War and the New 21st Century Disorder

Abstract

This article is based on a presentation prepared in August 2004 for the Land Warfare Studies Centre’s occasional seminar series. Professor Black begins from the premise that technology alone cannot win war. In the 21st century, with urbanised Third World populations suffering poverty and unemployment, warfare and its aftermath will take place in the complex terrain of megacities, where the war-winning power of technology is reduced. He argues that war is won when your enemy is persuaded that they have lost. Consequently, defeating the enemy should not be confused with causing more casualties—just as winning battles does not equate to winning wars.

Today, more than ever, I find myself challenging the technological interpretation of war. Perhaps this is because I see this interpretation as asserted rather than demonstrated. Many military thinkers and scholars appear, by contrast, to place much more emphasis on the cultural factors of war. By ‘cultural factors’ I mean the way different societies have different tolerances of and different understandings of victory and defeat, suffering, death, and casualties. While I intend to examine these cultural differences in the ensuing discussion, I also want to look at the way in which war is currently developing and may develop in the future.

I want to look closely at the technologically driven interpretation of war. Put simply, it is clear that those fighting or engaged in power projection want better weapons than their opponents; they want better weapons systems, they want better means of force projection. The difficulty arises when superior weaponry alone is regarded as sufficient to ensure victory. The general historical interpretation in the past, certainly up to the early 1990s, viewed developments in military proficiency essentially as linked to developments in weapons systems. Early modernist historians cite the impact of gunpowder; 19th centuryists point to the changes in handheld weaponry and cannon in that period. Naval historians, of course, view the 19th century in terms of amour plating and steam power. While there is an enormous amount of truth in these assertions, they also rest on a number of fallacies and I intend to deal with these in conceptual ways as well as drawing on some points of evidence. Let me start with one or two conceptual points.

One of the most obvious fallacies is that you win a war by winning battles. This may seem an obvious point—if you don’t win the battles, you are unlikely to win the war. I would argue, however, that you win a war when you persuade your enemy that he’s lost—when he ceases fighting, when he surrenders. Certainly there have been wars in history that have ended with the complete extirpation of the other side; but in virtually all cases, wars end with one side being expected or forced into surrender. The factors that lead to that surrender merit careful thought because clearly—to introduce the cultural element—they are determined by the way in which people understand that they have lost.

One historical example of this perception of defeat is that of the American Civil War, in which the white cohort in the Confederacy took twenty per cent fatalities and twenty per cent injuries before accepting that they had lost. In most modern wars, casualty figures would never reach that level. But what has become apparent over the last hundred years—and this is likely to continue in the future—is that different societies’ tolerance of casualties will vary enormously. One of the great mistakes is assuming that the other side’s understanding of ‘casualty’ is the same as yours. Some historical interpretations of this sense of casualty can be blatantly flawed. For example, the historian Niall Ferguson, who is quite a well known historian, published an article in a major British newspaper about three years ago in which he attempted to argue that the Wehrmacht—the German Army—was the best military force in the 20th century. He based this on a statistical analysis showing that the Germans had killed more of their opponents than they themselves had suffered by a bigger ratio than any other army in World War I or World War II. The problem with that analysis is that the Germans actually lost World War I and World War II. In other words, being able to inflict a much heavier casualty rate, which in World War II was particularly the case at the expense of the Soviets, did not prove decisive for the Germans given that their opponents were willing to go on taking much heavier casualties. In a sense this is obvious, yet it undermines many of the standard interpretations of war that present a rather crude dichotomy between symmetrical and asymmetrical.

The argument popular with most scholars and military thinkers at present is that we are in an age of asymmetrical war. It’s important to bear in mind that, in symmetrical warfare, the two sides will not necessarily have the same willingness to entertain casualties. As a consequence, there’s really no point attempting to plan one’s military operations on an attritional basis in which you kill more of the enemy than you lose yourself and then they accept the verdict. It simply won’t operate that way in symmetrical warfare—so it certainly won’t do so in asymmetrical warfare.

To return to the issue of the technological interpretation of warfare, my problem with this view is that it often merges two very different stages in war and power projection. It merges the ability to move to the battlefield, the zone of conflict or the zone of the actual contact, with what actually happens there. There is no doubt that advanced technology brings with it enormous advantages. The simple fact of air travel, particularly combined with aerial refuelling in a way that would have been a fantasy in the past, represents an ability of power projection which is a major form of capability. Once a destination is reached, however, a whole new set of challenges unfolds. This is particularly the case in an environment in which the distinction between enemy and friendly forces is difficult to establish. This is far more common in the history of war than the relevant literature would have us believe. Much of the documented history of conflict is based on defined armed forces, easily recognisable as armed forces—they wear uniforms or, in the pre-uniform age they had some sort of designation that made them quite clear—and they operated as regular forces. Even in civil wars—which are a much more prevalent form of warfare than is commonly held—the American Civil War or the English Civil War, for example, were fought by what were, in effect, regular armed forces. Historically, there has been a whole range of conflict in which there is no clear-cut separation of the two sides—and this is likely to become a common feature of future warfare. New tasks such as peacekeeping or peace-making are particularly prone to a lack of clarity in separation. Even in simple crude warfare, however, it may not be easy to differentiate between the two sides and therefore establish the opponent against which you impose your power.

Technology also imposes its own difficulties and the use of air power in the interwar years provides a good example of this. The Americans used air power and marines on what they termed ‘peacekeeping missions’ in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua in the 1920s and 1930s, although their actions may not have appeared much like ‘peacekeeping’ to the natives. In the early 1920s air power had a tremendous impact and this was particularly demonstrated by the British in Iraq, Somaliland and Yemen where it was used to great effect—on those occasions when the British were able to establish just who they were targeting. In urban environments, however, it proved very difficult to establish precisely who the target was, even with the advanced technology in the possession of the militaries of that period. Destruction was an easy option; the French, for example, resorted to shelling Damascus in 1926 as they simply had no form of precision targeting more sophisticated than that.

Future theatres of conflict will undoubtedly be urban and involve the world’s great population centres. Any insight into the future of the world’s population will show clearly that about ninety-five per cent of population growth occurs in the Third World. Much of that growth is concentrated in vast cities, places like Kinshasa, Karachi, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Johannesburg. Engaging militarily in cities such as these is extraordinarily difficult given the very topography of those areas, their characteristically urban societies and the close way in which they are mixed together. It is going to be incredibly hard to use the kind of power projection possible today in order to achieve results. Yet these are the environments most likely to become theatres of conflict in the future. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that the cities in the Third World are experiencing enormous economic and social change at a level unprecedented for those societies. In these societies, massive economic change commonly results from the rapid deterioration of an agricultural base. This is often accompanied by an enormous demographic increase which pressures societies that simply cannot produce enough jobs and whose cities become swamped by people moving into urban areas in search of work. These pressures are combined with social patterns of a breakdown of deference and the erosion of the pre-existing ways of organising society. Such dramatic change and its ensuing dislocation can often lead to elements of the population being exposed to very radical political pressures. Tehran is a fine example of this. In the eyes of the outside world, Iran appears firmly under the control of what is a fairly authoritarian government. It’s my belief that they don’t control it at all. The Iranian government simply cannot control what’s going on in Tehran, which is a vast sprawling city of no real structure, of neighbourhoods which have moved beyond the control of the civil authority. Likewise the Pakistani government cannot control Karachi. Other cities are the same. There are very few major cities which are actually under reasonable control.

In a sense, the West has little experience of intervention in countries such as Iran and Pakistan. Most of the intervention that has occurred has been in countries in which the population density has been much, much lower. I am deliberately excluding Iraq from this argument as the war in Iraq began as a conventional war. I’m referring to interventions in countries such as Liberia or Sierra Leone where the major problems were not so much controlling the cities, Monrovia or Freetown, but in attempting to control the distant forest regions. I suspect that such interventions are going to appear relatively easy in comparison with the enormous problems of controlling urban terrain for which there is yet to be an established and successful modus operandi. Despite this, there have been Western successes and successes by non-Western governments in attempting to control insurrection. It’s generally agreed, for example, that the French brought Algiers under control through intensive policing characterised by brutality in 1957–58. One of the great problems with that campaign, however, was that the French timetable of control was so completely different to that of the insurgents. This issue of a timetable of control is another looming difficulty in the interventionist scenario. The French pulled out of Algeria because of a build-up of political pressure within France. The key to this political pressure was the continued ability of sufficient Algerians to defy the authority of the French government of occupation.

The issue of a timetable of control and the effect of political pressure on military outcomes reflects what I would refer to as the revolution in attitudes to the military. In Western societies in particular, there is a growing disinclination to accept the notion of casualties, long-term commitments and arduous roles. This disinclination manifests itself in civil society and within the ranks of politicians. The issue of casualties has long plagued the political architects of war. The War Cabinet in Britain in the Falklands War of 1982, for example, decided in its wisdom that domestic public opinion would accept a thousand British fatalities after which it would be necessary to negotiate with the Argentinians via the Americans. At that stage, the British population was over 50 million. Given the nature of labour in a modernist society, it is far easier to endure higher casualty levels without any real economic or demographic problem. Even after a very major war in which casualty levels are very, very high, history has shown that society classically suffers only short-term demographic blips. Nevertheless, under what was perhaps the most resolute Prime Minister I can ever expect to see in my time, Cabinet estimated that a thousand fatalities was the maximum that would be acceptable. And that was a war that was fought in defence of British sovereign territory—of course to the Argentinians it wasn’t a war in defence—but to the British it was fought in defence of British sovereign territory. In the current international context, the Americans are clearly suffering a great deal of public angst given that their casualty levels have risen well over a thousand. For a society of 290 million people (the American population on the last census figure), the idea that losing a thousand males should be a crisis is surprising. To add some context to this point, just over fifty years ago in the Korean War, societies such as Britain, Australia or the United States were prepared to envisage much higher casualties for a territory—Korea—about which they knew very little and which certainly wasn’t part of their established geopolitical concerns. Clearly there has been a shift. World War II, on the other hand, was obviously different, with attacks constituting a very real threat to existence. The Korean War, however, presents a sound basis for comparison, and demonstrates quite starkly that, within two generations, the public willingness to accept casualties has changed radically.

Looking ahead, it’s a matter of some debate as to whether this is going to remain the case or not. The American scholar Victor Hanson has argued that this is just a short-term blip and that, in his view, Western societies will revert to a willingness to take high casualties—what he calls ‘civic militarism’. I’m very dubious about that. I think that in fact there have been a whole series of quite profound social changes in the late 20th century and into the 21st century in terms of the atomisation of society, greater individualism, greater expectations of hedonism, and a different relationship with the state. I don’t think this will be reversed. It is certainly the case that there are different sets of values compared with those of the warrior societies of the mid-20th century. Again this varies around the world. Any study of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 will produce evidence of losses amounting to several hundred thousand among the combatants, and a willingness to engage in frontal charges against unsuppressed machine-gun fire with very heavy casualties. The same kind of conflict and the associated willingness to slaughter civilians is clearly evidenced in the Congo, for example, or in recent events in the Sudan, let alone what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s. This form of conflict is characterised by a high willingness to accept combatant losses, very high willingness to inflict casualties on non-combatants, and often an erosion of any real understanding of the difference between the two. That is likely to remain the case in large areas of the world. Again, it’s worth noting that most conflict in the world will occur in Third-World societies. Third-World societies house the greatest social pressures and suffer the greatest economic strains. These are the countries in which the demographic ratio is more and more of a problem, where there are lots of young males without jobs, often poorly socialised with a high tolerance for violence. The collision of these factors will ensure the highest incidence of violence in these countries.

Australia has a natural geographic buffer from the conflict zones of the Middle East and Africa. Yet, it is reasonable to assert that the balance of world power has shifted quite considerably to the Pacific in recent times. I think this is a trend that will continue. I would argue that the European Union is a relatively failed economic model. I foresee a situation in which the demographic and economic weight of Europe within the world system will decline and the demographic, economic and military weight of East and South Asian countries will increase. There are, of course, conventional volatile geopolitical environments all round the perimeter where the Pacific area meets Asia. It is very difficult to engage in the arms races currently being waged in South and East Asia without some form of confrontation. It doesn’t have to be war. This potential for confrontation forces other regional powers, of which Australia is one, to at least plan for their responses to it. It’s quite obvious that there are going to be confrontations over Taiwan, for example. When those confrontations occur, the powers with links to Australia—classically the United States—will turn to the Australians and expect them to take a major role. Any form of refusal may not necessarily be acceptable.

Currently, the United States’ power is primarily projected into the Balkans, the Middle East and South Korea. It is short of military resources and it has run down its conventional army—in my view, unadvisedly so. Yet the United States’ military focus may be about to change. There are certainly going to be problems in Near America, for example, when President Castro dies, or if civil conflict erupts in Colombia—a country which is highly unstable—or in Venezuela where the Chavez regime is deeply unpopular with the American administration. It is therefore entirely conceivable that America’s allies, NATO—as far as the Balkans is concerned—and Australia and Japan—as far as the Western Pacific is concerned—will find themselves in a scenario in which the Americans pull back some of their troops and military resources to the Caribbean and Central America and require NATO, and countries such as Australia and Japan, to take over security tasks in their own regions. It is fair to say that states such as Britain and Australia have had, to some extent, a free ride in strategic terms for several decades. This is because the Americans have actually underwritten everything in strategic terms which have been crucial to our security. This doesn’t mean we have found all their policies acceptable since, quite clearly, there is major disquiet among America’s allies over the war in Iraq. The practicality is that we cannot assume that, over the next half-century, America’s ability to commit itself militarily will match our geo-strategic needs. This is becoming very apparent both in the Asia-Pacific and in Europe. The Americans are telling the Europeans in no uncertain terms, ‘It’s your responsibility in the Balkans; it’s your responsibility in the Mediterranean.’ The only reason the Americans don’t push it even further is their desire to maintain the capability to intervene in support of Israel and, accordingly, they have a great interest in the East Mediterranean. Australia, in turn, may find itself under increasing pressure from the Americans—who see Australia as a wealthy society that hasn’t invested enough in defence. It is worth bearing in mind that American power projection into this part of the Pacific dates essentially from the 1940s and to the Indian Ocean it dates as recently as the 1970s. The same levels of commitment at all stages cannot be assumed.

In discussing the future stability of the Asia–Pacific region, it is dangerous to assume that the tensions within East and South Asia can be insulated. Looking close to Australian shores, for example, the potential for Indonesia to remain unified hangs to a certain extent on its success in managing to suppress separatist movements in, for example, Sumatra. Indonesia has really only worked as a state since the very beginning of the 1950s, and even then there were separatist movements in Sumatra and Java. The possibility of its continuing to work successfully as a state for the next fifty to a hundred years is minimal at best. The possibility of many countries being able to operate in that fashion is unlikely. The Japanese, for example, are very worried about China becoming too powerful; yet they are also concerned about China becoming too weak. If only one per cent of the Chinese population flees to Japan in the event of a breakdown of order in China, the Japanese simply couldn’t cope. We have to bear in mind that many of these states are actually quite weak and the possibility of one of them becoming a failed state will have obvious consequences in terms of refugee control.

Should we be seeking to take a far more interventionist role in shaping and educating those nation-states with a potential for failure? One has to be very cautious about the practicality of interventionism. I once heard Paul Wolfowitz speak on the topic. He explained very lucidly that his interest in Iraq came from his experience in his early days in the State Department where he played a role in persuading the American government to withdraw its support for the Marcos regime in the Philippines. America duly withdrew its support and Marcos went and, added Wolfowitz, the Philippines has worked ever since. This same success, continued Wolfowitz, is quite possible in the Islamic world and he cited Turkey as a case in point. The problem with that analogy is a simple one. In Turkey, it was a Turkish military regime that imposed the change. There is a degree to which people appear more ready to take enforced reform from within their own society or from groups within their own society. If enforced change is imposed from outside that society, it is far less acceptable. I certainly would not regard military intervention as in any way a first option. I actually feel that the United States has taken too much of a militaristic view of national power projection. They have under-invested in diplomatic advice; they have under-invested in positive economic intervention. I’ve heard it said that America can ‘take out’ fourteen other countries in the world. What happens then? Once a military solution is adopted, it is very difficult then to transition smoothly. Take Afghanistan as a case in point. From the 1930s through to the 1970s, even the Afghan monarchy found it quite difficult to maintain control of that country. How much harder is it for an alien force? From 1979 to 1988 the Soviets used 120 000 men and resorted to brutal methods and, even then, they weren’t able to subdue the country. Bombing cities such as Kandahar certainly didn’t help them gain control.

I think there are very few reasons for willingly engaging in conflict. There is much to be said for Bismarck’s comment, ‘the Balkans aren’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian Grenadier.’ Military power is strongest, most effective, when it is used very rarely. Military strength rests fundamentally not on the ability to beat others but on the ability to intimidate them. Intimidation is strongest when there is no risk that it will go wrong. The risk is higher if the level of involvement is greater. The danger is, as with the Americans in Iraq, that other people will draw lessons that you can be beaten or snubbed or humiliated. In fact the Americans in many respects have succeeded, as they have removed Saddam Hussein; they took a thousand casualties, put in a caretaker regime and, to a certain extent, they’ve succeeded in the long-term pattern of history. But in practical terms, they’ve failed: they’ve found themselves in a situation in which their power has not had the consequences that they wished and, to that extent, their ability to intimidate others has actually been partially compromised.

I believe there is a double naïveté about the Middle East. There is an American naïveté and there is a European naïveté. The European naïveté is that fundamentally, if only Israel didn’t behave in such a nasty fashion, there wouldn’t be a problem because the Arabs would be sympathetic to Israel and they could have limits and it would all work out. That’s naïve. There is an American naïveté which places the blame for global disorder at the door of international terrorism and refuses to believe that it has anything to do with the policies of the state of Israel in the Middle East. Both these views are naïve and both fail to understand that it is a much more volatile situation. The American idea of the draining of the swamp is a false analogy. In fact, what I actually think this does is to create environments in which there is likely to be even more trouble particularly because many of the centres of terrorism are based in allied states which are not under full control. One of the major centres of terrorism at the moment is Karachi. You’re not going to end terrorism in Karachi by bombing Islamabad. I think the notion that somehow we get rid of the rogue regimes and suddenly we create a better world is a deeply flawed approach to terrorism. Yes, we have to be robust toward terrorism, but I also personally think that the rules of engagement have to be changed and much of the war on terrorism should be handled not by the regular military but by Special Forces which operate outside the military. While this always represents a danger to the state, in a sense, the rules of engagement which affect military units are not ones which necessarily are most appropriate for dealing with terrorists. A country like Australia, which is a couple of islands, has the ability to control its borders. While border control is a fundamental defence against terrorism, it isn’t the only defence because a certain amount of terrorism is home-grown. Many people think of terrorism in terms of an Islamic threat. Terrorism itself is much more general than that; it isn’t always politically slanted, and it is part of the continuum in which sheer criminality and sheer psychotic behaviour are aspects of terrorism. We need anti-terrorist techniques when we’re up against organised movements. But we also have to be aware that terrorism per se can come from a whole series of causes and with some of those what you need is simply sophisticated policing. And for that, a technologically based military is of little use.