The 5th and final excerpt from War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot:
Technological advance will not change the essential nature of war. Fighting will never be an antiseptic engineering exercise. It will always be a bloody business subject to chance and uncertainty in which the will of one nation (or sub-national group) will be pitted against another, and the winner will be the one that can inflict more punishment and absorb more punishment than the other side. But the way punishment gets inflicted has been changing for 500 years and it will continue to change in strange and unpredictable ways.
In assessing the future conduct of conflict, most analysts tend to fall into one of two camps. One group stresses the dangers of terrorists and guerrillas who use cheap, simple weapons like AK-47s, machetes, or explosives. Another group stresses the danger of high-tech weapons such as cruise missiles and killer satellites proliferating around the world and into the hands of states such as China and North Korea. The former school (associated with ground-combat arms) stresses the need for better warriors; the latter school (associated with air and naval forces), the need for better machines. The reality is that both high-intensity and low-intensity threats are real and that both more superlative people and first-rate equipment are needed to counter them. Michael Evans of the Royal Military College of Australia offers sage advice when he writes: “In a dangerous and unpredictable world, military professionals and their political masters must … be ready to tame the big wildcats and not simply the vicious rodents, to be able to fight troops like Iraq’s former Republican Guard as well as Taliban, al-Qa’ida militia, and terrorists.”
Today, the U.S. is much further along in figuring out how to tame the Republican Guard than Al Qaeda, and it needs to place more emphasis on making up for its deficiencies in irregular warfare rather than simply enhancing its already substantial lead in conventional warfare. While the Information Revolution has decreased the number of weapons and soldiers needed to defeat a conventional adversary, occupation duty and nation-building—the prerequisites for turning a battlefield triumph into a long-term political victory–continue to demand lots of old-fashioned infantry. Therefore, the U.S. and its allies would be making a mistake if they were to seriously stint on force size in order to procure more high-tech systems.
But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. can simply ignore the dangers of major warfighting or the dictates of technological change. That was the mistake Britain made before 1914 and again before 1939. The British had the world’s best “small war” force—an army well-trained and equipped for fighting bandits and guerrillas—but it was ludicrously insufficient to deter German aggression or to defeat Germany once a world war broke out. That mistake, symbolized by deficiencies in tanks and aircraft carriers, hastened the end of the Pax Britannica.
Today, the possibility of conventional inter-state war is lower than at any time in 500 years, but it has not disappeared altogether. Because Americans and other citizens of Western democracies no longer seem willing to suffer the same level of casualties experienced by their ancestors, their armed forces must be able to defeat adversaries at scant cost in lives. That argues for keeping the qualitative edge that the U.S. gained in the Information Age–an edge that cannot be preserved by standing still. It will be necessary to keep innovating since, as previously indicated, some of the technologies and techniques employed by the U.S. are starting to be negated by their dissemination around the world. Innovation must be organizational as much as technological, and it needs to focus on potential threats across the entire spectrum, from low-intensity guerrilla wars to high-intensity conventional conflicts.
In any case, the boundaries between “conventional” and “unconventional,” “regular” and “irregular” warfare are blurring. Even non-state groups are increasingly gaining access to the kinds of weapons—from missiles and landmines to chemicals and perhaps even atomic bombs—that were once the exclusive preserve of states. And even states will increasingly turn to unconventional strategies to blunt the impact of American power.
Two colonels of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army envision “unrestricted warfare” encompassing not only traditional force-on-force encounters but also financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes, tsunamis, or other disasters). In a clever bit of ju-jitsu, many of these strategies turn the strengths of Information Age countries against them. Al Qaeda is pursuing similar strategies.
Countering such threats will require much more than simply buying more advanced aircraft, tanks, or submarines. Such traditional weapons systems may be almost entirely useless against adversaries clever enough to avoid presenting obvious targets for precision-guided munitions. To fight and win the wars of the future—wars that may more closely resemble a series of terrorist attacks or hit-and-run raids than traditional force-on-force armored, aerial, or naval engagements–will require reorganizing conventional militaries to emphasize such skills as cultural awareness, foreign language knowledge, information operations, civil affairs, and human intelligence. It will also require cutting away the bureaucratic fat to turn bloated Industrial Age hierarchies into lean Information Age networks capable of utilizing the full potential of high-tech weapons and highly-trained soldiers.
Whether the U.S. is ready for such challenges will determine whether it can keep its position as the lone superpower or whether the world will see another power shift of the kind that accompanied the Gunpowder Revolution, the First Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the early stages of the Information Revolution. The course of future history will turn on the outcome.