Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 12/19/06 Section: News

Max Boot, Contributing editor of the Weekly Standard

Max Boot believes that we should send hired mercenaries into Darfur, and his perspectives on the War on Terror are no less interesting. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that superior technology, though important, is not necessarily enough to ensure superiority, and that organization of bureaucracy is the true key to success. The author and columnist came to the Athenaeum for a Nov. 13 lunch to discuss "Revolutions in Military Affairs and the War on Terrorism." Authority on everything from defense policy and foreign policy to military technology and the media, and one of the 500 most influential people in the country in foreign policy, Boot brought a considerable amount of expertise to the talk.

He began his speech with "500 years of history in 10 minutes," stressing the importance of military history in making the modern world. He summarized the major world revolutions that have occurred in the last five centuries. In roughly the amount of time it took Europeans to go from controlling 13 percent of the world to 84 percent, he argued, the world saw dramatic changes in the warfare, industry, and technology that helped Europeans achieve this dominance. He spoke of the importance of information technology, arguing that one of the major factors in the collapse of the Soviet Union was that "we had a Silicon Valley and they didn't."

Boot's major point, however, was that such technology is not going to ensure victory in the 21st century. The rapid dissemination of successful technologies, he said, highlighted his point that it takes an organized government to harness technology to its advantage. In other words, "technology isn't going to be enough" in the War on Terror, because technology is widespread-organizational structure is necessary for success.

Boot fears that our enemies are making better use of their resources than we are, using a less bureaucratic, smaller chain of command to strike at our vulnerabilities. He explained that while terrorists come up with new and creative strategies to kill troops in Iraq, we are always a half step behind because we have to move policy slowly through a more extensive and deliberative system. "In many ways, al-Qaeda is the eBay of terrorism," he said, noting that on 9/11, men with box cutters and no significant budget killed more people than the Japanese Imperial Navy could in 1941. Additionally, Boot argued that we need better interrogation and human intelligence, quoting a TIME magazine statistic that only 33 out of 12,000 FBI agents have a limited proficiency in Arabic, and not one has skills equal to a native speaker. How we confront such issues is the challenge of our time.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools