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Ralph Peters, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999. Pp. 210. $19.95, hardcover.
Just as NATO Operation Allied Force in Kosovo intensified, a new book examined how to win the battles of the twenty-first century. Fighting for the Future is a collection of essays previously published in various military science journals describing the nature of future warfare and the new types of adversaries the United States is likely to face. Writing from firsthand experience as an officer in the U.S. Army, Ralph Peters graphically illustrates that, while magnificently trained to defeat opponents on a conventional battlefield, U.S. forces are ill-prepared to face a new class of enemies who do not play by the time-honored rules of warfare.
This work was not written for an academic audience. Rather, Peters targets his "effort on a broad front" to policy-makers and the general public. Perhaps as a consequence, it contains no citations or references. Despite their topical relevance, Peters' insights and conclusions are hardly as original and controversial as he himself would have readers believe. Although a skilled writer, trite epigrams and pointless musings such as "we are the giant afraid of mice," "the purpose of the military is to kill," or "revolutions happen, above all, in the minds of men" spoil the utility of his argument. But while deeply unsatisfactory from the standpoint of academic rigor and innovative scholarship, Peters effectively presents likely scenarios for the nature of future warfare and raises legitimate questions about American political, military, strategic, and moral readiness for the next century. However, when discussing the processes of globalization, the effects of economic and cultural dependencies, and the politics of identity, he exceeds the generalizability of his purely anecdotal evidence.
His main argument is that in the future we will see fewer classic wars. Prepared to fight only "mirror images of ourselves," he explains, "we face constituencies of the damned, of the hopeless, from whose midst arise warrior...