"Many of the diplomatic techniques on which we rely are archaic," Kennedy's US Ambassador to India J.K.Galbraith wrote in his 1969 essay “The American Ambassador”. After 35 years this remains so, engendering budgets that favor soldiers over diplomats. The identification of peace pursuits with ancient, non-technological skills is reinforced by anti-technological philosophies

associating advanced technology with war and such undesirable effects as environmental despoliation. This bias underpins the concept of the military-industrial complex and the undervaluation of links between peaceful

socio-economic structures and technological development (see economic historian John U. Nef's 1950 study “War and Human Progress”).

In a high-technology world, then, the Peace Corps operates anomalously in a climate in which peace is seen in terms of war and of a history of ideas

associating advanced technology with war. However, far from advanced technology being a military preserve, Admiral Owens, the former Vice

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, believes the US military is dangerously underserved in advanced technologies (which for practical purposes means

information technologies). And not only the military but government generally. This view is given added credence by the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has arisen expressly because of intelligence-processing agency failures, due partly to internal politics but significantly to inadequate technology. Clearly, high technology is not just the business of war. It is very much the business of peace: of building information-processing structures for a peaceful, secure, efficient, competitive America able to maintain global leadership, effectively export a peace that is not only an absence of war but a positive global model of economic growth, and share information infrastructure and knowledge with other nations. In this context a rebudgeted Peace Corps with state-of-the-art technologies is a peace-exporting instrument of incalculably great advantage to US interests.

A NATIONAL STRATEGIC ASSET WHOSE VALUE REMAINS LARGELY UNTAPPED.

In discussion for this article Owens told me: "Technology means the end of the era of the lonely Peace Corps worker cut off from his support base. A Peace Corps volunteer can now be set down in a desert or on a remote plain

without any modern amenity, and have with him or her a compact computer or array of computers, powered by solar cells, making available to local

residents a library of hundreds of volumes under Corps supervision. Via satellite, Corps officers and their beneficiaries can connect virtually

constantly with Washington and a Corps telecommunity worldwide." Unknowingly echoing President Carter's words, he added: "The technology is available now." For Peace Corps personnel used to missions in areas without electricity, let alone resources even distantly approaching those Owens describes, technological empowerment offers an extraordinarily exciting prospect, as is the Peace Corps expansion scenario that this implies. But does the political will exist to mobilize a Corps using the most sophisticated technology available to share America's skills, values and knowledge with other nations via electronic access to US libraries, teachers and knowledge pools, and staffing consistent with international peace promotion? This question exposes how we define the pursuit of peace.

If we see the pursuit of peace as primarily a function of military and consular actions, it would not be inappropriate to see the Corps as at best a benign but essentially peripheral function whose federal purpose is analogous to that of a marginal public relations outpost of a large corporation. This role matches the Corps' current resources: a fiscus of $319.5 million, 7700 volunteers. The hope is for 11 250 personnel by 2008 "at a rate consistent with funding levels and infrastructure support", Peace Corps Director Gaddi H.Vasquez has stated. But President Bush's 2001 inaugural support of Peace Corps growth has not translated into appropriations. A telling example is a 2004 Peace Corps request for USAID funds for use in poverty-stricken Niger. This request was to assign Corps volunteers to help fledgling democratically elected local governments in Niger to engage their unaccustomed economic and social development responsibilities.

The new mayors and council members have no experience at all in local government. Many are illiterate. They very much want Peace Corps help,

reports Director Bullington. Such a project offers the US an opportunity to implement a conspicuous, innovative expression of American idealism and commitment to promote democracy, accomplishments which have special geopolitical importance in an Islamic country (which Niger is). But the request was declined. The annual amount that could not be found for it: about $200,000. It is thought-provoking to consider this alongside the 2005 profiles of the Department of Defense (2.3 million military personnel; almost 700,000 civilian personnel; discretionary budget authority of $401.7 billion) and State Department (30 266 personnel; discretionary budget authority of $10.3 billion).

In 1996, Peace Corps Director Loret Miller Ruppe reported: "This agency's budget has less in purchasing power than when Sargent (Shriver) left it in the '60s. In 1981 it was listed in the 150 Account under 'miscellaneous' ... Its budget was less than the military marching band." For an agency exporting peace, signaling the US's highest values to the world, and disseminating US

democracy, literacy, health practices and other desired national characteristics, these circumstances are egregious. Much consular,

ambassadorial and attachй work is not proactive peace promotion in the same sense that Peace Corps work is. It is, indeed, unfair to expect conventional diplomats to provide the services that idealistically motivated Corps volunteers are uniquely positioned to supply. Budgets should reflect this fact, and the growing significance to US interests of the Corps' mission.

Director Ruppe said in 1996: "The Peace Corps is needed now more than ever. It is our nation's greatest peace-building machine." She asked: "Is peace simply the absence of war? Or is it the absence of the conditions that bring on war, the conditions of hunger, disease, poverty, illiteracy and despair?" It would be unrealistic to expect the Corps to solve such problems. But it is surely among the most effective tools available to export the values, motivations and knowledge without which they cannot be solved. The power of example and passionately impelled personal instruction by idealistic young

civilians can scarcely be equaled as a global communication medium for the US. These are the assets the Corps offers America in its urgent quest for foreign remediation. They are potent for any policy that is seriously predicated on President Bush's second inaugural address. "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom, " the President said, adding: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." This exporting-freedom doctrine continued President Reagan's