A Moveable Maginot Line?

If they can hurt us, and we can't hurt them .....

Military-strategic power is not existential. It is only of any value if it can help you achieve your political objectives: in other words, if you can actually make effective use of it. It’s become clear that current western military capabilities are increasingly irrelevant to the West’s stated political goals, and probably to its long-term interests. From what we can deduce from Ukraine, however, the Russians have been developing the tools to give them potential strategic dominance in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere.

Any political entity is a system for exerting control over a defined space. That space can be as small as a city or a village, or it can be as large as a country with different time-zones, or even an empire. This control comes in different types and can be exerted to different degrees in different places, to the point that there are parts of the world today where the political system’s power and control over places distant from the capital is pretty much hypothetical. Historically, when different political entities wanted the same type of control over the same space, there was political, economic and sometimes even military conflict. And it was not unusual for a given space to be subject to different types and degrees of control, from different sources, all at the same time.

Power, as I have argued before, is relative, not absolute. In a particular case, it may actually only be available to you in a form which is not useful, or at least not decisive. As with the game of scissors, stone, paper, the power you have created, and the choices you have made, have to be appropriate to the situation. Britain’s worldwide imperial network and powerful fleet, for example, were of limited value in trying to prevent Russian expansion into Central Asia and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are now at a stage in world history when the very complex calculus of political, economic and military power and control of space is changing, but not in a single, simple direction. Here, I’ll try to set out what I think is actually happening in the military-strategic area, without presuming to say where I think we will necessarily wind up.

First, we have to let go of Realist-type ideas of power as something we can measure on a scale. A country with two hundred tanks is not twice as powerful with a country with one hundred. My GDP may be twice yours, but that doesn’t mean you are only half as powerful as me. The root meaning of “power," if you go back far enough, is “the ability to do something.” If you can’t do what you want to do, it doesn’t matter how notionally powerful you may be according to some measurement dreamt up by think-tanks. Clausewitz, remember, defined war as “an act of violence to force an enemy to do what we want.” If you don’t actually succeed in getting what you want, then the amount of death and destruction you are capable of inflicting is irrelevant. If what you want is simply not possible, or if your enemy is in no position to give it to you, it doesn’t matter how much notional power you have.

Back at the dawn of the present century, there was a simple-minded belief that one country—the United States—possessed absolute power in every domain, or something close to it. Politicians and pundits engaged in competitive self-abasement rituals at the feet of the Hyper-power, as it was then common to call the United States. The idea got around that the US was all-knowing and all-powerful, and that if you made a rude remark about that country on your Facebook page, you could be targeted by a drone, or something.

Now to be fair, US government and military personnel, or at least the ones I came across, never really believed this. They were well aware of the limits of power, and the practical difficulties of exercising it. But in spite of the debacle of Iraq and the catastrophe of Afghanistan, the notion of the US as a military hyper-power  persisted, and many pundits seem to have been genuinely surprised that the US was clearly unable to intervene militarily in the Ukraine conflict.

It comes back to the issue of the kind of power you have, and whether it’s relevant. As I argued recently, the West as a whole no longer enjoys the easy economic dominance it once did, and this is a long-term strategic problem with massive military and political consequences, but with no obvious solution. Beyond that, though, the way that military power itself has been used in the world in the last few decades has given us a view of its nature which is completely lopsided, and historically marginal. Consider: in Afghanistan and in Iraq after 2004, but also in Mali and in Syria, First World militaries have used high-technology platforms combined with intelligence assets and light ground-forces, to fight irregular, religiously motivated, indigenous opponents that operated in small groups, blending in with the civilian population. By any standards, this was a type of warfare extremely rare in history, and the product of very specific conjunctions of circumstances. In this case, it’s fair to say that, even if the US was not successful in such conflicts, it was still able to bring considerably more resources to bear on them than any other single country. For an entire generation of western military officers, this is what war was, and their weapons, doctrine and tactics were developed accordingly. This is also why western military officers, whether serving or retired, seem to have so much trouble understanding what is going on in Ukraine, let alone who is winning.

Recent western operations, from the attack on Serbia in 1999 onwards, may fairly be described as “aggressive," or more politely “expeditionary” operations. The enemy who was being forced (we hoped) to do what we wanted was a long way away. It was a government, one side in a civil war, a rebel faction, or something similar. War was something we did to them, over there, with minimal to no consequences for us. This was the kind of war that western militaries planned, trained and exercised for. We were not being attacked, except perhaps in some existential, normative sense that we ourselves identified.

As I have previously suggested, whilst we define war as soccer, the Russians have always defined it as rugby. With their history as a land power, and their tradition of mass armoured operations supported by lots and lots of artillery, it would be surprising if their vision of warfare had much in common with that of the West. But for that matter, neither does their strategy. No western power has had its borders threatened since the end of the Cold War, and in most cases since the end of World War 2. It’s not simply that the Russians will never forget that war—how could they?—it’s that the nature of their geography, the size of the country and its almost limitless supply of raw materials, has put them on the defensive for centuries. And since the 1930s, the answer to this recurrent threat has been a doctrine that is strategically defensive, but operationally and tactically offensive. Better to go to the enemy than have the enemy come to you.

Most people with a nodding acquaintance with military history know about the centuries-long struggle between offence and defence, at all levels from the individual soldier to the entire war-making capabilities of a state. I want to suggest that some of these balances are changing, in important and not necessarily obvious ways, with profound political consequences for the future.

I would argue that the essential balance to consider is the one between the cost and performance of weapons platforms on the one hand, and the cost and ease of destroying them on the other. (Note that this is not the usual comparison of platforms with each other.) Consider the horse, probably the ultimate platform in history, after the development of the stirrup. The horse enabled mobility, force projection, transport, logistics, communications and intelligence gathering, as well as being a platform for different types of weapons. Together with a mounted knight, it was a shock-weapon that could overcome most obstacles, and could be protected against most forms of attack. It also required no maintenance, spare parts or fuel beyond food, which is why horses were still being used in World War 2. If the worst came to the worst, you could always kill and eat them.

But it had weaknesses as well. Horses had to be specially bred and trained for war, and equipped with expensive armour. Knights had to be specially trained in military skills from boyhood, and their supply was accordingly limited. Defenders could and did do unsporting things like forcing cavalry to charge over broken or waterlogged ground, uphill, or into wooden spikes driven in the ground. Cavalry that could not actually force the defenders to flee tended to mill around uselessly and were vulnerable to close-range attack. What did for cavalry finally was less the bow-and-arrow, because armour technology was increasingly developing counters to it, but rather the invention of the musket. Musketeers were relatively quick and cheap to train by comparison with archers, and armour was incapable of defending against the projectiles: cavalry’s status never recovered.

Other platforms have come and gone. The battleship was the super-weapon of a century ago; able to roam the world, command the oceans and deliver firepower anywhere within perhaps 20-30 kilometres of a coastline. But battleships were also fantastically expensive to build and maintain, and it became clear early in WW2 that relatively cheap and simple aircraft with torpedoes could pose an unacceptable threat to them. No more were laid down after the end of the War. Aircraft carriers replaced them to some extent as the new capital ships, and enabled force projection at very long distance: not just aircraft, but helicopters, ground troops, communications, command and control, intelligence gathering  and even humanitarian aid. But whilst carriers always had protective air cover, they were becoming increasingly vulnerable to submarine attack. The real challenge to carriers, though, is relatively cheap long-range missiles, many of which can be launched from the land. This means, for example, that the US Navy will be unable to participate in any war between China and Taiwan, simply because its carriers will be unacceptably vulnerable. Carriers can be attacked much more easily and cheaply than they can be protected.

And finally, and importantly for this argument, most manned aircraft may be going the same way. By the end of World War 2, it was already becoming expensive and time-consuming to manufacture heavy bombers, and even more to train the crews. Interceptors and anti-aircraft artillery were much simpler and cheaper, although at that stage they were only moderately effective. With every generation of modern combat aircraft, were has been a jump in costs, complexity, maintenance problems and training time. A typical current-generation combat aircraft (multi-role to save money) will be eye-wateringly expensive, bought in small numbers, difficult and temperamental to operate, and impossible to replace during any foreseeable conflict. The air forces of western states now consist of historically very small numbers of aircraft, which would be destroyed in a few days of peer-level intensive combat, and take years to replace if indeed that were possible. And much of that destruction would be by missiles, including those directed against air bases.

Air forces, as any pilot will admit, can’t win wars by themselves, and can’t take and hold ground. Their purpose is first to control the air, and then to carry out ground attack operations against the enemy. But as Ukraine is showing, a combination of missiles and drones can do this much more cheaply, and that will have a massive impact on land operations. Land warfare itself has seen successive swings between the ease and cost of attacking, and that of defending. The small armies of seven or eight hundred years ago could only control the immediate area through which they were moving. To control terrain, you needed to construct forts, which land powers with vulnerable borders did for many hundreds of years. The French engineer Vauban constructed a dozen highly-sophisticated fortification systems around the borders of the country under Louis XIV, to protect against invasion from land or sea. In the 1930s, the French built the Maginot Line, which protected the most vulnerable part of the frontier from direct German attack, and enabled the bulk of French forces to be deployed further North, in the Ardennes and on the border with Belgium. The construction of the Line in turn reflected the strategically defensive posture of the French: they had no geographical objectives to fight for, and in any future war the Germans could be expected to be the attackers, as was indeed the case.

There was a brief period around the end of the 1930s and the start of World War 2 when it seemed that the advantage had shifted to the attacker. Coordinated attacks by tanks and aircraft, widespread use of radio, and the avoidance of direct combat in favour of dislocating enemy command systems through deep penetration, were tactics that had no obvious counter-measures at the time. Yet this changed, with the deployment of rocket-carrying aircraft and man-portable anti-tank weapons. The development of special armours in the 1970s made tanks more survivable, but it didn’t make them invulnerable, and they have now become hugely expensive, complex and sophisticated machines requiring enormous technical support. Tank charges have gone the way of the cavalry charges on which they were modelled, and the use of tanks today (as in Ukraine for example), acknowledges the power of the defence.

But in the end, this is not an issue of technical military capability, no matter how absorbing that may be to military geeks. It really doesn’t matter too much, in the end, how good the centre-forward is, if his opponent is a prop-forward. It’s ultimately a question of cost-effectiveness, almost of economics. Control of the air, primarily by missiles, now makes an attack on Russia or on areas it regards as within its zone of influence effectively impossible. Moreover, the current Russian lead in long-range, highly accurate missile technology puts western capitals within range of conventional missile bombardment, with no obvious way of preventing it. In such a situation, highly expensive air superiority aircraft are of no use, and ground-attack aircraft cannot fly. Sophisticated aircraft carriers and missile-carrying ships, whatever their other virtues, cannot greatly influence ground combat hundreds of kilometres away. And ground forces would be operating under a crippling disadvantage.

Which means that any conventional attack on Russia wield be so costly as to be self defeating. But it also means one more thing. The Russians are working to expand the range and accuracy of their conventional missiles, and most of them are now mobile, unlike the missiles of the past. From Minsk, it’s about a thousand kilometres to targets in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. Between them, the S-500 air defence system now being deployed, and various long-range air-to-air missiles under development, could bring air traffic across most of Eastern and Central Europe to a standstill. And because much of this missile screen is mobile, it actually turns into an offensive weapon: a mobile castle, if you like, or the Maginot Line on wheels. Any future Russian government that wanted to take back the Baltics could so with an assurance that it would have air superiority, and that its own territory would be protected.

It’s possible, of course, that the West could itself begin a crash programme of missile development, including the deployment of a layered, continent-wide missile defence system: something that NATO has already spent two decades trying to organise without much success. Perhaps lots of money could also be poured into development of long-range, highly accurate missiles with conventional warheads, as a deterrent. Perhaps the necessary design and production skills and the facilities and skilled personnel for large-scale production can be brought into existence quickly. Or perhaps not.

None of this, of course, is to say that Russian technology is flawless, that planned developments will necessarily succeed completely, nor that, over time, some of Russia’s relative advantage may not disappear. But geography dictates a lot, and for the foreseeable future Russia will have a security cordon around its borders, and the ability to deny an enemy the ability to attack, except at enormous cost. Europe (and to a degree the US) will not be so lucky. The politics of this haven’t even begun to be appreciated yet, and it may be some time before the West realises the degree of its vulnerability. But it’s not surprising: the West has been training soccer players while the Russians have been training rugby players. It’s the Russians who get to say what game we’ll be playing.