One sin common to diehards on both the political left and right is pessimism, the unfounded conviction that our country is in decline. Whether spreading the left’s dread that government agents will force every American to go to Sunday school, or the right’s insistence that immigration is destroying our society and values, alarmist voices insist that our glory days are over and we’re headed for a bleak, uncivil future.

We’ve heard such arguments since the 18th century. The only difference is that, in the past, the hysteria was usually more articulate. The prophets of doom have always been wrong. And barring cataclysmic acts of God, the naysayers of today will be every bit as embarrassed by history as those who once predicted that Irish immigration, the income tax, racial integration, or Japanese purchases of American real estate (remember those fears?) would lead to the demise of the United States as we know it.

Never underestimate the power of the American dream and the transformative genius of our country’s soul. Far from being in decay, we are headed for even greater might, wealth, and moral stature. The 21st century will not belong to China or to any other foreign power. It will be yet another American century.

Despite living in the most revolutionary society in history, we rarely pause to consider the degree to which we Americans have altered fundamental human patterns that prevailed for millennia. The real revolutionaries of the past century weren’t Che Guevara, Mao, or Lenin, but middle-class Americans going about their daily lives. We have broken barriers to human progress that, a century ago, appeared eternal.

The most powerful strategic advance has been the emancipation of women. Within the lifetimes of most readers of this magazine, the scope of opportunity for women has broadened with breathtaking speed. Previously, half of America’s human capital was restricted to a few narrow fields of endeavor. Today, women fly military aircraft, sit on the Supreme Court, lead corporations, hold cabinet positions, or work at the local convenience store — but they all contribute. As a result, we now operate at an unprecedented level of economic efficiency. The change in the role of women in our country and a handful of other nations constitutes the greatest social revolution in history.

That revolution threatens traditional, male-as-master societies in which women are viewed as property (essentially as slaves). While we are not conditioned to think in such terms, women’s liberation in the West is the single most frightening aspect of our civilization for males in tradition-bound societies — especially those of the Middle East. To a degree we fail to comprehend, the great contest between the West and the societies of the Middle East is a struggle over women’s freedom. We would never express it so, but the enduring, unorthodox war between our military and Islamist terrorists is best symbolized by the contrast between the burka and the two-piece women’s business suit.

Yet, the extensive participation of women in the work-force is only one of the multiple American revolutions of the past 50 years. Racial integration, arguably more advanced here than anywhere else on earth, introduced another flood of previously unavailable talent into our society and economy. While much is made of the technological revolution of our times, equally significant is the changing role of older citizens in our country. Two generations ago, men and women aged in chronic pain, dying at ages we now consider young. Bluntly put, they were resource consumers, a negative for the economy.

Today, Americans not only are far healthier in their 60s, 70s, and beyond, but also continue to contribute to our national wealth and well-being in ways we have not yet learned to measure fully, from volunteer work in their communities to founding new businesses. At a time when, even in Europe, young university graduates cannot find jobs and middle-aged employees who lose their positions cannot find new ones, Americans well beyond formal retirement age continue to produce goods and provide services in our talent-hungry society. Many military retirees or reserve-component officers reading these lines will be in the midst of their second, third, or even fourth careers.

How on earth can a country such as Pakistan or, for all its oil income, Saudi Arabia begin to compete with us? They can’t. That’s the crux of the problem. The unspoken strategic factor underlying anti-American rhetoric and violence today often comes down to that primal human emotion, jealousy. Lagging societies cling to cherished but noncompetitive values while hating us because they feel humiliated by our success.

Over the past half-century, we Americans have pioneered no end of other social revolutions that enhanced our power, and the effect is synergistic, not a matter of simple addition. Military officers know very well how effective the GI Bill proved six decades ago. The revolution it spurred in democratizing higher education changed our country profoundly. In the same time frame, we saw a revolution in religious tolerance — a seismic shift in history that alarms bigots everywhere. We’ve had an efficiency revolution in our daily lives and even a revolution in health care (yes, it costs more, but I, for one, remember the primitive conditions in our hospitals as recently as the 1950s).

No other country, not even Canada or Australia, rivals us in the combination of social revolutions, sound laws, entrepreneurial culture, and constructive values that are set to guarantee the acceleration of our wealth and power across the coming decades.

The new barbarians

But that future will not be peaceful. We are in the early stages of a third world war. This conflict may occasionally involve standing armies on both sides, but, more often, it will be fought asymmetrically, as in Iraq or Manhattan, with our enemies seeking to avoid our military strengths while capitalizing on the vulnerabilities inherent in a free society, on the irresponsible nature of our media, and on our great national weakness, impatience.

The great wars of the last century, waged first over empire, then over ideology, were more horrific in the scale of their battles and the extent of their destruction than the cat-and-mouse struggle today. But the differences between the sides are even harder to reconcile. This struggle is about belief, something an order of magnitude more intractable than ideologies concocted by intellectuals. On one side, we Americans have our deep conviction that human freedom is of paramount value. Our enemies are convinced that the will of a punitive god is incontestable and that freedom cannot coexist with faith.

Opponents suffused with a vision of a vengeful god whom they serve as executioners, men who regard death as a promotion and disdain the humane coexistence for which we stand, must be fought until their defeat is total. And that is far easier said than done. This will, indeed,
be our longest war, if not our bloodiest.

This isn’t just a war on terrorism. It’s a struggle between the future and the past, between liberating innovation and suffocating tradition, between reason and superstition. This age of ever-expanding knowledge is so threatening to traditional societies that they barricade themselves behind primitive beliefs. This great century of technology also promises to be a century of mass retreats back to superstition.

Today, the focal point of our struggle with the new barbarians is the Islamic civilization of the Middle East, where a vast struggle is under way for the soul of a great religion. And it is by no means guaranteed that the liberalizing elements will win.

Yet, while the Middle East may be the grimmest failure among contemporary civilizations and Islam the current religion-in-crisis, we would be foolish to assume the faith of Muhammad has a monopoly on violence. The flight into intolerant and antimodern fundamentalism afflicts each of the world’s great religions to some degree. The only saving grace is that, thus far, religious malcontents beyond the Islamic world have pursued only local violence.

Will the high-tech 21st century see new wars of religion hearkening back to the bloodbaths of past centuries? We certainly hope not and will do all that we can to avoid such catastrophes. But we might not be able to control the destabilizing effects of globalization and the proliferation of information — so much of which is false, hate-filled, and incendiary. Nor will we wish to arrest our own progress merely to wait for limping cultures to catch up.

No matter what you have heard or read about the Internet inaugurating the Age of Aquarius or globalization bringing humanity together, the dynamic changes of our day threaten to be as catastrophic to other societies as they are advantageous to us. Far from bringing peace in our time, the Internet, for example, rapidly became the most efficient tool for spreading hatred in history.

We may hope for the best, but we had better prepare for the worst when it comes to the human taste for violence.

The blood of our troops

So what about the one great American revolution not cited above, the much-vaunted revolution in military affairs, or RMA? Will that save us, allowing us to build impenetrable electronic walls while permitting us to kill our enemies from a safe distance? No. Of all our revolutions, the RMA has been, by far, the most oversold — as we see in Iraq and elsewhere. We are far from the day when any technology will replace the need for men and women in uniform. A paradox of our techno-age is that our security threats are overwhelmingly human. And it still takes an armed, trained, and dedicated human being to address them.

Certainly, military technologies provide us with a marvelous range of tools to assist us in our conflicts. But too many Americans were lulled by contractors’ promises or simply overestimated the effectiveness of new weapons. Above all, the most zealous proponents of the RMA forgot to take the enemy into account.

Consider just one new tool that arguably has harmed our military effectiveness almost as much as it’s helped us: the precision warhead. The faithful argued that smart bombs would limit collateral damage, reduce the exposure of our pilots and aircraft to enemy fire, and enable a single strike to destroy targets that required multiple missions in the past.

All that was true. But the advocates of the RMA failed to calculate the second- and third-order effects of what they praised. Utterly unrealistic expectations were raised about the possibility of bloodless war that would spare not only our own troops but eliminate the need to kill many of our enemies. The RMA zealots sold future war as a sanitized video game in which our land forces were not needed.

Worst of all, the proponents of technology as our all-purpose problem-solver failed to consider the enemy’s psychology. Remember “shock-and-awe,” how a sound-and-light show over Baghdad was supposed to convince Saddam Hussein to surrender? No one asked themselves why on earth Saddam Hussein would give up when he knew he would lose everything by doing so. Instead of convincing him to raise a white flag, the puny effects of precision weaponry — combined with inept targeting — hardened his determination and that of his regime to resist.

Sorry, but in war you still have to fight.

Our arsenal of precision weapons was rapidly and dangerously depleted as our ground troops fought their way to Baghdad in less than a month — the war was won by the infantrymen who were supposed to be unnecessary. There was, indeed, less damage than in previous wars, and there were fewer enemy casualties. But the result was an enemy never really convinced of his defeat. Attempts at waging painless war tend to lead to a very painful aftermath.

As we go forward, there certainly will be many uses for our new military technologies. No one would argue for a return to swords, spears, and signal banners. But we need to purchase weapons to suit our strategic needs, rather than adjusting our strategies to suit the weapons we want to buy. And we must never again forget that the crucial relationship isn’t between the bomb and the target, but between the physical effects achieved and the psychological effect on the enemy.

It’s time for a no-nonsense national discussion about the fundamentals of war. What does it take, how much graphic destruction, for an enemy to feel defeated? How do those in uniform convince a misled American public that there are no cheap wars and that a government unwilling to pay war’s butcher’s bill up front will pay it with compound interest in the end? How can we return to the model that served us so well through World War II, in which our civilian leadership chose where and when to go to war, laying out the strategic imperatives, but allowed the military to decide how to fight on the battlefield? How do we get civilian leaders who disdained military service themselves to understand that military professionals are worthy of respect?

Despite the spectacular performance of our troops, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been a terrifying example of how amateurs interfering in combat operations endanger all that we hope to achieve in war. Make no mistake: The arrogance of civilians in the Pentagon was redeemed only by the blood of our troops.

Future historians will view our age as one of constant conflict, a period in which the United States triumphed, but during which the armed forces of the United States faced a range of threats without precedent. Terrorists will strike our homeland again, no matter how thorough our prevention efforts. Nonetheless, the weight of the terrible crises of our time will fall most heavily on the shoulders of our men and women in uniform, not on the American public. Never will so many have lived so well at the expense of so few.

As daunting as the latter half of this article sounds, I always return to the new American revolutions with which the discussion began. As bad as things may seem, we remain far in the vanguard of human development, freedom and decency, opportunity, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. In my military career and the lively years thereafter, I’ve visited more than 60 countries and every continent except Antarctica. And I always come home convinced that, on our worst day, we’re far better off than anyone else. Despite our country’s undeniable problems and remaining challenges, we win by default compared to the rest of the world. We are at the beginning of a great age for the United States — and a bitterly demanding one for those Americans who wear our country’s uniforms.

Ralph Peters is the author of 20 books, both fiction and nonfiction. A former enlisted soldier, he retired from the Army shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel in order to write. The themes in this article are developed more fully in his book New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy (Sentinel, 2005).