Story

The Shah Always Falls

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Authors: Fredric Smoler

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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March 2003 | Volume 54, Issue 1

Military historians sometimes write biographies of people they call military intellectuals. Such people are interesting because they can have a vast effect on history, and also because they combine in one career two modes of life normally considered incompatible, the life of thought and the life of action.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters is a military intellectual, and his career makes surprising reading. He enlisted in the Army as a private in 1976 and served in a mechanized infantry division. He was commissioned in 1980 as a second lieutenant in military intelligence and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1998. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in international relations and published eight novels, typing out the first one while still a sergeant stationed in Germany. He also published a remarkable series of essays, many of which first appeared in Parameters, the theoretical journal of the U.S. Army War College. These essays are some of the most radical writing I have ever read on the recent revolution in military affairs. They began appearing at the start of the last decade, they are beautifully written and intellectually exciting, and they have proved startlingly (and sometimes grimly) prescient.

 

This prodigious intellectual and literary output began while he was pursuing a dramatic and varied set of military careers. Some of his assignments informed his novels: Red Army, a cult classic within the Army before the fall of the Soviet Union, describes a successful Soviet breakthrough on NATO’s central front and was inspired by his stint as chief intelligence analyst for the 1st Armored Division, as well as by a job as the chief of the Intelligence Production Section for III Corps. Other books grew out of assignments in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. Some are set in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, in its successor states, and in Central Asia, all places where Peters has spent a great deal of time. These novels share a theme with many of his essays on strategy and international relations - the idea that a world ended between 1989 and 1991. Our new situation is chaotic, its politics were generally unforeseen, it is extremely dangerous, and, in many ways, it is extremely sad. However, the United States faces its new threats with historically unparalleled strengths. Over the course of his career, Peters served in or visited more than 50 countries, on every continent save Antarctica, and the experience has made him a patriot and an optimist.

In 1999, he retired from the Army to write full-time, and soon wrote, beginning with Faded Coat of Blue, a series of highly acclaimed Civil War novels under the pen name Owen Parry. I interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Peters in his house in northern Virginia, surrounded by Russian and German books—he is at least trilingual—and a wonderful collection of contemporary Russian paintings. We spoke about his essays, two volumes of which have been collected and published—Beyond Terror: