Special to WorldTribune.com

By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs

Wealth is the great opiate. It creates a sense of invincibility, even when battles are lost, and wars fail to sustain or expand victory. The syndrome is exemplified by the credo: “I am rich, therefore I am omnipotent.” It is the beginning of downfall.

Modern societies — East and West, North and South — today find themselves beset by challenges to the legitimacy of their governance and their states. This persists to the point where the challenged societies themselves exhibit the seeds of self-doubt.

Much of this phenomenon is attributable to the great shifts in population groups over the past century, particularly the concurrent transnational movements and urbanization trends which have changed the nature, thinking, and shape of many societies. Certainly it has changed the centers of gravity in many societies.

This I investigated in the book UnCivilization: Urban Geopolitics in a Time of Chaos. Wealth (and dreams of wealth) motivate much of this population movement, and, concurrently, urbanization itself has helped to create wealth.

But in that book I also remarked that the rise of the city-states would come to be challenged by exercises of crude power, just as it was when Philip II of Macedon rolled up the sophists of the Hellenic city-states in a careful series of maneuvers in which he rarely sought a direct confrontation in conventional terms.

Today, the rise of geopolitical movements such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) [or the Islamic Caliphate] has already begun to confuse the defense and intelligence apparatus of the states confronting it.

Have we even begun to understand that the amorphous nature of the opponents faced by the International Coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan was, like the Caliphate, not quite the usual insurgency threat which the conventional powers had traditionally faced?

What is clear is that the present tools — political, military, and doctrinal — are ill-suited to face the threat of primitive warfare, and, indeed, often abet it through foolish missteps.

The West gave these, its lavishly-bought tools, free rein to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Al Qaida in 2001, and by the precursors to that group in the years building up to the 9/11 attacks. The West’s only response to the ongoing inability to stem the building tide of opposition was to redouble the kinetic response, regardless of the diminishing cost-benefit ratio.

Bluntly put, the modern world is fighting tomorrow’s wars with yesterday’s weapons, doctrine, and political organization. Neither is it merely a matter of looking solely to history to extract the lessons from earlier ages of counter-insurgency warfare, although such lessons are part of the clean-sheet analysis which will be critical to coping with the future.

The fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

And the first step toward understanding the threat lies in understanding ourselves. If we ask why modern, wealthy, industrialized societies are vulnerable, and why they do not seem to have the cohesiveness to respond to threats, then perhaps we are beginning the process. After all, terrorism and insurgency are the tools of the disenfranchised; of those with nothing to lose, or those who do not fear loss of the structures of civilization.

Again, the target societies — “modern societies” — are threatened because they are inflexible, and have become unwilling to surrender their privileges, or even to suffer hardship. Even to see to their own safety or cohesiveness.

But the question still remains: what does it take for a society (or its government) to tackle a next-generation threat? Firstly, it takes a leadership willing to assign the task of finding and delivering a solution to professionals who do not have a vested interest in (or a psychological dependency on) the structures, doctrine, and technology of the past or present. This may result in the creation of new force structures and capabilities, requiring new budgets, with the commensurate scaling back of the empowerment of existing force capabilities.

Secondly, it requires an intelligence capability which can assess the threats without being mired in political or ethical judgment, and comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of an adversary which arose out of the complex mix of its own societies as well as the vulnerability of the societies it challenges.

There is, in the West, still no understanding of what motivated Al Qaida, or the Taliban, let alone the Caliphate. How, then, can the West (or modern society) even think it can cope with the new challenges?

As with all things at a national strategic framework level, the question must be asked: what do you want your society to be, and how do you intend to deliver.

  Fighting a primitive threat with a 21st century mindset? Think about it, WorldTribune.com