What will future wars look like? This was the question that occupied scientists and futurologists in the 1960s. The most frequent answer was that future wars would be waged on a global scale by superpowers using ultrasophisticated weapons.
In the 1970s the advent of detente reduced the prospect of a global thermonuclear war being unleashed as a deliberate policy move. But even then the possibility of an accidental war could not be ruled out.
The chief theoretician of the global war concept was Robert McNamara, who served as the United States’ defense secretary for a record seven years. To prevent a global nuclear duel he developed the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” known by its acronym MAD which in English means crazy. MAD meant that any power that initiated a nuclear attack would ensure its own destruction as a result of retaliatory action by the aggressed country.
The events of the 20 years that followed MAD showed that the concept of a global war had been wrong right from the start. Far from preparing for future wars the concept had answered a question that had arisen at the end of World War II. Had MAD been in place in 1939 Hitler would almost certainly not initiated the moves that plunged the world into conflict for five years.
Generals and military strategists have often failed to guess the nature and shape of future wars.
In the 1930s the French high command developed the Maginot Line doctrine that answered the problem France had faced in 1870.
In 1967 the Arab states neighboring Israel were prepared to fight the 1948 war.
In the 1970s the Americans failed to win the Vietnam War because they were fighting in the style they had used against the Japanese in the 1940s.
The 1990s showed that even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been unable to prepare for the real wars that struck the European continent. For half a century NATO had prepared to fight a thermonuclear war.
In 1990 the principal NATO powers were forced to fight a conventional war in the Gulf to liberate Kuwait. The Iraqi Army for its part had prepared to re-fight the 1980s war against Iran. It had dug deep and massed an impressive amount of armor while keeping it chemical weapons as a trump card. Within days, however, its entire strategy was lost alongside with the Iraqi Air Force.
By the mid-1990s NATO found itself hunting war criminals in Bosnia, disarming guerrillas in Macedonia, and escorting children to school in Kosovo.
Sun-Tzu, probably the world’s first strategist, noted the changing nature of war more than 2000 years ago. He observed that those who invest heavily in preparing for any one form of war are bound to be defeated when faced with a different form of war.
Sun-Tzu’s German heir Clausewitz observed further that those who prepare for a war that they think they know well have already lost.
The key question, therefore, is flexibility.
With the rapid pace of technological change, compounding equally fast changes in political and economic fields, reliance on any one-track analysis of the military threat could prove costly if not suicidal for almost any nation.
History shows that most nations have lagged behind in coping with new forms of warfare. The Persians were strong when it came to fighting on land and conquered the world’s first biggest empire.
But it took them almost two centuries, and several defeats, to understand that war could also be waged at sea. The British political elite opposed the creation of an air force for much of the 1920s, paying the heavy price of the Battle of Britain in 1940. Even then many strategists believed that “the bomber will always get through”, and dismissed the development of radar as a technological gimmick. France began developing armored units, and new types of tanks, only after World War II.
Many developing nations have repeated the errors of the industrialized powers, albeit in their own way.
Between 1975 and 1995 Indonesia was the biggest importer of arms in the Third World. But the sophisticated equipment it purchased proved of little use in East Timor or Aceh or against rioters in Jakarta.
In the past decade or so Iran has invested heavily in missiles of all type. But the Iranian obsession with missiles may prove self-defeating once new anti-missile weapons are developed and deployed in the region within the next few years.
Which brings us to the “anti-missile shield” proposed by President George W. Bush. The topic will be top of the agenda at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, next month.
The Bush argument is simple: If a country is attacked from land, sea and air it has some means of defending itself. But what about ballistic attack through space?
But is the US preparing for a form of war that may be outdated by the time the new weapons are in place?
It is too early to tell. But attention is already focusing on a new and potentially deadlier theater of war: The cyberspace.
A recent study shows that cyber war, waged through computers, could cause more material damage and kill many more people than any form of conventional war in an equal period of time.
During the past decade or so thousands of skirmishes have taken place in the cyberspace, revealing the vulnerability of modern economies. What we have witnessed so far, however, may well be child’s play compared to the deadly possibilities of full-scale global cyber war.
In the meantime the so-called developing countries continue to buy yesterday’s weapons and prepare for the wars of the day before yesterday.
