by Praveen Swami
Doklam, like other recent stand-offs in Depsang or Demchok, is not about a road: It is is a message about China’s ire at India building alliances with its adversaries in Asia, and with the US. Beijing seeks, through the threat of force, to instruct India on how countries ought to conduct themselves.
Europe’s wars of the future, the Spanish general Manuel Fernández Silvestre y Patinga wrote in 1910, “will be concluded in one day’s hard fighting”. He had observed the Japan-Russia war, where armies fighting with new technologies like rapid-fire field guns and repeating small arms had become locked in entrenched, positional warfare. For him, like most contemporaries, the Japanese victory showed élan would overcome the machine: “The officers quit shelter with ringing shouts of Banzai,” wrote an enthused French observer, “wildly echoed by all the rank and file”.
The general, the millions sent to their death in the First World War showed, had learned the wrong lesson: In fact, Russia had been brought to its knees by economic crisis and political revolution. Even at the battle of Mukden, the collapsing Russians inflicted 70,000 casualties while losing 20,000 to the attacking Japanese.
Banker and part-time war theorist Jan Bloch, in an 1898 book, had predicted just this: “The future of war”, he wrote, “is not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organisation”.
