How It Is.

And how it always was, actually.

Last week’s post generated a lot of interest and brought another sizeable group of new followers and subscribers. Welcome to all of you.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve set out two-thirds of an argument, which I hope to complete today. Briefly, I suggest that the nature of conflict in all its aspects (military and technological, but also economic and political) has changed and is changing further, and generally to the disadvantage of the West. The military battle-space is no longer ruled by high-technology and extremely expensive weapons platforms, whose effectiveness is increasingly disputed by drones and missiles. These new systems can make attacks prohibitively expensive, but they can also be used offensively, and defence against them is difficult. Moreover, the resources and technologies needed to construct and use them are relatively modest, and within the capabilities of far more nations that can afford a fifth-generation jet aircraft. Likewise, economic levers not previously exploited become weapons with the new capabilities these systems provide.

These developments would be less of a problem if western states had more intellectual flexibility, and better-operating government systems. But stranded between cloudy aspirational pronouncements and actual implementation on the ground, they have lost the ability to make operational-level plans and carry them through. This suggests that as the indirect consequences of the continuing Iran crisis start to bite, western governments will be increasingly less capable of coping with them as they affect their economies and their societies, and indeed will lack the ability to plan, and even to understand what is happening.

All this suggests that there will be a considerable rebalancing of strategic and political power in the world in the next few years. The purely military dimension is important, of course, but it’s not the only one, because economic power, the use of control over commodities, processing and manufacturing, and even the internal stability of countries are also parts of the equation. So what can we say about how these tendencies may evolve and combine in the years to come?

Well, not much actually, at least if we want to go beyond idle speculation: predicting the future is a game where you generally only get it right by accident. I’m not going to cover the current “ceasefire,” since anything I say here could be out-of-date tomorrow. Come to that, even trying to predict the broad outline of the state of the world in five years’ time is essentially a waste of effort, since so much will depend on decisions by people who may be unknown at the moment, about things that haven’t even happened yet. (Think back five years to the Spring of 2021 if you doubt me.) But it is often possible to do one or both of two connected things. On the one hand, you can identify aspects that are not going to change, except marginally, because the factors determining them are essentially fixed. On the other you can identify a series of reasonable possibilities arising from the present situation: how things are now, in other words, determines how far things can change at the highest level. To this we might add an adaptation of the old Soviet ideological concept of “permanently operating factors” in strategy: geography doesn’t change, climate and changes to climate are inevitable, the Atlantic isn’t going to get any smaller, and factors like population, natural resources and cultural specificities change only very slowly.

A useful example of what I mean, and how we may proceed, is the famous statement by Marshal Foch in June 1919 at the Versailles Treaty negotiations: “this is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” Now whilst in practice Foch did “predict” the outbreak of World War 2 with some precision, that is not what he was trying to do. He was talking about the situation as it was in 1919, and the text of the Treaty that had been negotiated. He observed, quite correctly, that nothing fundamental had been done to resolve the underlying problem: the rivalry between France and Germany for military domination of Europe. The war had ended in unconditional German surrender, but German territory had not been fought over, its industry was intact and its population was significantly greater than that of France. None of these factors was going to change. Nothing could prevent a new generation of German politicians, twenty years on, from turning to threats of war again to modify or overturn the Treaty. Even so, a decade after, a time of peace in Europe, strong economic growth and successive governments in Berlin committed to a peaceful resolution of the reparations problem and of Versailles, there was grounds for limited optimism.

To anticipate a stock market crash in the US leading to a worldwide depression, a Right-wing government under the incompetent Chancellor Bruning imposing successive austerity packages to make the situation worse, rising support for fringe political parties including the Communists and the Nazis, a needless election which reduced Bruning’s strength in Parliament to almost nothing, a cunning plan by the evil genius General Kurt von Schleicher to rescue Bruning’s government by inviting the Nazis, who had enjoyed a moment of glory but whose support was now declining, to join the coalition, an approach to Gregor Strasser, an “acceptable” Nazi, to join the government which he refused, a decision that in that case they would have to make use of this Austrian corporal who would quickly be eaten alive by the system … well, I don’t really need to go on. Which is to say that, whilst it’s useful and important to try to identify large-scale trends that are already underway, it’s pointless to try to go into levels of detail, and I do not intend to do so here, in spite of current excitement over the Iran “ceasefire.” Let’s stay at the Foch level.

Wars involve a process akin to price discovery in finance: they make clear what the underlying realities actually are. The Crimean War, for example, simply demonstrated that the British Army and state were not modern and not fit for purpose. The regimental system as it then was, where commissions could be purchased, the life of an officer was primarily social, and there was little training and no doctrine, could be and was defended before the War: Wellington, Waterloo, aristocracy as the backbone of the nation etc. After the War, such defences were simply not possible. And much the same was true of Ukraine. It suddenly became obvious to all that the US already had little military power in Europe and was no longer a major player in the region, that much western weaponry was poorly adapted to modern war, that western ammunition stocks were inadequate and that the quality and quantity of Russian military power had been greatly underestimated. And in some ways the most worrying realisation was that there was nothing practical the West could do about any of these problems in the short or medium term. This could be denied before 2022: it could not be denied afterwards.

In other words, the military power of the West, and especially that of the United States, is what it has been shown to be, not what it was claimed to be. (By contrast, the full extent of Iranian military power remains unclear, since not all of it has been displayed.) And the first substantive point I want to discuss is that this capability is not going to get any better. That may seem surprising at first sight, but it’s actually quite logical. It’s not to deny that new equipment will be delivered (though see below) but we are talking here, yet again, of capability, which means the ability to actually carry out missions, and goes well beyond equipment, however new and however shiny. As I never tire of repeating, military power cannot be thought of in the abstract. It is not existential, it has to produce military capability to perform some assigned task, or it is irrelevant.

But let’s begin with equipment. As I previously suggested, much US equipment is now elderly and, whilst it continues to function adequately for the most part, it is increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. Some of the older airframes have components and mechanical systems that are no longer produced, and involve technical skills that no longer exist, even if other aircraft can be cannibalised. Damage done to older aircraft such as the KC-135 and the E-3 AWACS may be such that they simply cannot be repaired. In addition, intensive operational usage of aircraft, with long mission transit times, imposes stress and eats up airframe life quickly. Some aircraft may already be at the end of their fatigue life, and even relatively modern ones will be aging towards replacement far faster than anticipated. This has already happened and will not change, even if the Iran “ceasefire” lasts. Precisely where most US aircraft are based in the region remains unclear, but there are limits to the depth of maintenance you can carry out in, or adjacent to, a war-zone.

The most obvious related problem is consumables. Like much of the detail of this conflict, the amount of ordnance expended by the US is uncertain, but the fact that US aircraft have been shot down over Iranian territory suggests that they have stopped using longer-range stand-off missiles, probably because stocks are running low. If estimates of 800-1000 Tomahawk missiles so far used are correct, and if current deliveries are running at about 100 per year, then the US will be obliged to choose between either running stocks dangerously low, and taking years to rebuild them, or using more in an attempt to finally win, if the conflict is renewed. Each has its disadvantages, but the least one can say is that the US will finish this conflict with a greatly reduced land attack capability around the world. The same applies broadly to other types of ordnance as well.

But it’s not just a question of going on to the Internet and ordering more. Manufacturers don’t like surge production, which requires investment and recruitment for just a short period with no long-term guarantees. Nor is it obvious that components and sub-assemblies from all around the world will necessarily be available in the quantities required. It’s normal these days for 50% of the value of an advanced military system to come from abroad, even without considering the materials (such as aluminium) that are needed to fabricate it. Equipment which is unusable or destroyed after the conflict will probably never be replaced, except in some hypothetical future by programmes which don’t yet exist or are in their earliest stages. Overall, the US will be substantially worse off for both platforms and weapons than it is now.

But of course to attack another country you need to get near to it. As far as we can tell, US bases in the region are all within range of Iranian missiles: most have been attacked and some, at least, are effectively abandoned. Historically, the US has not used Hardened Aircraft Shelters in the region, believing that the threat did not justify it: indeed so far as I can see, US facilities there are generally not hardened at all. Large aircraft generally have to be stored in the open anyway, but even a crash programme of building HASs for the smaller aircraft and hardening the critical parts of the bases would be an immense and costly undertaking. (Some installations, like radars, are effectively impossible to harden anyway.) In any event, the Iranians would retain that most powerful of weapons: the ability to destroy something at any time if they wanted to. And this assumes, for example, that states in the region would agree to continue to host these bases in the long term, that locals would continue to work there, and that something like normal life could continue in the region, with the permanent threat of missile attack.

Naturally, the US will be trying to defend any bases it does re-open. We still have very little objective information about the success of interceptor missiles against Iranian drones and missiles, but there are indications that we are approaching a point where extremely high-velocity missiles capable of manoeuvring can simply not be engaged in the time available, unless the laws of physics are repealed. If this situation does not exist now, then it soon will do, and unless some form of area defence capable of protecting large areas of ground is magically developed (lasers, who knows?) we may arrive at a point where there is simply no defence against such an attack, even in principle.

Attacks can be launched from ships, as the US seems to be doing now, but this carries its own risks. Even smaller combatants like destroyers are extremely expensive and difficult to replace, and would take years to build. It’s hard to see by what calculus a given number of Tomahawks on targets in Iran would be worth the loss of even one destroyer, let alone a larger ship. On the other hand, using long-range missiles to attack a surface ship, which is a moving target capable of violent manoeuvres, is not easy, and it’s not clear whether Iran yet has this capability. But they will obviously try to develop it, and if they can threaten US ships such that those ships cannot come within missile launching range, and then threaten airbases as well, they have effectively won for the foreseeable future. That is presumably what they are now aiming at.

Thus, the US will be evicted militarily from the Middle East, and potentially from the Eastern Mediterranean as well. It is already tacitly acknowledged that the US is not capable of challenging China in Asia, and it has been obvious at least since 2022 that the US is not a major player in Europe any more, faced with Russia. Now of course this will be difficult to acknowledge, and the political class and the pundit community will not give in easily, so long as they have their keyboards and that Twitter thingy. Even now, Very Serious People will be drafting very serious think pieces about how the US can recover its previously assumed dominance in the Middle East or still manage to kneecap China after all. The naive may believe them, or even be hypnotised into imagining they are describing an actually existing strategy, but in fact, like the hilarious 2001 video starring General Wesley Clarke (what was it, “five countries in seven years?”) they are best seen as letters sent by small boys to Father Christmas, asking for a train-set. Even if the US retains a limited presence in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, it is unlikely to be able to operate seriously there, even as its arsenal slides inexorably in the direction of unilateral structural disarmament. But in Washington, adjusting to the new reality will be complicated and difficult, and may even be impossible without the system coming apart.

It’s not really possible to say what new strategic configuration will replace the current one, now that it has been shown to be largely a mirage anyway. However, it’s worth pointing out that the three major beneficiaries of the current conflicts—Iran, Russia and China—are all continental/littoral states, and they seem to have broadly similar strategic objectives: keeping potential threats as far away as possible, and dominating their immediate region. Unlike the West, which has retained essentially Cold War and expeditionary force structures, their own are relatively well configured for these objectives, and they are improving them all the time. Ukraine and Iran have shown that western forces are largely impotent against such a military system, unless you measure achievement just in terms of bombs dropped. But cannot the West imitate this military posture, and reclaim at least some of its power and influence abroad? Not really, for two reasons.

One is that, as I’ve indicated, you need platforms to transport drones and missiles to the place where you want to use them, whereas the defender is by definition already there. Even if you could build large, powerful missile and drone carrying ships to send against one of these countries, the ship itself would be a high-value target which you could not afford to lose. Moreover, ever since the 1960s, the West has tried to field sophisticated, multi-capable systems, prizing quality and versatility over quantity. It has tried not just to be more technically advanced than the opposition, but also to anticipate and counter things that haven’t happened yet. A good example is the (happily) aborted British MBT-80 project, originally designed to defeat not just the Soviet tanks of the rest of the century, but the next generation as well. The plug was pulled when it was recognised that the tank would probably never be finished, let alone deployed.

As a result, western weapons systems often choke on their own complexity. Aircraft are the worst case, and are probably the classic example of trying to do too much and ultimately doing too little. From the Tornado aircraft of the 1970s to the F-35 today, designers and military staffs have pursued the hallucination of a Swiss Army Knife aeroplane that could do anything, often in sharply different variants. In every case I know of, apart perhaps from the French Rafale, the result is aircraft which cost more and performed less well than several cheaper, more specialised aircraft would have done. And the idea of involving other nations to spread the costs (again originating with the Tornado) has produced delays, complexity, arguments over specifications and a unit cost which is in many cases higher than a national development would have been. Even if the problem of the vulnerability of platforms could somehow be resolved, therefore, western defence industries and military staffs don’t think in that way, and it’s doubtful if the equipment itself could be constructed in any useful timescale.

The other is cultural. States whose orientation is landward/littoral tend naturally to prioritise defensive technologies and force structures, and concentrate, as I have suggested, on keeping potential threats at a distance, and controlling their immediate region. They have typically invested heavily in air defence by aircraft and missiles, and in the capacity to deter and defeat attempted seaborne invasions. Since the Cold War, western powers have adopted a very different set of strategies. For a long time, their forces were configured for mass mobilisation to fight a defensive battle on their own territory. Because of that, air superiority over the battlefield was assumed, and to be fair, this assumption made some sense, given that Soviet fixed-wing aircraft would have had to cross NATO airspace. After 1990, as the prospect of war faded, and western troops were increasingly deployed far from home on peacekeeping or coalition operations, the force structures were essentially preserved.

In the present series of crises, the West therefore finds itself stuck between two sets of doctrines. One is the distant memory of Cold War heavy-metal warfare with air superiority, the other is counter-insurgency warfare using small, highly-trained and mobile forces, again with total command of the air. Doctrine is what tells you how to fight, and perhaps as importantly, enables you to understand what the enemy is doing. We can see the dead weight of such outdated doctrine when we consider the joyful statements that were made in Washington about “destroying” the Iranian Air Force and Navy, under the assumption that the Iranians would use a doctrine that the US could understand. The actual doctrine employed by the Iranians surprised and disoriented the US, not because their commanders were stupid, but because they were prisoners of their own doctrine to the point that they even disregarded what the Iranians had said. They simply were not equipped to understand that the Iranians might fight as they did, let alone how to respond. It follows that western governments could not hope to integrate drone and missile warfare into their existing doctrine, and it might take decades to rethink and implement not only their doctrine, but their entire force structure and equipment priorities.

This leads to two consequences, one of which is less obvious than the other. The more obvious is that western, and particularly US, forces will be pulled back, and are unlikely to be used any more in distant operations. (Indeed, I predicted the end of expeditionary warfare several years ago.) The fact is that the ability of the defender to damage and destroy very expensive weapons platforms is already prohibitive, and can only increase. The other is that western ability to even sustain, let alone operate, its armed forces, requires a constant supply of strategic commodities. One of the things that has been “discovered” over the last few years is that modern western “just in time” militaries are optimised for peacetime, not for fighting. Such problems as limited quantities of equipment and even more limited spares and ordnance are not accidents, but the product of a system which prioritised “management,” in the commercial sense of keeping the minimum inventory to save money. It was assumed that any conflicts would be sufficiently short and low-intensity that this would not matter. But even if by some miracle western forces could be expanded and defence industries relaunched, globalisation has ensured that components for western defence equipment and materials for manufacture are now sourced from all over the world. In the past this has not been a problem, but I expect that more than one nation is watching the Iranians use the economic weapon with interest. We are going to see a substantial change in the terms of political trade, as component suppliers and producers of primary products start to realise the power that they could potentially wield over Western governments, and by extension on their military capabilities. But that’s how it is.

A large part of the political relations between states is governed by inertia: for example, links between nations and their militaries and security forces often go back a very long time, and continue as much out of habit and convenience as anything else. Whilst this has been disparaged by decolonialists, the fact is that since the nineteenth century states outside the West have seen western states as models and inspirations. The Japanese were first: they sent students to study engineering at British universities, but they also carefully observed the developing bureaucratic states of countries such as France, Britain and Germany. And until the nineteen-nineties, at least, states wanting to set up effective and honest bureaucracies would come to Britain for ideas: I was involved in this occasionally myself, and the interest was considerable. (I fear that’s not the case now.) Likewise, foreign students continue to go to western universities in large numbers, mainly because courses are available in English or sometimes French, and because non-western universities don’t have the same advantages of historical links and language, nor the same experience of teaching foreigners.

As I say, much of this is inertia, and will survive the revelation of the inadequacy of western hard power to some extent. But the further you go from the fuzzy end of the spectrum, the more difficult it will become. Forty years ago, if you wanted advice on high-speed trains you would come to France. Now you go to China. This obviously has political implications. Especially questionable, and very important, are the wider effects on security relationships. This is a complicated subject, difficult to explain if you haven’t been part of it, and full of spoken and unspoken traditions, habits and assumptions. The range of relationships and interactions is enormous, although in most cases, the reasons for the relationships are very practical. Western states and institutions are often more technically and organisationally advanced, and for a whole range of subjects from counternarcotics to computer security to electronic warfare, small countries will generally come to the West or receive western training at home. And after the end of the Cold War, states in the former Warsaw Pact found themselves suddenly having to create new security structures in multi-party political systems from scratch, with such innovations as a politician as Defence Minister and the need to make their own defence policies instead of having them dictated from Moscow. Naturally, they turned to their western neighbours (though not usually the US) for advice and ideas. Countries in Africa moving towards multi-party regimes after the Cold War often did the same.

Sometimes the reasons are economic and technical. If you have two squadrons of supersonic fighters in your air force, then setting up a special training facility is a waste of money. It makes sense to go to a collective training facility with other nations: the oldest and best-known is a NATO-run school in Texas, where the weather can be relied up. And there is a whole range of specialised military and technical skills that smaller nations can’t provide training for. Traditionally, the West has provided these skills, and reaped the political benefits that go with it. It’s less clear that this will be the case in the future, although inertia is still a fact. Most countries will still ask for training in English or French, for example.

Beyond this are wider political issues. Western Staff Colleges have always trained large numbers of non-western students. Such places are highly-prized and governments send their best students, who often go on to important posts. Some western countries find this easier to do than others, again often for linguistic and cultural reasons. Britain, France and the US have the advantage of using languages spoken around the world, whereas not everyone will want to spend a year in Hamburg learning German before attending the Bundeswehr Staff College. The same applies with more force to Russia and China, although both have a tradition of providing foreign training from the days of the Cold War. Even so, neither is likely to take control of the field quickly, for very practical reasons.

These sorts of contacts amount to a kind of parallel and supplementary diplomacy, and enable western powers (though not exclusively, it should be said) to project themselves and their ideas and influence abroad. And again, inertia is a major factor. A country reorganising its military or its police will want expert advice and training from a country which is a recognised leader. Countries like Britain and France benefited for a long time from the recognition that their militaries actually fought wars, and knew what it was like to be in combat. It wasn’t an accident that the British played a leading role in advising the South Africans on the creation of their new Defence Force after 1994: that Force was, after all, overwhelmingly made up of people who had just finished fighting each other. But for the British, certainly, those days have largely gone, and I suspect that recent events in Iran will have done no good to the international military reputation of the US either. Of course, students won’t immediately go flocking to Beijing or Moscow, inertia being what it is, but there’s no doubt that the reputation, and therefore the influence, of the US military has taken a huge hit.

That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.

And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.

Just as with “AI” there have been groups of experts for a while with a more sober view of the limitations of the US as a military power. Ukraine revealed that the US could no longer hope to influence crises in Europe very much. And when the Iran fantasy was first mooted, the same experts quietly pointed out that the US did not have the capability to sustain a long-distance attrition war fought largely by airpower, against a nation of 90 million people, where patriotism was still a word in the dictionary, fighting a defensive war and seeking just to outlast the enemy. It doesn’t matter what you think about the regime in Iran: wish-fulfilment can’t alter the facts of geography, technology, numbers, and in general how it is.

The wider political consequences of all this for western countries could be severe in several ways, and at some point I will probably write more on the subject. For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.

The Europeans have relied on money and the imposition of normative frameworks to secure their own place in the world. But even if the European economy survives intact, and even if soft power money continues to be spent at something like the current level, it will be increasingly irrelevant. Programmes to establish gender training in municipal police forces aren’t much use when starvation and even famine start to hit some of the world’s poorest countries. And these days the Europeans increasingly lack the practical skills and the organisation that would be helpful, always assuming they could spare effort from their own problems. Meanwhile, whilst we won’t necessarily see actors like China and Russia moving in straight away, the fact that they have retained capabilities that the Europeans have squandered away will become increasingly obvious to all.

The problem with norms is that you can’t eat them. The European media is currently consumed with the threat from the “extreme Right” in various countries, which in practice just means lecturing citizens on who they should vote against, and it mentions Iran only incidentally. No European government seems to have a genuinely thought-out programme for tackling even the existing economic and social problems of their countries: the only priority is that the Other Team shouldn’t win. We are now approaching a test to destruction of the Liberal/Neoliberal ideology which has been forced on Europeans over the last generation or two, and it will rapidly be seen that both it has nothing to offer to explain, let alone address, the situation in which Europe will find itself, and that the hollowing-out of the European state and the decline of the political class means there’s no real capability to do anything serious any more. Maybe the Iranians can send us some technical experts.

And I expect that much of the Liberal/neoliberal ideology will disappear like an ice-cream melting in the sun, as people and governments are required to think about issues such as having enough to eat. But what will replace it? The Brussels ideology has carefully destroyed any sense of national identity, history and culture, and left nothing in its place except vague and contradictory norms which will vanish like dew in the morning. Nobody’s going to die for that, but more importantly no-one’s going to make sacrifices for it either. Well, there’s always organised crime, as I mentioned last time, which is at least organised.

The Iran crisis is the moment the lights come on, and we can see things clearly at last. We have become “enlightened,” and like mystics, we have seen things “as they really are.” Accordingly, nothing has particularly “changed” recently: much of what we can see before us in the harsh light has existed for some time, but we didn’t want to acknowledge it. Now we can’t avoid it. But that’s how it is.