By Bronwen Maddox
Western countries should be careful about starting wars because they are not very good at stopping them. And Donald Rumsfeld was wrong in thinking that armies could get smaller and lighter, freed of their traditional burdens by satellite surveillance and better missiles.
These are some of the conclusions in The Military Balance 2007, the annual tome on 170 countries’ military strength from the International Institute for Strategic Studies. For the most part it is a compendium of who has what, but it points out that counting kit and soldiers is a less useful guide to predicting outcomes now than during the Cold War. Instead, it allows itself an enjoyable time demonstrating the victory of practice over theory in the West’s recent military endeavours.
The stunt that the IISS, one of London’s most influential think-tanks, also performs obligingly when it summons an audience is to predict how long it might be before Iran gets a nuclear bomb. At least two to three years, John Chipman, its director, said yesterday. That is the answer it has given for each of the past three years; it is reassuring that every year the threatening date is just as far in the future. The reason given by the IISS is that Iran has not yet mastered the assembly, on an industrial scale, of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
That is plausible. It is presumably underpinned by a study that the IISS says it will publish in April on the nuclear black market and the activities of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who singlehandedly (if his Government is to be believed) supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea with nuclear expertise.
The IISS performs a public service in going where British think-tanks usually fear to tread and making predictions that may be proved wrong. We have to hope that its views of the Iranian threat fare better than its 2002 “dossier” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — cited heavily by the Government in its justification for military action — which was authoritative and detailed, and soon proved wrong comprehensively.
Iran and the diplomacy of trying to curb proliferation are at the heart of this report. It is not that the world is getting less military, that defence spending is shrinking or that armed forces are becoming smaller (although there are exceptions, and the report notes the budget constraints that will follow the ageing of Western societies).
But Iraq has, understandably, shaken the faith of the United States in the use of the half a trillion dollars it spends a year on defence. Iraq and Afghanistan are challenging old assumptions about what can be achieved by military means when political co-operation is poor and the neighbours unhelpful (answer: not much).
For democracies, that loss of confidence, more than the often-surmised lack of public tolerance for casualties, may make it harder to go to war. Not so countries with authoritarian governments; the IISS, by plunging into the intricate task of estimating the Chinese and Russian defence budgets, suggests their reluctance to cut back on this domain despite obvious rival claims to funds.
“Don’t overreact”, is the institute’s advice to America after China’s provocative display of power in space, shooting down one of its own satellites. That may be the coda for this volume, which catalogues the world’s impressive stockpile of military hardware, and the uncertain result of putting it to use.
