The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (13 page)

Instead, electronic togetherness hinges on our shared appetites—and a growing communal comfort factor. After it invaded Georgia, Russia’s oil buyers became upset. As did its own aristocratic grandees, who saw international capital flee Moscow.

European states worry about oil shortages should the U.S. bomb Iran; China worries about its vital American export market should it invade Taiwan. We need not assume that “soft power” and the potential loss of easy twenty-first-century consumerism will always prevent set battles. After all, in the past, such a belief that global interreliance would prevent ruinous battle was clearly erroneous. Norman Angells’s
The Great Illusion
(1909) argued that pre–First World War Europe simply had achieved too great an interdependence of financial credit, economic integration, and prosperity to throw it away on nihilistic warmaking. The Somme, Passchendale, and Verdun shortly followed.

Yet in a world in which an American can call his brother in the morning in Kenya, check his European 401(k) stocks over coffee, watch Japanese wrestling in the afternoon, and chat with Chinese Facebook friends in the evening, it is more difficult for a particular nation to marshal conventional forces, systematically seek out the enemy, encounter a like rival with similar hopes of success, and unleash a terrible fury of munitions—all under the instantaneous gaze of six billion. In the future, economic and cultural globalization increasingly may emulate old Roman imperium, becoming a superstructure that turns Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans into a one-world province.

We are not yet facing the “end of history,” with a final and total elimination of decisive set battles—and a united and harmonious world agreeing on the general protocols of globalized capitalism and consensual government. Armed struggles that at times result in horrific collisions of forces are as old as civilization itself, and a collective reflection of the constant and unchanging deep-seated elements in the human psyche. Tribalism, affinity for like kind, desire for honor, reckless exuberance—these expressions of our reptilian brains stay embedded within peoples.

The Return of Battle?

F
OR THE FORESEEABLE
future, we will remain in an age without decisive battle, in which bloody war is unlikely to be played out with swarms of Abrams tanks, rows of artillery pieces, a storm of F-22s and B-1s overhead, and hundreds of thousands of infantry soldiers advancing to mass carnage against a like-minded enemy. Yet will big battles haunt us once more?

Should the European Union dissolve and return to a twentieth-century landscape of rival proud nations, should the former Soviet republics form a collective resistance to an aggrandizing Russia similar to that in the nineteenth century, should the North Koreans, Pakistanis, or Chinese choose to gamble on an agenda of sudden aggression in the belief that a political objective could be obtained at a tolerable cost, then we may well see a return of decisive battles.

New Waterloos or Verduns may revisit us, especially if constant military innovation reduces the cost of war or relegates battle to the domain of massed waves of robotics and drones, or sees a sudden technological shift back to the defensive that would nullify the tyranny of present-day horrifically lethal munitions. New technology may make all sorts of deadly arms as accessible as iPods and more lethal than M-16s, while creating uniforms impervious to small-arms fire—and therefore making battle itself cheap, unpredictable, and thus once more to be tried.

Scenarios for battle’s return are endless. 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 in perpetuity in a glorious collective paradise—an apocalyptic vision that sometimes seems almost welcome in theocratic Iran—and therefore worth risk of a launching of ballistic missiles, then even the once unimaginable nuclear showdown becomes imaginable.

When the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modernist return of a Cannae or a Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before. In the words of Matthew Arnold,

We are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggles and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

CHAPTER 9

“Men Make a City, Not Walls
or Ships Empty of Men”

When high-tech is not always so high
*

Cycles of Military Innovation

I
F THE PRINCIPLES
of war stay the same across the centuries, one reason that we of the present age sometimes doubt such continuity is the recent radical change in military technology, especially given the twenty-first-century advances in informational science and its applications. We forget sometimes that transformation in arms has always been a hallmark of warfare, even if not as radical as what we have witnessed in the past half century. As a rule, militaries usually begin wars confident in their existing weapons and technology. But if they are to finish them successfully, it is often only by radically changing designs or finding entirely new ones. The Union military started the Civil War with muskets and cannonballs but ended it using bullet-firing repeating rifles and explosive artillery charges that were superior to those employed by the Confederacy. Ironclads, observation balloons, rubberized ponchos, canned meats, and elaborate telegraphic communications were birthed during the war—many of these inventions enriching peacetime America for decades.

In 1940 the five-year-old, continually improved B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was considered an indestructible aerial behemoth, the most radically innovative warplane in the history of aviation. By the end of 1945 even its huge replacement, the recently introduced B-29 Superfortress, was facing near obsolescence in the new era of rocket-armed jet fighters. Germany invaded Poland with armored columns spearheaded by Panzer Mark III tanks equipped with a 37mm gun. But by war’s end even beefed-up high-velocity 75mm and 76mm tank guns were overshadowed by 88mm cannon—and finally by even larger 122mm models.

During the five-year course of the Second World War, sonar, radar, ballistic missiles, and atomic bombs evolved from speculation to battlefield-proven, deadly reality. We entered the Vietnam War with the Second World War and Korean-era “dumb” bombs, and ended it with laser-guided aerial and antitank munitions.

Things have not been much different in the recent Iraq war. In March 2003 the United States attacked Saddam’s Iraq, confident in our superior Abrams tanks, GPS- and laser-guided aerial munitions, and fast-moving mechanized columns powered by Humvees and Bradley armored vehicles. Seven years later the U.S. military’s prewar land arsenal has been radically altered in reaction to Iraqi terrorists and insurgents.

As in all our prior wars, two kindred developments occurred. First, what was once considered adequate quickly proved ineffective. In a new war without identifiable fronts, light-skinned, troop-carrying Humvees were soon shredded by ever-larger roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Subsequent up-armored kits, with expensive electronic jamming devices, resulted in only marginally safer vehicles. The military then rushed in even more heavily armored Humvees. It was soon sending over Stryker and mine resistant, ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles, which use new defensive mechanisms such as deflector shields to thwart land mines—even as new Iranian-made shaped charges, with liquefying copper heads, show an ability to penetrate these vehicles.

Second, entirely new weapons systems appeared. We had experimented with drones for much of the 1990s, though they were never considered critical components of the military’s battlefield arsenal. But in Iraq—with its vast expanses, clear skies, open borders, nocturnal terrorists, and constant enemy mining of thousands of miles of roads—Predator and Predator B aerial drones, along with a variety of other pilotless airborne surveillance craft, suddenly became vital to monitor and kill once inaccessible terrorists.

The sheer excellence of large conventional American weapons systems—planes, ships, tanks—means few enemies now challenge them directly. Instead, the rope-a-dope insurgent tactic is to kill individuals in urban environments, often in an asymmetrical equation of investing many terrorist lives and little money to take out just a few Americans and millions of dollars of their supporting infrastructure. A ten-dollar IED might blow up a five-hundred-thousand-dollar robot, in the same fashion that a lone suicide bomber might blow up both himself and an affluent American who has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in his training, equipment, and education. So far American planners have not figured out a means of producing cheaper weapons that allow fewer casualties on the ground. In the present we are substituting money for lives, our enemies in contrast using lives in lieu of money.

General weapons parity—in rockets, small arms, body armor, computers, weapons manuals, and tactics—is easily obtained by private purchase from mail-order weapons outlets, just as instructions for making bombs and mines are freely downloaded off the Internet. The lethality of off-the-shelf modern weapons is enhanced in the protective landscape of urban warfare. An insurgent’s three-thousand-dollar Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG-7) need not match the sophistication of a superior model employed by a U.S. Marine to take down a twenty-million-dollar Apache helicopter hovering over an Iraqi apartment building—thereby allowing each dollar of jihadist military hardware to nullify $6,660 of American investment.

For now, this disturbing challenge from the Iraq War has no answer: In a globalized world of instant communications and easy commerce, how do we prevent ever-increasing enemies from acquiring sophisticated-enough weapons and tactical manuals at little cost to nullify our far larger investments quickly and cheaply? Western businesses—as they compete with manufacturers abroad that have lower costs, far fewer regulations, and far less concern about the morality and ecology of how they operate—may think they are immune from this existential military lesson. But the Iraq War also shows us why and how—with parasitic technologies, without care for international law, and with little regard for human life—our rivals are making weapons off the battlefield far more quickly and cheaply than we can respond to them.

So the question remains: Is there something about twenty-first-century military technology, both its lethality and its mass dissemination, that has altered the face of war altogether, that has posed challenges of a nature and an extent unseen before in the history of arms?

The Revolution in Military Affairs—and Its Discontents

I
N RECENT YEARS,
the phrase “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has come to be applied to the vast changes that computerized intelligence and globalization have brought to the conduct of war. This catchy sobriquet, however, is only a new name for something very old. In fact, radical transformations in military practice have marked Western history at least since Sparta and Athens squared off in the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century
B.C
, and the Greek world soon saw strange new flamethrowers belching compressed gases and ever more sophisticated use of stone ramparts.

Such RMAs are also the focus of recent books by two of our most accomplished commentators on military affairs: Frederick W. Kagan in
Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy
and Max Boot in
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today
. I should note at the outset that both of these scholars are wise enough not to be taken in by the notion that today’s technological breakthroughs in satellite communications, computers, and miniaturization have altered the nature of war itself rather than merely the present face of battle, much less that they can by themselves win wars outright. Both also share a keen interest in the contemporary “war against terrorism”—and in their articles (Kagan) and columns (Boot) have responded in similar ways to America’s purportedly erratic progress in the Iraq War.

Early and vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq, Kagan and Boot each became harshly critical of our postwar efforts at counterterrorism; each, furthermore, has at various times called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking generals in Baghdad. Such zeal is periodic in Boot’s work, more overt and constant in Kagan’s, but it informs their shared concern over a Pentagon leadership that has supposedly put too much reliance on high-tech weaponry and organizational principles borrowed from business, and thereby contributed to the growing fragility of America’s current position of military superiority.

Kagan’s book, more contemporary in its frame of reference than Boot’s, centers on three revolutions in the American military since the Vietnam War: the rise of the volunteer army with its high-tech equipment and weaponry, the appearance in the 1980s of precision-guided munitions, and the adoption of information technology. To Kagan’s mind, these are often welcome developments, and yet their consequences in policy have gone hand in hand with a decidedly unwelcome failure of American military and strategic thinking.

No country, he writes, has a more diverse and effective arsenal than America. At the same time, however, no nation is so bogged down fighting wars in a manner it would prefer not to. His bipartisan indictment fingers two recent culprits: Bill Clinton, who dismantled crucial elements of the Cold War military establishment, and George W. Bush, who, not understanding the larger political purposes of war, lacked the necessary vision to reap the advantage of the vast conventional power that was reconstituted under his leadership.

Kagan is scornful of faddish concepts like “network-centric warfare” and of the idea that the American military needs to embrace the spirit and the tactics of successful American corporations—downsizing, seeking greater efficiencies through new technologies and on-demand supply trains, and overwhelming rivals with pyrotechnics. In his view, all such cookie-cutter notions miss the point of how best to defeat multifarious enemies. Old-fashioned armored divisions with tanks and massive artillery, and their expensive manpower costs, may not achieve as much bang for the buck. But such men and materiel are often better suited to war’s proper aim: bringing about long-term political settlements favorable to the United States. In this case, “War is not just about killing people and blowing things up,” he writes. “It is purposeful violence to achieve a political goal.”

Of course, Afghanistan and Iraq are his object lessons. In both places, having put the military cart before the strategic horse, the United States easily toppled oppressive regimes only to find itself hard-pressed to replace them with something both lasting and better. To what advantage is all our high-tech weaponry, Kagan asks, if, after lightning-quick victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, our soldiers are still, years later, falling prey to crude improvised explosive devices and primitive suicide bombers? What is the purpose of having high-tech weaponry replace soldiers on the ground, if men, not machines, are necessary to enforce postwar order?

Kagan’s advice is that the U.S. military should undergo something of a counterrevolution. We need, he insists, not more gadgets but more human know-how. In practical terms, this means providing military officers with the resources and training—especially in cultural awareness and languages—that they need in order to serve as proconsuls in postwar landscapes. The victories of the future will be won and will endure, he argues, only when we have sufficient boots on the ground, filled by soldiers sophisticated in the ways of diverse enemies.

Max Boot’s
War Made New
is a rather different creature, both in its temporal scope and in its methodology. A universal history of military transformation since 1500, the book deals with four quite different upheavals: the gunpowder revolution that began in the late sixteenth century; the first industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century, which brought rapid communications, large-scale transportation, and the internal-combustion engine; the second and more radical industrial revolution in the early- and mid-twentieth century, which led to the mass production of sophisticated ships, planes, and tanks; and, finally, our own information revolution of satellites, computers, and instant wireless communications.

For each of his four eras, Boot provides graphic accounts of three representative battles and a chapter on “consequences.” His section on the second industrial revolution, for instance, opens with the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg in France before moving on to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and then the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. Throughout, Boot provides a vivid and engaging mix of historical narrative and analysis, showing the bloody real-world results of abstract decision making about the nature and degree of a country’s military preparedness. His twelve case studies, stretching from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the current situation in Iraq, point to a variety of disparate lessons, but, once again, also some themes that are surprisingly constant over time and space.

The most important of these is an old reminder that sheer numbers do not always ensure victory. In the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener’s redcoats defeated a Mahdi army that enjoyed as much as a three-to-one advantage in manpower over the English. As Boot argues, modern military success has depended less on bulk (or even firepower) than on the broader capacities possessed by nations that are “intellectually curious and technologically innovative.” The key to success is not just advanced weaponry that replaces manpower, but knowledge that utilizes sophisticated weapons in the proper strategic context.

The dynamism of imperial Britain gave Kitchener the expertise, organization, and capital to build a railroad across a bend in the Nile, thus enabling his expeditionary force to arrive near Khartoum intact, with plenty of artillery and machine guns and better supplied than its native adversaries. A similar intellectual dynamism, illustrated in another of Boot’s accounts, enabled the innovative Japanese navy to achieve its astonishing victory over the Russian fleet in 1905 in the battle of Tsushima. By the twentieth century, modern-looking regimes, often statist like Japan, were ostensibly best positioned to harness the natural resources and industrial labor demanded by modern warfare. They also appeared most adept at raising the mass-conscript armies that would distinguish the two world wars to come.