"A strategic necessity is anything which, if seized by an enemy under a plausible scenario, could cause you to lose a war you would otherwise win."
Ulhas wrote:
"How does the US preserve its dominance? By being at war all the time? Do strategic necessities exist only during wartime?"
I'm hardly the one to go to for definitive answers on these kinds of matters, but I've come to hold the belief nation-states are, in fact, constantly in state of a war. Clausewitz came up with the famous dictum "War is politics by other means," and Michel Foucault reversed it to sy "Politics is war by other means." Nation-states, by their nature, seek to forever expand, encroach, jockey for power, consume, and dominate. It seems to be hardwired into their authoritarian structures.
I have a soft spot for Foucault. In _Society Must Be Defended_ he elaborated:
"War obviously presided over the birth of States: right, peace, and laws were born in the blood and mud of battles. This does not, however, mean that society, the law, and the State are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order.
"To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone's adversary."
=)
b