The following essay was written before the events of September 11. No attempt has been made to alter its contents in light of those events.

Nothing is great, writes Seneca, "which is not at the same time calm." In contrast to warriors, gladiators, he goes on to say, "are protected by skill but left defenseless by anger."

We should pay attention to Seneca, because the American statesmen of the future will need to control their emotions-for there will be much to be angry about. States and other groups that refuse to play by our rules will constantly be committing outrages. After all, the terrorism that will arise from increased economic disparities, combined with social and cultural dislocation, will enjoy unprecedented access to technological resources. Overreaction to terrorist outrages will exact a terrible price, as technology allows us to more easily reach, and be reached by, the Middle East than ever was the case between the Middle East and Europe for all the centuries gone before. Every diplomatic move will also be a military one, as the artificial separation between civilian and military command structures that has been a feature of contemporary democracies continues to dissolve. We are reverting to the "unified" leaderships that characterized the ancient and early-modern worlds, reflecting what Socrates and Machiavelli recognized as a basic truth of all political systems: whatever the labels those systems claim for themselves, war and diplomacy are two facets of the same process.

The split between civilian and military commands emerged only in the 19th century with the professionalization of modern European armies. In part because the Cold War went on for so long, it created a military establishment too vast and well informed to retreat to the margins of policymaking. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is now a veritable member of the president's cabinet. The regional U.S. commanders-in-chief in the Middle East, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas are the modern-day equals of Roman proconsuls, with budgets twice those of the Cold War era, even as State Department and other civilian foreign policy budgets have dwindled.

The commingling of military and civilian high-technology systems, which increasingly puts the military at the mercy of civilian experts and vice versa, will magnify this trend. The short, limited wars, special forces operations and rescue missions with which we shall be engaged will go unsanctioned by Congress and the citizenry; so, too, will pre-emptive strikes against the computer networks of our adversaries and other defense-related measures that in many instances will be kept secret from the public. Collaboration between the Pentagon and corporate America is necessary, and will grow. Short of a response to the occasional outrage perpetrated against us, going to war will be less and less a democratic decision.

In an age when it took weeks to mobilize and transport armored divisions across the seas, it was possible for American presidents to consult the people and Congress about doing so. In the future, when combat brigades can be inserted anywhere in the world in 96 hours (and entire divisions in 120 hours), and with the majority of our military actions consisting of lightning air and computer strikes, the decision to use force will be made autocratically by small groups of civilians and general officers, the differences between them fading as time goes on. Already, the difference in knowledge between generals, the most prominent of whom operate almost as politicians, and civilian specialists, who function in effect as military officers, is often insignificant.

Even if international law should continue to grow in significance through trade organizations and human rights tribunals, it will play less of a role in the conduct of war because war will increasingly be unconventional and undeclared, and fought as often within states as between them. The concept of "international law" promulgated by Hugo Grotius in 17th-century Holland, in which all sovereign states are treated as equal and war is justified only in defense of sovereignty, is fundamentally utopian. The boundaries between peace and war are often unclear, and international agreements are kept only if the power and self-interests of the parties are there to sustain them. In the future, wartime justice will not depend on international law; as in ancient times, justice will depend upon the moral fiber of military commanders themselves, whose roles will often be indistinguishable from those of civilian leaders.

The terrorist nature of future outrages, the collapse of the distinction between military and civilian decision-making, the truncation of democratic deliberation over the use of force, and the vitiation of the laws of war, taken together, promises to make future war more like ancient war than anything Americans and Europeans have witnessed for many centuries. More specifically, the ancientness of future wars has three dimensions: the character of the enemy, the methods used to contain and destroy him, and the identity of those beating the war drums.

National security analyst Colonel Ralph Peters has written that American soldiers "are brilliantly prepared to defeat other soldiers. Unfortunately", he goes on, "the enemies we are likely to face . . . will not be 'soldiers'", with the discipline and professionalism which that word implies in the West, but "'warriors'-erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order."

There have always been warriors who, as Homer wrote in The Iliad, "call up the wild joy of war", but the collapse of Cold War empires and the disorder it has engendered-along with the advance of technology and poor-quality urbanization-has provoked the breakdown of families and the renewal of cults and blood ties. The latter includes both a more militant Islam and Hinduism. The result is the rise of new warrior classes as cruel as ever, and better-armed. This phenomenon embraces armies of murderous teenagers in West Africa; Russian and Albanian mafiosi; Latin American drug kingpins; West Bank suicide bombers; and associates of Osama bin Laden who communicate by e-mail. Like Achilles and the ancient Greeks harassing Troy, the thrill of violence substitutes for the joys of domesticity and feasting. Achilles exclaims,

You talk of food?
I have no taste for food-what I really crave
is slaughter and blood and the choking groans
of men!

Today's warriors come often enough from the hundreds of millions of unemployed young males in the developing world, angered by the income disparities that accompany globalization. Globalization is Darwinian. It means the economic survival of the fittest-those groups and individuals who are disciplined, dynamic and ingenious will float to the top, while cultures that do not compete well technologically will produce an inordinate number of warriors. I have seen firsthand the creation of warriors at Islamic schools in Pakistani slums: The children of those shantytowns had no moral or patriotic identity except that which their religious instructors gave them. An age of chemical and biological weapons is perfectly suited for religious martyrdom.

Warriors also include ex-convicts, ethnic and national "patriots", shadowy arms and drug entrepreneurs awash in cynicism, and failed military men-cashiered officers of formerly communist and Third World armies. The wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus in the 1990s featured all of these types reborn as war criminals. Whether in Russia, Iraq or Serbia, nationalism in our age is, Peters notes, simply a secular form of fundamentalism. Both religious and secular fundamentalisms arise from a sense of collective grievance and historical failure, real or imaginary, and preach a lost golden age. Both dehumanize their adversaries and equate mercy with weakness. Thus, while there are enormous differences between, say, a Radovan Karadzic and an Osama bin Laden, neither plays by our rules; both are warriors.

Hitler exemplified the warrior leader, a prototypical skinhead with a moustache who wrested control of an advanced industrial state. Anyone who assumes that rational economic incentives determine world politics should read Mein Kampf. None of the warriors we have seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall has presented a comparable strategic threat in part because none has had control over a state like Germany. But that could change: the further development and profusion of smaller, low-tech nuclear devices and of chemical and biological weapons will transform obscure "freedom fighters" into strategic menaces. While the average engagement during the Civil War featured 26,000 men per square mile of battle front, the figure is now 240; it will dwindle further as war becomes increasingly unconventional and less dependent on manpower. Moreover, an economy of scale is no longer necessary to produce weapons of mass destruction, nor can the United States sustain its monopoly over new military technologies, many of which are not expensive and can be acquired by present and future adversaries through free trade.

We may, of course, face military conflicts not only with warrior groups, but with great powers such as China. But rather than deploy its soldiers against ours, so as to play by our rules, an adversary may prefer to use computer viruses against us, or unleash its warrior-allies from the Middle East, supplied with its military technology, even while it denies any connection with such stateless terrorists. Russia, too, could make strategic use of terrorists and international criminals in order to fight an undeclared war. Precisely because the United States is militarily superior to any group or nation, we should expect to be attacked at our weakest points, beyond the boundaries of international law.

Effective responses to the outrages of these warriors are inconceivable without the element of surprise, making democratic consultation an afterthought. After all, war is subject to democratic control only when it is a condition distinctly separate from peace. In Cold War confrontations such as Korea and Vietnam popular opinion played a major role, but a protracted state of quasi-conflict marked by commando raids and electronic strikes on enemy computer systems-in which the swiftness of our reaction is the key variable-will not be guided by public opinion to the same extent. Such conflict will feature warriors on one side, motivated by grievance and rapine, and an aristocracy of statesmen, military officers and technocrats on the other, motivated, one hopes, by ancient virtue.
Vigilance demands that we remember the Trojans of Homer's Iliad. They were the envy of the world: urbane and civilized, surrounded by magnificent buildings and farmlands, wanting only to be left alone, and believing that their wealth and success could always buy a solution. Yet they were besieged by piratical chieftains from across the water who were driven to war by the Greek gods-gods who, with their intrigues and temper tantrums, are timeless reflections of human irrationality. "Three thousand years have not changed the human condition", observes the classicist Bernard Knox, "we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence." And writing in 1939, as her native France was about to be overrun by Nazis, the philosopher and resistance activist Simone Weil celebrated The Iliad as the "purest mirror" of our collective experience; it showed, she wrote, how "force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history."
While the United States is a peaceful, commercial republic that has usually tried to avoid war, its leaders should still be able to appreciate Homer's description of the defenders of Troy, awaiting their dawn attack on the Greeks:

And so their spirits soared
as they took positions down the passage
ways of battle
all night long, and the watchfires blazed
among them.
Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky
glittering
round the moon's brilliance blaze in all
their glory . . .

In one respect, at least, ancient war was more civilized than is war in our age. The aim of ancient war was generally to kill or capture the opposing chief and display him in a cage. Because of the primitive state of technology, the only way to get to the opposing leader and his inner circle was to cut through the mass of his people and army, necessitating bloody battles and great cruelty. Since the Enlightenment, however, Western leaders have exempted themselves from retribution and have sought to punish each other indirectly: by destroying each other's armies and-since Grant and Sherman-by making the civilian populations suffer as well. But is it really more honorable to kill thousands by high-altitude bombing than by the sword and axe? In Kosovo, NATO air attacks were far more effective against civilian targets than military ones. Yet, impending precision-guidance technologies-in which bullets can be directed to specific targets like warheads-will make strikes on the offending chief quite practical. In the future, satellites may track the movements of specific individuals through their neurobiological signatures the way that cat scans do now from a few inches away. We will reinvent ancient war; it will soon be possible to kill or capture the individual perpetrators of great cruelties rather than harm their subject populations, which in many cases are also their victims.

Would it have been more humane to assassinate Milosevic and his inner circle rather than bomb Serbia for ten weeks? In the future, such assassinations will be possible. Because many of our future enemies may not inhabit a country as technologically developed as Serbia, there may be no suitable targets like electrical and water-treatment plants to bomb. The only target may be the offending chief or warrior himself. In Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden hides out, attacking his "infrastructure" means destroying only a few burlap tents, cell phones and computers, all of which are immediately replaceable. Because future war will feature precision attacks on command posts, hitting those computer nerve centers will often mean killing the political leadership. Either the law against assassinations that sprang from our Vietnam experience will be scrapped, or it will be sidestepped.

Whether or not future wars are bloodless, there will be an undeniable ancientness to the way in which we conduct them. Kosovo, from our point of view, was a bloodless war, but thousands of civilians (mostly Kosovar Albanians) died so that there would be no NATO casualties. But had a dozen NATO planes been shot down, President Clinton might have been forced to call off the war. Our appetite for war is similar to that of the Romans, whose professional and salaried legions had no desire to fight warriors eager for glorious death. Thus, whenever they could, the Romans avoided open field engagements in favor of expensive and systematic sieges in which their own casualties were minimized. The Romans were also protected beneath cumbersome helmets, breastplates, shoulder guards, and foot greaves, even though this reduced their agility. We are not the first great empire to despise casualties.

"If military action is cost-free", Michael Ignatieff asks, "what democratic restraints will remain on the resort to force?" It is only the specter of casualties that engages the public, sparking a debate that has democratic significance because it reaches beyond the media and intellectual communities. When I was in New Mexico and Colorado at the start of the Kosovo air war, televisions everywhere were tuned to entertainment, especially game shows, not to CNN's continuous war coverage. The United States could bomb any place in the world for weeks, I thought, and the public might not object, or even be interested, provided there were no American casualties or adverse effects on the stock market.

Left to themselves, most leaders in the post-Cold War West would avoid all non-strategic interventions with the risks that they carry, if not for the media and intellectual communities. Because the elite media is dominated by cosmopolitans who inhabit the wider world beyond the nation-state, it has a tendency to emphasize universal moral principles over national self-interest. "Most newsmen", says Walter Cronkite, "feel very little allegiance to the established order. I think they are inclined to side with humanity rather than with authority and institutions." In the hands of the media, the language of human rights-the highest level of altruism-can become a powerful weapon that can lead us into wars that perhaps we should not fight.

When the media finds a cause it can rally around, it can both shape and replace public opinion, as it did in Bosnia and Kosovo, when the media was overwhelmingly interventionist while the public, as the polls showed, remained unenthusiastic. The media and intellectual communities are professional castes no less distinguishable than those of military officers, doctors, insurance agents and so on-and no more representative of the American population. As with other professional groups, they are often more influenced by each other than by those outside their social network. Faced with an indifferent public, this quasi-aristocracy may shape the views of Western leaders much as the ancient nobles did of their emperors. And the media's arguments will be difficult to resist. Human rights arguments advanced by the media at their most extreme have a distinctly inquisitional air about them.

Television correspondents at the scene of catastrophes, like the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982 and starvation in Somalia a decade later, manifest an impassioned tunnel vision in which sheer emotion replaces analysis: Nothing matters to them except the horrendous spectacle before their eyes-about which something must be done! The media embodies classical liberal values, which concern themselves with individuals and their well-being, whereas foreign policy is often concerned with the relationships between states and other large groups. Thus, the media is more likely to be militaristic when individual rights and suffering are concerned, rather than when a state's vital interests are threatened.

Of course, there may be times when the undisciplined emotions of correspondents and human rights activists are exactly what political leaders need to hear, as in Sarajevo in 1992 and 1993. Statesmanship is about distinguishing between what is just and what is merely sanctimonious, or impractical. "The side that knows when to fight and when not to will take the victory", says Sun-Tzu. "There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted." Indeed, the increasing tendency toward urban warfare-Tuzla, Mogadishu, Karachi, Panama City, Beirut, Gaza and so on-as well as interventions in anarchic territories such as Somalia and Sierra Leone may compel a ruthlessness on our part that the very people demanding intervention cannot bear. As the Athenian general Nicias said, warning in 415 B.C.E. against intervention in Sicily:

We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him.

As with the Americans in Vietnam, the Athenians had been lured into Sicily by their allies. Fearing the domino effect of growing Syracusan power, the Athenians came to believe that the conquest of far-off Sicily was crucial to the maintenance of their empire. Prosperity had made the Athenians arrogant about their chances of success, and too idealistic about their cause. Because they underestimated the great effort and the brutality that would be required to prevail, the expedition ended in tragedy.

Prudence dictates that we approach casualty-free war as a myth, despite technological advances such as bullets that incapacitate without injuring. War is uncertainty, characterized by friction, chance and disorder, as Clausewitz says. According to Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, American forces will have to operate in a range of settings, "from deserts to foliage, to densely populated urban areas with embedded antagonists"-environments not conducive to technological dominance. Laser and electro-optically guided munitions will not track targets through heavy tree cover, and will not preclude civilian casualties in cities. Even when they work well, computer-operated sensors and listening devices may swamp military organizations with undigestible data. As more information accumulates, the difference between information and real knowledge could widen. Robert McNamara's predictive universe, with its quantitative measurements and game theory assumptions, led us deeper into the mire of Vietnam. Exclusive reliance on technology, at once naive and arrogant, takes little account of local history, traditions, terrain and other factors that are essential for making wise judgments.

Luckily for the Clinton Administration, the sophisticated, modern Serbs of Belgrade were not North Vietnamese; they were ready to give up after American bombs disrupted their water supplies and electrical system. Perhaps we in the West would also admit defeat if an enemy stopped our running water, our phones and our electricity. But we should not expect warriors with very few material possessions at risk to be so fragile. Bullets that do not kill and sonic waves that immobilize a crowd by causing a sensation of nausea and diarrhea may facilitate an individual commando operation, but warriors will interpret such an aversion to violence as weakness, emboldening their cause. Therefore, writes Air Force Colonel Charles Dunlap, Jr., "Future war may become more savage, not less so. An adversary waging neo-absolutist war could resort to a variety of horrific actions . . . of a low-tech variety to offset and divert high-tech U.S. forces." The enemy will take hostages and place critical supplies susceptible to precision bombing beneath schools and hospitals. For such adversaries, our moral values-our fear of collateral damage-represent our worst vulnerabilities. The most sincere and heartbreaking truth of the ancients is the vast gulf that separates political-military virtue from individual moral perfection. It is such a truth that may help define the 21st century, as we are forced to choose in the midst of high-tech war between what is right and what is unfortunately necessary.

Another problem will be the unwitting collusion between the global media and our enemies. Many defense analysts envision massive, "vertically integrated" media conglomerates with their own surveillance satellites. One firm, Aerobureau (of McLean, Virginia) can already deploy a flying newsroom: an aircraft equipped with multiple satellite video, audio and data links, gyro-stabilized cameras, and the ability to operate camera-equipped vehicles on earth by remote control. Colonel Dunlap asks, "What need will there be for our future enemies to spend money building extensive intelligence capabilities? The media will become the 'poor man's intelligence service.'"

The media is no longer simply the fourth estate, without which the other three branches of government could not operate honestly and effectively. Because of technology and the consolidation of news organizations-similar to the consolidation of airline and automobile alliances-the media is becoming a world power in its own right. The power of the media is wilful and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome. Indeed, the media's moral perfectionism is possible only because it is politically unaccountable.

When America became an independent nation, the press was meant to keep government honest. Alerting the public to humanitarian problems overseas is germane to that role; directing policy is not, particularly if officials are forced to operate at a lower level of altruism than the media. A statesman's primary responsibility is to his country, while the media thinks in universal terms. Emotional coverage of Somalia by a world media foreshadowed an American intervention that, because it was ill defined, led to the worst disaster for U.S. troops since Vietnam-a disaster that then helped influence policymakers against intervention in Rwanda. In a world of constant crises, policymakers must be selective about where and when they believe it worthwhile to get engulfed in the Clausewitzian "uncertainty" of conflict-something that the power of the media makes ever more difficult.

Just as future wars will, in many ways, be ancient, so will the nature of military alliances and the reasons we go to war in the first place. As in the Peloponnesian War, a world of shifting alliances will once again demonstrate the language of power balancing.

The notion of "just war", advanced by Grotius, echoed St. Augustine and the medieval theologians, who sought to define circumstances under which Christendom could rightfully give battle. Grotius' "just war" presupposed the existence of a Leviathan-a supreme authority in the person of the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor-to enforce a moral code. But in a world without a universal arbiter of justice, discussions of war as "just" or "unjust" carry little meaning beyond the intellectual and legal circles in which such discussions take place. States and other entities-whether the United States or the Tamil Tigers-will go to war when they decide that it is in their interests (strategic, moral, or both) and will, consequently, be unconcerned if others view their aggression as unjust. According to polls, more than 90 percent of voting-age Greeks-citizens of a NATO democracy-thought the air campaign against Serbia was "unjust." But we ignored the Greek public's interpretation of "just war" and did what we felt was right and necessary. The Greek public was using what it thought was a moral argument to justify a national interest: The Serbs were fellow Orthodox Christians and historic allies of the Greeks. However, that is what all nations do in wartime: it isn't only the Greeks.

Ho Chi Minh's Communist government killed at least 10,000 of its own civilians prior to the entry of American troops into Vietnam. Did this make U.S. intervention in Vietnam just? Perhaps, but it was still a mistake. The Mexican War was probably unjust-motivated as it was by sheer territorial aggression. But it was a war well worth fighting: The United States acquired Texas and the entire Southwest, including California.

In the 21st century, as in the 19th, we will initiate hostilities-whether in the form of Special Forces operations or computer viruses directed at enemy command centers-whenever it is absolutely necessary and we see a clear advantage in doing so, and we will justify it morally after the fact. This is not cynical. The moral basis of U.S. foreign policy will depend upon the character of the nation and its leaders, not upon the absolutes of international law.

Nevertheless, there is a model that explains how states and other groups are likely to approach war in the future. It is an age-old model based on an ancient code of honor (as explained in an unpublished essay by Michael Lind). Lind says that in primitive societies, lawless frontier towns and the world of organized crime, injustice has always been redressed by the injured themselves, or by their powerful protectors; thus, the safety of the weak rests upon the willingness of their protectors to wield power. Indeed, feudal relationships between stronger and weaker states have marked world politics since time immemorial. Even today, civilian economic powers like Germany and Japan and niche states like oil-rich Kuwait and trading tiger Singapore have specific functions in a quasi-feudal Western world order, in which the United States provides military security.

In places where the rule of law does prevail, one is expected to suffer insults without resort to violence. But in a lawless society, a willingness to suffer insults indicates weakness that, in turn, may invite attack. A world without a Leviathan is somewhat similar: An alliance leader must play the role of barbarian chieftain. In theory, international law governs world politics; in practice, relations between great powers are regulated by a sort of Code Duello. Lind notes that "Khrushchev's conception of 'peaceful coexistence' and Third World competition, and the establishment of a Hot Line, were designed to ritualize the struggle for power, not to end it." Such conventions, he continues, "might be compared to the elaborate rules surrounding the aristocratic duel." Such a code may not be Judeo-Christian, yet it is moral just the same. For even in a lawless realm, too extreme a response-killing large numbers of civilians in Beirut for the sake of protecting its northern border, as Israel did in 1982-may be perceived as wanton violence, and thus lack legitimacy. In any age, a reputation for power must be balanced by one for mercy. A barbarian chieftain may occasionally have to defend immoral clients (like U.S. support for some dictators during the Cold War), but if he does so too often to the exclusion of all else, his chieftaincy may lose respect and consequently be toppled. A future in which rival chiefs risk assassination as never before-with surprise attacks on computer command posts-is one perfectly suited for a Code Duello.

Systems in which two great powers confront each other in a ritualized struggle-as in the Cold War-tend to be more stable than the present one, in which there are many secondary powers, yet the primary power is still not a Leviathan. In pre-20th-century Europe, when one state became too powerful, others often came together to balance it. But there is also the opposite tendency: for weak states to appease a rising power, as when many Third World states aligned themselves with the Soviet Union at the height of its strength in the 1960s and the 1970s. That is happening now, as the ex-communist and developing worlds seek to emulate America's model of democratic capitalism. But we should never forget that such a positive development rests upon our power as a chieftain. Romania and Bulgaria copied fascism when Nazi Germany was ascendant. Now that America is triumphant, they copy our democracy. If we are weak militarily-if we are not able to meet the rising challenge of warriors-our political values may be eclipsed worldwide.

Bernard Knox writes that according to the early Greeks, the past and present, because they are visible, are "in front of us", while the future, "invisible, is behind us . . . ." The future of warfare is already behind us, in ancient times.