Gaza and an extract from my book, The Vortex of Violence and Why we are losing the war on climate change

Watching the attack on the power station in Gaza today and the seeing the city in total darkness is a statement of such profound and unsettling violence it is hard to cope with its emotional trauma. It a manifestation of new forms of warfare sweeping the world. This makes it worse. 

The following is a brief extract from my forthcoming book talking about the ability of the military industrial complex to fire "precision" strikes into cities and the implications:-

Nuclear weapons were such a paradigm shift in warfare that they made the industrial wars such as the First and Second World Wars impossible. However, wars that are fought today using conventional munitions are able to deliver total destruction in a matter of hours, rather than the months of bombing required in the past, as demonstrated in the Iraq wars amongst others. Although these did not have the massed bomber squadrons that blackened the skies in the Second World War, the destructive capability of B52s combined with waves of precision missile attacks is in many way as destructive as the massed bomber raids on Dresden and Tokyo. This has been demonstrated on repeated occasions were the essential services that any modern city depends on such as water, electricity and telecoms have been surgically removed leaving it as disabled as any of the hollowed out shells of cities in the Second World War. In conjunction with improved targeting ability, the cities of today are larger, more complex and more interconnected than those of the Second World War era amplifying the damage done and causing the recovery to take far longer, despite the initial appearance of the damage not being so great. The intensity of the destruction is further enhanced by the trend towards increased urbanisation that all nations around the world have been swept up in since the beginning of the industrial revolution, thus targeting the cities of modern nations targets much bigger proportions of a nation's total population and increases the intensity of the trauma when compared to past events.

Our strategy in attacking cities today has also become analogous to the training that we give to our infantry men. They are taught that on the battlefield it is best not to kill the opponent but to critically wound him. His screams of pain and distress traumatise his colleagues who are also diverted from fighting to supporting him. To not kill a city, but to keep it critically injured and traumatised stops a whole country from fighting back.

What is left behind is the ideal breeding ground for wars amongst the people as the effects of climate change and resource shortages within shattered infrastructures force everyone to take sides and engage in localised wars with no end. These, rather than wars against the people have already become the dominant form of conflict, undermining the integrity of the nation state as the premier structure of governance.