G'day all,
Whilst I reckon there's something to Mark's words (below), the fact is they
don't really matter like they used to. You can't beat the US strategic
might, so you have to beat their resolve (which just about any long war
would do, as long as it weren't important enough to tempt Unca Sam to reach
for the red button). The US got ahead in electronics via the cold war and
got ahead of the SU on wealth via a more dedicated system of international
exploitation within their sphere. The SU fell behind in electronics coz
they started wrong, again, coz of the urgency of the cold war in 1965. The
military were powerful enough in those conditions to demand, not what would
one day be better (achievable via domestic R&D), but what was then the best
available (achievable via smugglers and reverse engineers). That, according
to Castells, was the IBM 360, and the SU IT sector (the one that counts when
it comes to strategic conflagratiuons) was on a road of follow the leader
dependency from then on. They even spaced the bits on their copied chips
wrong (1/10th inch was unwieldy in mms), so they couldn't fund their R&D
with exports (incompatibility problems).
Anyway, I reckon the US's big problem is their own brand of Lysenkos - the
Wall St (and Fed Bank) economists. 'Trouble is, they're everybody's
problem. I reckon 'information society' thinking ignores some big
theoretical problems (mebbe Brad and Froomkin's paper on 'The Next Economy'
points to stuff more important than some reckon - coz what would a policy
boffin do with the news none of the projections s/he needs have legs any
more? - ya can't solve everything with Tomahawks! And then there's the
problem of uneven development that comes with it - the law of value has more
to say on that than Paul Samuelson does.);
I reckon there's nothing in economic theory that can do a thing about
predicting, preventing or alleviating big crashes, and if that happens, and
it's world-wide, we're back to tomahawks again;
and I reckon there's nothing economic theory can do about the environment
(fresh water is my tip for the first big 'un - Iraq, Australia, & Sudan are
all already near crisis point, each in their own way), and mebbe we're back
to those tomahawks, or at least M16s - there, too). All of that deserves
far more thought and explanation than I have either the time or erudition to
handle, but thus does my expansive gut feel.
Cheers,
Rob.
>I haven't the faintest idea what the truth us, and I've been round Soviet
>defence plants and talked to lots of people. How do you know whom to
>believe? Probably the best people to ask are guerrillas living
hand-to-mouth
>and fighting under hard conditions. They say you can strip down an AK-47 in
>the field, and even if you let it fill up with mud and go rusty it still
>works fine. That's the kind of Lada-type technology which actually wins
>wars. Modern British army rifles hardly work at all, apparently; and in
>Kosovo the British Army radio system was so defective, that British
soldiers
>had to use local cellphones... which worked on a network owned by
President
>Milosevic, who still caved in despite all these apparent advantages, and
>despite the fact that, as we now know, Nato bombing was a failure.
>The hero in Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara is a soldier who keeps a
>carrot in his holster, because the main problem in a battle is to find
>something to eat. That's the kind of technological advantage I relate to.
