The Ninth Battalion of Hot Chicks

Bruce Sterling calls Caitlin Moran a "British Pop Music Critic as International Military Strategist". I'd just call her brilliant:

This is unfortunate because, had the Americans read the report, they would have noted two vital findings. The first is that while the same old countries — Iran, China, North Korea, France probably, haha — want to have a pop at the US, America has to accept that we are now in a “nonpolar” world and must redefine its strategies to cope with “nonstate actors” — your Hezbollahs and al-Qaedas. These are defined as forces that are “strong enough to resist an American agenda but too weak to shape an internationally attractive alternative”.

Of course, by those criteria, America’s newest enemies are not merely Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. They would also include atheists, pedestrians, socialists, European film directors who make films with unhappy endings, drizzly weather and Courtney Love — but not, interestingly, vegetarians, who have been pretty strong in “shaping internationally attractive alternatives”, what with the Quorn burger and McDon-ald’s Toasted Deli Grill Veggie Melt.

The IISS’s second conclusion was that, in the “complex battlefield” of the 21st century, America needs to concentrate more on psychological warfare. Of course, those who have read Jon Ronson’s excellent The Men Who Stare At Goats will know that the US has already been, albeit in a low-key and mad way, experimenting with psychological warfare. The conclusion of its 20-year-long experiments resulted in the playing of heavy rock music, including Guns’n’Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle , within earshot of the former Panamanian President Manuel Nori-ega when he was holed up the Vatican Embassy in 1989. As many will have subsequently noticed, this particular tactic of psychological warfare did remarkably little in ending the siege, but oddly coincided with the high-water mark in Guns’n’Roses’ career — possibly marking out the thin red line between state-sponsored psychological combat and a very effective marketing campaign.

However, once an entity loses the ability to use Guns’n’Roses as a weapon, it’s understandable why the ensuing period would be one of intense confusion, bordering on panic, with no obvious alternative taking its place. US psychological warfare is at an all-time low at the moment. Luckily, however, I do have a few suggestions for future activity:

1)Stage a massive army-recruitment drive among the table-staff of Hollywood, and assemble a battalion of actresses/models/ whatevers. When invading a city, send in the Ninth Battalion of Hot Chicks first, dressed in skin-tight catsuits. Get them to enter the city with a series of excitable screams and yelps, while doing leaps, rolls and cartwheels down the high street — like Catherine Zeta-Jones’s training scene in Entrapment but, obviously, without Sean Connery sitting on a chair and watching. A man may well be devout enough to shoot old men in the head, but I’m pretty sure he would at least pause for a few vital seconds before shooting at an Angelina Jolie lookalike doing the splits in mid-air. And while he’s pausing, some giant Marine can shoot him.