As imperialist rivalry, now aggravated by economic crisis, keeps intensifying, potential bloodbaths far deadlier than Iraq or Afghanistan are emerging globally. Andrew Krepinevich, a Defense Department strategist has just written “7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century.” (Krepinevich is no armchair pundit; see box at right for his résumé.)

Publicity for the book identifies as plausible cataclysms: “(1) the unraveling of the state of Pakistan; (2) a nuclear attack on the United States with materials covertly transported across borders; (3) a pandemic influenza sweeping across the globe; (4) escalation of an Arab-Israeli conflict toward a nuclear showdown; (5) a U.S. standoff with China over Taiwan; (6) the crippling of an increasingly fragile global economy; and (7) a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq gone bad.” Any one could cause massive loss of life and provoke an all-out U.S.-led war.

(An influenza pandemic scenario has produced bosses’ plans to use cops and the military to prevent any movement of large segments of populations to go to their jobs, in or out of the country or anywhere else without permission. A future CHALLENGE article will detail this fascist scenario.)

Though things can change rapidly, the first and last cases seem the most immediate. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is already inflamed by the Taliban and a military bent on war with nuclear-armed India. But additionally, Foreign Policy Magazine, an arm of the liberal Washington Post (March/April 2009), says: “Pakistan’s small but politically powerful middle class has been slammed by the collapse of the country’s stock market. Meanwhile, a rising proportion of the country’s huge population of young men is staring unemployment in the face. It is not a recipe for political stability.”

Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?

The murderous efforts of 147,000 regular U.S. troops and an equal number of allies and mercenaries in Iraq can’t stop frequent bombings. On March 8, a suicide attack killed 28 people at Iraq’s police academy, and 33 more the next day. Obama’s proposed shift of U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan can only embolden Islamic militants in Iraq. GIs may be back in Baghdad sooner than expected.

Scenarios Four and Five, standard Pentagon doctrine for years, take on enhanced urgency in the current economy. The U.S. counter-threat to Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel over Palestine dates back to the Clinton administration. Checking the growth of a Chinese blue-water navy that can dominate Mid-East/Far East oil-supply routes was one reason President Jimmy Carter began his Persian Gulf Rapid Deployment Force. The latest financial crash only increases U.S. rulers’ needs to forcibly control the world’s cheapest — and thus most profitable — fuel supplies.

Item Six concerns a more belligerent Russia. Oil at $140 per barrel enabled Putin to buy off his population with jobs and other material incentives. Now he must resort to whipping up the warlike empire-rebuilding spirit that brought him to power a decade ago. As Foreign Policy (March-April, 2009) says, “He stirred dormant nostalgia for the lost Soviet empire....” Now Putin faces “an imploding economy, expanding economic hardship, and an increasingly desperate Russian state that must rely on repression and nationalism.”

Rulers Preparing for Two Simultaneous Wars

Krepinevich’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) says the Navy must “prepare to fight and win two overlapping conflicts” against a continental-sized adversary [China or Russia] and a mid-sized nuclear-armed regional adversary [Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, or India]. It urges the Navy both to cut costs and to fire all its bullets before they rust. “Exploit ships now in production to greatest extent possible. Reduce total number of different ship types. Reduce crew sizes.” (CSBA website). CSBA reports underlie an ongoing series of New York Times editorials on restructuring the military.

Workers Need to Take the Offensive

Two scenarios are missing here. One is the kind of mass anti-war organizing in the Vietnam era (led most militantly by our Party) that has made restoring the draft politically unacceptable. The CSBA considers conscription an “extreme measure” even in a deepening depression with sharpening challenges to the U.S. rulers’ empire.

But the rulers sorely need to beef up their forces. They’re not giving up on an expanded military. That’s why they’re organizing a “back-door” draft — Obama’s National Service, with pumped-up patriotism and loyalty (to the bosses) to induce millions of youth to join the military in exchange for college tuition or, for undocumented immigrant youth, U.S. citizenship.

This leads to the most important scenario of all, the need to fight for communist revolution. Because of the demise of the old communist movement rulers worldwide have been able to channel workers’ anger down dead-end nationalist, ethnic and religious paths.

That’s why communists and other militant workers need to up the ante of class struggle against the profit-driven ruling class, hell-bent on imperialist wars. We must mount an offensive on racist unemployment (see front page), win soldiers and sailors to join their brothers and sisters in other countries to rebel against the common enemy: the capitalist warmakers. We must organize strikes against the rulers’ attacks on workers’ living standards, against their wars and their attempt to implement fascist measures in the workplace.

In all this, we must unite the working class — black, Latino, Asian and white, men and women — against the rulers’ crises that worsen workers’ misery exponentially. All this will move us towards our Party’s long-term goal, rebuilding revolutionary class consciousness to prepare our class for communist revolution.

CEO For Murder, Inc.

Andrew Krepinevich has a 20-year career as an Army officer, teaching at West Point and serving in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and Quadrennial Review, the Pentagon’s top long-range planning bodies. He participated in Clinton’s 1997 force review that set the stage for U.S.-led mass murder in Serbia and Iraq. Today Krepinevich runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an outfit studying which hardware and troop configurations can give the U.S. war machine its “biggest bang for the buck” in coming wars.