The end of traditional warfare.

Question: How will this age be remembered?

David Kennedy: Well how this age will be remembered. That’s an impossible question to answer from this perspective. It may be remembered as the age in which traditional warfare ended, if by that we mean the amassing of large forces and their application in the field against adversaries with comparably large forces. That age of industrial warfare, the concept around which we’ve configured our armed forces forever.

We may be seeing the end of that era. It’s possible we may be at the beginning of the end of the carbon era in terms of the world’s energy supplies. We may be seeing as the beginning of an era of ever more exponentially increasing international interaction; I hesitate to say “cooperation”. That’s not quite a word I’m ready to embrace yet as a prediction, but interaction and interdependence on one another.

Again, that image that is so powerful that’s one that has been available only in our generation or our time of satellite photographs, or photographs taken from orbiting spacecraft of the planet. And you sense its singularity and its . . . its smallness in the great cosmos. And what that represents to us about the dawning consciousness that we are one species on this planet. And we do have a common fate, and we very well better find ways to make that a reality.

July 4, 2007