New Model Armies

Since Cromwell forged an army ran under professional lines, not as a gentleman's club, a national army has been an expensive instrument of the state. Indeed the needs of the military were the main drivers for mass production of goods.

Today, with consumer society driving production, the military no longer have the buying power. Now the US Air Force buy Playstations and links them together to make an ad hoc supercomputer; snipers use trajectory programs on their iPhones and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are using theirs to run translation software. Maybe this is the "military consumer" complex. Look at this toy and how indistinguishable it is from a UAV scout drone.

The military consumer superstar is the AK-47; in many troubled areas, this is easier to get hold of than a stapler. It isn't accurate - but it is simple, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to clean and maintain. These are largely consumer benefits, not so much military ones.

When soldiers had only face to face communication, discipline was important - today mobile phones have removed the need for rigid command hieracrhy. Indeed a small unit can switch from civilian to paramilitary and back simply by reading text message orders, picking up hidden arms, hitting their targets and then returning their arms to the cache and clocking back in to their day jobs. All of this without meeting the person giving the orders.

In the same way that a terrorist cell can easily form around a minimum amount of expertise, now a security service can morph into a small armed unit without much fuss. This reality is usually masked by terminology to avoid embarrassing questions. Look at the term "policing". While we understand the police to be a strictly civil an public entity, "policing" seems to be done by private military entities in the Middle East. And "military advisor" also seems to be an underhand term used to explain similar things.

Is the US planning to fight more future wars through private proxies? Blackwater (now Xe) looks very much like a private army supermarket, and has gained notoriety because its actions were obscured behind the name "security service". Companies like Sandline International have been providing similar mercenary services for sometime, though without so many headlines.

Most national armies are best at ceremonial duties, and are less good at fighting where most wars are actually fought. As the price per soldier reduces, it will be much easier to hire men in one country, train them in another and deploy them in a third - perhaps in a similar way to city states in the middle ages. Hezbollah is a current example. Arguably, faith defined armies are more efficient than state defined one. Notice how the makeup of "Taliban" alters depending on time and location, to take advantage of local content.

To look good on the world stage, governments will continue to trade away useless nuclear cold war relics, back peaceful defence pacts, and use their armies to help in natural disasters, while buying and deploying off the shelf military services in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This used to be a game for superpowers only, but now anyone can play.