So-Called Bloodless Wars: Training U.S. Military Officers

An Interview with Noam Chomsky, by Carl Whithaus

CW: I wanted to start off by asking you a question about the potentials you saw for information technologies to transform the training of U.S. military officers. I am thinking particularly of the cohort of military officers going to West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, VMI, or the Citadel. Do you have any sense of the ways in which blogs, wikis, or iPhones might be used in the teaching of these students?

Chomsky: I have visited West Point, but not the others. The students who have come to these places are pretty technologically adept. They have grown up in a wired culture. Computers and the Internet are second nature for them, as are cell phones and the whole array of contemporary communication technology.

A lot of these developments came through the state sector designed for military use. The Internet, for example, was the ARPAnet, the military network, for years before it was handed over to the National Science Foundation.

Undoubtedly this is a core element of the ways the US military fights wars. The US military tries to fight wars that are bloodless from the US point of view. But [these] highly automated [wars] are murderous from the point of view of the victims. That involves complex communication. So I am sure that the officer training schools are brought into trying to integrate the highest technology that is available and that is constantly growing and changing for surveillance and control and military action.

	Introduction
	Training U.S. Military Officers
	The Conquest of the Philippines
	IT in the Early 21st Century
	The Cyber Section of the Pentagon
	Blogs and Schizophrenia
	Intellectual Property
	Israel
	High Tech Corporations
	War Images
	Closing

Note: The complete audio recording of the interview is available to listen to as you browse the edited webtext.