Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)A most interesting book on two levels.
First, this is an excellent introduction to what the research laboratories working on new weapons technology are doing. Virtually every aspect of combat from the basic infantry grunt to high tech airborne or space based recon is being changed. The technology of the future, not totally clear just yet, will be as dramatically different from today's equipment as today's is from the wire and cloth airplanes of World War I.
Second though is the inescapable fact that these weapons are operated by men (or increasingly by women as well). And men haven't changed that much. We have just about the same mental and physical capabilities, limitations, and problems that men have had all along.
To some extent the society behind the men has changed. In the developed countries the idea that war should actually kill our sons and daughters has become anathema. Wars should be nice and clean with precision bombs wiping out our enemies without casualties, blood and body parts of our own soldiers being thrown about.
What's not mentioned is the fact that these kinds of weapons work only when the enemy has configured themselves in a convenient way that matches our weapons capabilities. These weapons advances will have little effect on an 8-year old walking along a street but carrying a hand grenade. If the battlefield becomes too deadly, then the war will move elsewhere. This is the current state of the war in Iraq.
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Are we afraid of war? Has the advancement of military technology created a mindset of invincibility on the battlefield? In War X, Tim Blackmore argues that the technology of warfare has essentially erased the human body from battlespace. The result is a physical and psychological distance between humanity and bloodshed. As the machinery of war develops, and as advances are made in the biological sciences, war becomes increasingly palatable - attractive, even - resulting in a sanitized murder culture in which war is anticipated and viewed with little anxiety.
Blackmore makes connections between human beings in battle and the very different world of weapons manufacturers, finding between the two a romance of war technology. Using popular science fiction literature and film, personal war narratives, biographies, and military imagery, he explores the human body in war, the ways in which soldiers imagine themselves superhuman - posthuman - protected by the armour of muscles and steel, tanks and helicopters, robotics and remote control.
War X is an explosive introduction to the discussion of modern warfare and a timely consideration of industrial warfare as it is unfolding even now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as it might be in the future, with new weapon development. It is also a deliberation on the startling world of new weapon development, and the indescribable future of war that beckons.
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