*Milspeak .pdf ahoy:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/09summer/phillips.pdf
"The Westphalian state system will crumble, and the world will slip into a New Dark Age presaged by fragmented political authority, overlapping jurisdictions, fluid territorial boundaries, group marginalization, divided loyalties, no-go areas, and contested property rights."
(((Or maybe not. Because, as this article ingeniously argues, the Westphalian system never existed in the first place. It was mostly American theorists making up "the Westphalian system" because the idea of international law made Americans feel better. The real world was always about bandits, terrorists, anarchists, mercenaries, and naked exercises of cynical power, and if we could get our heads around that, we wouldn't have to sweat a New Dark Age because we wouldn't be able to tell it from common reality.)))
(((The author here also argues that global guerrillas are mostly the tools of state actors, and just not that big a deal compared to organized states. Okay, maybe. But if that's true, then why wasn't the Iraqi "mission accomplished" as soon as the Iraqi state was overthrown? Everybody thought so at the time, right? Remember all that cheering and triumphalism? The state collapsed, and there was no need to fret much about any diehard scattered gangs and remnants.)))
(((Join the diehard scattered gangs and remnants, put 'em on a sound financial footing, and you can forget there ever was a world order. Guys in the Dark Age did it by declaring darkness the standard.)))
