We have not seen a repeat of the Sinai battles of 1973 for various reasons—growing common regional interests between Israel and Egypt, satellite surveillance, the absence of an Arab nuclear patron to provide backup should an Egyptian gambit fail. But prominent among them is the cost of any such engagement, and the difficulty of finding an industrial big brother willing and able to budget billions for such efforts. Take away Iranian money, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas might have no missiles at their disposal.
In some cases, one belligerent may have the resources to offer a challenge to decisive battle, but it’s unlikely that an enemy could be found with a similar hope to win through a head-on confrontation. Again, the frontline Arab states have for more than thirty years given up such a dream, as has Iran in its various aggressions against U.S. allies in Iraq and Lebanon.
The current ascendant anthropological notion in the West that war may well be unnatural, preventable, and the result of rational grievances—that can, with proper training and education, be eliminated or at least curtailed—perhaps has also made battle less tenable among the general public. To the millions of teachers, social workers, academics, medical professionals, and politicians in the West who are invested in such laudable notions, battle is seen as retrograde, a Neanderthal rejection of the entire promise of higher education itself. And so a sizable population of influential professionals in Europe and the United States actively opposes military action of any sort—and especially the prospect of a traditional slugfest in which repellently high casualties on one side would be inevitable. Such makers of public and often government opinion may likewise have played an indirect role in temporarily discouraging even the semblance of major conventional military confrontations.
The bombing of fleeing Iraqi bandit brigades from Kuwait on the so-called Highway of Death in the first Gulf War (1991) was halted by popular outrage because of the televised carnage. The argument that such enemies who had just committed pillage and rapine in Kuwait should be punished or preempted, given that they were likely to regroup back in Iraq to slaughter Kurdish and Shiite innocents, could hardly trump the Western abhorrence at the images of death on millions of television screens. Russia’s shelling and destruction of Grozny escaped world condemnation only because a news blackout ensured Westerners would see little of mass death—and nuclear, oil-rich, and unpredictable strongman Vladimir Putin would have cared little if they had.
To suggest that Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel, or Syria and Israel, when the next Middle East war breaks out, be allowed to fight each other until one side wins and the other loses, and thus the source of their conflict be adjudicated by the verdict of the battlefield, is now seen not only as passé but also as amoral altogether. Who would wish a no-holds-barred showdown? And would not the loser simply try to reconstitute his forces for a second round?
We should remember that both victory and clear-cut defeat often put an end to a power’s struggles in a way armistices and time-outs do not. Nazis, Fascists, and most Baathists have presently disappeared from the governments of the world. Military defeat ended not only their power but also discredited their ideologies to the extent that they have not resurfaced in any real strength in Germany, Italy, or Iraq.
A decisive end to war does not necessarily mean greater violence and human losses than what totalitarian governments are capable of in times of peace. Far more perished during Stalin’s collectivization, the Holocaust, and the murdering and starvation brought about by Mao’s various revolutions—mass genocides outside of formal military engagements—than in all the decisive battles of the twentieth century, which suggests that, at least in Hitler’s case, they should have been stopped through force before they were allowed to kill millions more.
Again, modern scientific pacifism that tries to “prove” that bloody war is unnatural and has no utility in solving conflicts also tends to discourage the reappearance of decisive battle by inculcating such ideas among influential elements of the population. We certainly have no more Homers who sing of the aristeia of battling heroes, or Tennysons eager to write of another gloriously foolhardy charge by the Light Brigade. To read of gargantuan clashes of arms, replete with nobility in pursuit of exalted aims, is today to read fantasy—Tolkien’s grand battle between orcs and men before the gates of Gondor.
Finally, globalization, through instant cell-phoning and text-messaging, use of the Internet, access to DVDs and satellite television, has created a world culture that depends on uninterrupted communications. It expects convenient airline flights, international banking, and easy access to imported consumer goods. The result is not quite a new worldwide pacifism or exalted humanity—one need only examine the membership of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to see that there is no such thing as an evolving transnational morality outside the West.
Instead, electronic togetherness hinges on our shared appetites—and a growing communal comfort factor. After it invaded Georgia, Russia’s oil buyers became upset. As did its own aristocratic grandees, who saw international capital flee Moscow.
European states worry about oil shortages should the U.S. bomb Iran; China worries about its vital American export market should it invade Taiwan. We need not assume that “soft power” and the potential loss of easy twenty-first-century consumerism will always prevent set battles. After all, in the past, such a belief that global interreliance would prevent ruinous battle was clearly erroneous. Norman Angells’s The Great Illusion (1909) argued that pre–First World War Europe simply had achieved too great an interdependence of financial credit, economic integration, and prosperity to throw it away on nihilistic warmaking. The Somme, Passchendale, and Verdun shortly followed.
Yet in a world in which an American can call his brother in the morning in Kenya, check his European 401(k) stocks over coffee, watch Japanese wrestling in the afternoon, and chat with Chinese Facebook friends in the evening, it is more difficult for a particular nation to marshal conventional forces, systematically seek out the enemy, encounter a like rival with similar hopes of success, and unleash a terrible fury of munitions—all under the instantaneous gaze of six billion. In the future, economic and cultural globalization increasingly may emulate old Roman imperium, becoming a superstructure that turns Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans into a one-world province.
We are not yet facing the “end of history,” with a final and total elimination of decisive set battles—and a united and harmonious world agreeing on the general protocols of globalized capitalism and consensual government. Armed struggles that at times result in horrific collisions of forces are as old as civilization itself, and a collective reflection of the constant and unchanging deep-seated elements in the human psyche. Tribalism, affinity for like kind, desire for honor, reckless exuberance—these expressions of our reptilian brains stay embedded within peoples.
The Return of Battle?
FOR THE FORESEEABLE future, we will remain in an age without decisive battle, in which bloody war is unlikely to be played out with swarms of Abrams tanks, rows of artillery pieces, a storm of F-22s and B-1s overhead, and hundreds of thousands of infantry soldiers advancing to mass carnage against a like-minded enemy. Yet will big battles haunt us once more?
Should the European Union dissolve and return to a twentieth-century landscape of rival proud nations, should the former Soviet republics form a collective resistance to an aggrandizing Russia similar to that in the nineteenth century, should the North Koreans, Pakistanis, or Chinese choose to gamble on an agenda of sudden aggression in the belief that a political objective could be obtained at a tolerable cost, then we may well see a return of decisive battles.
New Waterloos or Verduns may revisit us, especially if constant military innovation reduces the cost of war or relegates battle to the domain of massed waves of robotics and drones, or sees a sudden technological shift back to the defensive that would nullify the tyranny of present-day horrifically lethal munitions. New te
chnology may make all sorts of deadly arms as accessible as iPods and more lethal than M-16s, while creating uniforms impervious to small-arms fire—and therefore making battle itself cheap, unpredictable, and thus once more to be tried.
Scenarios for battle’s return are endless. Should a few reckless states feel that nuclear war in an age of antiballistic missiles might be winnable, or that the consequences of mass death might be offset in perpetuity in a glorious collective paradise—an apocalyptic vision that sometimes seems almost welcome in theocratic Iran—and therefore worth risk of a launching of ballistic missiles, then even the once unimaginable nuclear showdown becomes imaginable.
When the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modernist return of a Cannae or a Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before. In the words of Matthew Arnold,
We are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggles and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
* This essay was written in spring 2009, and a version appeared in a fall 2009 issue of City Journal.
CHAPTER 9
“Men Make a City, Not Walls
or Ships Empty of Men”
When high-tech is not always so high*
Cycles of Military Innovation
IF THE PRINCIPLES of war stay the same across the centuries, one reason that we of the present age sometimes doubt such continuity is the recent radical change in military technology, especially given the twenty-first-century advances in informational science and its applications. We forget sometimes that transformation in arms has always been a hallmark of warfare, even if not as radical as what we have witnessed in the past half century. As a rule, militaries usually begin wars confident in their existing weapons and technology. But if they are to finish them successfully, it is often only by radically changing designs or finding entirely new ones. The Union military started the Civil War with muskets and cannonballs but ended it using bullet-firing repeating rifles and explosive artillery charges that were superior to those employed by the Confederacy. Ironclads, observation balloons, rubberized ponchos, canned meats, and elaborate telegraphic communications were birthed during the war—many of these inventions enriching peacetime America for decades.
In 1940 the five-year-old, continually improved B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was considered an indestructible aerial behemoth, the most radically innovative warplane in the history of aviation. By the end of 1945 even its huge replacement, the recently introduced B-29 Superfortress, was facing near obsolescence in the new era of rocket-armed jet fighters. Germany invaded Poland with armored columns spearheaded by Panzer Mark III tanks equipped with a 37mm gun. But by war’s end even beefed-up high-velocity 75mm and 76mm tank guns were overshadowed by 88mm cannon—and finally by even larger 122mm models.
During the five-year course of the Second World War, sonar, radar, ballistic missiles, and atomic bombs evolved from speculation to battlefield-proven, deadly reality. We entered the Vietnam War with the Second World War and Korean-era “dumb” bombs, and ended it with laser-guided aerial and antitank munitions.
Things have not been much different in the recent Iraq war. In March 2003 the United States attacked Saddam’s Iraq, confident in our superior Abrams tanks, GPS- and laser-guided aerial munitions, and fast-moving mechanized columns powered by Humvees and Bradley armored vehicles. Seven years later the U.S. military’s prewar land arsenal has been radically altered in reaction to Iraqi terrorists and insurgents.
As in all our prior wars, two kindred developments occurred. First, what was once considered adequate quickly proved ineffective. In a new war without identifiable fronts, light-skinned, troop-carrying Humvees were soon shredded by ever-larger roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Subsequent up-armored kits, with expensive electronic jamming devices, resulted in only marginally safer vehicles. The military then rushed in even more heavily armored Humvees. It was soon sending over Stryker and mine resistant, ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles, which use new defensive mechanisms such as deflector shields to thwart land mines—even as new Iranian-made shaped charges, with liquefying copper heads, show an ability to penetrate these vehicles.
Second, entirely new weapons systems appeared. We had experimented with drones for much of the 1990s, though they were never considered critical components of the military’s battlefield arsenal. But in Iraq—with its vast expanses, clear skies, open borders, nocturnal terrorists, and constant enemy mining of thousands of miles of roads—Predator and Predator B aerial drones, along with a variety of other pilotless airborne surveillance craft, suddenly became vital to monitor and kill once inaccessible terrorists.
The sheer excellence of large conventional American weapons systems—planes, ships, tanks—means few enemies now challenge them directly. Instead, the rope-a-dope insurgent tactic is to kill individuals in urban environments, often in an asymmetrical equation of investing many terrorist lives and little money to take out just a few Americans and millions of dollars of their supporting infrastructure. A ten-dollar IED might blow up a five-hundred-thousand-dollar robot, in the same fashion that a lone suicide bomber might blow up both himself and an affluent American who has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in his training, equipment, and education. So far American planners have not figured out a means of producing cheaper weapons that allow fewer casualties on the ground. In the present we are substituting money for lives, our enemies in contrast using lives in lieu of money.
General weapons parity—in rockets, small arms, body armor, computers, weapons manuals, and tactics—is easily obtained by private purchase from mail-order weapons outlets, just as instructions for making bombs and mines are freely downloaded off the Internet. The lethality of off-the-shelf modern weapons is enhanced in the protective landscape of urban warfare. An insurgent’s three-thousand-dollar Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG-7) need not match the sophistication of a superior model employed by a U.S. Marine to take down a twenty-million-dollar Apache helicopter hovering over an Iraqi apartment building—thereby allowing each dollar of jihadist military hardware to nullify $6,660 of American investment.
For now, this disturbing challenge from the Iraq War has no answer: In a globalized world of instant communications and easy commerce, how do we prevent ever-increasing enemies from acquiring sophisticated-enough weapons and tactical manuals at little cost to nullify our far larger investments quickly and cheaply? Western businesses—as they compete with manufacturers abroad that have lower costs, far fewer regulations, and far less concern about the morality and ecology of how they operate—may think they are immune from this existential military lesson. But the Iraq War also shows us why and how—with parasitic technologies, without care for international law, and with little regard for human life—our rivals are making weapons off the battlefield far more quickly and cheaply than we can respond to them.
So the question remains: Is there something about twenty-first-century military technology, both its lethality and its mass dissemination, that has altered the face of war altogether, that has posed challenges of a nature and an extent unseen before in the history of arms?
The Revolution in Military Affairs—and Its Discontents
IN RECENT YEARS, the phrase “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has come to be applied to the vast changes that computerized intelligence and globalization have brought to the conduct of war. This catchy sobriquet, however, is only a new name for something very old. In fact, radical transformations in military practice have marked Western history at least since Sparta and Athens squared off in the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C, and the Greek world soon saw strange new flamethrowers belching compressed gases and ever more sophisticated use of stone ramparts.
Such RMAs are also the focus of recent books by two of our most accomplished commentators on military affairs: Frederick
W. Kagan in Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy and Max Boot in War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today. I should note at the outset that both of these scholars are wise enough not to be taken in by the notion that today’s technological breakthroughs in satellite communications, computers, and miniaturization have altered the nature of war itself rather than merely the present face of battle, much less that they can by themselves win wars outright. Both also share a keen interest in the contemporary “war against terrorism”—and in their articles (Kagan) and columns (Boot) have responded in similar ways to America’s purportedly erratic progress in the Iraq War.
Early and vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq, Kagan and Boot each became harshly critical of our postwar efforts at counterterrorism; each, furthermore, has at various times called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking generals in Baghdad. Such zeal is periodic in Boot’s work, more overt and constant in Kagan’s, but it informs their shared concern over a Pentagon leadership that has supposedly put too much reliance on high-tech weaponry and organizational principles borrowed from business, and thereby contributed to the growing fragility of America’s current position of military superiority.
Kagan’s book, more contemporary in its frame of reference than Boot’s, centers on three revolutions in the American military since the Vietnam War: the rise of the volunteer army with its high-tech equipment and weaponry, the appearance in the 1980s of precision-guided munitions, and the adoption of information technology. To Kagan’s mind, these are often welcome developments, and yet their consequences in policy have gone hand in hand with a decidedly unwelcome failure of American military and strategic thinking.
The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern Page 12