David Patrikarakos
In the popular mind, being at war is like being pregnant: you either are or you aren’t. In fact, as David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts show, conflicts increasingly exist in a “grey zone” between outright war and peace — it’s possible for civilians to be unaware that they are at war. From Iraq to Afghanistan we fight enemies who wear no uniforms, do not march in formation and who cannot be defeated on the battlefield. In Iraq, the real war began only after Saddam Hussein’s army had officially been defeated.
Take Beijing’s behaviour in the South China Sea. Rather than physically conquer islands and force a military confrontation with the US, China uses everything from lawsuits to propaganda to foster anti-war sentiments in enemy populations. As the authors correctly observe, the wars of the future will be fought in six domains: land, sea, air, cyber, space and information, which means they will not always be visible to the naked eye.
Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine is a rigorous and thoughtful study of what has happened on battlefields over the past eight decades, rather than the wider causes or political fallout of conflict. For instance, in their study of the Yom Kippur war the authors aren’t so much interested in the bigger geopolitical picture, but in tactics and technology . On October 6, 1973 an alliance of Arab armies attacked the state of Israel and, for a time, looked like it might finally achieve its dream of “throwing the Jews into the sea”. It was a surprise attack launched on Judaism’s holiest day, and it almost succeeded. But did you know that almost as important as the element of surprise was the Sagger, “a highly lethal Soviet anti-tank guided missile with a two-mile range, that inflicted particularly serious damage on Israel’s armoured vehicles”?
Similarly, the importance of, say, the Korean War is not the political miscalculations that led to its outbreak, but that it occupies a “unique place in history” because it showed that limited conventional wars could still be fought in the new nuclear age without total escalation.
The book sets out to do two things. First, “to show how militaries around the world have learnt – or failed to learn – from each previous war when trying to fashion the means to fight the next”. Second, “to investigate the personal qualities needed for successful strategic leadership”. In this sense, the two authors, the retired US General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, biographer of, among others, Churchill and Napoleon, combine well.
They list four key things that successful leaders must do to win. First, they need a comprehensive grasp of the overall strategic situation in a conflict so they can craft the appropriate strategic approach; second, they must communicate these “big ideas” to all relevant parties; third, they must oversee their proper implementation; and finally, they must understand how to refine and adapt. But as the authors point out exceptional strategic leadership is “as rare as the black swan”. Well, quite.
The charismatic and talented Douglas MacArthur, whose military successes bred a hubris that eventually curdled into near madness, is a cautionary tale here. As the authors drily observe, his request to use nuclear weapons because they were “merely quantitative increments to the arsenal of war” was “not picked up early enough by the Truman administration as [a sign] of his growing instability”.
Mao Zedong, conversely, while clearly one of the 20th century’s worst psychopaths, did all four things brilliantly. At the start of the Chinese civil war, the Kuomintang government had 2.6 million men under arms, whereas Mao’s communist forces had fewer than half a million, only half of whom had rifles. But by remaining agile, understanding both the strategic and tactical situations he faced, and, it appears, studying The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Mao ultimately showed the world that smaller guerrilla forces could defeat a western-backed government.
The authors’ narrow focus is an effective approach that means the book never meanders, but it can be limiting. Take Ukraine: you cannot understand what is happening on its battlefields without understanding how the practice of politics dominates them. In 2014, when Russia stole Crimea and first sent its troops into eastern Ukraine, the goal was not to defeat Kyiv on the battlefield and then force it to accept peace terms. Instead, the Kremlin wanted to carve out a space in the east where it could pump in pro-Russia narratives. The goal was to destabilise Ukraine so that it could never join the EU or Nato — a political, rather than a military goal. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote (in various formulations) that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. In Ukraine it became the practice of “armed politics”.
The book takes in the end of empire, Korea and the Middle East, analysing how conflict has evolved incrementally. Where it really impresses is its informed speculation about the future of warfare. Making predictions in an age when industrial war has returned to Europe and Jeremy Corbyn once had a shot at being prime minister is generally about as serious as astrology, but the authors understand one of the key points here. Traditionally, technology that was developed in conflict paved the way for technological advances in civilian life. Now western armies are increasingly reliant on tech from civilian life, especially in fields like robotics and AI. The result is yet more blurring of the lines between war and peace.
When I began going to Ukrainian front lines almost a decade ago, the troops I met there were generally tough, grizzled men on the front because they had experience of fighting for the Soviet Union. Now I see skinny, often bespectacled IT engineers, who are among the most potent soldiers Kyiv has because they pilot drones. During the battle of Bakhmut an officer showed me how his unit bought civilian drones off the internet. They then used a 3D printer to make 6in rockets that they filled with explosive. Target it correctly and this rocket — which costs $30 to make — can take out a multimillion-dollar tank.
The effect of all this is that the Ukraine war is both futuristic and oddly analogue: drones fly over 60-year-old Soviet armour; Kalashnikovs are fired along with digitally guided anti-tank missiles. The authors understand this. “We hope to highlight just how strangely regressive is the present Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” they correctly observe. “Warfare evolves; it does not ossify. Yet it is clearly also capable of being suddenly and shockingly thrown into reverse.”
Now, I’m in Israel covering yet another conflict — once again, Arab forces are trying to throw Jews into the sea. This is the second big point about future wars: they are almost certainly going to be as numerous as in the past.
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