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who, as Hobbes pointed out, value their lives above all else. If they do not feel safe
within that order, they will reduce their participation in it so as to protect themselves.
Moreover, those who are willing to commit their lives to a mission will find precious
little standing in their way.
Discipline and war are not, at any rate, the same thing. To be sure, war involves
discipline for both sides, but the objective of war is victory. And to be won, a war must
be fought. Discipline, by contrast (and as I use the term here), involves avoiding war,
achieving victory by means other than war, if you will; it is a combination of Panopticon
and flexible punishment. Discipline combines full battlefield surveillance—and the
battlefield is not only everywhere, it includes everything—with the notional ability to
apply punishment precisely where it is needed in order to pacify the unruly. In this light,
the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the personal project of Donald
Rumsfeld, represents merely an intermediate step between the old model of Total War
(and its side product, “flexible response”) and new model of Total Pacification (TotPac).
Both are fantasies, of course. War has never been total and Discipline can never
be. But, whereas the former depends on the mass of materiel that can be thrown at the
enemy, the latter relies on the timely application of specialized forces to those places
where resistance may threaten or escalate. Here, we see the merging of police tactics and
military strategy and, indeed, this is a form of “police,” of maintaining a particular order
of society. Just as the SWAT team is deployed to deal with disruptions of normality in
the civic order, Special Forces, backed by all manner of electronic surveillance and
reconnaissance (S&R) are being deployed to deal with actual and potential disruptions in
the imperial order. But the American military is not configured for TotPac, as
Convention