Politics & Power Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling’s line lands like a deadpan prophecy: when the civilian systems we pretend are in charge buckle, the institution built for coercion becomes the default repair crew. The “of course” is doing the real work here. It’s not outrage; it’s the shrug of someone who’s watched enough crises to know that failure gets routinized, then rebranded as inevitability.

The intent is less to praise the military than to indict everyone else. Politics and business are supposed to manage risk, build resilience, and distribute resources before catastrophe hits. Sterling suggests they reliably won’t, because their incentives point elsewhere: election cycles, quarterly returns, plausible deniability. When floods, fires, and disease outbreaks arrive as recurring features rather than “acts of God,” the only apparatus with logistics, manpower, and a chain of command ready to move at scale is the one designed for war.

The subtext has an edge: militaries don’t just respond; they define the terms of response. “Called in” implies invitation, but it also hints at dependence and creeping normalization. Disaster becomes a security problem, citizens become populations to be managed, and humanitarian aid starts to look like occupation-lite. In the “developing world,” Sterling points at a grim asymmetry: weaker civilian institutions mean the armed forces are often the only functioning national organization, so climate shocks accelerate a drift toward militarized governance.

Contextually, this is classic Sterling: cyberpunk’s patron saint of systems thinking, translating climate collapse into political reality. The line reads now like a memo from the near future, warning that if we don’t build competent civilian capacity, we’ll keep outsourcing survival to the people with guns.