Future War – Future Warfare
Abstract
With the Australian Army’s Complex Warfighting in mind, this article delves into the debate surrounding the nature of future wars and future warfare. Drawing on prominent figures in the current literature, the author concludes that while the fundamentals of war will remain solid, they will manifest themselves in ways that appear, at least initially, unrecognisable. The author argues that Clausewitz’s ‘Trinitarian’ conception of war—properly understood—provides a suitable framework for understanding future war in this confusing situation, as it allows a relatively clear illustration of continuities and differences between today’s wars and those of tomorrow. Understanding these similarities and changes will enable professionals at arms to better prepare themselves for future challenges by building on the solid foundations of proven current practice.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- Book of Ecclesiastes 1:9
Introduction
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War marked a point of departure for military analysis. Until then strategic problems, although complex and thorny, were necessarily dealt with within the context of the greater competition between the East and West. From then, each new strategic problem outwardly enjoyed a degree of singularity and, accordingly, required a greater amount of a priori examination. Replacing the somewhat arid and mathematical debate that underlies the conduct of the Cold War, the profusion and novelty of these emerging strategic problems stimulated an equally profuse and disparate array of analysis and prescription.
The new wave of military theory began a little earlier, in the late 1980s, when Soviet theorists began to discuss the implications of emerging weapons, sensing and communications technologies—conventional means that replicated the power of, and provided a useable alternative to, tactical nuclear weapons. They anticipated that the impact of these weapons would require a fundamental reordering of the tactical battlespace in the same way as the introduction of smokeless powder in the 1890s and of tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s. The 1991 Gulf War offered a practical demonstration that hinted at what might be achievable through the thoughtful combination of these technologies and triggered a flood of seemingly new ideas, including the proposition that there was a revolution in military affairs (RMA) underway.
The proposition that an RMA was in progress triggered a veritable flood of books describing the long waves of military innovation and identifying earlier periods of discontinuous or extremely rapid change. Depending on semantic arguments of what constituted a revolution and historical arguments centred around the causality of victory and defeat, this resulted in lists of from none to ten historical RMAs.
The span of arguments fuelling this debate has been broad but has fallen into two principal schools: one focused on the power of technology and the potential it offers, and the other on the response of putative enemies to Western technological dominance. The result of the to and fro between these two schools of thought has seen the debate follow a quite clear trajectory: from examination of the implications of technology on the tactical battlespace, through a period of technological triumphalism culminating in the unsuccessful air campaign against Serbia in 1999, and settling into a Hobbesian view of an anarchic tribal world rife with blood feuds and incessant terrorism.
In ‘War and Anti-War’1 the Tofflers argued for the power of the technologies that comprised the RMA but warned that states would not monopolise that power. Arquilla in numerous writings went further and posited that ‘netwar was coming’ and that the field of battle would increasingly shift away from geographic space and into cyberspace. In 1989 Lind introduced Fourth Generation War; in 1991 Van Creveld described the processes that he saw underlying what he considered to be ‘the transformation of war’2 and announced the death of Clausewitz—an announcement that drew vigorous support from John Keegan3 and relief from staff college students the world over. In 1999, two Chinese colonels created a ripple when they published Unrestricted Warfare,4 in which they argued the futility of confronting US power directly and called for an approach that was both more comprehensive and nuanced.
The US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has stimulated what has become a debate between a technological view and an anthropological one—between the ‘special forces on horseback’ exemplar in Afghanistan and the daily bloody grind of Fallujah, Ramadi, Tarin Qowt and Baqubah. In short, a debate on whether modern war was amenable to technological resolution or would continue to rest on brutish and bloody close combat. Although there is a clear consensus that insurgency is the proximate strategic problem, there are larger questions that have not been resolved—in particular whether conventional state-on-state war has passed into history.
Most recently, Frank Hoffman in The Rise of Hybrid Wars5 and Max Boot in War Made New6 have refreshed the debate with Hoffman projecting from the Unrestricted War platform and resting heavily on the Australian Army’s Complex Warfighting7 and Boot carrying forward the RMA banner. There are superficial similarities between these two works that mask fundamentally different views. Boot decries the Napoleonic aphorism that the ‘moral is to the physical as three is to one’, whereas Hoffman argues persuasively that where there is a will there is a way. The result is that Boot sees that the answer lies in institutions able to seize technological opportunities, whereas Hoffman expects to be engaged in a broader battle of wills. Part of this is the semantic difference between war and warfare, with Boot focusing on how to win battles and Hoffman describing what roles battles will fill in deciding the outcome of future wars. Hoffman is aligned with Rupert Smith8 in arguing that, increasingly, wars will be decided in the ‘hearts and minds’ of the belligerent populations rather than on the battlefield.
This article does not attempt to review each of the works mentioned or to proffer detailed arguments for or against the positions they propose; rather, it will investigate a number of broad themes intertwined through them all in order to draw some equally broad conclusions about the characteristics of future wars.
The Enduring Nature of War
Gray9 notes that when trying to predict the future of war the ideas of continuity and discontinuity—that is what changes and what does not—are of compelling concern. He argues forcefully that the nature of war is not variable, whereas the character of warfare has and should be expected to continually evolve. On this basis future war is not an amorphous mass of unknowns but rather has a discernable and constant core. Only aspects of war outside this core are amenable to change—this makes prediction much easier.
Clausewitz described war as a chaotic interaction between rational analysis and aspirations, irrational emotions like love, hate, fear and envy, and random factors like blind luck, friction and the effects of incomplete or incorrect information. He saw these elements interacting in what he referred to as the ‘remarkable trinity’, which was the source of the term ‘Trinitarian war’. Clearly the trinity is at work within each human being and within every group that human beings form—from family to international organisation. It describes how humans interact with the universe. Most importantly it describes the mechanism that we know as politics and is why war is a political act. When Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics he did not mean to suggest that it was an act of rational policy but rather that it was a product of the action of the remarkable trinity and therefore of politics with all of the chaotic interactions and irrationality that such an association suggests.10
Because each of us is subject to our own Trinitarian foibles and each group to its own, war involves the interaction of a myriad of individual, group, national and cross-cultural trinities. The resulting chaos means that each war—whatever the wish or intent at the start—will take a form that is unique to itself and will change, unpredictably and continuously, throughout its course. This then is the immutable nature of war; it is a political act—a social, cultural and political phenomenon that will constantly seek to escape human control in order to establish an independent existence.
Many contemporary writers on the future of war manifest a wrong-headed tendency to see Trinitarian war as being between states and fought by the regular military forces of those states.11 They tend to disparage this Clausewitzian model of war in favour of one which sees it as an endeavour founded on social, cultural and informational precepts. On this basis it is possible to look at factors like economic interdependency, the frequency of international travel or the proliferation of international, multinational and transnational organisations, and come to the conclusion that state versus state war has passed, or is passing, into history. In reality, state versus state wars fought by regular militaries and terrorist attacks by radical Islamists are both manifestations of true Trinitarian war in which politics finds its expression at least partially through the application of violence, and which is subsequently shaped by its own logic.
It is this variability that makes warfare a free, creative act in which the contending wills of the protagonists seek to find and exploit advantage over each other. Edward Luttwak12 described the ‘paradoxical logic’ of war in which adversaries seek ‘to oppose, deflect and reverse each others actions’. The result of this logic is that defensive preparations trigger attacks, for example; that flexible deterrent options provoke rather than deter; and that the creation of strengths directs adversaries against comparative weaknesses. Accordingly, the notion of ‘asymmetric’ warfare is nonsense; war is by its nature a search for asymmetrical advantage over an enemy. This constant jockeying to seek advantage means that the character of any particular war will inevitably be shaped by the relative social, cultural, physical, technological, informational and economic strengths, weaknesses and perceptions of the protagonists and we should not be surprised if our next war requires a mode of warfare that is completely unlike anything we have done before and which we find hard. It would be unusual if this were not so.
Once war is seen as a political act, in the Trinitarian sense, it can be easily understood that wars are decided politically—not militarily—and that military force is merely one blunt instrument that can be applied to influence the remarkable trinity of an opposing polity to concede rather than resist. This sets clear limits on the utility of military force. Wars can only be decided in the ‘hearts and minds’ of the populations of the rivals.
Why Wars are Fought and Who Will Fight in the Future
Kto Koap? (Who is to rule? Who is to be ruled?)
- Lenin
The death of the state has been long anticipated13 and with the exception of Colin Gray, most of the pundits publishing today are heralding the end of conventional state versus state wars and the rise of irregular wars fought between and against other polities clustered around some political, social or ideological issue.
In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington posited the view that sources of future conflict would be found along the boundaries between differing cultures. Although his arguments have been widely criticised they have as their foundation the idea that cultural identity and the desire to assert it, or need to defend it, will be the principal source of future wars. That is, that even (or especially) in a globalised world, individuals will continue to ask and answer the questions ‘who is the “we”, who makes up the “us”?’. Having decided who are insiders and who are outsiders, the question of who rules whom comes naturally. All wars are ultimately about the distribution of political power.
The proposition that we have seen the end of state versus state wars does not sit well in this context. Despite some optimism late last century, the state is not in decline. People still cluster together based on some sort of territorial identity and they form communities as a result of the manifold advantages it brings. Over time some of those communities arise as states and are admitted, grudgingly or not, into the international system. Although continuous re-ordering of the state system is natural and inevitable, the creation of states is a natural outcome of geography and economics and of an anthropological drive. The existence of states and the arrangement of the international system based on states is not under threat.14
It should not be forgotten that successful insurgencies, by definition, become states and that terrorism is simply a tactic of insurgents intended to coerce obedience from those who would resist, or as a propaganda tool to attract recruits or deter external interference. Even al-Qaeda, that most formless of groups, is currently fighting in a number of locations seeking to establish a geographic toehold from which it can grow the Caliphate—itself a state. For the time being political power can only be fully expressed through the medium of the state and so states will continue to be central to our experience of war.
Over time, the relative power of the countries that make up the international system will wax and wane and the status quo will become more or less tolerable depending on individual points of view. In our own time the rise of China, India and Russia will profoundly affect the strategic environment in ways that are only broadly discernable. Gray argues that resistance to US hegemony will be the keynote of the state system in the mid-term and this view has some validity. However, how the rising states will relate to each other and the combinations that will be made between these emerging and existing great powers and between them and other powers—in response to perceptions of status, resource security or direct and indirect threats—is less clear. Almost certainly, simple resistance to US influence is too crude a model. What is clear is that the kinds of competition for status, resources or a sense of security that triggered wars between states in the past seem certain to be present in the future. State versus state wars remain a strategic problem for today.
Since war is an expression of political processes it is timely to recall the aphorism that ‘all politics is local’. There is a tendency for strategists to ascribe to protagonists a degree of rationality, to treat them in fact as unitary rational actors. Such rational behaviour is both foreclosed by Clausewitz’s theory and extremely rare in the historical record. This is because the leadership of any polity is beholden to the members of that polity in a way that is much stronger than the web of relationships extending from it to the outside—nationalism remains a very strong driver. Therefore, overwhelmingly, internal pressures—the remarkable trinity at work—drive external actions. This affects both the causes of wars and how they are fought.
The existence of disaffected internal groups, and the sources of their identities, provides opportunities for third parties to become involved. In southern Thailand, for example, unrest among a local Islamic community in the face of claimed neglect by the culturally Buddhist central government—although founded purely on local issues—provides the opportunity for revolutionary Islamists to become involved with a view to connect this local conflict with the global jihad.15 This process of recruitment of local conflicts to a wider war is not new—it was the principal way that the Cold War expressed itself violently. The result today, as then, is that even seemingly minor local conflicts may be more important, much harder to resolve, and more likely to develop in unexpected directions than first appearances might suggest. However, it seems likely that this is to become the principal way in which military force will be applied in competitions between states in which, in any single geographic area, at least one side will likely fight entirely through proxies—at least initially and as long as reason retains control.
There is no help here in terms of narrowing the field of options for how future war will look. State versus state warfare will not go away. The influence of cultural identity will continue to be felt for many years and will be an important driver in the evolution of the international system as new states emerge, or struggle to emerge, and older states compete for their place in the sun. The recruitment of local conflicts to wider causes and resistance to perceived Westernisation will also continue and probably accelerate. Local conflicts will continue to arise but will seldom remain local and will seldom be able to be ignored. Transnational threats along the lines of, but not limited to, Islamic terrorism will remain a major preoccupation. Although conventional confrontation of the United States may appear futile that does not mean it will not happen—equally, the United States remains a special case and conventional confrontation of nearly any other country remains within the bounds of rationality. None of these sources of conflict will be isolated from the others, and state and non-state actors will exploit them to pursue their own ambitions. Another bloody century indeed.
Technology and War
War is completely permeated by technology. Humans are a tool-using animal, and since the development of opposable thumbs they have used tools to dominate their competitors. As technology has advanced over the centuries the ability to produce more and better weapons has advanced apace, and today weapons are available that can destroy virtually any target with great confidence. On this basis it is possible, and common, to apply a degree of technological determinism to war. It is wrong to do so. Technology can influence the character of a war but it does not affect its nature and, with the possible exception of the special case of nuclear weapons, nor is it ever likely to be a decisive factor in the resolution of a war. There are a number of reasons for this.
The first and most important is that, as has been stated, wars are decided in the ‘hearts and minds’ of the belligerent populations and technology has only a limited capacity to influence them. Overwhelming technological advantage can deter war up to a point but, given sufficient reason, populations have historically shown a readiness to fight against seemingly insuperable odds. Once military confrontation has started, mere destruction of the armed forces of the enemy may not be sufficient for victory unless the enemy population perceives it to be so. It is possible to win every battle and lose a war.16
The notion of a tool rests on a sense of a stable cause and effect relationship. When you hit a nail with a hammer in a certain way it penetrates deeper into the wood. On the basis of this stable cause and effect relationship there is a tendency towards specialisation. This is why there are a number of different types of hammer, for example—each specialised for a relatively narrow range of tasks and each designed specifically to perform that array of tasks with the greatest possible efficiency. The further one moves away from specialisation the less efficient the tool becomes. The result is that the scissors on Swiss army knives are not used by tailors and nor are the saws used by carpenters. Thrown into juxtaposition with the paradoxical logic of war, this tendency towards specialisation places limits on the utility of any technology. The more specialised a weapon is, the easier it is for an enemy to create conditions that make it either unusable or of very low utility. The increasing use of urban terrain by ground forces to limit the utility of stand-off surveillance and engagement technologies is a contemporary example. Excellence in technology necessarily creates opportunities for asymmetry.
In this vein, each technological strength necessarily presents a weakness to an enemy: heavy tanks are hard to destroy but equally hard to support; fast jet fighters are enormously powerful but totally reliant on long, fixed, obvious, concrete runways.
As a result, the exploitation of technological strength relies heavily on organisational complexity and robustness. It is not sensible to rely on fighter aircraft unless the air and ground defences of airfields are fully provided for, nor is it sensible to operate tanks unless appropriate combat service support arrangements can be made.
That is not to say that technology can be eschewed. Innovative technology can confer an advantage for the time it takes the enemy to think their way around it. This interplay between innovation and counter-innovation represents an aspect of the constant search for asymmetric advantage. An ability to innovate and to produce practical responses to an enemy’s innovations, not exclusively technological innovations, is essential for survival on the battlefield let alone success.17
Superior or novel weapons have occasionally, but not uniformly, led to tactical success. The challenge for the innovator is to turn the fleeting advantage offered by innovative combinations of technology into a more enduring advantage. In the attacks of 11 September 2001, box cutters and willpower created cruise missiles. These conferred a local and temporary tactical advantage which was in the end counterproductive for al-Qaeda. This simple example illustrates the limits on the importance of technology. In War Made New Max Boot quotes J F C Fuller and Napoleon Bonaparte and warns against both of them as representing the poles of two dangerous ‘determinisms’: the technical ‘what can be done will be done’, and the psychological ‘where there is a will there is a way’. In this he is wrong, war is not about battles, it is about defeat and victory, which are perceptions rather than facts. Moral factors—perceptions, beliefs, willpower—dominate war completely. Where there is a will, war will find a way.
There are no silver bullets; at best, technology offers fleeting advantages to those that adopt and apply it and, in the constant search for advantage, consistent technological inferiority represents a major, but seldom fatal, weakness. The more advanced and specialised technologies become, the easier they are to subvert. Certainly, there is no sense in which it is true to say that the outcome of wars will be determined or even largely influenced by technology. On the contrary, it is fair to say that any view of future war that rests on a technological argument is probably in error.
Conventional Weapons
The limited impact that technological advantage has on the outcome of wars cannot hide the fact that the use of weapons separates war from political competition and remains the central activity of warfare. Furthermore the type and quantity of weapons available to the belligerents fundamentally shapes the character of any particular war.
There is a growing consensus that states are losing their previous monopoly on the best, most lethal weapons and that non-state actors will increasingly dispose of comparable arsenals. This is only partially true. It is the scale, wealth and organisation of states that has given them logistic capabilities which have enabled them to design, construct, field and support an array of weapons and to sustain and expand this array through the course of a war. The more sophisticated the weapons the more that this is true. This is the truly decisive advantage that states will continue to exercise over non-state actors. This does not mean, however, that wars against non-state enemies will be constrained to primitive grappling with unsophisticated weapons. Some wars, against groups that are ideologically or geographically isolated, totally impoverished and fighting against a universally acclaimed ‘white knight’ may be so constrained. More commonly, non-state groups will find state supporters able to provide these advantages for them. Well developed relationships of this kind enable organisations such as Hezbollah to wield anti-shipping cruise missiles, advanced surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank guided missiles and large calibre artillery rockets.
Non-state actors that are more isolated from such state support—such as al-Qaeda—have correspondingly less choice in the array of weapons available to them and, in practice, are therefore more constrained to the least sophisticated weapons and, by extension, the softest targets. This has more than merely a tactical effect—their inability to tactically confront US forces, for example, has been the principal shaper of al-Qaeda strategy in Iraq. Poor weapons limit the strategic options available to them. In contrast, Iranian support for Jaysh Al Mahdi means that they are provided with improvised explosive devices able to penetrate US armour. On this basis, Iranian state support was directly responsible for 60 per cent of US casualties in Iraq despite the fact that the war against al-Qaeda was the ‘hot’ one.
Without state support, non-state actors will be constrained to relatively primitive weapons or, if they do gain access to sophisticated weapons, they will not be able to field or sustain sufficient quantities to have more than a local tactical effect. States will continue to exercise a practical monopoly over the most sophisticated weapons and will channel them to non-state actors in pursuit of state interests.
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
WMD fall into two main groups: nuclear weapons and chemical/ biological weapons. Chemical and biological weapons are relatively easy to produce and disseminate but they are of limited effectiveness. Nuclear weapons, in contrast, are difficult to produce and deliver but are so astoundingly effective that, since their advent in 1945, they have fallen into a class of their own.
Nuclear weapons are presently the exclusive possessions of a small group of states. They are such powerful weapons that no state, except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has found the political logic to justify their use and, in practice, the possibility of their use has been a powerful factor in limiting the ends sought in wars. There can be no wars of national survival fought between nuclear armed states. At the same time, there has been a perception that the use of nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear state would be so far beyond the pale that coercion by nuclear threat is not a practical tool of state-craft. As a result, nuclear weapons have had a major dampening effect on international relations.
On this basis there is an argument that attempts to counter-proliferate are unnecessary and undesirable. If all states were nuclear-armed, war between them would become illogical. Therefore, if states were allowed to develop nuclear weapons in accordance with their perceived security needs there would be greater stability amongst the community of states. Unfortunately logic is a poor lens through which to examine history and entirely inappropriate as a prognostic tool.
The reality is that the greater the number of nuclear armed states the greater the likelihood that rogue individuals or rogue states will pass either the expertise or functioning weapons to third parties or find within themselves the logic to employ the weapons directly. This would establish the possibility of a connection between the psychology of the suicide bomber and the employment of nuclear weapons that represents a complete departure from our experience to date.
The history of the Geneva and Hague Conventions stretching back to the 1860s has been one of attempts by the community of states to limit the viciousness and horrors of war. Under pressure, either as acts of policy or because of local decisions, most of these constraints have, from time to time, been ignored but the trend has been generally towards wider observance. If nuclear weapons were to fall into the hands of an ideologically motivated state or group, unconstrained by a culture or history of restraint in the application of force, and engaged in what it perceived as an existential conflict with an unmitigated evil, then the application of nuclear weapons would have found the logic that has hitherto been missing.
Proliferation control is failing and there is little reason to think that this trend will reverse in the future. The threat of retaliation and the consequences of near universal condemnation remain restraints on the employment of nuclear weapons by any state, no matter how rogue or how ideologically motivated, but the provision of weapons to proxies willing and able to use them could achieve the same ends while maintaining plausible deniability. As a result, the use of nuclear weapons by non-state actors becomes more likely with each passing day.
In a 1980s commercial war game simulating the defence of NATO, both sides had the option of resorting to nuclear weapons after the fifth game turn. If either side took up this option, the game finished on the roll of the dice with a 50/50 chance of victory or defeat. To some extent the same calculus could be applied to nuclear use by a non-state actor today. The limitations on the number, yield and targeting of terrorist-delivered bombs precludes anything resembling strategic bombardment. Instead a nuclear attack would be an upscale terrorist incident, devastating to those involved and damaging to the target state but far from sufficient to destroy or even cripple it. In the end all a terrorist organisation (and its state sponsor) get is a really angry and energised global community and an enemy, more powerful than them, from whom all practical restraints have been removed, thereby undermining the terrorists’ first line of defence.
In future wars it would be overly optimistic to anticipate the continued non-use of nuclear weapons. Although direct state use remains unlikely, indirect delivery by proxies is becoming more likely. Although such an eventuality would be appalling and every action should be taken to avoid it, such an attack would be one blow in a war, and not the complete war.
Perception Management
Since war is a violent battle of wills, war termination relies on disarming the enemy’s will. This might be done by physically destroying their means of continued resistance or by threatening to impose costs on the enemy that are broadly perceived as outweighing the potential benefits of continued resistance. The desire to attack the national will of the enemy directly, rather than through the proxy of the fielded army, lies at the core of the air power theories of Douhet and his successors.
Globalisation brings with it greater economic interdependence between states, a proliferation of international organisations and transnational corporations and large numbers of people travelling or working in countries other than their own. The economies of both individual states and of the world increasingly rely on the free movement of commodities and products, pervasive communications, networked computers and the Internet. Clearly such interdependency creates a dampening effect on international conflicts by making the attendant costs and risks apparent to a wide audience from the start.18 The counterpoise is that interdependency also provides levers that can impose costs directly onto a government or population without, supported by, or in support of, direct military pressure. Economic, informational and cyber attacks are therefore widely touted as a means to deliver what air power theorists have promised, but been unable to deliver, since 1917.
The power of such manipulation is difficult to judge. Even with massive resources, comprehensive opinion polling and control over many aspects of day to day life, democratic governments are unable to confidently manipulate their publics on any issue of importance. Societies are complex systems that react to stimuli in unique and unexpected ways. For example, there is no evidence that in 1945 Japan succumbed in the face of the atom bomb. Rather the atom bomb—combined with the practical destruction of the army, navy and air force; interdiction of supplies of raw material; the collapse of Japanese industry; the apparent inevitability of an invasion of the home islands; and the continuing series of massively destructive fire raids—eventually convinced some elements of the Japanese polity that further resistance was futile. Similarly, the shared hardships of the Blitz in London and even fiercer bombing campaigns in Germany apparently served to strengthen a sense of community and tighten the bonds between the people and their fielded military forces rather than convince them that they should or could cease to resist.19
The point here is that given the limitations of the military instrument, and the similar limitations of the other elements of national power, success is most likely (but not certainly) to flow from a careful combination of all of the elements of national power in a mutually reinforcing way—hoping that the whole is more effective than the sum of the parts. Therefore, although attacks on financial, industrial or social targets in isolation seem unlikely to be decisive and may well be counterproductive, carefully orchestrated attacks on all of these targets, in conjunction with thoughtful application of military pressure, may compel an enemy population into concession.
The Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries divided their activities into propaganda of the word—the articulation of an agenda and the explanation of their actions with propaganda of the deed—and actions to demonstrate their potency, reach and determination. In their view, word without deed was merely rhetoric and the deed without explanation was pointless. This is not a bad model for the combination of military and non-military actions that is being prescribed by the more thoughtful pundits on modern war. In it there is a dominant message, or informational theme, encapsulating the issues at stake and the costs and benefits that accrue to a target population from the actions they might take.
All of the elements of national power would be subordinated to demonstrating and reinforcing this dominant message with a view to using rewards and punishment to condition desirable behaviours from an enemy.
This looks fine on paper, and was incorporated into the Australian Army’s view of future war as ‘perception management’ in 1999. It remains an admirable aspiration but it is hard to imagine under what circumstances it could be made to work. In reality, the world is simply too complex, humans too imperfect and their institutions too frail to allow this type of nuanced and orchestrated application of effort from thousands of independent workers—none of whom have the absolute ability to make something work and all of whom can cause it to fail. At best, attempts at perception management are likely to be of the ‘two steps forward, one step back’ variety with dissonant actions constantly threatening to overwhelm the dominant message. Even if applied as planned, the impact on the enemy’s remarkable trinity would be entirely conjectural and the outcomes practically unknowable.
Despite the limited prospects for success, attempts to manage the perceptions of enemy populations seem sure to be a central organising principle in the planning of future wars—at least at the start. Clausewitz would warn us that the control and coordination required to be successful is almost certainly unattainable and that the endeavour was based on moral weakness in the first place.
What Will Future Wars Look Like?
To bring these themes together in some way, it may be possible to describe the elements of a ‘typical’ future war that might occur in the mid-term.
States and statehood will continue to be the organising principle for the international community, and wars will continue to be predominantly about the distribution of political power expressed variously as global or regional hegemony, or more locally.20 Although future wars will generally be in pursuit of limited objectives, globalisation offers the opportunity to engage other protagonists who are globally applying all of the elements of national power and are exploiting propaganda and economic and international organisations in a way that is, at least in conception, more indirect, synchronised and comprehensive than has been our experience to date. Indirectness is the strategic catch-cry.
Within this indirect confrontation, military force will be applied to impose costs on an enemy and to provoke it into responses that either provide propaganda opportunities or reduce its strategic freedom of action. These globalised wars are not bound by geography. The objective will be exhaustion rather than annihilation, and most likely military force will be applied through proxies in the form of terrorism or insurgencies. In this context, terrorist use of WMD is likely but the risks to both the terrorist organisation and the state sponsor are substantial.
Non-proxy small wars will occur around purely local issues but they will either be amenable to local solutions or will be sustained but contained within tolerable levels of violence. Without state support, both military and diplomatic, localised insurgent or terrorist groups will continue to be unsuccessful and, over time, will either be destroyed or will lose relevance and gradually fade away.
This conflict environment will be extremely difficult for any democracy. Its very indirectness will make it hard for leaders to establish in the minds of their own populations a strong link between the expenditure of national blood and treasure and clear national interests. Azar Gat has said that when it applies force, the West’s ‘heightened awareness of the elusiveness of victory and of the intricacy of military and political causes and effects—as well as self-imposed restrictions on ruthlessness ...—result in half-way measures, stop go strategies, and a general indecisiveness’.21 On this basis, in response to an indirect confrontation, democracies are reasonably likely to exhaust their attention spans and lose interest in the competition before it is resolved in their favour.
The US 2005 National Defense Strategy identified four threat components: irregular threats that arise from the employment of unconventional methods, such as terrorism, insurgency or civil war, by both non-state and state actors; catastrophic threats arising from state and non-state actors employing WMD; traditional threats arising from direct military state-on-state confrontation; and disruptive threats arising from competitors developing or employing novel technologies or capabilities that supplant US domination in particular domains of operation. Tukhachevski and the other Soviet theorists who developed deep operations theory (and the idea of operational art) began with the realisation that the nation-state was so robust it could not be defeated in a single climactic battle but would require a succession of mutually reinforcing crippling blows if it were to be defeated. This idea, read in conjunction with the US threat matrix, makes Hoffman’s argument particularly interesting. What Hoffman is saying is that future war will not comprise any one of the listed threats, but will be an infinitely variable amalgam of them all and that they will be connected by an approach to operational art which is both wider and deeper, seeking perception management, than our current experience. Hoffman’s view is strongly reflective of the arguments contained in Unrestricted Warfare and entirely consonant with the analysis in the Australian Army’s Complex Warfighting. The strong message from each of these sources is that where there is a will, war will find a way. Ralph Peters adds further emphasis to this when he argues that ‘we need to prepare for governments to wage war in spheres now forbidden and still unimagined’.22
The 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is considered by some an exemplar of future wars and this is partially true but needs to be dealt with cautiously. In many ways Hezbollah is a special case. It enjoys a permissive government giving it a quasi-state role in southern Lebanon; for a number of years it has been sedentary in strong defensive terrain with very few avenues of approach for a single, clearly identified and well known enemy and has taken the opportunity to fully prepare that terrain for defence. Although also employing local levies, the core of Hezbollah consists of fully trained, long-service, professional fighters. It enjoys comprehensive financial, training and technical support from Syria and particularly Iran. These factors put it at the extreme end of the ‘reasonable worst case’ spectrum. Despite these special factors there are a number of lessons that can be drawn from this conflict and which might be typical of future wars:
- The local Hezbollah/Israeli conflict was recruited into the broader Iran versus Israel and Iran versus US competition. This type of exploitation of local grievances to further more expansive aims is not new but will likely become the norm.
- The conventional forces of nation states no longer necessarily enjoy a direct technological advantage over irregular forces. State sponsors provided Hezbollah with a full array of the very latest and most modern weapons. These included uninhabited aerial vehicles, anti-shipping and anti-tank missiles, modern surface-to-air missiles, and the latest rocket propelled grenades and mines.
- Air power proved largely ineffective when operating independently of ground forces. Despite involving over 9000 sorties, the air offensive failed to decapitate or seriously hinder Hezbollah’s leadership or manoeuvre. Shrouding themselves in cities or other population centres will become the norm for both state and non-state military forces, as failure to do so will expose them to weapons against which many will have no defence.
- Hezbollah aggressively manipulated credulous global media to provide a strategic safety net which played a large role in preventing Israel from developing its military advantage into strategic success. Polished and orchestrated propaganda campaigns, supported by, rather than in support of, military action may well be the dominant line of operation in future wars.
- Despite the advantages it enjoyed and the poorly planned and executed Israeli offensive, Hezbollah was tactically defeated—but this did not matter.
- Hezbollah was able to coordinate its actions to be mutually reinforcing across a number of lines of operation. In this they demonstrated a competence in operational art that was superior to that of the Israelis and surprising in an organisation that has not benefited from generations of staff college attendance and essay writing.
Conclusion
Complex Warfighting, published in 2003, describes war diffusing across many of the conceptual boundaries we use to describe and analyse it. Combat has diffused across the strategic, operational and tactical levels of war so that actions at one level have a direct effect at another. Non-state actors have always been part of warfare; however, the military characteristics of state and non-state actors are becoming increasingly similar. The geographic definition of theatres of operation or of allocating geographic priorities to national interests is increasingly invalid—strategic geography is irrelevant. Many of our putative enemies will try to make our home front the battlefront. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants is eroding with consequent blurring of the applicability of the laws and norms of war. Wartime is diffusing into ‘peacetime’. Since it was written, the diffusion described in Complex Warfighting has continued and accelerated, and will test our abilities to understand and control the conflicts to which we may be party.
The indirectness with which we will be engaged in the future, the nuanced use of proxies and ‘causes of convenience’ will hamper our ability to identify when, with whom and about what, we are at war—let alone how we should proceed to win. We will attempt, probably unsuccessfully, to manage the perceptions of the enemy and the enemy will be equally unsuccessful in managing ours. Once initiated, future wars, like their forebears, will take on a life of their own and rapidly escape reasoned control.
States have such power and permanence that they are not easily brought undone in war. They retain a total monopoly on the production of the most advanced weapons, sensors and communications technologies and their logistic capacities mean they are able to sustain effort through the various vicissitudes of lengthy conflicts. In contrast, non-state actors are able to impose pinpricks on the fabric of states—they can annoy, even hurt them, but they cannot do genuine damage. This is true even of those that gain access to WMD. Wars will remain state-on-state affairs.
Today, Boot, Hoffman and Smith are all being freely quoted in discussion about the character of future war. At their core, none of these authors has much to offer that is new but all are worth reading. Smith is telling us that wars are decided by the political will of the belligerents not by the results of battles; Boot that good soldiers with good weapons will do a good job; and Hoffman is telling us that all of the elements of the national power of our enemies will be arrayed against us. Boot’s arguments are not wrong, but equally, they are not important. Smith’s and Hoffman’s arguments have more meat in that there is a strong theme that, in future wars, there will be more ‘play away from the ball’—enemies will use all of the levers they have against us but they will attempt to use them in a much more indirect and nuanced way than we might (unreasonably) expect.
Ultimately, future war will contain elements of all of our past wars but will see them jumbled together until they threaten to be unrecognisable. The type of operational and strategic coordination necessary to prosecute these wars successfully will be exceedingly difficult and so they are even less likely to go according to plan than previous wars—a terrifying statement indeed. Furthermore, attempts to engage the population directly and the immediacy of modern communications will cause the remarkable trinities of the belligerents to be even more volatile—another scary thought. The prospect of these globalised indirect wars remaining within any of the geographical or conceptual limits that we try to impose on them, or to remain linked to any sort of rational means-ends calculations are very small. Future wars—even more than our previous wars—will be ‘more than true chameleons’.
Endnotes
1 Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, Warner Books, New York, 1995.
2 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, The Free Press, New York, 1991.
3 John Keegan, A History of Warfare, Hutchinson, London, 1993.
4 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, PLA literature and Arts Publishing House, Beijing, 1999.
5 Frank G Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, 2007.
6 Max Boot, War Made New, Gotham Books, New York, 2007.
7 Australian Army, Complex Warfighting, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2004.
8 Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force, Alan Lane, London, 2005.
9 C S Gray, Another Bloody Century, Phoenix, London, 2006, p. 373.
10 For an expanded explanation of this reading of Clausewitz’ trinity see: E J Villacres and C Bassford, ‘Reclaiming the Remarkable Trinity’, Parameters, Autumn 1995.
11 This is the view taken by the Tofflers, Lind, Van Creveld and Keegan.
12 Edward N Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1987.
13 Engels argued in the 1890s that ‘the State is not “abolished”, it withers away’ in the face of the global revolution of the proletariat. On present trends its demise in the face of globalisation seems equally unlikely.
14 The Wall Street Journal contained an article which argued that, far from declining in importance, there was in fact a resurgence of nationalism and that this movement represented a challenge to globalisation. See Bob Davis, ‘World No Longer Flat, WSJ.com, 28 April 2008.
15 Another example is al-Qaeda’s exploitation of Sunni unrest in Iraq, and Iran’s covert war exploiting Shia nationalism there, which together have been the principal shapers of the way that the war in Iraq has evolved.
16 Perhaps the most often cited example of this is the Vietnam War, in which the United States was militarily dominant but was still defeated. Similarly, in southern Lebanon in 2006, Israeli forces captured each geographic objective they fought for but failed to achieve any of their political objectives. It would be fair to say that the jury is still out in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military dominance in these countries can remove or suppress enemies but cannot, of itself, ensure desirable political outcomes.
17 There are arguments for good technology which extend beyond direct military utility. In any democracy that has chosen to gambit its young people there will be close public scrutiny of how well they are equipped and sustained. Good weapons are also important in the maintenance of morale among soldiers.
18 In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman proposes the ‘Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention’ which stipulates that no two countries will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. He goes on to say, however, that this does not mean that such countries will not go to war, but that the very heavy economic costs attendant on such decisions will constrain their actions. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Theory_of_Conflict_Prevention>. Friedman’s thesis attributes to war a degree of rational instrumentality that has not been historically demonstrated.
19 A subtle comprehensive and nuanced propaganda (of the word) campaign to manipulate public opinion is inevitably a component of future wars but is likely to be effective only insofar as the target population as a whole is only vicariously committed to the issues at stake. When the issues remain less than compelling, propaganda can sway public opinion very effectively. The Kosovar and Hezbollah manipulation of global media was effective in isolating their enemies (Serbia and Israel respectively) from international support and in constraining the means employed against them.
20 At first glance, given the current world situation, this is a bold claim, but the conflict in Afghanistan, for example, is the continuation of a state versus state war that began in 2002 with the objective of regime change. Fighting today is about removing the remainder of the old regime and properly putting in place the new one. The same is true of the war in Iraq and the war against al-Qaeda is about denying them statehood. If al-Qaeda were able to achieve the foundation for a caliphate, their relative power, and the threat they would present, would be of an entirely different magnitude.
21 Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought – From the Enlightenment to the Cold War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 828.
22 The character and role of operational art in this type of conflict needs to be carefully considered. The independence previously granted to operational commanders that has been cogently argued for, and variously preserved, may be increasingly inappropriate and we may be approaching the situation where the direct connection between tactics and strategy should be re-established—without the intervening layer of command.
