Tomorrow's Wars
Enormous, massively destructive engagements may again be on the
horizon.
"Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western
way of war?" Two decades ago, I concluded The Western Way of
War with that question. Since Western warfare had become so
lethal and included the specter of nuclear escalation, I thought
it doubtful that two Western states could any longer wage large
head-to-head conventional battles. A decade earlier, John Keegan,
in his classic The Face of Battle, had similarly suggested
that it would be hard for modern European states to engage in
infantry slugfests like the Battle of the Somme. "The suspicion
grows," Keegan argued of a new cohort of affluent and leisured
European youth – rebellious in spirit and reluctant to give
over the good life to mass conscription – "that battle has
already abolished itself."
Events of the last half-century seem to have confirmed the notion
that decisive battles between two large, highly trained,
sophisticated Westernized armies, whether on land or on sea, have
become increasingly rare. Pentagon war planners now talk more
about counterinsurgency training, winning the hearts and minds of
civilian populations, and smart interrogation techniques
– and less about old-fashioned, blow-'em-up
hardware (like, say, the F-22 Raptor) that proves so advantageous
in fighting conventional set battles. But does this mean that the
big battle is indeed on its way to extinction?
Big battles sometimes changed entire conflicts in a matter of
hours, altering politics and the fate of millions. It is with
history's big battles, not the more common dirty war or
insurgency, that we associate radical changes of fortune as well
as war poetry, commemoration, and, for good or ill, the martial
notions of glory and honor. Had the Greeks lost their fleet at
Holy Salamis in 480BC, instead of beating back the
Persian invaders, the history of the polis might well have come
to an end, and with it a vulnerable Western civilization in its
infancy. Had the Confederates broken the Union lines at
Gettysburg and swept behind Washington, Abraham Lincoln would
have faced enormous pressure to settle the Civil War according to
the status quo ante bellum. If the band of brothers had
been repulsed at Normandy Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944,
it is difficult to imagine that they would have reattempted an
enormous amphibious invasion soon after – but easy instead
to envision a victorious Red Army eventually camped on the
Atlantic Coast and occupying Western Europe.
Yet set engagements, it's important to note, have never been the
norm in warfare. The 27-year-long Peloponnesian War saw only two
major ground engagements, at Delium (424BC) and Mantinea (418BC),
and a few smaller infantry clashes, at Solygeia and outside
Syracuse. In the asymmetrical struggle between Athenian naval
power and premier Spartan infantry, the most common kinds of
fighting were hit-and-run attacks, terrorism, sieges, constant
ravaging of agriculture, and sea and amphibious assaults. True,
during the murderous Roman Civil War (49-31BC), frequent and
savage battles at Actium and elsewhere claimed more than a
quarter-million Roman lives. Yet after the creation of the
Principate by the new emperor, Augustus, much of the
Mediterranean world was relatively united and free of frequent
major battles for nearly half a millennium. And after the fall of
the Roman Empire, for most of the Middle Ages, sieges and
low-intensity conflict were more common than major engagements
such as Poitiers (732), Hattin (1187), and Crécy (1346).
In fact, the course of military history has been strikingly
cyclical. The eminent military historian Russell Weigley once
described an Age of Battles – a uniquely
destructive two centuries of pitched warfare between Gustavus
Adolphus's victory at Breitenfeld (1631) and Napoleon's defeat at
Waterloo (1815) – in which European armies of multifarious
rivals, often in vain, sought to decide entire wars in a few
hours of head-to-head fighting. That age ended with the
agreements following the Congress of Vienna, which (along with
military deterrence) kept a general peace in Europe for nearly a
century. Set battles were common only in colonial theaters (Tel
el Kebir, Omdurman), in Asia (Tsushima), and in the Americas (the
decisive battles of the Mexican, Spanish-American, and American
civil wars).
Then, during the first half of the twentieth century, came
another Age of Battles, with the First and Second World
Wars witnessing the most destructive fighting in the history of
arms. The details of Iwo Jima, Kursk, Marne, Meuse-Argonne,
Okinawa, Passchendaele, the Somme, Stalingrad, and Verdun still
chill the reader. Asia saw horrors of its own: most Westerners
know little about the Huaihai campaign (late 1948-49), in which
the Nationalist Chinese lost an entire army of 600,000 to the
Communists in mostly conventional fighting.
Today, the world is clearly enjoying another respite from huge
set battles. Except for the daring American landing at Inchon
(September 1950) and the subsequent first liberation of Seoul,
few battles of the last seven decades resembled the Battle of the
Bulge. Far more common in the past half-century have been the
asymmetrical wars between large Westernized militaries and
poorer, less organized terrorists, insurgents, and pirates. The
list of theaters where conventional forces have battled
guerrillas is long: Afghanistan, Grozny, Iraq, Kashmir,
Mogadishu, the Somali coast. Seldom does an indigenous force dare
to come out in the open, marshal its resources, and test head-on
the firepower and discipline of a Westernized force. History's
record on that score – from Tenochtitlán to Omdurman
– is not encouraging for those who try.
Those who have successfully attacked the United States – in
Lebanon (1983), at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996), at
America's East African embassies (1999), on the USS Cole (2000),
and in New York and Washington in 2001 – did so as
terrorists. If nation-states sponsored such radical Islamist
groups, they nearly always denied culpability, avoiding an
all-out conventional war with the United States that they would
inevitably lose – as the brief rout of the Taliban in
Afghanistan demonstrated in 2001.
Amid the murderous fighting between well-organized armies during
the Vietnam War, North Vietnam as a matter of practice did not
attempt to engage Western forces in formal set engagements. (The
sieges at Khe Sanh and, earlier, against the French at Dien Bien
Phu proved the exceptions rather than the rule and were
themselves not traditional collisions of infantry.) In its failed
attempt in the 1980s to take over Afghanistan, the Soviet army
may have killed more than one million Afghans without once
engaging in a set collision with tens of thousands of jihadists.
We still do not know all the gory details of the Iran-Iraq war
(1980-89), in which more than one million combatants and
civilians perished. But despite the carnage that characterized
that war, set engagements, out in the open, between two massed
armies were not a major part of the conflict, so far as we know.
Even the Mother of All Battles in the 1991 Gulf War was
largely a rout. The tank battle at Medina Ridge involved hundreds
of armored vehicles but lasted little more than an hour –
the Americans suffering neither casualties from enemy fire nor a
single Abrams tank destroyed, while obliterating 186 Iraqi tanks.
Today, few Americans even know what Medina Ridge was. In other
engagements, most of Saddam's army disintegrated rather than
fight advancing American armor – as was commonly the case
again during the three-week war of 2003.
Some decisive fighting took place between British and Argentinean
units during the Falklands War of 1982, but on a minuscule scale
compared with the twentieth century's bloody engagements. Tank
battles raged in the Golan Heights during both the Six-Day War
(1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973). For a few days, also in
1973, the Israelis and the Egyptian Third Army fought each other
openly in the desert expanses of the Sinai Peninsula. But the far
more usual pattern of the inconclusive Israeli-Arab conflict has
been terrorism, intifadas, bombings, and missile strikes.
Why does decisive battle wax and wane in frequency, and why has
it become rarer again? The political landscape certainly explains
much. Empire of any sort can lessen the incidence of warfare.
Unified, central political control transforms the usual ethnic,
tribal, racial, and religious strife into more internal and less
violent rivalries for state representation and influence. Once
Philip unified Greece under a Macedonian hegemony after Chaeronea
(338BC), set battles between city-states, so common earlier in
the fourth century BC, became a rarity. For now, anyway, the
European Union lacks the interstate rivalry that plunged Europe
into murderous battles for much of the first half of the
twentieth century.
When the world is divided into larger blocs that have sizable,
competent conventional forces – such as the Soviet and
American spheres during the Cold War – confrontation can
potentially turn catastrophic, given the vast resources available
to each side. Yet it's also possible that in such a bipolar
world, battling along nationalist lines, among a variety of state
players, will be less frequent. No nation of the Warsaw Pact
fought the Soviet Republic; American allies like Iran did not
threaten American allies like Israel; Tito and Yugoslavian
Communism for a time kept Bosnians, Croats, Kosovars,
Macedonians, and Serbs from killing one another.
In the present age, many of the most powerful economies in the
world are united under the loose rubric the West, which
includes some former nations of the British Empire (Australia,
Canada, New Zealand), the transatlantic NATO alliance (most of
the European Union and the United States), and democratic nations
of the Pacific (Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan),
along with miscellaneous allies, capitalist and democratic, such
as India and Israel. At present, there is virtually no likelihood
that we will see decisive battles between any of these similarly
minded democratic states, even though a mere seventy years ago,
when consensual government was less widespread among them, most
of them squared off in various temporary alliances against one
another in terrible engagements.
Technology also helps explain the current decline in conventional
battles. The battlefield can now be seen and mapped to the
smallest pebble through aerial photography, often by unmanned
drones that update pictures second by second. Surprise is rare.
Potential combatants know the odds in advance. They can use the
Internet to download the most minute information about their
adversaries. Generals can see streaming video of prebattle
preparations and calculate, to some degree, the subsequent cost.
Uncertainty and the unknown were often essential to the outbreak
of decisive battles, since each opposing force usually felt it
had some chance of operational success. Had the British enjoyed
satellite reconnaissance of the German lines in the days before
and during the Somme, they might have curtailed their suicidal
assaults. Had the Americans possessed live streaming video of
Japanese forces fortifying bunkers on Okinawa, they might not
have chosen to assault the Shuri Line frontally. Pickett's Charge
up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg was predicated on an erroneous
assumption that there was an especially weak spot in the Union's
line – a conjecture that General Robert E. Lee would have
easily corrected if he'd had a Predator drone at his disposal.
Weaponry is not static. It resides within a constant
challenge-and-response cycle between offense and defense, armor
and arms, surveillance and secrecy. Body armor may soon advance
to the point of offering, if only for a brief period, protection
against the bullet, which centuries ago rendered chain and plate
mail useless. The satellite killer may render the satellite
nonoperational. Sophisticated electronic jamming may force down
the aerial drone. Yet for now, the arts of information-gathering
about an enemy trump his ability to maintain secrecy, thus
lessening the chance that thousands of soldiers will be willing
to march off to massive battle.
The cost of today's military technology, too, renders big battles
more unlikely. To wage a single decisive battle between tens of
thousands of combatants along the lines of a Gaugamela (331BC;
Battle of Arbela) or a Verdun (1916) would cost hundreds of
billions of dollars, a figure far beyond the resources of most
belligerents. A single B-1 bomber on patrol overhead represents a
$1 billion investment. Abrams tanks go for over $4 million. A
single cruise missile can cost over $1 million. One GPS-guided
artillery shell may cost $150,000; one artillery platform could
expend over $10 million in ordnance in a few hours. Even a
soldier's M-4 assault rifle runs well over $1,000. The result is
that very few states can afford to outfit an army of, say,
100,000 infantry, supported by high-tech air, naval, and
artillery fire – much less keep it well supplied for the
duration of battle. Even in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when weapons
were cheap compared with today's models, both Egypt and Israel
needed massive amounts of new weaponry from the Soviet Union and
the United States shortly after the commencement of fighting.
Globalization – accelerated by technology – is
another reason that decisive battles are uncommon today. Instant
cell-phoning and text-messaging, the Internet, access to DVDs,
and satellite television have created a world culture that
depends on uninterrupted communications. It frowns on massive
disruptions in airline flights, banking, and the easy importation
of consumer goods. Electronic togetherness hinges on our shared
appetites – and a growing communal comfort factor. When
Russia invaded Georgia, its oil buyers became upset. So did its
own aristocratic grandees, who saw international capital flee
Moscow. European states worry about oil shortages, should the
U.S. bomb Iran; China frets about its vital American export
market, should it invade Taiwan.
Finally, changing mores have changed military tactics. The
current ascendant belief in the West that war is unnatural,
preventable, and the result of rational grievances – that
it can, with proper training and education, be eliminated –
has probably made battle less tenable among the general public.
The bombing of fleeing Iraqi bandit brigades from Kuwait on the
so-called Highway of Death in the first Gulf War was
halted by popular outrage because of the televised carnage. The
abhorrent images of death on millions of television screens
easily trumped the argument that the enemy, who had just
committed rapine in Kuwait, should be punished – or
preempted, since he was likely to regroup in Iraq to slaughter
Kurdish and Shiite innocents again. Russia's shelling and
destruction of Grozny escaped world condemnation only because a
news blackout ensured that Westerners saw little of mass death.
We shouldn't assume, though, that these various forces will
always prevent set battles. Similar predictions have proved wrong
before. In 1909, Norman Angell's The Great Illusion argued
that Europe had achieved too great an interdependence of
financial credit, economic integration, and prosperity to throw
it all away on nihilistic warmaking. The Somme, Passchendaele,
and Verdun shortly followed.
Human beings remain emotional, irrational, and guided by
intangible calculations, such as honor and fear, that
collectively can induce them into self-destructive behavior.
Armed struggles that at times result in horrific collisions are
as old as civilization itself and are a collective reflection of
deep-seated elements within the human psyche – tribalism,
affinity for like kind, reckless exuberance – that are
constant and unchanging. We are not at the end of
history.
Can big battles, then, haunt us once more? If the European Union
were to dissolve and return to a twentieth-century landscape of
proud rivals, or if the former Soviet republics were to form a
collective resistance to an aggrandizing Russia (as they did for
much of the nineteenth century), or if the North Koreans,
Pakistanis, or Chinese were to gamble on an agenda of sudden
aggression (as they have on previous occasions when they were
confident of achieving political objectives), then we might well
see a return of decisive battles. The U.S. military still
prepares for all sorts of conventional challenges. We keep
thousands of tanks and artillery pieces in constant readiness,
along with close-ground support missiles and planes, in fear that
the People's Army of Korea might try to swarm across the
Demilitarized Zone into Seoul, or that the Chinese Red Army might
storm the beaches of Taiwan.
Waterloos or Verduns may revisit us, especially in the
half-century ahead, in which constant military innovation may
reduce the cost of war, or relegate battle to the domain of
massed waves of robots and drones, or see a sudden technological
shift back to the defensive that would nullify the tyranny of
today's incredibly destructive munitions. New technology may make
all sorts of deadly arms as cheap as iPods, and more lethal than
M-16s, while creating shirts and coats impervious to small-arms
fire – and therefore making battle cheap again, uncertain,
and once more to be tried. Should a few reckless states feel that
nuclear war in an age of antiballistic missiles might be
winnable, or that the consequences of mass death might be offset
by perpetuity spent in a glorious collective paradise, then even
the seemingly unimaginable – nuclear showdown –
becomes imaginable.
In short, if the conducive political, economic, and cultural
requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically
over the centuries, we will see our own modern version of a
Cannae (216BC) or Shiloh (1862). And these collisions will be
frightening as never before.
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