LLOYD
GOODLEIGH, Guest ColumnistTHE JAMAICAN Minister of National Security announced towards the end of last year that the role and structure of the Jamaican Defence Force (JDF) was being reviewed. This exercise is being undertaken in order to meet the security challenges currently faced by Jamaica; and is being done with British, Canadian and American assistance.
This exercise is critical to Jamaica's national interest and should have been undertaken from 1994 at the end of the Cold War and with the increasing pace of globalisation and the emergence of a new set of challenges.
With the end of the Cold War, many individuals had assumed that the pre-eminent place that the military establishments of the United States and Russia enjoyed in their respective countries would have been significantly eroded.
Numerous commentators were convinced that there would have been a peace dividend, a transfer of resources from military to civilian use. Neither of these developments has materialised. They have not done so because those assumptions were made by individuals who did not grasp the level of technological sophistication attained by the military; the degree of vertical and horizontal linkages to the scientific, industrial, social and political communities in their respective societies.
REDEFINING MISSIONS
With the end of the Cold War, these military establishments are busy redefining their missions and roles in order to ensure their continued pre-eminence.
The American military establishment, through the Pentagon, has been the first to make an announcement it intends to become a global policeman. This development should not come as a surprise to the informed.
To understand why, one must first substitute Fort Leavenworth for the Pentagon. It is at Fort Leavenworth that future United States military doctrine is written. It is where the U.S. army prepares its commanders to fight the next war. Its Foreign Military Office conducts in-depth analysis of foreign adversaries. It is a military think tank. If you are anyone in the army, you have been to Fort Leavenworth, 90 per cent of the captains, 50 per cent of the majors and all of the senior staff officers have passed through its doors.
What is the background against which Fort Leavenworth must articulate a new role for the military and a strategy to protect and project American national interest. Basically, it is that we live in a post-modern world in which there are certain assumptions.
The primary one being, that ideologies are dead and therefore any assumptions about a perfect world and utopian societies is far-fetched.
It, therefore, has to be accepted that some parts of the world and mankind cannot be salvaged. The industrial revolution created jobs.
The computer revolution and the post-modern world threaten to destroy more jobs than they create, it has unleashed unbridled capitalism and has promoted low wages, long hours, and exploited workers.
This development is spawning growing economic inequity. Economic inequity between nations and between groups in nations.
One-sixth of the world's population live in abject poverty and the world is increasingly plagued by terrorism, drugs, money laundering, environmental degradation and the AIDS pandemic. All these things are occurring whilst there are oases of prosperity within nations and among nations, surrounded by deserts of want and deprivation.
To put it starkly, the U.S. and the G7 countries and some cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore are islands of prosperity. Fort Leavenworth's job is to devise a military and foreign policy that convinces those entities that American interest is their interest. The policy must ensure that you also hold at bay the vast majority of mankind and their attendant economic, social, health and political problems.
If you think that my assertion is far-fetched, think of Britain's Tony Blair proposal to place European Union troops at the EU border to keep out non-EU migrants. Global reconstruction is probably what Leavenworth would have said.
My advice to us as a people and as a region is that we had better stay awake. We know that their old adversaries, the Russian military, will be looking closely at the policies of the U.S. military as it seeks to redefine its role. Do not fool ourselves. There are forces within Russia determined to return the military to a position of pre-eminence.
Russia's new military doctrine emphasizes a shift in defence spending from procurement to research and development. It was estimated that in 1997, 40 per cent of Russia's military budget was spent on research; supercomputers, direct energy weapons, electronic warfare, stealth aviation, naval weaponry, enabling Russia to produce weapons that have no equivalent in the world. Basically the Russian are moving away from numerical superiority in divisions, tanks, planes and nuclear power to the three Ts of a modern military establishment technology, training, and tactics.
RE-INVENTING THE MILITARY
It is not only the U.S. and Russia that are reordering their military, Norway, a nation that in the Cold War was almost neutral so neutral in fact that when the Jamaican trade union movement sought a honest broker to settle their political differences, it had chosen the Norwegians now has the second highest per capita spending in NATO.
They are emphasizing technology and special forces. Singapore has a small but well-trained and technologically-driven military; Japan and Germany are seeking to re-access their roles in international military affairs. The new Canadian Prime Minster has ordered a redefining of the Canadian military, with increased budget allocation.
Those military establishments will also be best placed to take advantages of the fact that the computer clip can now pass information directly into the human nervous system, spawning what some regard as the fourth wave of human transformation.
The old barracks refrain old soldiers will never die, they just fade away is wrong. In the post-modern world they re-invent themselves. Minister Phillips and his advisers must not only reinvent the Jamaican military, but must do so in conjunction with our partners in the CARICOM single market.
Lloyd Goodleigh is General Secretary
of the Jamaica Confederation
of Trade Unions (JCTU).
E-mail: jctu@cwjamaica.com
