselves the SIOP-62, the commanders held "World-Wide Coordination Conferences," and "Joint Coordination Centers—one in England and one in Hawaii—were established to assist in the elimination of interference among striking forces."[36] The two centers on the opposite points of the globe—England and Hawaii—cared that the strikes of the western and eastern fronts do not overlap. Adjusting to its global range, the new authority over Air Force which inherited Strategic Air Command in 2009 was called Global Strike Command.

The post-Cold War period

The end of the Cold War brought about new surge in the military globalization. NATO expanded to include seven former members of the dissolved Warsaw Pact and three former Soviet Republics. The eastern frontier of NATO stretched from Estonia to Bulgaria. New Ballistic Missile Defenses (BMD) were installed eastward of the Fulda Gap. In 2008, France returned to the integrated NATO command. This marked the end of the Gaullist attempt to restore strategic sovereignty and reverse the trend of military globalization. Following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, US bases and security commitments were established in Central Asia--"one of the last areas in the globe without them."[37] On the other hand, no military alliances were formed in the post-Cold War period that exclude the United States.

The BMD underwent globalization too. On May 1, 2001, President George W. Bush called for an integration of National (NMD) and Theater (TMD) Missile Defenses into "a new framework" that would simultaneously protect the United States and its overseas allies.[38] In the age of military globalization it became hard to distinguish between "national" and "theater" defenses. Their fusion means that US national defense became global defense. The following year Michael Hirsh commented that a "world they had wished to keep at ocean's length became largely their world."[39]

Barry Posen in his article "Command of the Commons"[40] stresses that the US obtained an unchallenged "command of the commons"—global neutral sea, area, air, and space—which provides unprecedented global military projection. For the contrast Posen referred to the level of military globalization during the peak of the British Empire only a century earlier:

When Nineteenth-century Britain had command of the sea, its timely power projection capability ended at the maximum range of the Royal Navy's shipboard guns. The Royal Navy could deliver an army many places around the globe, but the army's journey inland was usually difficult and slow; without such a journey, Britain's ability to influence events was limited."[41]

The technological progress, Posen comments, changed all that. The US enjoys the same command of the sea that Britain once did but it can also move larger and heavier forces around the globe and do it faster. Command of space allows the United States to see the whole surface of the world. And air power, ashore and afloat, can reach targets deep inland and destroy them.[41] In the same article Posen refers to the Unified Command Plan.[42] It divides the whole globe on strategically controlled branches unified under a single command. In case of necessity, it "can generate significant combat power in the far corners of the world on relatively short notice." [43]

See also

References

  1. ^ David A. Held, & D. McGrew Gold Blatt & J. Perraton, Global Transformations; Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge Polity Press, p 88.
  2. ^ Robert Keohane & Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence, Boston: Little, Brown and Co, (2002), p 196.
  3. ^ Global Transformations, p 89.
  4. ^ Armin Krishnan, Wars as Business: Technological Change and Military Service Contracting, London & New York: Routledge, 2008, p 158.
  5. ^ Wars as Business, p 158.
  6. ^ Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World, London & New York: Routledge, (2002), p 195.
  7. ^ Geoffrey R. Sloan, Geopolitics in US Strategic Policy, 1890-1987, (Sussex: Wheat Sheef Books, 1988), pp 114-115.
  8. ^ Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London: California University Press, 2003.
  9. ^ "Political Geography of Power," Geographical Review, 32/1, (1942): p 352.
  10. ^ "American War Documents: Wendell L. Wilkie's Radio Address of October 26, 1942," Current History, 16/3: (December 1942), p 340-341.
  11. ^ ‘’Hitler's Interpreter’’, ed. R. H. C. Steed, London: W. Heinmann, 1950, p 238.
  12. ^ cited in Geoffrey R. Sloan, ‘’Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 1890–1987’’, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988, p 152.
  13. ^ Declarations of war during World War II
  14. ^ John Lukacs The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age, (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), p 107.
  15. ^ Hugh Byas, The Japanese Enemy: His Power and Vulnerability, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1942), p 29.
  16. ^ The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, (New York: Perseus Books, 1997), p 5.
  17. ^ Maps and How to Understand Them, Consolidated Voltee Aircraft Corporation, Designers and Builders of Military and Commercial Aircraft and Stimson Personal Planes, New York, 1945, p 3.
  18. ^ Cited in Hans Weigert, Principles of Political Geography, New York: Appleton Century Crofts, (1957), p 242.
  19. ^ Hans Weigert, Principles of Political Geography, p 242, 275, 279.
  20. ^ In 1957, the Soviets estimated that the United States had 950 military bases on foreign soil. Alvin J. Cottrell, “Soviet Views of US Overseas Bases,” Orbis, 7/1, (1963): p 80.
  21. ^ Andrew J. Pierre, “The Future of America’s Commitments and Alliances,” Orbis, 16/3, (1972): p 696.
  22. ^ Cited in Elliot R. Goodman, “De Gaulle’s NATO Policy in Perspective,” Orbis, 10/3, (1966): p 718.
  23. ^ In his 1960 speech, Khrushchev announced that his regular air force was being phased out, that bombers were obsolete, and that they would be entirely replaced by rockets. Meanwhile, Eisenhower was telling the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the proposed B-70 bomber (the forerunner of the later B-1) “left him cold in terms of making military sense.” Cited in Marc Trachtenberg, “The Question of No-First-Use,” Orbis, 29/4, (1986): 756.
  24. ^ Marc Trachtenberg, “The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security, 10/1, (1985): p 150.
  25. ^ Foreign Affairs, 46/2: p 244, 247.
  26. ^ Dean Acheson. “The Illusion Disengagement,” Foreign Affairs, 36/3: (1958), p 371.
  27. ^ Cited in Mark A. Stoler, "From Continentalism to Globalism," Diplomatic History, 6/3, (1982): p. 320.
  28. ^ Stephen B., Jones, “Global Strategic Views,” Geographical Review, 45/4, (1955): p 498.
  29. ^ “The Illusion Disengagement,” p 375.
  30. ^ "The New Development in the Polar Regions," Cooperation and Conflict, 9/2, (1974): p 75.
  31. ^ "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future," Diplomatic History, 16/2: (1992), p 235.
  32. ^ Francis X. Kane, “Space Age Geopolitics,” Orbis, 14/4, (1971): p 924.
  33. ^ Hans Heinrik, "Star Wars," Journal of Peace Research, 23/1, (1986): p 3.
  34. ^ By 1960 it contained 80,000 entries. Derek Gregory, “Bombing Encyclopedia of the World,” Geographical Imaginations: War, Space, and Security, (August 3, 2012), https://geographicalimaginations.com/2012/08/03/bombing-encyclopedia-of-the-world
  35. ^ Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp 269-279.
  36. ^ "The JCS Single Integrated Operational Plan-1962 (SIOP-62)," International Security, 12/1, (1987): p 41.
  37. ^ Robert Jervis, "The Compulsive Empire," Foreign Policy," 137: (2003), 84.
  38. ^ Ken Jimbo, "A Japanese Perspective on Missile Defense and Strategic Coordination," The Nonproliferation Review, 9/1, (2002) pp 56, 58, 66; Wade Huntley, "Missile Defense: More May Be Better—for China," The Nonproliferation Review, 9/1, (2002) p 8.
  39. ^ Michael Hirsh, "Bush and the World," Foreign Affairs. 81/5, (2002), 31
  40. ^ "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony,"' International Security, 28/1, (2003).
  41. ^ a b Barry R. Posen, "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony,"' International Security, 28/1, (2003), 9.
  42. ^ "Command of the Commons,"' p 9. https://www.google.co.il/search?q=unified+command+plan+image
  43. ^ "Command of the Commons,"' p 19.
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