act, to change our ideas, well, then, there’s
a good chance we’ll end up like Gorbachev in the photo that hangs in my house — alone, deep in the wilderness, staring at
the footsteps that led us here and finally knowing the answer to that haunting question:
what is it like to lose an empire?
C HAPTER F IVE
Budweiser
1. The Killing Box
In the fall of 2002, at a military fair in the southern Chinese port city of Zhuhai, you could find for sale, near the stands
that were selling miniature plastic helicopter toys and harmless general-aviation seats, a small box that promised, for the
cost of tens of thousands of dollars, to undo many billions of dollars of weapons development and about forty years of military
history. If you saw the box for sale there, stared at the little collection of transistors and transmitters inside, and you
didn’t know any better, you might simply have figured that it was the mild and friendly dream invention of one of China’s
eager new entrepreneurs, produced with the same clever enthusiasm as a mobile phone or plastic car parts. You would have been
mistaken.
The Zhuhai military show was not a must-attend stop for the heavyweights of international arms dealing. Though China was a
rising power, the country was mostly known for its cheap AK-47s, which probably killed more people in conflicts around the
world every year than any other weapon — with the exception of off-years like 1995, when the AK’s nearest low-cost competitor,
the machete, killed nearly a million people in Rwanda. In any event, China wasn’t generally known for peddling particularly
impressive weaponry. The Chinese military had a doctrine of developing what they called “assassins’ maces” — computer viruses,
antisatellite weapons, microsubmarines — which would use high tech to knock out bigger powers (read: the United States) that
might one day attack China. But those packages were certainly not for sale. Among other things, the assassins’ maces were
likely packed full of technology that had been lifted from the United States, France, Russia, and other countries, in violation
of nearly every national-security export law on the books in those nations. The Chinese, whose country had been invaded by
nine different nations between 1839 and 1949, were noticeably, sensibly reticent about sharing much of their way of war. That,
in a way, was what made the innocuous little box on sale at the Zhuhai fair so unusual.
Before we can understand the importance of what the box contained and what it means for us in a sandpile world, we need to
understand something about modern warfare — or at least the kind of modern warfare that has been fought by the United States
and its allies since World War II. From the earliest African battles of that war to the most recent skirmishes in Iraq, America
has held as a matter of nearly religious doctrine the idea that war demands control not only of the ground but of the air.
This idea was once seen as so absurd that it cost its leading advocate, a forward-thinking army general named Billy Mitchell,
his job in the Army Air Service after he suggested in 1919 that airplanes were the future of war (and, in 1925, predicted
an eventual Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). But by the end of World War II, this apostasy had become dogma: the United States
was pumping out more than 100,000 warplanes a year and had crystallized a killing doctrine in which the airplane was indispensable.
The idea lived on into the Cold War and beyond through ideas like the Pentagon’s AirLand Battle doctrine, in which nearly
a million men and billions of dollars’ worth of machinery were designed (who knew if it would work?) to produce a harmonious
concert of airplanes, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The U.S. military would no more go to war without air superiority
than you or I would drive a car without the windshield.
Future military historians
a good chance we’ll end up like Gorbachev in the photo that hangs in my house — alone, deep in the wilderness, staring at
the footsteps that led us here and finally knowing the answer to that haunting question:
what is it like to lose an empire?
C HAPTER F IVE
Budweiser
1. The Killing Box
In the fall of 2002, at a military fair in the southern Chinese port city of Zhuhai, you could find for sale, near the stands
that were selling miniature plastic helicopter toys and harmless general-aviation seats, a small box that promised, for the
cost of tens of thousands of dollars, to undo many billions of dollars of weapons development and about forty years of military
history. If you saw the box for sale there, stared at the little collection of transistors and transmitters inside, and you
didn’t know any better, you might simply have figured that it was the mild and friendly dream invention of one of China’s
eager new entrepreneurs, produced with the same clever enthusiasm as a mobile phone or plastic car parts. You would have been
mistaken.
The Zhuhai military show was not a must-attend stop for the heavyweights of international arms dealing. Though China was a
rising power, the country was mostly known for its cheap AK-47s, which probably killed more people in conflicts around the
world every year than any other weapon — with the exception of off-years like 1995, when the AK’s nearest low-cost competitor,
the machete, killed nearly a million people in Rwanda. In any event, China wasn’t generally known for peddling particularly
impressive weaponry. The Chinese military had a doctrine of developing what they called “assassins’ maces” — computer viruses,
antisatellite weapons, microsubmarines — which would use high tech to knock out bigger powers (read: the United States) that
might one day attack China. But those packages were certainly not for sale. Among other things, the assassins’ maces were
likely packed full of technology that had been lifted from the United States, France, Russia, and other countries, in violation
of nearly every national-security export law on the books in those nations. The Chinese, whose country had been invaded by
nine different nations between 1839 and 1949, were noticeably, sensibly reticent about sharing much of their way of war. That,
in a way, was what made the innocuous little box on sale at the Zhuhai fair so unusual.
Before we can understand the importance of what the box contained and what it means for us in a sandpile world, we need to
understand something about modern warfare — or at least the kind of modern warfare that has been fought by the United States
and its allies since World War II. From the earliest African battles of that war to the most recent skirmishes in Iraq, America
has held as a matter of nearly religious doctrine the idea that war demands control not only of the ground but of the air.
This idea was once seen as so absurd that it cost its leading advocate, a forward-thinking army general named Billy Mitchell,
his job in the Army Air Service after he suggested in 1919 that airplanes were the future of war (and, in 1925, predicted
an eventual Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). But by the end of World War II, this apostasy had become dogma: the United States
was pumping out more than 100,000 warplanes a year and had crystallized a killing doctrine in which the airplane was indispensable.
The idea lived on into the Cold War and beyond through ideas like the Pentagon’s AirLand Battle doctrine, in which nearly
a million men and billions of dollars’ worth of machinery were designed (who knew if it would work?) to produce a harmonious
concert of airplanes, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The U.S. military would no more go to war without air superiority
than you or I would drive a car without the windshield.
Future military historians
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