Modern Warfare
Yes, I'm Naming These After Community Episodes Now
The clash between innovative technologies and outmoded thinking is worse no war than in war. You would think we’d see the dead hand of history at work less here than in lower stakes fields like higher education or sports broadcasting. But it’s where we see it the most. This is so common that there’s a popular saying that countries always fight the last war. Why?
As mentioned before, if humans can invent a technology, we can find a way to kill with it. Which means our abilities to fight wars are constantly increasing both in means and methods. In fact, war often births an accelerated level of innovation. Much like in sports – which feature rapid on field innovation because there’s clear winners and losers – war does the same. Except it happens even quicker because the winners and losers are so much more important here. Yet, the people in charge of waging war are, well, people, meaning all the same biases we see when looking at those lower stakes fields are present here. Just with more disastrous consequences.
We Americans experienced this the hard way. During the Civil War started American commanders urged attack after attack. Which worked when soldiers used muskets. But along came the rifle and its combination of accuracy and distance meant attacks led to terrible slaughter. Again and again and again. And it’s not like there wasn’t warning. A quarter century earlier the Alamo defenders held off waves of attack while massively outnumbered because they were riflemen behind walls. And those were worse rifles. But American commanders were committed to the offensive. It had worked for Napoleon. It worked against Mexico. It was the honorable way to fight. So they attacked. And they died. Tens of thousands of men paid with their lives. They gave the last full measure of devotion not because their commanders could not accept that the world of war had changed.
But it gets worse. Unfortunately, Marx was wrong. When history repeated itself, it was not as farce but as unimaginable tragedy. A tragedy that is frankly unimaginable to us Americans except in fantasy.1 There’s no way that I – an at best average writer on the internet – can come close to expressing the human toll of this, so I’m just going to drop a lot of recommendations in a footnote.2 The worst part is that it was all predictable. Anyone who had paid attention to the advances of war could’ve seen that “attack rifles and machine guns behind fortifications” was mass murder, but the people calling the shots – pun intended to lighten the mood – chose not to. In lieu of thousands of words to explain why, it was basically cultural. Attacking was considered glorious, and right, and how wars were fought. Examples like the American Civil War were willfully ignored. Changing how soldiers were trained, how plans were made, and how doctrine was taught was too much. Instead, there was a focus on human will, red pants, and elan. And millions of men died for it. Millions.
Then the cycle started anew, with development of new weapons like tanks and planes. And although they weren’t decisive in the First World War, anyone who has ever seen a movie about the second knows what happens. But, again, not everyone pay attention. France3 spent $9 billion building the technological masterpiece of the Maginot Line, which was like buying Kodak stock in 1996. It was so devastatingly effective the Germans went around it. The Polish started the war by somehow doing cavalry charges. With horses! The Germans came close to conquering Europe partly because they understood the new ways of war. And of course, to stop all this came an even newer way of war.
At some point, humans – or our ancestors – learned to kill someone at a distance by throwing rocks. Now, we could destroy cities. War had irrevocably changed. Fighting the last war became impossible. Which shifted the question to, what is the next war? Well, after the bombs fell, this happened:
That got better. A lot better. Which raises the question: is the war of the future no war at all?
No, the answer to that is definitively no. One of my favorite fountains of predictions that are never true – Balaji Srinivasan – has claimed that drone technology will obviate human soldiers. This is, of course, false, although believed by a shockingly amount of otherwise intelligence people.4 This is wrong for the same reason most “disruption” predictions are wrong: the person making the prediction doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the rise of drone technology in warfare – as we’ll discuss later. It’s that his understanding of war is completely wrong.
[1] One of the only arguments I’ve ever gotten into with my criminally underfollowed Twitter account was with the usually perceptive AlicefromQueens about this.
This all drones future will never - and this is perhaps the strongest statement I’ll ever make here - ever happen. War is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, politics by other means. War predates humans, has always existed for us, and always will. The types of wars will change – they always do – but war with dead humans will continue so long as people want things they can’t get otherwise. Wars aren’t fought by technology, they’re fought by societies with technology to get what they want. During the withdrawal from Afghanistan you may have heard the Afghan proverb of “you have the watches, we have the time.” And that line explains how wars are won better than about anything else. They’re won by whomever wants it more. They’re won by the side that refuses to give up. One country may be able to use drones to level the other’s cities and ruin their infrastructure, but if those people don’t want to accept whatever the other side is trying to enforce, it won’t matter. It never has. Unless we return to the era of war being decided by single combat – which probably is mythical – we’re not going to see war without humans because if it’s worth fighting a war over, it’s worth dying for.
So if there will be war, what will they look like? Let’s throw one more chart in here:
The atomic bomb didn’t end warfare, it changed it. The era of major powers directly going to war with each other has been put on pause. But states without nuclear weapons still go to war. And nuclear powers still go to war with non-nuclear powers (that frequently turn into proxy wars). Which means that the next war will either be fought after our appetite for the risk of thermonuclear warfare continues to become greater – in which case this doesn’t matter and I’ll see you in hell – or we’ll continue to see this pattern repeat. Which for the great powers means wars that keep going horribly.5
And they keep going horribly because all those advances in means and methods hasn’t changed anything. Things like kill ratios and counterinsurgency tactics and ultra-advanced weapons systems don’t change the basics of “who wants to win more.” The Soviets created an amazing attack helicopter, what would’ve been a game changer in World War II, a war against NATO, or an episode of GI Joe. But a mujahideen fighter with a Stinger could blast it out of the sky. Four decades later and not much has changed.
For fist pumping American readers, remember, all glory is fleeting. We created the most impressive and expensive military in human history with the most advanced weapons and best trained and equipped soldiers. And they couldn’t defend against IEDs and ambushes in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan.6
If war is about who wants it more, and the weaker power already suffers a massive amount of devastation, a greater ability to kill by the big country isn’t going to change much. America went away from mass mobilization and forbid the type of journalism that brought the horrors of the Vietnam War home, but the price of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still became too much. Neither the Soviets nor Putin worry about the ballot box, but there’s a reason the Russian mobilization orders this week were so limited and still sparked protests. There’s a price that must be paid in warfare and if the people of one country find it too high, they won’t pay it. This is also the effect of nuclear weapons. For most of the last seventy years Americans and Russians may have wanted war with each other, but the price was higher than most wanted to pay. But, what if the real secret of drone technology is it could lower that price?
We’ve already integrated drones deeply into airpower. It’s had some success but it hasn’t been revolutionary. That isn’t surprising because – to flippantly engage in a contentious debate– air power is limited. So what if those stingers and IEDs weren’t sending American and Russian boys home in coffins, but just leaving parts on the battlefield? America, Russia, and China are already working on drone tanks. And although Russia’s usage of them has so far been disastrous, that’s also the word that best describes the debut of tanks during the Somme. That was little relief to the people of Europe 20 years later.
And although we’re not close to soldiers being replaced by robots, it’s no longer the stuff of sci fi. We won’t retread all of the drone ground, but military drones are certainly something the U.S. military, Chinese military, and Russian military are all working on. And although nothing here is in use now, I don’t want to let you down without some videos of the future.
These may all look incredible but imagine how incredible tanks and planes and missiles would’ve looked to Ulysses S. Grant. And you may think, based off the first thousand words about the dead hand of history controlling war, that the conclusion here will be that there will be tragic consequences because they won’t be used correctly because we always fight the last war. But what if we don’t? Or at least, we don’t anymore? What if the tragic consequences come from them being used correctly? Imagine Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan (either one), or Ukraine but with no dead Russian or American soldiers. Just destroyed machines. Is there enough internal pressure to end those wars? Probably not. The problem major powers have had has never been lethality. It’s been the price they pay for winning. If the price becomes just money and machines, who wants it more doesn’t matter much. Which means for the last 70 years we haven’t been fighting the last war. We’ve already been fighting the next war. We just hadn’t got there yet.
I do not mean this lyrically. The horrors Tolkien illustrated in The Lord of the Rings is influenced by his experiences in the Great War.
If you wish to read a book, I’d say Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace is an excellent – although exhaustive – work on the prelude to the war. John Keegan was wrong about a lot of things but his The First World War is an excellently written primer on the conflict. And of course, recommending Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August is like recommending someone listen to The Beatles. Literally 90% of novels and poems between 1918-1939 were about the war, but if you escaped school without reading All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms they’re quite good. Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” and John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” are the most accessible poems that express the horror. Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon podcast series is a fantastic – but superlong – overview of the war. And if you’re feeling a movie, I recommend Paths of Glory for a classic that will break your heart and 1917 if you wish to stay more modern.
It’s popular in the English speaking world to mock the French so I’m devoting a footnote to defending them. From 732 until 1917 I challenge anyone to name a superior European military. No English-speaking country has ever faced anything like what the French faced in WWI and only geography saved anyone from the blitzkrieg. It’s fun to mock the French but their military history is far superior to ours or the English.
One of the only arguments I’ve ever gotten into with my criminally underfollowed Twitter account was with the usually perceptive AlicefromQueens about this.
Not all of them. As we’ve seen in the Gulf War and the Russo-Georgian War, major powers can win wars quite easily if they have limited objectives.
Most of this looks at American and Soviet/Russian experiences because the post-1945 world has been dominated by asymmetric warfare. China hasn’t fought many wars as a great power, Germany and Japan have been understandably quiet post-WWII, and the French and British experiences are similar enough not to add much but length. What civil wars or peer wars of the future will look like is probably similar to Nagorno-Karabakh where drones will provide an advantage - but not decisive - one to whomever possesses them.
As usual, a fascinating piece filled with stuff I hadn't thought about before. In those videos of Tokyo and Hiroshima, I was reminded of a family myth that may be truer than I realized (I need to talk to one of my cousins who lives in N.I. but regularly travels Europe; he's a history teacher): my great grandfather was rescued by the French underground and smuggled back to Britain. He went to his sister's home (they had evacuated) and fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, the house he was in was the only one left standing on the street.
A Tour de Force.
I'm reading a massive biography of Churchill now who is more thought about by the general population for WWII then WWI.
He participated in the last major cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. When he was head of the Navy, he initiated balloons off ships at the beginning of WWI so sort of created aircraft carriers. And found the $$ for tank development. And then, of course the bomb in 1945. Reading his letters and essays about planning for war and contracts for oil and how he thought of the people he sent to Antwerp and the Dardanelles is a more focused look at your grand sweep.