At War

“Marlborough has left for the war” is one of the most popular folk songs in the French and Spanish languages. English speakers will immediately recognize the tune in the well-known song “for he is a jolly good fellow.” It is the burlesque lament on the presumed death of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, in the battle of Malplaquet in 1709. Today’s Marlborough leaves for a new type of war –uncertain, and confused to the point that the word itself loses its meaning. This note seeks to take a peek into the future of armed conflict in the 21st century.When Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001, it hit two targets of the three seemingly intended: Wall Street and The Pentagon (it also aimed possibly at the Capitol Building or the White House). In doing so, however, the non-state organization hit neither nerve nor muscle, but symbol and fat. As Michel Foucault said many years ago, power does not reside in institutions with a fixed address, but in networks and relations. It did succeed, however, in shocking the world with a bloody and spectacular publicity stunt, and it managed to bait the most powerful nation into declaring a “war on terror” which distorted the meaning of the first noun beyond recognition.

Blinded by the sneak attack, the United States reacted like the giant Polyphemus when wily Odysseus and his itinerant crew struck him. It embarked upon a conventional war of choice against the wrong target: a dilapidated third-rate power that soon morphed into a protracted site of unconventional violence. Unprepared for the latter, the occupying nation managed it so poorly that in the end the largest power on earth jeopardized the armed forces, lost prestige, and drained the treasury. Several hundred thousand troops in rotation, “network-centric” warfare with space-age technology, pilotless aircraft, precision-guided munitions, and a budget upwards of 400 billion dollars have had a hard time managing 20 to 30 thousand insurgents armed with simple or improvised lethal devices, who choose where to strike and how.

The 9/11 attack and its aftermath –especially the fiasco of Iraq– forced into the open a realization that had been gaining ground among serious military analysts and historians, but which had remained largely hidden from the public in developed societies –namely that the classical notions of strategy taught for generations in military schools were woefully inadequate to deal with the realities of 21st century conflicts.

War, as we have come to know it in the period between 1648 and 1945, is ever more manifestly an obsolescent institution. Others more capable than I have analyzed this evolution or involution into near-extinction.1 As is often the case with declining institutions, its specific defeasance is marked by the abusive extension of the word to cover metaphorically very different phenomena. We have had a war on drugs, a war on poverty, and of course, the war on terror. We may soon add to the list of guerres du jour a war on economic depression. The targets are the windmills of Don Quixote.

At the same time, both rich and developing nations insist in procuring weapons systems that are exquisite, expensive, and largely useless, and in maintaining military establishments whose main role in the “low-intensity” conflicts that rage around the world is that of “observers” and “peace keepers”, impotent before civil wars, insurgencies, ethnic cleansings, and genocides.

Non-state actors wage war against each other and against organized states. As the cities of New York, Madrid, and London know, these actors are no longer kept at the gate of the “civilized.” Like other global networks like Nabisco or Mitsubishi, they too no longer respect borders, civilian/military distinctions, or transcendent symbols.

There is therefore a serious disconnect between the new challenges and the conventional responses. Most defense establishments are beholden to the realities and the ideas of yesteryear while violent conflicts of a different kind multiply like maggots in the bodies of failed or weakening states. Do these conflicts merit the label of “war?” One is hesitant to employ the word after it has been subjected to so much abuse. However, we may keep it if we also keep in mind at least the following features: (1) it is organized violence waged by non-state actors, (2) it confounds civilian and military distinctions, (3) it is global (it knows neither physical nor symbolic borders), and (4), it is more expressive than instrumental (more an end than a means). Before this reality, the world of Realpolitik, –a bunch of nation-states claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence over fixed territories and fighting over their respectively perceived interests– must adapt both adequately and fast, or it will sink into irrelevance. This is easier said than done. The old aggregates persist; military-industrial complexes are hard to reform and redirect. Above all, mindsets are hard to change.

And yet, a window for reform is now opening with the global economic crisis. After years of unfettered growth in military budgets, not only in the extant superpower –the United States– but also in China and in resurgent Russia, as well as in aspiring regional powers (whose military ambitions are often fueled by petro-dollars) the sharp global economic downturn will have a serious impact on weapons procurement. In the United States alone, the Pentagon’s annual base budget for standard operations has reached half a trillion dollars, the highest since World War II. And this excludes investment in new weapons. The question is no longer whether large defense budgets will break the bank, but how to manage military expenses after the bank is broke. And behind these queries looms the biggest question of all: What will be the role of war preparedness in the large public works programs that will be needed to jump start stalled economies?

Across the military services, meetings behind closed doors are devoted to figuring out where and how to cut spending. Therefore this is a moment of rare candor in the military establishments about the scope and nature of warfare in the 21st century. Nothing like a serious crisis to focus the strategic mind. Beyond the dilemma of cutting here or there, muscle or fat, the more important issue is how to redesign and redirect the whole expenditure effort, so that it is more rational and useful and less inertial and useless.

At the moment, the most likely targets for cuts are likely to be the expensive, super-sophisticated arms programs that constitute the theoretical pride of a super-power. Given my argument before, this is all for the good. Weapons systems are to our societies what pyramids were to the Egyptians. In the United States, some of these programs have had cost overruns estimated in the hundreds of billions. As a result, in the US Congressional watchdog offices are poised to reduce spending for advanced combat systems, and such jewels of the arsenal as the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy’s latest-designed destroyers, and the very missile defense system that has soured relations between the U.S. and the Russian Federation. The time has arrived to ask what purpose do these weapons systems serve, and even whether they have any manifest purpose at all.

The other big ticket in military expense, also outside the budget for standard operations (the Bush administration has accomplished the unique feat of keeping two ongoing wars out of the regular budget), is the “supplemental” spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is running in excess of $100 billion a year. The central fact about these wars is that, despite the enormous resources thrown at them, they never have come near to what even remotely could be defined as “victory” for the powers that wage it. Contrary to politicians back home, no responsible commander in the field uses the term. The asymmetry between expense and “payoff” also prompts doubts, in these times, about the functionality, sense, and purpose of war, as we have known it through the ages. In short, both high-tech in the skies and boots on the ground do not seem to do the job they are supposed to do.

What therefore is to be done? The first job is to recognize that the challenges are complicated –a puzzle of pre-modern violence and post-modern networks. The second job is to acknowledge that all military establishments –and preeminently that of the extant superpower—are not equipped for the task. The Pentagon does not have enough troops and equipment to remain in Iraq and fight in Afghanistan, let alone to face additional crises elsewhere, should they break out. If 685 billion dollars (the budget for 2008) cannot do it, what will? Having other nations –actual and potential allies—add their resources to the pot will not help: their combined defense budgets are smaller than the American budget. One cannot keep feeding a dinosaur.

It is clear that it is not an issue of resources but of design. The third job therefore is to rebuild and reshape the military establishments to face elusive enemies and disparate dangers, which morph like retroviruses. As Ulrich Beck has proposed(2), we are in a global risk society and no longer exclusively in a system of states. What remains of the latter is itself evolving with the emergence of regional powers such as China, Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil; with the instability –and therefore unpredictability- of other significant nations like Pakistan and North Korea (significant insofar as they have a limited nuclear capability); and finally with a number of failed or failing smaller states. NATO and the United States must device a strategy to deter, contain, and co-opt these state actors. Conventional wars, and even a nuclear one, make yet break out in the rimland of the system of states1. In this geopolitical fault line containment and deterrence are essential, aggression and confrontation a mistake. The one lesson of Iraq is that pre-emptive wars of choice are likely to turn into strategic disasters, because they breed a different type of challenge, namely insurgencies, where the odds of “winning” are low. Moreover preemptive doctrines set a dangerous precedent: if one state launches one such war, others will feel equally entitled. That is a sure path to Armageddon. If Iraq has taught something it is this: nation busting followed by (usually botched) nation building is putting the cart before the horse. Here strategic retreat and increased diplomacy will be required. Paradoxical as it may sound, such strategic retreat will result in the regrouping, repair, retraining, and enlargement of ground forces.

The biggest challenge is of a different order, though related to the evolving system of states. It has appeared in its crevices and will continue to grow. It is by no means new, but has acquired a new significance. It goes by the names of irregular warfare, insurgency, or the far less apt one of “terror.” As Martin Van Creveld has observed, manuals on counter-insurgency fill entire libraries, but most should be discarded, for the simple reason that they have been written by the losing side. To date there is no silver bullet in this type of war: the two or three success stories since 1945 are very context-specific and disallow sweeping generalizations. The lessons learned are somewhat modest and few. Moreover, they are at opposite poles of the spectrum: from swift and brutal suppression to slow and patient reconciliation. One thing is clear however: this kind of warfare has as much to do with intelligence gathering, police operations, and social science understanding (from anthropology to economics and political sociology) than with killing the enemy.

What we are likely to see in the near future is the interpenetration of military and civilian programs, and the militarization of foreign aid and poverty reduction –in the words of the president of the World Bank “bringing security and development together.” Given the financial crisis and the ensuing deep recession that has engulfed the world, homeland and international security will be the mantle under which new public works projects will be undertaken. Just as war preparedness was the public works projects that finally pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, so will an updated type of war preparedness help pull the globalized economy of our times out of the doldrums. But it will not be mass industrial production for a titanic combat –Rosie the Riveter helping produce 100,000 combat planes a year– but a different sort of mobilization, aimed at conflict prevention, poverty reduction, and the propping of failed states. Just as the Pentagon will become partially a development agency, so will civil society (thousands of civilian experts and volunteers) be summoned to collaborate in the containment of new wars. These will include economists, public administrators, public health experts, agronomists, city planners, social anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists. And just as there will be a certain “civilianization” of the armed forces, so will there be new agencies like the proposed Civilian Reserve Corps.

The new Pentagon and its counterparts elsewhere will focus less on classic war toys (like blue water fighting vessels, aerial combat fighters that play war games with each other for lack of serious enemies, or untested missile defense systems) and more on coastal, transport, and lift capacity to deploy huge quantities of armed personnel and equipment from one emergency in a corner of the world to another. Other nations will join in a secondary and support capacity, including the United Nations. The Americans will provide the muscle for heavy lifting; the others the softer power of skills and expert assistance.

War will be with us until the end of time, largely because it is an ultimate human game for which there are no real substitutes. But its shape has changed enormously. Classic “trinitarian” war(4) is dead; titanic world wars have passed; doomsday thermonuclear exchange is over. The wars that will remain are the following: occasional conventional wars in the rimland; potentially a regional nuclear exchange; here and there localized insurgencies in failed states; and last but not least terrorist attacks urbi et orbi, poising networks of organized states against networks of non-state subversives. The price to be paid for defense in these wars is ever more intrusive surveillance of civil societies with the ensuing paradox: the more “developed” the more subject to surveillance. In these new guises war will continue to stalk humanity, and peace will be, as always, its elusive antinomy.

Peace has no heroes. In extremis it produces martyrs. The original meaning of this term (Greek μάρτυς) placed it at the opposite pole of combat: not to bear arms, but to bear witness. A great many charismatic figures that have advocated peace met a violent end. It was perhaps the cruelty of their denouement that helped preserve their memory. The social movements that followed the nonviolent example of those charismatic types have interpreted the latter’s tragic demise as an act of sacrifice. But such sanctification by blood brings them back full circle to their archetypical nemesis: the warriors.

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Notes: 1) Notably Martin Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War. Lessons of Combat, from the Marne to Iraq, New York: Presidio Press, 2006. 2) Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity. Trans. from the German by Mark Ritter, and with an Introduction by Scott Lash and Brian Wynne. London: Sage Publications, 1992 [originally publ. 1986]. 3) The strip of coastal land that it encircles Eurasia. Classic geostrategists like Mackinder and Spykman debated its importance. 4) This is war as defined by Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, and redefined by Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New York: The Free Press, 1991.

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