I meant to link up to this over the weekend, it is  stark and speaks to conventional wisdom and myth and I held off.

Ralph Peters is a retired US Army officer and he is essentially speaking to military comrades at the Pentegon in this Weekly Standard essay.  I’m going to pull a few sentences that jumped out at me - this is not a ideological editorial blog-post decision, it is about sentences and ideas that jumped out at me. For a man who sees media as enemy also, he is quite the master of the soundbite/quote, and he writes as a man with a mind that is too full.
Peters as warrior-writer-futurist is almost hypergraphic, ( author of 21 books) but how does a warrior seeing the present, looking into future sound his rallying cry without perceiving the enemy in all of us and everywhere? 

Chained to their 20th-century successes, they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities.

 We are seduced by what we can do; our enemies focus on what they must do.

Stubbornly, we continue to fantasize that a wondrous enemy will appear who will fight us on our own terms, as a masked knight might have materialized at a stately tournament in a novel by Sir Walter Scott.

There is, in short, not a single enemy in existence or on the horizon willing to play the victim to the military we continue to build. Faced with men of iron belief wielding bombs built in sheds and basements, our revolution in military affairs appears more an indulgence than an investment. In the end, our enemies will not outfight us.

We refuse to comprehend the suicide bomber’s soul–even though today’s wars are contests of souls, and belief is our enemy’s ultimate order of battle.

Our enemies act on ecstatic revelations from their god. We act on the advice of lawyers. It is astonishing that we have managed to hold the line as well as we have.

And his deed is heralded, while even our most virtuous acts are condemned around the world. Even in the days before mass media, assassins terrorized civilizations. Today, their deeds are amplified by a toxic, breathtakingly irresponsible communications culture that spans the globe.

The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism–and the phenomenon isn’t limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes.

Security-wise, we have placed our faith in things, in bright (and expensive) material objects.

Human beings are hard-wired for faith. Deprived of a god, they seek an alternative creed.

via GetReligion