message 0554

• On Cherryh's 'Inside Outer Space' article (topic: the implications of space travel for civilizations, esp. regarding warfare)

>Date: Mon, 20 Sep 93 18:45:01 -0400
>From: "Nancy Silberstein" <silbersteinn@a1.mscf.upenn.edu>
>Subject: Cherryhlist/CJC on Warfare III

INSIDE OUTER SPACE, "Goodbye Star Wars, Hello Alley-Opp," pp. 24 - 25.

(F)or cause of war, (there is) always the act of a lunatic, a pirate, a 
dissenter, or an entity with motives arising from nonhuman biology and 
culture.  And that might entail one of the most difficult of decisions - to 
determine whether the isolated ship attack that took out New Chicago was 
the act of a lunatic, a prankster, a criminal, or the calculated policy of 
a nonhuman government which might differ in...motive from anything ever 
encountered.

Military strategy depends on certain assumptions, one of the most basic of 
which is that we are fighting others who respond to the same stimuli and 
react predictably.  Consider all these possibilities:

A feint might bring all-out attack.

NOT to make a feint might cause the potential enemy to consider us an easy 
mark and might bring all-out attack.

To accept the damage might put us at moral advantage with the alien 
authorities.

The attack must be returned in exact measure as given to induce respect.

The attack must be returned a hundredfold because we will not get another 
chance.

The enemy has no allies and does not understand negotiation at all.

The enemy is a primitive member of a vast alliance embracing fifteen 
hundred star systems and employing technology far in advance of ours.

The aliens are retaliating in a measured way for damage accidentally 
inflicted by the contact team.  They do not treat individual death as 
important, basing their own selfhood on the social unit, and they do not 
comprehend the extent to which humanity resents the loss of New Chicago.

The aliens have no social unit.  Reproducing by fission, they are 
absolutely solitary and were brought into space by imprudent traders.  Now 
they commit totally random actions, each according to its peculiar mindset. 
 Only that very distant trader-species can deal with them....

Interspecies war might be the most expensive of all, and very possibly 
without sensible or understandable issues.  In such a war, humankind might 
never know why it had been fought, or even, at the conclusion, which side 
had won.

(Final installment!)