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4/26/00 11:30 a.m.
At Arms
Has warfare changed beyond all recognition?

By Eliot A. Cohen, contributing editor of National Review, from NR's January 24, 2000 issue

t is an odd irony that one of the last wars in this, perhaps man’s bloodiest century, was fought in a cockpit of perhaps its bloodiest continent, Europe, with fewer military casualties than civilian ones, and, indeed, on one side no combat casualties at all. That war was, of course, the conflict in Kosovo. Serbia, the source and locus of repeated wars even before the World War of 1914-18, had seen horrific slaughter in the first half of the century, as its young (and old) men went off to do battle with Turks, Austrians, Bulgarians, Italians, and Germans, as well as one another. They had done so in uniformed masses and serried ranks, carrying rifles and under the covering fire of artillery barrages.

By and large, Serbia fought its wars as Europeans had fought them since the middle of the 19th century — as conscript warriors in mass armies. Yet Serbia succumbed, in the Kosovo war, to a kind of military power too fantastic to imagine in 1900, in which aircraft barely visible to the naked eye dropped bombs or fired missiles so exquisitely precise that they were aimed at — and succeeded in hitting — particular windows on selected floors of high-rise buildings; in which bridges crumpled up and electrical power grids dissolved in a shower of sparks; and in which commanders, buried deep in bunkers, had to fear the arrival of a bomb that could count the slabs of concrete it had penetrated before exploding next to them.

Has warfare changed beyond all recognition? Certainly, the kind of war that the United States fought in Kosovo begins to exemplify what the cognoscenti call “the revolution in military affairs,” or RMA. This bit of technical shorthand refers primarily to two technological developments in combat: the power of instantly available, networked information, and the pervasiveness of precision firepower. Satellites beaming fresh pictures of targets to pilots in jet aircraft, tanks communicating their locations to computerized command posts, generals peering remotely over the shoulders of company commanders through the cameras of orbiting unmanned aircraft—these are all phenomena of today, not the military dreams of tomorrow. This is a style of warfare that is, in some respects, unstoppable. It is a form in which the United States leads all others, because of the sheer size and sophistication of the American defense establishment — aided by a budget larger than that of the next four powers combined — and the amazing vigor of its information-driven economy.

The revolution-in-military-affairs militaries have at least two characteristics other than the technological wizardry of sensors, missiles, and networks. They are, increasingly, professional. The mass army, which dominated military organizations from the French Revolution on, disappeared in the United States in the 1970s, and in Europe twenty years later. Around the world, even armies with growing budgets and substantial security threats are deliberately shrinking themselves. Conscription, which shaped domestic politics as well as war, has come under pressure as a military institution; even the French, who invented the draft in its modern form, have abandoned it. The demise of the draft, and with it the mass army, has occurred because the rise of technological quality has, at last, trumped quantity. Thirty years ago, if an American officer had been offered a hypothetical choice between commanding a battalion of fifty American tanks or a division of three hundred of their Iraqi counterparts in a fair fight, he would, at least, have hesitated; today the choice would be no choice at all, so great is the discrepancy in the quality of the weapons of war and the men who wield them. The American battalion would slice the Iraqi division to bits.

The decline of conscription poses great challenges to armed forces whose self-understanding rests upon the draft, and to societies in which conscription has helped define citizenship and manhood alike. Israel is the major case in point. Even in countries like the United States, however, the transition from a mass-army mentality is not quite complete, as witness the difficult relations between the U.S. Army and the National Guard, or the ponderousness of the Army’s requirements for conducting expeditionary operations abroad.

An even deeper challenge is posed by the second great characteristic of the RMA militaries: their extraordinary sensitivity to casualties. For many and subtle reasons, these organizations are unwilling to take the kinds of losses in routine military operations that were common only thirty or forty years ago. A single death in combat looks like a lapse in military leadership or skill; a dozen appear a national scandal; several hundred are a catastrophe. It is not clear that this sensitivity arises from society (after all, elites increasingly view soldiers the way they view police officers and firefighters — as worthy people paid to go into harm’s way) so much as from the military itself. But whatever its cause, this reluctance to lose men (and women) in military operations is pervasive and sometimes crippling, and it affects Australians and Israelis as much as it does Americans.

In this and other respects, then, the RMA militaries and their way of war have distinct weaknesses, which may be exploited by wily opponents. For it is not the case that the rise of the new military has created such a preponderance of might on the side of the United States and its allies that war has become too difficult to look attractive. Some countries, such as China, will attempt to carve off pieces of the revolution in military affairs for their own purposes — in the case of China, by developing large missile forces that can hold at bay the casualty-averse Americans while intimidating and coercing a country like Taiwan. More broadly, the older form of warfare — the mass-army way of war — still persists in some parts of the world, particularly those in which the United States is not expected to intervene. The current Russian onslaught in Chechnya, in all of its horror and brute force, represents the old way of war at its cruelest. The barely noticed but bloody border struggles of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the war in central Africa, the infantry and artillery battles in Kashmir, or the only somewhat more visible contests of Croats and Serbs, have been of this type. This was the kind of war that Saddam Hussein expected when he awaited the American onslaught in 1991: a bloody grapple in the mud, in which an edge in weapons or numbers would count for only so much, and victory might well go to the man least willing to concede defeat. But the mass-army way of war is on the way out.

Far more durable is a different kind of war: the virtual war of weapons of mass destruction that sets the conditions for, and defines the limits of, real conflict. Saddam’s scramble for biological and nuclear weapons even (or rather, particularly) after the Gulf War reflects his belief that the ownership of such devices may buy some protection from both the unlimited struggle of the twentieth century’s world wars and the attentions of high-technology opponents. The attractiveness of weapons of mass destruction has grown as the development of RMA militaries makes conventional conflict look less appealing.

What the rules of the game will be when this kind of conflict becomes real, however, we do not know. There have been two substantial wars between nuclear powers: the barely known border fighting between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, and the Kargil war of 1999 between India and Pakistan. There may be others before too long. Eventually, the odds would suggest, someone will use biological or nuclear weapons (chemicals are not really weapons of mass destruction, having geographically limited effects) in anger. At that point, the rules of the third major kind of war — mass-destruction war — will change, in ways perhaps too difficult to anticipate. It is, however, safe to predict that new kinds of mobilization for war will occur, as societies hurry to create defenses against the more obvious forms of attack. The logic of preemption will almost surely take hold, and attacks on an opponent’s leadership, in hopes of paralyzing its ability to strike, will be accepted.

There is yet a fourth kind of war that will continue to stalk the planet early in the next millennium. One may call it, in the words of a character in The Centurions, Jean Lartéguy’s superb novel about the French war in Algeria, “termite war.” It is the murky war of the guerrilla and terrorist, the kind waged with such success by men as different as the Taliban, the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and Somali warlords. It is the kind of war that RMA militaries abhor, because their technical advantage appears far less useful than it does against the plodding armies of traditional mass-warfare states, and because in such wars a trickle of casualties is unavoidable.

The potential of termite war has grown with the spread of some quite simple technologies — very effective high explosives, cheap automatic weapons, and antitank or antiaircraft missiles — and with the ease of international travel and communications. It has fatally undermined states as diverse as Colombia and Afghanistan, and it represents a threat against which there are very few successful counters. America’s withdrawal from Somalia, the first Russian retreat from Chechnya, Britain’s opening of peace talks with representatives of the IRA, Israel’s announced willingness to withdraw unilaterally from southern Lebanon — all represented the triumph of termite war. To be sure, in such wars many of the tactical victories go to the more sophisticated side, and the costs borne by the hapless populations in whose midst the wars take place, and on whose behalf the guerrilla-terrorists nominally fight, are enormous. But barring massive, prolonged, and harsh military responses (the Turks against the Kurds are a good example), the termites seem to have the edge. Paradoxically, against such opponents, the bludgeon of the mass army may serve better, if more brutally, than the rapier of the RMA military.

Thus, four kinds of conflict — RMA high tech, the waning mass-army battle, weapon-of-mass-destruction war, and termite struggle — will persist into the next century. But to what end? Clausewitz, the greatest thinker on war, insisted that the most important aspect of any war is its politics. If that is so, what will men fight about in the next century?

Clearly, some kinds of purposes are on the way out, much like some of the forms of warfare themselves. Secular messianic ideologies (Communism and Fascism) will no longer feed war, as they did from 1918 through at least the Vietnam War. Neither will the great national rivalries of Western Europe, which nearly led to the suicide of that great civilization in the first half of the century. Similarly, the complex struggles that brought to an end the European colonial order are well and truly over. Wars of state-building may still occur, but not in the environment of contest between West and East, or between an imperial past and a future of multiple sovereignties.

Nationalism is altogether more durable as a motivation for struggle, but the end of the mass army will make wars of national ambition different than in the past; they will be a kind of giant spectator sport, conducted not by masses of draftees and reservists shuffling off, arms swinging, to the front, but by national champions (one might almost say, combat stars and celebrities) in the forms of pilots and commandos. The kind of sacrifice and effort that lit national conflagrations will no longer exist; nationalist bellicosity, then, may come and go, flaming up in spurts, rather than lighting a fierce, near-inextinguishable burning.

Thucydides’ explanation of the causes of war — fear, interest, and honor — will continue to hold, although they will take different forms than in the past. By the middle of the 19th century it had already become difficult to imagine war as merely a knob by which cold-eyed aristocratic statesmen adjusted the workings of that intricate mechanism of international politics, the balance of power. By the 21st century it is inconceivable. Fear of the great powers will, no doubt, persist, and one can well imagine some states wishing to see others reduced in vigor by a judicious letting of blood. But overt warfare among the great powers will be a rare event. This may owe less to the general progress of mankind than to the dominance of the United States and its liberal democratic allies, who are likely neither to fight one another nor to exercise such a tyranny over other states as to elicit a violent response. Other kinds of fear will persist, however, particularly if states or non-state actors actually use weapons of mass destruction. Statesmen acting less from an abstract fear of the expansion of hostile military power than from anxiety about the ghastly consequences of its use, may provoke small-scale conflicts that, though not dignified by the name of war, will nonetheless yield a harvest of destruction and death.

Interest, in the sense of ambition for gain, seems least plausible as a motive for war. There will be exceptions, of course, particularly when it comes to natural resources such as oil and natural gas in the Persian Gulf, or, possibly, in Central and Southeast Asia. Still, national gain will, by and large, be measured by economic growth, and neither raw materials nor extent of national territory nor even, necessarily, numbers of subjects count as the raw ingredients of power in the ways they once did.

Which leaves honor, the most durable, as Donald Kagan has reminded us, of the motives for war. There we have a source of conflict that may well grow over time. The understandably prickly national self-esteem of states on the way down or on the way up (Russia and China, most notably) has already led to some wild threats, and even some wild deeds. The plausibility of autonomy on the part of ethnic and religious groups — and the quest for independence is, in some measure, a claim on regard and esteem — has grown, as the state system has continued to add new members, while the dominance of the great states would appear to have diminished. The Information Age causes accidents and insults (the unintentional U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Kosovo being a particularly acute example) to be magnified at home and abroad. Pride, self-regard, and self-assertion are all likely to increase now that the icefield that was the Cold War international system has melted.

In this last observation lies a great danger. The end of the Cold War led many to think that war was, finally, on its way to obsolescence as an international institution. It is not. It has shifted locales and means, styles and modes, but it has not gone away. And if fear and pride more than interest will motivate states and non-states to use violence to pursue their ends, there is cause for worry. The fearful and the proud, far more than the coldly calculating and conniving, are likely to stumble into wars out of stubbornness, or misunderstanding, or sheer willfulness, surprising themselves and others as they do. The wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, which so much shaped this last century, had hung in dark clouds over world politics for years before the storms broke. In the next century, the storms may seem to come out of cloudless skies, in fairest weather.

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