Sean McFate
Everywhere around the world, the nature of war is changing, and the West is failing to adapt. Western powers are already losing on the margins to threats like Russia, China, and others that have made the leap forward and grow bolder each year. Eventually someone will test us and win.
The West has forgotten how to win wars because of their own strategic atrophy. Judging by how much money the United States invests in conventional weapons like the F-35, many in our country still believe that future interstate wars will be fought conventionally. But although Russia and China still buy conventional weapons, they use them in unconventional ways. China has armed its fishing fleet in the South China Sea, turning it into a floating militia. Russia gave T-72 tanks, truck-mounted rocket launchers, and howitzers to its mercenaries in Syria. Tellingly, Russia even cut its military budget by a whopping 20 percent in 2017, yet it shows no sign of curbing its global ambitions. Its leaders understand that war has moved beyond lethality.
Conventional war thinking is killing us. From Syria to Acapulco, no one fights that way anymore. The old rules of war are defunct because warfare has changed, and the West has been left behind. War is coming. Conflict’s trip wires are everywhere: black market nukes that can melt cities; Russia taking something it shouldn’t and NATO responding in force; India and Pakistan duking it out over Kashmir; North Korea shelling Seoul; Europe fighting an urban insurgency against Islamic terrorists; the Middle East goes nuclear; or the United States fighting China to prevent it from becoming a rival superpower.
Traditionalists who view war purely as a military clash of wills will be doomed, no matter how big their armed forces, because they do not comprehend war’s political nature, while their enemies do. There are many ways to win, and not all of them require large militaries.
Changing the way we fight means forging new instruments of national power, starting with how we think. The first step is jettisoning what we think we know about war. Our knowledge is obsolete. The second step is understanding the art of war for the coming age, so that we may master it, rather than be mastered by it.
Inthe future, wars will move further into the shadows. In the information age, anonymity is the weapon of choice. Strategic subversion will win wars, not battlefield victory. Conventional military forces will be replaced by masked ones that offer plausible deniability, and non-kinetic weapons, like deception and influence, will prove decisive. Shadow war is attractive to anyone who wants to wage war without consequences, and that’s everyone. That is why it will grow.
Future wars will not begin and end; instead, they will hibernate and smolder. Occasionally, they will explode. This trend is already emerging, as can be seen by the increasing number of “neither war, nor peace” situations and “forever wars” around the world. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 found that never-ending violence is on the rise, despite all the peace efforts around the world. Social science research confirms this, showing that half of all negotiated peace settlements fail within five years. “War termination” is already an oxymoron. Expect this trend to grow.
A new class of world powers, from multinational corporations to super-warlords to billionaires, can now rent private armies.
Mercenaries will once again roam battlefields, breeding war as their profit motive dictates. (I should know — I used to be a private military contractor myself.) International law cannot stop them, while the demand for their services rises each year. Things once thought to be inherently governmental are now available in the marketplace, from special forces teams to attack helicopters. This is one of the most dangerous trends of our time, yet it’s invisible to most observers. That’s by design. Private warfare is the norm in military history, and the last few centuries have been anomalous.
When money can buy firepower, then the super-rich will become a new kind of superpower, and this will change everything. As states retreat, the vacuum of authority has bred a new class of world powers, from multinational corporations to super-warlords to billionaires. Now these powers can rent private armies, so expect wars without states. This trend will grow, fueled by a free market for force that generates war but cannot regulate it. Today’s militaries have forgotten how to fight private wars, leaving us all exposed.
To the conventional warrior, this all looks like disorder and instills panic. The world is burning without a way to put the fire out. But the new warrior sees something different. States are dying as a concept and are being replaced by other actors, who also fight. How they fight is not disorder — it’s the future of war. Rather than panic, let’s master this future.
The good news is that we can win in an age of durable disorder if we understand the new rules. This begins by transforming militaries from conventional forces to post-conventional ones, and by upgrading our strategic education. We should invest in people rather than machines, since cunning triumphs over brute force, and since technology is no longer decisive on the battlefield. We also need a new breed of strategist — I call them war artists — to contend with new forms of conflict, such as private war.
Half of winning is knowing what it looks like, and this requires a grand strategy. In an age of durable disorder, our grand strategy should seek to prevent problems from becoming crises and crises from becoming conflicts. Attempting to reverse disorder is a Sisyphean task because such disorder is the natural condition of world affairs — again, it’s the recent centuries that have been abnormal.
War is going underground, and the West must follow by developing its own version of shadow warfare. Special operations forces should be expanded, since they can fight in these conditions, and the rest of the military needs to become more “special,” too. The West must do a better job at leveraging proxy forces and mercenaries. But the true weapon of choice will be the foreign legion — it maximizes firepower and minimizes risk. It will combine the punch of special operation forces with the staying power of a normal military unit, all without the problems of proxy militias or mercenaries.
In the future, victory will be won and lost in the information space, not on the physical battlefield. It’s absurd that the West has lost information superiority in modern war, given the heaps of talent in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in London. The West’s squeamishness about using strategic subversion only helps its enemies.
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
When General Patton spoke these words 75 years ago, they were true. His troops were about to embark on the greatest amphibious assault in history: D-day. Over the course of the “longest day,” 160,000 Allied troops seized a slab of beachhead in Normandy, France. More than 10,000 of them died that day, and individual acts of valor turned a potential military catastrophe into a triumph. From there, the Allies began the long march to Berlin, ending the Nazi empire.
Patton’s words are no longer true.
Today, bastards do not die for their country; they die for their religion, their ethnic group, their clan, money, or war itself. A few, like Afghans and Somalis, say they fight for their country, but the “country” in question is a metaphor and not a modern state. In fact, were there a functional state in those situations, they would probably fight that, too. Patton, were he alive, would be holding his head in his hands.
Countries need to evolve the way they fight, but can they do it? History teaches us that this transformation is difficult. Billy Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for having the audacity to suggest that the future of war would be dominated by airplanes and aircraft carriers, not by battleships. He predicted Pearl Harbor 16 years before it happened. His superiors laughed as they convicted Mitchell because it was easier than listening to him — only to be caught “by surprise” on December 7, 1941.
If there is anything to learn from military history, it’s this: warfare evolves before fighters do.
Strategic dogma is stubborn because everything about it is existential. If you get it wrong, the nation dies. This is why strategic leaders are leery to experiment with new approaches, and perhaps why the military calls its tactical playbooks “doctrine.” But such devotion also gets people killed. Typically, blood is required — a huge amount of it — before nations change their way of war, and sometimes not even then.
World War I is a good reminder. Strategists on all sides were stuck in their own past glory days: Napoleonic warfare. However, by the time World War I broke out, fighting had moved well beyond that of Napoleon’s day, and millions died pointlessly because leaders had no strategic imagination. Or they just toed the line. Politicians commanded the generals to win, and they in turn ordered waves of soldiers to assault fortified trenches, only to see them slaughtered by machine guns. Still, this didn’t stop the generals from doing the same thing the next morning. During the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered 60,000 casualties in a single day. That’s more than all the Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The Battle of the Somme was a meat grinder, stealing 1.2 million lives and achieving nothing.
If there is anything to learn from military history, it’s this: warfare evolves before fighters do. War in our time has already changed, but most nations have not. This includes their militaries, political leaders, intelligence agencies, national security experts, media, academic institutions, think tanks, and members of civil society who care about armed conflict. The West’s way of war has evolved little since Patton’s day, and this rigidity has cost us needless lives, just like at the Somme.
There is a choice before us. Either we spill enough blood in battle until we finally realize our problem, or we choose to change now. No one ought to select the former, but the latter is difficult. It will require disruptive thinking and bold steps that conventional warriors will reject but troops on the ground will understand.
It will not be easy, but as any soldier will tell you, nothing worth fighting for is.
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