THE FUTURE OF WARFARE: Stephen Fidler on the new importance of diplomacy, reconstruction and minimal force
By STEPHEN FIDLER
For much of the 1990s, the US defence department looked to the future using a framework that it called the revolution in military affairs.
Fresh from an easy victory against Iraq in 1991, American military thinkers concluded that the future of warfare would have the US dominating what it called the "battlespace" through information and communication systems, using technology to launch precision attacks on targets from afar with the help of superiority in the air. Armies could travel light, protected by firepower from the air and from artillery deep behind the lines. An enemy's military could be destroyed without undue bloodshed.
In retrospect, the limitations of that vision of the future are plain, as quickly became obvious on September 11, 2001. During the first Gulf war - as Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London, points out in a new paper* - it was as if Saddam Hussein had organised his forces in such a way as to show the US-led campaign to its best advantage. "Because the Gulf war was so one sided, it displayed the potential of modern military systems in a most flattering light," he writes.
It meant that when US-led forces went into Iraq in 2003, their commanders had committed the error of generals down the ages. They easily toppled the degraded government in Baghdad but they were not ready to tackle the insurgency that the invasion spawned.
According to Eliot Cohen and John Gooch**: "The (US) military studied its past as a set of morality plays, the failures of the Vietnam set against the successes of the first Gulf war." This simplified narrative meant that the US defence establishment set itself up to forget much of what it had known about fighting insurgencies.
In another recent book, the retired British general Rupert Smith*** explains the gradual shift from industrial war - exemplified by the second world war - to what he calls "war among the people".
That means more than the arrival of mass casualty terrorism and of conflict that is increasingly likely to take place in population centres. It means that victory can only be won through changing minds. Unlike industrial war, such conflicts are not won through the maximisation of force, but often through the judicious assertion of minimal force. Victory here is rarely achieved through military force alone but has to be gained in combination with "soft power" tools such as diplomacy and reconstruction.
Thomas Hammes, a US Marine colonel, argues**** that the US obsession with technological advance "simply disregard(s) any action taken by an intelligent, creative opponent to negate our technology". The assumption has been that the US commander would be in charge of almost perfect contemporaneous information that his enemy could not match. But, he says, as US forces are now organised in a "ponderous, hierarchical bureaucracy", that will not happen. Yet while conflict in the early 21st century appears to be dominated by insurgencies, the prospect for interstate war has not disappeared. Iran and, further into the future, China, seem possible state adversaries for the US. Richard Cobbold, a retired real admiral who heads the Royal United Service Institute in London, points out that this presents a dilemma for governments that cannot afford two armed forces.
On China, he says the US should follow President Dwight Eisenhower's dictum not to fight a land war on the Asian mainland. Much of China's modernising forces are aimed at fighting on the mainland, or keeping US forces at a distance. But the US, he suggests, should not fight the kind of war its opponents expect or want: it should use understanding of networks, of chaos theory, to develop its own ability to wage what he calls "fourth generation" warfare.
There are significant consequences for security budgets as "homeland security" spending rises sharply. There are obvious implications too for "platforms" used by the west's armed forces. There appear to be too many fighter aircraft, too few military transport aircraft and too few helicopters. The importance of the infantry appears to have been underestimated - the US is once again expanding its army and the Marines. A rapidly changing strategic environment also means procurement needs an overhaul.
In his book, Gen Smith emphasises what may be the most important point of all: the absolute requirement for leaders contemplating war to analyse whether the use of the military tool will achieve its strategic objectives. In the UK, for example, the run-up to the Iraq war was marked by a necessary debate about the morality of using military force but the separate and critical discussion over whether the use of force would succeed in achieving its ends was entirely absent.
Indeed, there is a danger in shaping armed forces as a "force for good" - as a 2003 white paper suggested Britain's should be. "The extent to which western interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Iraq did not end instability, but merely changed its form, is instructive," writes Jeremy Black, history professor at Exeter University. **** "Such interventions may well make the world more difficult."
* The Transformation of Strategic Affairs by Lawrence Freedman. International Institute of Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper 379
** Military Misfortunes by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch. Free Press
*** The Utility of Force by Rupert Smith. Penguin **** The Sling and the Stone by Thomas X. Hammes. Zenith Press
***** The Dotted Red Line by Jeremy Black. The Social Affairs Unit
