Written for both a broad popular audience and for serious intellectuals, Gray's account of postmodern war is animated by a vision of a possible peace. Postmodern war, emerging from the cauldron of World War II, is based on critical mutations in scale, compression of events, expanded battle space, and above all on cyborg weapons systems. Gray richly details the emergence of myriad human-machine weapons systems as they change the face of war and the stakes for peace.
Alert to paradoxes, Gray shows postmodern war to be a perverse and critical species of progress inextricably linked to globalized technoscience, computers, and information. Gray is attentive to the sensuous pleasures and fierce beauty, and above all to the profound insanity of war and weapons. He asks how war works and what continues to make it possible. The question at the heart of Postmodern War is simple: How did contemporary war, with its obscene proliferating cyborg artifacts and practices, come about? What is different about postmodern war, and how can that difference ground sustained work for peace? Postmodern War is ambitious, large, sometimes rambling, but always compelling in its telling and horrific detail and passionate hope. Postmodern War is written against denial and for the possibility of truly changing the rules of engagement in our war-ready and war-saturated time.
