A 16 May 2020 Note from the Author: This 1999 strategic-cultural essay (below) was originally published on pages 108-117 of a searching and candid book of 233 pages, entitled Food and Agricultural Security: Guarding Against Natural Threats and Terrorist Attacks Affecting Health, National Food Supplies, and Agricultural Economics (New York, New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 894—December 1999)
December 1999
ROBERT D. HICKSON
Department of Philosophy and Fine Arts, U.S. Air Force Academy, 2354 Fairchild Drive, Suite 6K12, U. S. Air Force Academy, Colorado 80840-6238, USA. [Some twenty years later now, this 1999 address is no longer a valid address for the then-visiting professor, who is also the author here.]
*****
Underlying the exposition of subtle deception and strategic indirect warfare that follows is the theme of trust, to include: the grave personal and cultural consequences of intimately broken trust and how the intimate effects of broken trust may themselves be strategically and grand-strategically manipulated by a deft opponent. The greatest social consequence of the lie is that it breaks trust. And trust, once broken, is so hard to repair, even with forgiveness, even with graceful mercy and the healing of the memory. Such a poignancy—such a fragility and vulnerability—is one of the unmistakable themes of all the world’s great elegiac and tragic literature. It also pertains to the world of strategy and grand strategy, which also takes the longer view and goes to the roots of things.
As in a tragically fragmented family, a culture of broken trust, especially when it involves an intimately broken trust, is likewise self-sabotaging and often deeply destructive. Such a riven and wounded culture is thereby also more vulnerable to strategic exploitation and external maneuver by a subtle adversary. If, for example, an intelligent long-range adversary perceives the United States to be a “rogue superpower” and a “hectoring hegemon,” but also a “declining hegemon” marked by a loss of purpose, decadence, and broken trust, he will likely also perceive how an exploitable weakness has favorably manifested itself, even as a “provocative weakness”—“so weak that it is provocative to others” (in the memorably accented words of Dr. Fritz Kraemer). When, moreover, increasingly untrustful American citizens are fearful of the safety of their food and their water, to include the long-range safety of genetically modified foods; and when the military culture itself is increasingly untrustful of the limited or experimental vaccines they are dubiously obliged to receive, others will likely notice our “internal contradictions” and “exploitable weaknesses,” which all, at root, derive from a cumulative and innermost broken trust. Such adversaries, desiring to limit or to “level down” the United States, as well as Israel, for example, might well the “seize, retain, and exploit the initiative” strategically and grand-strategically, and thus further maneuver to subvert domestic trust.
Reality is that which doesn’t go away, even when you stop thinking about it. If somebody is at war with you, even if you don’t know it, you’re at war! Furthermore, every assessment of a threat is correlative to the vulnerability of the target—to include the “target culture” and the target’s vulnerable trust in its agriculture and sustainable agricultural infrastructure. All strategy and responsive counterstrategy must first be attentive to the “security of its base,” before it can also adequately achieve “mastery of the communications,” which is itself a strategic indispensability, as well as a part of the maneuvering “preparation for the strategic advantage” (or what the Chinese call shi’h).
The use of biological weapons to infect food supplies, blood supplies, vaccines, water and other “soft targets” would constitute a formidable challenge to our nation and political culture, especially if it were also to be intelligently harnessed to Fabian forms of indirect grand strategy. This conjunction is a terrible thing to think upon, and yet we must do so, because history shows that indirect grand strategy, with its use of surprise, delay, and psychological dislocation, has been used repeatedly and effectively against militarily more powerful adversaries.
Fabian strategy is named for the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (d. 203 BC), who defeated Hannibal by avoiding direct conflict. His long-range strategic indirection and evasiveness countered Hannibal’s military genius and sapped the energy of his forces. (The Fabian Society, founded in nineteenth-century Britain, also adopted the strategy in an attempt to introduce socialism gradually and indirectly.)
If Fabian strategy were now to be used in intentionally incongruous and shocking combination with more immediately traumatic forms of bio-terrorism, this could rightly be understood as a new form of psychological or political warfare—for it specifically targets the human mind and the weakened or despairing will, especially of one’s vacillating political leadership or fractious allies. For the purposes of this paper, I will discuss this form of warfare not just as an effective weapons system (albeit without conventional fire-power), but as an even larger new phenomenon that is more fittingly called strategic psycho-biological warfare, which exploits current revolutions in molecular biology and genetic engineering while aiming to manipulate the fears, broken trust, and uprooted hope of a modern citizenry at the end of a dark century.
Psycho-biological warfare, with its technical manipulations, ethical equivocations, and purposive confusions, could take us, finally, to the foundations of what it means to be a human person, as distinct from a mere artifact to be experimentally engineered and impersonally discarded. This could compel us, as well, to answer some trenchant questions: “What is a human person?” and “What is a human person for?” For how we see human life and its moral purposes1 will profoundly affect the limits we set in warfare, especially in the fearsome and far-reaching realm of warfare considered here. Any adequate American grand strategy to counter psycho-biological warfare must first consider such moral limits; it must also consider the long-range aftermath of such warfare, which is so likely to stain the nature of the subsequent peace and have even deeper after-effects on civilization.
To appreciate these larger issues more fully, we must first turn to history and, specifically, to Israeli military history. When, in September 1949, the Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Forces, General Yigael Yadin, wrote his strategical analysis of the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War, he eloquently accentuated his understanding of and successful dependence on B. H. Liddell Hart’s theory of indirect strategy, especially its psychological subtlety and efficacy.2 What if, fifty years later, keen-minded anti-Israeli and anti-American strategic thinkers were to apply Liddell Hart’s strategic principles against Israel and America? That is to say, what if adversaries now applied the insights of Liddell Hart in order to produce, both in Israel and in the United States, strategic surprise, shock trauma, psychological dislocation, and paralysis, especially by manipulating the imagined or actual effects of bio-terrorism and longer-range biological warfare? The words of Liddell Hart should concentrate our attention: “It should be the aim of grand strategy to discover and pierce the Achilles’ heel of the opposing government’s power to make war.”3 In our own case, the aim could be to discover and pierce the Achilles’ heel of the U.S. government’s power to carry out what is sometimes perceived as its undefined, provocative, and increasingly resented “policy of engagement and enlargement” abroad. And indeed as with other great powers in history, the perception of our strategic policy as overbearing is likely to provoke “political jujitsu,” as Saul Alinsky called it, and other Fabian forms of indirect grand strategy against us, is it not?
That is to say, strategic thinkers opposed to Israel and the United States may by now have “grasped what the soldier, by his very profession, is less ready to recognize—that the military weapon is but one of the means that serve the purposes of war; one out of the assortment which grand strategy can employ.”4 Once this larger and more inclusive understanding is grasped by an adversary, “the military principle of ‘destroying the [enemy’s] main armed forces on the battlefield’…fits into its proper place along with the other instruments of grand strategy—which include the more oblique kinds of military action as well as economic pressure [or economic warfare], propaganda, and diplomacy [or what General Beaufre, as we shall see, called the mentally dislocating ‘exterior maneuver’].”5
In this view,
Instead of giving excessive emphasis to one means,…it is wiser to choose and combine whichever are the most suitable, most penetrative, and most conservative of effort —i.e., which will subdue the opposing will at the lowest war-cost and minimum injury to the post-war prospect. For the most decisive victory is of no value if a nation be bled white in gaining it.6
Liddell Hart also proposed a complementary insight: “[T]his decisive strategic victory…was rendered indecisive on the higher strategic plane [i.e., of grand strategy].” 7 Even an effective indirect approach to the enemy’s strategic rear, for example, may be nullified by a larger failure in grand strategy, to which lower, more physically decisive military strategy must always be subordinated, adds Liddell Hart:
For, if the government has decided upon a limited aim or “Fabian” grand strategy [i.e., one of protracted indirection, delay, and evasion], the general who, even within his strategic sphere, seeks to overthrow the enemy’s military power may do more harm than good to the government’s war policy.8
In the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens (431–404 BC), the Spartans initially had to face a kind of “Fabian” strategy and
were foiled by Pericles’s war policy, of refusing battle on land while using the superior Athenian navy to wear down the enemy’s will by devastating raids. Although the phrase “Periclean strategy” is almost as familiar as the “Fabian strategy” in a later [Roman] age, such a phrase narrows and confuses the significance of the course that war pursued [after the 430 BC Plague in Athens]. Clear-cut nomenclature is essential to clear thought, and the term “strategy” is best confined to its literal meaning of “generalship”—the actual direction of military force, as distinct from the policy governing its employment and combining it with other weapons: economic, political, psychological. Such policy is in application a higher-level strategy, for which the term “grand strategy” has been coined. In contrast to a strategy of indirect approach which seeks to dislocate the enemy’s balance in order to produce a decision, the Periclean plan was a grand strategy with the aim of gradually draining the enemy’s endurance in order to convince him that he could not gain a decision. Unluckily for Athens, the importation of plague tipped the scales against her in this moral and economic attrition campaign. Hence in 426 BC, the Periclean strategy was made to give place to the direct offensive strategy of Cleon and Demosthenes.9
He also adds that “through the exasperation and fear that this [Spartan counteroffensive strategy] generated [i.e., “by taking an economic objective,” the “Athenians’ ‘national’ lines of communication”], he [the enemy Spartan general, Lysander] was able, thereby, also to produce conditions favorable to surprise and to obtain a swift military decision.”10 Later, ironically, the altogether weaker city-state of Thebes was able, gradually, to “[release] herself from Sparta’s dominion by the method later christened Fabian, of refusing battle….”11 Is it not also reasonable to suppose that the U.S.’s adversaries today might have similar incentives to resort to Periclean or Fabian indirection?
It is also important to consider that “the strategy of Fabius [known, interestingly, as the “Cunctator,” or “Delayer”] was not merely an evasion of battle to gain time, but calculated for its effect on the morale of the enemy—and, still more, for its effect on their potential allies” and thus “was…primarily a matter of war-policy or grand strategy.”12 Says Liddell Hart:
The key condition of the strategy by which this grand strategy was carried out was that the Roman army should keep always to the hills, so as to nullify Hannibal’s decisive superiority in cavalry. Thus this phase became a duel between the Hannibalic and the Fabian forms of the indirect approach.13
To what extent will the United States, as well as Israel, now have to face Periclean, Hannibalic, or Fabian forms of the indirect approach—and other insidious forms of “asymmetrical” indirection that use biological agents to achieve an even more devastating psychological effect of subversion and dislocation on the citizenry and soldiery? To what extent will biological warfare (and bio-terrorism) on our own home front now be—or be perceived to be—the U.S.’s “Achilles heel” and perhaps become an asymmetrical form of retribution for our obtrusive policy of “engagement and enlargement”? Given our current form of government and Constitutional provisions, how can we discern and counteract an adversary with biological weapons who also possesses strategic “interior lines” on the “inner front” of our homeland, so as to infect such vulnerable soft targets as vaccines, water, and food and blood supplies? A good strategist must first reliably secure his own base and become “master of the communications,” especially the strategic lines of communication, both interior and exterior, the mass media, and the communications of his enemy. How will our defenses counter such subtle penetration?
We can gain insight into these questions from a noted French military strategist, General André Beaufre, writing in 1963 on indirect strategy and the psychological factor in war. His thoughts have trenchant implications for our situation in America today. Learning from the humiliations he had known both as a Frenchman and as a combatant commanding officer, he warned and instructed us about the insidious methods of indirect strategy.14 America has much to learn from him.
Beaufre says that even though strategy can be played two ways, directly and indirectly—like the major and minor keys in music—the object of strategy remains the same: “a struggle for…freedom of action” leading to “a decision arrived at through the psychological surrender of the enemy,” The object is “to produce a climax—the point at which the enemy’s morale cracks.” When, according to Beaufre, one is able “to strike terror, to paralyze, and to surprise” one’s adversary—“and all these objects are psychological”—then one can limit or remove his freedom of action and his security, often by seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative and by “the strategy of guile.” But, always in strategy, “the touchstone is freedom of action,” especially when, as is usually the case, “psychological action must precede military action” and prepare for military action by a psychological “artillery barrage,” which includes diversion and deception.
What is our own strategic freedom of action today in the United States, both psychologically and militarily, against foreign and domestic threats of bio-terrorism and longer-range psycho-biological warfare? How might our adversaries, at home and abroad, be preparing to distract and dislocate us, physically and psychologically? Since, according to Beaufre, strategy is “a thought process” and “the art of the dialectic of [at least] two opposing wills” in order to “reach the other’s vitals by a preparatory process,” how might U.S. strategists anticipate the use of biological weapons by such preparatory and insidious indirection?
Beaufre uses the forceful metaphor of “an incubator war,” such as “the lethal but insidious infections of the Cold War or ‘war in peacetime’ (la Paix-Guerre).” He says that “in an incubator war, psychological infection [including the infection of panic] is not unlike that produced by biological warfare,” for, “once launched, it is difficult to control,” just as “the virus of Bolshevism rebounded upon her” after Germany enabled Lenin to arrive in 1917 at Finland Station in St. Petersburg to start his revolution. Beaufre proposes that the Soviet’s revolutionary dialectic of dissolution against its enemies was, like biological warfare, “a method of slow creeping diffusion of chaos under the umbrella of an insidious threat.” By using “psychological technology…partly camouflaged by an anesthetizing propaganda campaign,” and by using Alinsky’s “political jujitsu,” the indirect strategy of the Soviets, says Beaufre, aimed “to disorganize the enemy by disrupting…[mental] cohesion…[and] loosening…moral ties.” This strategic “enervation or erosion method,” a part of the “new style of war,” says Beaufre, is itself like “the creeping infection of an illness”—a gradual titration and permeation of an infection. Beaufre’s metaphors are even more forceful when applied to the modern realm of psycho-biological warfare.
Against psycho-biological forms of warfare, as well as against new forms of Marxist or Gramscian revolutionary warfare (as seen for example in the Trans-National Radical Party in Europe today), there is a grave need for what Beaufre calls “inoculation and counter-infection,” because they are part of a new battle for the mind. In the context of our vulnerable democratic culture, the challenges in forming an integrated defense-in-depth against psycho-biological warfare are great indeed.
In forming such a defense, it is important to note that even the best of tactics or operations (i.e., “the sum total of the dispositions and maneuvers”) are “rendered nugatory,” says Beaufre, “if used to further an erroneous strategy.” Tactics “must be the servant of strategy,” but the “choice of tactics is, in fact, strategy,” as when deciding, for example, “whether to use force or subversion” as a subordinate part of one’s own larger or grand “strategy of guile.” As Beaufre says, “how total [i.e., how inclusive] the art of strategy must be”—because it involves politics, economics, finance, and psychology, among other things. “The strategic priority” must always be “to decide how great the freedom of action is for oneself and what is available to the enemy.” In the face of biological weapons today, how would we ourselves make this decision?
We must also answer such questions as these: Who is the enemy? What (or whom) are we trying to protect? And why? The amount of access to our “interior lines” (i.e., to our interior dispositions, communications, and maneuver room) that is unwittingly provided to our adversaries, including trans-national criminal syndicates, is very great.
In my experience over the last three years, all too many people, when considering bio-terrorism and indirect biological warfare, have been cynically (or flippantly) inclined either to a kind of “pre-emptive futility” or to various forms of denial, both of which already constitute “pre-emptive psychological surrender”! “What can we do?” was the question put to me often enough. However, those whose special duty of leadership it is to provide for the common defense are called to a higher standard of foresight and determination.
It has been with these considerations of duty in mind that Dr. Thomas Frazier has worked so selflessly and indefatigably, despite discouragement and disincentives, to bring so many scientists, specialists, analysts, and thinkers together for candid discourse and a call to action. For merely passive forms of defense against psycho-biological weapons will likely be insufficient and perhaps even ruinous.
But, as to our response policy, should U.S. counter-initiatives be immediate and proportionate, like the well-known counter-initiatives of Israel? Would this be self-defeating for the U.S., exacerbating or only dissipating, given our diverse and vulnerable extensions abroad as well as our cultural politics at home?
One of the reasons, therefore, I am focusing our attention on Fabian forms of indirect grand strategy to make psychological use of bio-agents and bio-technologies is to make us more aware of the dangers of over-reaction, which might not only increase our vulnerability, but could even help unite additional hostile elements against us. That is to say, in the gathering disillusionment and resentment against the United States, many are likely to say “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The consideration of Fabian indirection will also likely make us more vigilant to the rash and reductive “terrible simplifiers,” those who might wish to use the pretext of a biological threat to implement Emergency Executive Orders or new “global arrangements” favorable to essentially unaccountable international oligarchies or NGOs (non-governmental organizations), but potentially unfavorable to national or local authority. I make this contention on the premise that a humane and proportionate scale—or scope of command—must be maintained when trying to deal with the threatened or actual conduct of psycho-biological warfare, because it specifically tries to destroy intimate trust, both in a community and in the individual mind.
In light of some fundamental axioms of strategy and grand strategy that will now be further elucidated by Liddell Hart, we will be able to consider more concretely how grand-strategic Fabian bio-warfare might operate and have its psychologically dislocating and paralyzing effects. Let us assume that an adversary or coalition of adversaries might wish to “revive the art and effect of strategy”15—especially long-range indirect grand strategy. The culture of China, for example, with its remarkable cultural cohesiveness over time and space, might be especially adept at grand-strategic deception. Certain European governments and Euro-socialists wishing for the diminishment of U.S. influence and enhancement of the euro as an international reserve currency might indirectly co-operate with China and others to add to America’s discomfiture, by omission at least if not by commission. In the London Mail, for example, Allan Piper and Richard Grant write:
The introduction of the Euro in January [1999] threatens to trigger the worst global economic crisis since the Second World War. It could even signal the breakdown of the global financial system, according to the City’s [London’s financial district’s] most respected economist. Stephen Lewis, who provides daily advice to the Square Mile’s leading institutions, blames the advent of the Euro for the present turmoil in world markets, and warns that massive currency movements created by its introduction will make matters worse. He predicts that, because European governments are determined to break the power of the U.S. dollar, it will encourage a worldwide proliferation of nationalistic policies, force widespread introduction of currency exchange controls, and lead to a sharp slowdown in global economic growth… . Lewis’ remarks follow an announcement from Beijing last week that the Chinese government wants to offload dollars from its $140 billion foreign currency reserve to buy the Euro… . Lewis warns: “One of the reasons there is a crisis at all is that the governments sponsoring the Euro are seeking to overturn the dollar’s supremacy. They do not want the dollar to survive as the world’s leading currency. A large part of the global economic problem over the past year has arisen from attempts by policy-makers to assert the Euro’s role in the scheme of things. This challenge is the biggest since 1945.” Last week, Wang Jian, economist of China’s State Development Planning commission, said that the country’s government would cut the proportion of dollar holdings to 40% so that it could build Euro holdings to the same level… . He [Stephen Lewis] said: “The movement of capital will devalue the dollar sharply and cause economic recession in the U.S. The significant point about Wang’s comment is that it came days after German bankers had been in Beijing seeking to persuade the authorities to shift their reserves from the dollar to the Euro.” (Emphasis added.)16
In this context, additional disruptions from the use of actual or feigned bio-agents could be traumatic and dislocating. With this example in mind, Liddell Hart’s axioms become even more cogent and sobering as we consider the Fabian use of biological weapons.
Liddell Hart is fundamentally opposed to two theses: (1) that “battle is the only means to the strategical end” and (2) that “in war every other consideration should be subordinated to the aim of fighting decisive battles.”17 He thinks it wise, instead, often “to enjoin a strategy of limited aim”18 and especially “a limited aim or ‘Fabian’ grand strategy.”19
He says:
The more usual reason for adopting a strategy of limited aim is that of awaiting a change in the balance of force—a change often sought and achieved by draining the enemy’s force, weakening him by pricks instead of risking blows. The essential condition of such a strategy is that the drain on him [e.g., the U.S.] should be disproportionately greater than on oneself. The object may be sought by raiding [or infecting] his supplies;…by luring him into unprofitable attacks [i.e., “lure and trap” or “mystify, mislead, surprise”]; by causing an excessively wide distribution [or centrifugal overextension] of his force; and, not least, by exhausting his moral and physical energy.20
When strategy, from its etymology, is considered as “generalship,” it is “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy” (as well as the ends of grand strategy) by “the movement of forces” and “its effect,” particularly when “the effect was [or will be] insidiously harmful.”21 The purpose of strategy, as well as grand strategy, is “to diminish the possibility of resistance” and “to fulfill this purpose by exploiting the elements of movement and surprise.”22 Says Liddell Hart:
The role of grand strategy—higher strategy—is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object…the goal defined by fundamental policy. Grand strategy should both calculate and develop the economic resources and man-power of nations… . Also the moral resources—for to foster a people’s willing spirit is often as important as to possess the more concrete forms of power…. Moreover, fighting power is but one of the instruments of grand strategy—which should take account of and apply the power of financial pressure, of diplomatic pressure, of commercial pressure, and, not least, of ethical pressure, to weaken the opponent’s will.23
Even when it pertains to the lower level of strategy, Liddell Hart argues—and our new adversaries may have listened to him—that “strategy not only stops on the frontier [of the province of fighting], but has for its purpose the reduction of fighting to the slenderest possible proportions” and, if fighting is unavoidable, “to bring about battle under the most advantageous circumstances.”24 And sometimes, as in the case of the Greek Byzantine general, Belisarius, in Syria, “the national object” was fulfilled by “pure strategy,” for, “in this case, the psychological action was so effective that the enemy surrendered his purpose without any physical action at all being required.”25 Liddell Hart comments:
While such bloodless victories have been exceptional, their rarity enhances rather than detracts from their value—as an indication of latent possibilities, in strategy and grand strategy. Despite many centuries’ experience of war, we have hardly begun to explore the field of psychological warfare.26
With respect to the military strategist or grand strategist, Liddell Hart says, by way of summary:
His true aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that, if it does not of itself produce a decision, its continuation by battle is sure to achieve this.27
Now, with reference to those who would use biological weapons to effect “psychological action,” we must remember that “dislocation is the aim of strategy” and the intended sequel is “the enemy’s dissolution or his easier disruption in battle.”28 But “how is the strategic [or grand strategic] dislocation produced?”—by, for example, “a move directed towards the enemy’s rear,” “a menace to its [interior] line of communication,” or seeking to gain “a decisive advantage previous to battle.”29 It may also be produced by “menacing [or ambushing] the enemy’s [or the “first-responder’s”] line of retreat,” “menacing the equilibrium of his dispositions,” or “menacing [or contaminating] his local supplies [including his medical supplies].”30
The proper strategic intention is not so much to produce strain, but rather to produce shock—suddenness and surprise. “Psychological dislocation fundamentally springs from the sense of being trapped.”31 Also, the “strategy of an indirect approach [is] calculated to dislocate the opponent’s balance,” physically or logistically but, especially, mentally. In fact, “paralyzing the enemy’s action” is “what constitutes a strategic indirect approach,” which is itself “preceded by distraction [i.e., “to draw asunder” the opponent], so as “to deprive the enemy of his freedom of action” and to give him the sense of being trapped. Such a preparatory distraction also seeks “the distention” and “the diversion” of the opponent’s forces, with the result that they are “too widely distributed and committed elsewhere”32 so as not to be able to regroup and effectively concentrate against one’s own forces—that is to say, “not giving your opponent freedom [of action] and time to concentrate to meet your concentration.”33
Given modern conditions and mobile weaponry, says Liddell Hart, “the need for [preparatory] distraction” has grown. The “most economic method of distraction” is to force on one’s enemy a choice of disconcerting “alternate objectives” along a single line of operations—striving to constantly “[put] the enemy on the horns of a dilemma” (as Sherman did in his “deep strategic penetration” of Georgia).34 Citing the two correlative principles of “concentration of strength against weakness” and “dispersion of the opponent’s strength,” Liddell Hart emphasizes that “true concentration is the fruit of calculated dispersion.”35
Liddell Hart thinks it essential to “adjust your end to your means,” after a sober assessment of one’s means, and to “think what it is least probable that he [i.e., the enemy] will foresee and forestall.”36 Since “a single objective is usually futile,” he says, it is important to “take a line of operations which offers alternative objectives.” This is also “the basis of infiltration tactics,”37 which today could include biological weapons, to exploit the opponent’s confusion, mental dislocation, disorganization, and demoralization—and to exploit them before he or his society can recover. However, certain cautious and unstrategic minds, inordinately focused on tactics, tend to promote “the common indecisiveness of warfare,” to “obscure the psychological element,” and “to foster a cult of soundness rather than of surprise.”38
One must bear in mind “the necessity of making the enemy do something wrong” and, “by compelling [his] mistakes,” to “find in the unexpected the key to a decision.”39 For “a man unnerved is a highly infectious carrier of fear, capable of spreading an epidemic of panic.”40 Although strategy “should seek to penetrate a joint [or critical communications node] in the harness [or networks] of the opposing forces,” Liddell Hart emphasizes that “a strategist should think in terms of paralysis, not killing.”41 But again, a “decisive strategic victory” can be “rendered indecisive on the higher strategic plane” of grand strategy.
Given the new face of terrorism, as seen for example in the Aum Shinrikyo cult, there is, it seems, a growing “fanaticism unmixed with acquisitiveness” and “infused with the courage of desperation.”42 This new enemy seeks only to destroy, not to conquer —and biological weapons will serve him well.
By taking the measure, in the larger grand-strategic context, of both the capacities of biological weapons today (actual and potential) and the resentful intentions of terrorists or transnational criminal syndicates, our judgments and responses will be more disciplined and wiser, more prudent and proportioned. We must not think of biological weapons or bio-terrorism in merely tactical or operational terms, or in isolation. We must anticipate and consider them in the context of Fabian forms of indirect grand strategy, which may subtly employ new biotechnologies and discoveries from neuroscience, such as psychotropic and neuro-tropic bio-agents, to infect the human mind and weakened will. Such subtle forms of strategic indirection against “soft targets” aim to subvert trust, the most intimate forms of trust, thereby producing, if not our despair and desolation, then, at least, our demoralization and strategic paralysis.
(Address correspondence to [not anymore valid as of May 2020]: Dr. Robert Hickson, Department of Philosophy and Fine Arts, HQ USAFA/DFEG Hickson, 2354 Fairchild Drive, Suite 6K12, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado 80840-6238; Telephone: 719-333-8716; Fax: 719-333-7137. )
REFERENCES [43 Footnotes]:
1. HARRIS, J., 1992. In Wonderwoman and Superman: The Ethics of Human Biotechnology. P. Singer, Ed. Oxford University Press. New York.
2. LIDDELL HART, B.H. 1967. Strategy. 2nd edit. Meridian Books. New York.
3. Ibid. p. 212.
4. Ibid. pp. 211-212.
5. Ibid. pp. 211-212.
6. Ibid. p. 212.
7. Ibid. p. 237.
8. Ibid. p. 321.
9. Ibid. p. 10.
10. Ibid. p. 13.
11. Ibid. pp. 13-14.
12. Ibid. p. 26.
13. Ibid. p. 27
14. BEAUFRE, A. 1965. An Introduction to Strategy, Praeger. New York. Quoted text from pages 1, 23-24, 30, 34-35, 42, 47, 55-57, 59, 80, 83, 86, 99, 100, 102-104, 108-110, 121-122, 127-128, 133, 135, 137-138.
15. LIDDELL HART, op. cit. p. 332.
16. PIPER, A. & R. GRANT.1998. London Mail (6 Sept.): 1.
17. LIDDELL HART, op. cit. p. 319.
18. Ibid. p. 320.
19. Ibid. p. 321.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid. pp. 321, 319.
22. Ibid. p. 323.
23. Ibid. p. 322.
24. Ibid. p. 324.
25. Ibid. p. 325.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid. p. 326.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid. p. 328.
33. Ibid. p. 334.
34. Ibid. p. 339.
35. Ibid. p. 334.
36. Ibid. p. 335.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid. p. 336.
39. Ibid. p. 336 (Emphasis added).
40. Ibid. p. 212.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid. p. 359.
—Finis—
Ordo Dei 