New Model Army

= "an interesting discussion of a democratic army and poses the argument that p2p warfare makes the option of the use of force open to a sub-set of people who could not use it before". (Tom Rawlings, email June 2010)

Book: "New Model Army" by Adam Roberts

Description

From the publisher:

"Adam Roberts' new novel is a terrifying vision of a near future war - a civil war that tears the UK apart as new technologies allow the worlds first truly democratic army to take on the British army and wrest control from the powers that be. Taking advances in modern communication and the new eagerness for power from the bottom upwards Adam Roberts has produced a novel that is at once an exciting war novel and a philosophical examination of war and democracy. It shows one of the UKs most exciting and innovative literary voices working at the height of his powers and investing SF with literary significance that is its due." (http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-model-army-by-adam-roberts-reviewed.html)

Reviews

1. Liviu Suciu:

""New Model Army" is partly near-future mil-sf novel, partly abstract didactic talk about love, war, faith, democracy and while the action part is very good to excellent at least to start with, the didactic part is way too simplistic, generic and with "cookie cutter" pronouncements that can come straight out of a graduate seminar or a maudlin bar discussion to be of much interest beyond its showcasing the author's erudition.

ANALYSIS: Before proceeding to show how a NMA acts, "New Model Army" opens with a sort of introduction about democracy as practiced by the Athenians and about how current technology may enable a return to such, rather than the "pseudo-democracy" we are used to, all of this of course in the opinion of the narrator.

So from the start we have the dichotomy between the two main aspects of the novel:

the show part - NMA's as a new kind of sentient organisms, each composed by some thousands of smaller sentient cells (ie people) that make war because it's fun, the new kids on the block that smash things as they experiment; while a staple of sf as group mind, this particular instance of it is excellent and combined with the superb style of the author makes the show part of the novel an A+

the tell part - witty and full of great references but very didactic dialogue about "true" democracy, love, faith and war between Anthony - who among other things happens to be gay and with parental and authority issues - and his "interrogator", a Baptist fundamentalist US officer; the dialogue contains the expected barbs and it occupies too much of the slim novel; the tell part is a C for wit and references otherwise it would have been an F." (http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-model-army-by-adam-roberts-reviewed.html)

2. Tomas Rawlings:

"I’ve just finished reading an interesting book called ‘New Model Army‘ (NMA) – for those not into their British history, there is a play on words, as the New Model Army were also the name given to the radical reorganisation of the Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War of 1642-1651. It’s an apt title for a novel that also explores a radical reorganisation of armed struggle.

New Model Army novel cover

The novel imagines that in the near future a new force will emerge – the NMAs – these are peer-organised armies that are essentially mercinary forces – but ones organised an a ridically different line to the current hierarcical method of military structure.

An NMA is:

• Composed of volunteers – they they are paid for service; thus it is not organised on national lines, but an ad-hoc construction.

• Constructed of those who volunteer at the time they are needed, thus the composition changes from battle to battle.

• Disband as soon as the action is over.

• The whole NMA is paid from contracts to supply an army (in the novel Scotland is at war with England but as the smaller Scotland has no standing army it hires an NMA to fight in it’s stead.

• The NMAs funds are then used to pay volunteers for service, pay medical costs if wounded and soldiers can claim equipment costs from the pool of funds.

• There are no officers – all the troops are equal and a combination of secure wikis and VOP systems are used for organisation – linked to an eBay-like reputation system. This goes for all levels of organisation from the smaller ad-hoc squads, coordinating the squad-level actions and to the totality of NMA policy.

• The NMA also makes cash by taking prisoners and ransoming them back to the mother army from whom they were captured.

It’s a radical vision that is at once democratic almost socialist and yet a pure market-driven army that takes the privatisation of war to it’s seemingly logical ends of supply and demand. In the novel the narrating character states this is the first truly democratic army – one solider=one vote (I should point out that Anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War were run on democratic lines with elected officers and the like) and he often talks of conventional armies with derision referring to them as akin to bonded slaves, and thus less motivated than the NMA because even if they are fighting for a democracy, the men and women of the NMA are fighting in a democracy. However the narrator is both haunted and confronted by the less-then-democratic way that the NMAs own conflicts impact on civilian populations (as does conventional warfare)." (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-model-for-p2p-warfare/2010/07/30)