The new book Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? from Stackpole is by the best-selling novelist Ralph Peters. In addition to being a best-selling novelist Ralph Peters is one of the most controversial American military thinkers of our time. He recently broke off a successful career as an Army officer so that he could write and speak freely. Profoundly influential, his provocative analysis is the result of firsthand experience in more than forty countries around the globe and in assignments that took him from an infantry battalion to the Executive Office of the President. He campaigns for military and policy reform in a wide range of media outlets and lectures internationally on cultures in conflict and the future of war. Stackpole in their announcement of Fighting for the Future say: 'Around the world, American soldiers, American interests, and American citizens face violent men who do not play by the time-honoured rules of warfare. These new enemies are warlords, terrorists, charismatic demagogues, international criminals – and the militaries of rogue states. Driven by hatred, greed, and rage, the weapons they use range from knives and bombs to computers and weapons of mass destruction. They fight in urban landscapes and information jungles – not on the neatly contained battlefields of yesterday.' Quoting from the book: Intercultural struggles, with their unbridled savagery, are the great nightmare of the next century. If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred. We are constrained by a past century's model of what armies do, what police do, and what governments legally can do. Our opponents have none of this baggage. Terrorists remain heroes for men and women who prefer a lush myth of the past to the sober demands of the future. We send our military into a broken country to 'lend credibility' to our diplomatic efforts. But the moment the local warriors realise that our military will not be employed as such or will not be used to full effectiveness, the credibility is gone. The U.S. military, otherwise magnificently capable, is an extremely inefficient tool for combat in urban environments. The citizenry of the United States, in fact, will tolerate the killing of enormous numbers of foreigners, so long as that killing does not take too long, victory is clear-cut, friendly casualties are comparatively low, and the enemy dead do not have names, faces, and families. Nationalism and fundamentalism are not separate problems. They are essentially identical ... nationalism is simply secular fundamentalism. So much of the progress imagined for the postcolonial era has come to nothing. All that remains to failing actions and cultures is the ceaseless assault of things foreign, dazzling, and humiliatingly unattainable. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 92 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com