Maurice Stoker Interviews a Spy - 2

MS: By way of introduction, can you tell us something about yourself?

K: No.

MS: Then it would seem we have already arrived at an impasse.

K: Abstractly speaking I’m a virtual warrior. Not always, though. Attended the finest war colleges in the world … including those in the US. But my specialty is nonlinear information warfare. I command a segment of that front from Europe.

MS: By virtual warrior, you don’t mean to say that you don’t exist in a corporeal sense.

K: Maybe. Can you see me?

MS: Can you explain a little about nonlinear warfare?

K: A little. It’s a load of manure. There’s no such thing. Or else it’s a triviality. Pinheads who teach such bullflop like to point to the battle of Lodz in 1914 as an example in classical times. But the North Vietnamese general Giap taught us more about it beginning in 1968 with his distributed methods. Everyone thinks Vietnam was guerilla warfare, but it wasn’t. Was light infantry acting in a distributed fashion, which is what the Army likes to call nonlinear in its operational doctrine of “AirLand warfighting.” Except Giap had no air component. And the U S Army acted liked they were fighting WWII, which cost them the war without losing the battles. Or so it seemed. Mostly nonlinear means that troops are not stretched along a line, except by communications. Which is dangerous for centralized operations unless you can guarantee secure communications, as we learned in Vietnam thanks to the Walkers.

MS: You mean the spy ring led by John Walker.

K: Staffed by military personnel who sold codes used by ground troops. No telling how many died from that asshole’s greed.

MS: Back to the topic. What are centers of gravity?

K: Fancy name for infrastructure, or headquarters, or sometimes just a way to break the will. These goons like to sound scientific, but they aren’t even near science in this. It’s old, this idea, but no one talked about it in the old days like they were scientists. When we bombed German railroads or factories in WWII, we were attacking centers of gravity, either directly or by cutting off their supply lines. When we firebombed Tokyo to demoralize the Japanese or wiped out electricity and other necessities in the Balkans under Clinton, we were doing the same. The will of the nation to continue is a center of gravity. Besides having hard value as infrastructure, these centers of gravity can have highly symbolic value. So the 911 attacks made the US look weak and al-Qaeda strong.

MS: Didn’t that backfire?

K: Depends on the goal. I don’t think it did, since it was a good step toward starting a radical Islamic uprising in the Middle East. Remember that that the schools where radical Islam is taught, where hatred of the US and Western culture is taught, like the schools in Pakistan, is one center of gravity. Though they’re dispersed in space, it’s still a center of gravity … a powerful point of difficulty for our handful of allies in Pakistan … prevents us flexing military muscle there. Iran’s similar. Our hope is indiscriminant killing of Muslim civilians all over the region by terrorists counters these strengths … blows up in the faces of the perpetrators.

MS: An apt analogy. So then what do you think is the strategy in the war on terrorism? Is it a nonlinear type approach?

K: Course not. There’s no real strategy in this so-called war on terror. In fact, there’s no war on terrorism.

• << PAM Home
• 1
• Page 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next >>