The introduction to this book says: "War itself has become virtual. The hypothesis of "The Gulf War will not Take Place" is that the deterrence of war in the traditional sense has been internalised and turned back upon the Western powers, producing a form of self-deterrence which renders them incapable of realising their own power in the form of relations of force...the deterrence of the real by the virtual"
..."just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same one in which capital moves. This does not mean that it is unreal in the sense of not having real effects, anymore than a capital crisis is unreal because it takes place in the electronic and informational space of digitalised and networked financial markets. Rather it means that state-of-the-art military power is now virtual in the sense that it is deployed in an abstract, electronic informational space, and in the sense that its primary mechanism is no longer the use of force. Virtual war is therefore not simply the image of imaginary representation of real war, but a qualitatively different kind of war, the effects of which include the suppression of war in the old sense."
[Kept thinking of a parallel proposition in terms of ordinary communications versus virtual communication. I don't think there would be so many expletives between souls if a genuine physical encounter took place (for obvious reasons). ...but then 'virtual expletives' could replace 'virtual war' one day...maybe]