Back in college, I took a military ethics course to fulfill a philosophy requirement.  It was taught by this guy who had retired as a colonel in the USAF.  He got bored and decided to teach… It was a fascinating course, full of hypothetical situations.  A typical test question would present a scenario (seemingly possible to navigate) that you would have to describe your actions and justifications for such actions.  Often, the questions were based on actual events, so you had the benefit of finding out what happened (after the test of course).  Well, I took this course in the spring of 2003.  That particular spring, as you may recall, our country was engaged in pretty heated debate as the US geared up for war in Iraq.  It provided a perfect case study for the causality and justifications used to declare war.  Class discussion was lively and this professor even managed to get old colleagues of his to come in and guest lecture, mainly explaining the consequences of all the specifics of things being thrown around in the media.  Things like, what “yellow cake” uranium meant, how difficult it was to find, how that did or did not violate international treaties, etc… Anyways, our final term paper in that class was only one question.  Based on current intelligence and US policy, is it justified to wage preemptive war on the sovereign nation of Iraq.  Why or why not?  

I won’t tell you my conclusion, but you are free to guess.  I still have the paper by the way.  I may eventually put it online.  :)

However, all of that to say, this TED Talk really caught my attention.  It seems that it is human nature to fight to try and get what you want.  Discussions surrounding the duty and responsibility of the “super-powers” when it comes to military action have always interested me.  Anyways, it is by a guy, Dr. Thomas Barnett, who is a Defense Department consultant and strategic planner.  His main thesis is that the US Military has made clear choices to create an organization that is unmatched in its strength and speed.  We can take anyone down, but the big question in our networked world today is: what happens after that?  We aren’t ready for the second half of the game.

I’ll let him explain it.

Take a listen. 

via TED.com