Military globalization

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Military globalization is the increase of range within which military power can be projected through the progress of military organization and technology and the increasing strategic interrelation first of regional systems and later of the global system.[citation needed]

Similarly to economic globalization, military globalization involves strategic integration of a system as expressed in network of alliances. Contrary to economic and socio-cultural globalization, strategic integration entails centralization under a single command.

World Wars

The formation of the global political system c. 1900 coincided with the technological revolution of warfare and communication. Air-Power exposed the globe defenseless. Not only the Lines of Siegfried and Maginot but even vast oceans ceased to be insurmountable barriers. The Eighth century scribe Alcuin was amazed by the Viking invasion from beyond the North Sea because it was not "thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made."[1] In the past century the Americans were similarly surprised by the Japanese inroad but this time the sea was the Pacific Ocean. At this point the history of surprise inroads from beyond the sea ended for no sea was large enough to make an inroad surprising.

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."[2] Isaiah Bowman, known as "Roosevelt's Geographer"[3] 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."[4] 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."[5] 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.” [6] 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.”[7]

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.[8] The War was globalized.

The battles of the War were synchronously fought amidst snow and ice and in the tropics half a globe apart.[9] A contemporary observer had stated in 1942: "The battle area is planetary in dimension."[10] 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."[11] In 1945 on the Elbe River met soldiers some of whom were from the Pacific Western and Eastern shores.

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. Hundreds of US military bases and installations,[12] 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.”[13] 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.”[14]

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.[15] 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.”[16] 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.”[17] A decade earlier, Dean 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.”[18]

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."[19] The Northern Ocean, now labeled "the Arctic Mediterranean,"[20] 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.”[21]

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..."[22]

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."[23] 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.”[24] 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 the beginning of the Cold War, the US Air Force compiled The Bombing Encyclopedia of the World. “The database soon became global..."[25] 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.[26] 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."[27] 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."[28]

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.[29] 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."[30]

Barry Posen in his article "Command of the Commons"[31] 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:

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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."[32]

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.[32] In the same article Posen refers to the Unified Command Plan.[33] 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." [34]

See also

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References

  1. Cited in Henry Royston Loyn, The Vikings in Britain, (London: B. T. Batsford, 1977), p 55.
  2. Geoffrey R. Sloan, Geopolitics in US Strategic Policy, 1890-1987, (Sussex: Wheat Sheef Books, 1988), pp 114-115.
  3. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London: California University Press, 2003.
  4. "Political Geography of Power," Geographical Review, 32/1, (1942): p 352.
  5. "American War Documents: Wendell L. Wilkie's Radio Address of October 26, 1942," Current History, 16/3: (December 1942), p 340-341.
  6. ‘’Hitler's Interpreter’’, ed. R. H. C. Steed, London: W. Heinmann, 1950, p 238.
  7. cited in Geoffrey R. Sloan, ‘’Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 1890–1987’’, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988, p 152.
  8. Declarations of war during World War II
  9. John Lukacs The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age, (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), p 107.
  10. Hugh Byas, The Japanese Enemy: His Power and Vulnerability, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1942), p 29.
  11. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, (New York: Perseus Books, 1997), p 5.
  12. 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.
  13. Andrew J. Pierre, “The Future of America’s Commitments and Alliances,” Orbis, 16/3, (1972): p 696.
  14. Cited in Elliot R. Goodman, “De Gaulle’s NATO Policy in Perspective,” Orbis, 10/3, (1966): p 718.
  15. 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.
  16. Marc Trachtenberg, “The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security, 10/1, (1985): p 150.
  17. Foreign Affairs, 46/2: p 244, 247.
  18. Dean Acheson. “The Illusion Disengagement,” Foreign Affairs, 36/3: (1958), p 371.
  19. Cited in Mark A. Stoler, "From Continentalism to Globalism," Diplomatic History, 6/3, (1982): p. 320.
  20. Stephen B., Jones, “Global Strategic Views,” Geographical Review, 45/4, (1955): p 498.
  21. “The Illusion Disengagement,” p 375.
  22. "The New Development in the Polar Regions," Cooperation and Conflict, 9/2, (1974): p 75.
  23. "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future," Diplomatic History, 16/2: (1992), p 235.
  24. Francis X. Kane, “Space Age Geopolitics,” Orbis, 14/4, (1971): p 924.
  25. 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
  26. Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp 269-279.
  27. "The JCS Single Integrated Operational Plan-1962 (SIOP-62)," International Security, 12/1, (1987): p 41.
  28. Robert Jervis, "The Compulsive Empire," Foreign Policy," 137: (2003), 84.
  29. 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.
  30. Michael Hirsh, "Bush and the World," Foreign Affairs. 81/5, (2002), 31
  31. "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony,"' International Security, 28/1, (2003).
  32. 32.0 32.1 Barry R. Posen, "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony,"' International Security, 28/1, (2003), 9.
  33. "Command of the Commons,"' p 9. https://www.google.co.il/search?q=unified+command+plan+image
  34. "Command of the Commons,"' p 19.