This Changes Everything!

Well, it depends what you're trying to do.

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The casual media consumer, slurping up the occasional story about the many wars threatened, feared or actually in course at the moment, could be forgiven for thinking that all conflict is about the development and fielding of newer and shinier weapons, which regularly “change everything.” Except that it appears some of these weapons don’t actually change very much in practice, and indeed may turn out not to work very well or at all, or even be less effective than the weapons they have replaced. It’s all very confusing.

It needn’t be. Security forces have tools (which include weapons but other things as well) to enable them to carry out tasks, with luck successfully. Sometimes, the tools are not appropriate to the task, ands the task can’t be done: a point I will return to. At other times, tools get misused because they are all you have. In the so-called Cod Wars of the early 1970s, Royal Navy frigates protected British fishing boats from Icelandic fishery patrols by physically interposing themselves. It was a bizarre use of expensive, fragile warships, but it was all there was available.

Weapons can be inadequate for the task, or for that matter just too powerful. Really, you may say? But what about nuclear weapons? Aren’t they the ultimate argument? Not really: nuclear weapons have very precise uses, mostly political, and are by contrast effectively unusable in any normal conflict. A good example is the 1982 Falklands War, where it must have seemed extraordinary to outsiders that Argentina, in effect, attacked a nuclear power, thus courting annihilation. But in reality, there was never a moment when the nuclear option was considered: it was in a different conceptual space, and it stayed there. It simply was not relevant to the conflict.

So it’s understandable that when a new technology comes along that actually promises to deliver something very new and very powerful, there’s a tendency to get highly excited about it. But in reality, technology by itself does not change the nature of conflict, or the outcomes of real wars. What (sometimes) changes them, is the application of technology to a particular situation with a particular objective. So for a very long time, for example, laser technology used aggressively has been a solution looking for a problem in conflict to resolve. Yet its actual application in the defence area is very limited. If enough power could be generated quickly from a small enough power source, then we might, finally, be in Star Wars territory. But until then, there are better, cheaper and more reliable ways of achieving the same objectives. At the moment, the Muse of techno-fetishist defence writers is incarnated in drone technology, especially drone swarms and First Person View drones. “This changes everything!” we are told. Well maybe, but it all depends on the context. Drones suffer from many limitations, including weather, and from electronic and other countermeasures already being developed. But most importantly, they have proved their worth so far in defensive, attrition-based warfare. It’s not obvious that they will have the same net advantages in other types of warfare in other environments.

So what I’m going to do this week is to try to sketch out some ideas about which technologies, if correctly used, might affect strategic balances and strategic outcomes in the next few years. I’m not going to go too deeply into the technologies themselves, nor the military scenarios, because I’m not an expert on either: I will try to concentrate on the political and strategic level.

A good place to begin, perhaps, is George Orwell’s 1945 essay You and the Atomic Bomb, in which he argued that:

“ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

Now Orwell-a trained soldier by the way—knew what he was talking about as regards the weapons of his day and earlier, from personal experience. But the argument can obviously be extended today to the armed faction and international level, putting to one side normative value-judgements about democracy and totalitarianism, and focusing rather on the balance of power between different types of states and political organisations. The real issue is, what kind of situation are we in now, and how is it changing? Are we in a situation where technology makes sophisticated, developed states stronger, or rather do emerging technologies help poorer states and non-state actors, depending, evidently on how and in which context they are used?

We can follow the development of tank technology as an example. In the battlefield of the First World War on the Western Front, the expectation, and very nearly the result, was a war of rapid manoeuvre, with an important role played by cavalry. Defensive weapons, such as machine guns were a lesser priority, because the armies of the two powers spent most of the end of 1914 in desperate attempts to outflank each other. Tanks (had they been available) would simply have been too slow and unreliable to have played an important role. In the end, neither side could outflank the other, because of the sheer numbers involved: the lines stabilised, and positional attrition warfare took over. On the Eastern Front, however, and at least up until the Russian-Polish conflict of 1921, cavalry remained very important, and massive cavalry battles were fought. Horses, almost literally, for courses.

Although the great killer numerically on the Western Front was artillery, it was machine-guns that made movement difficult to impossible, and so made attacks very costly. Moreover, the real capability gap—which would not be plugged until the 1940s—was communications. Artillery could kill defenders and suppress defensive fire, to different degrees, but once the advancing troops were out of visual range, there was no way of knowing in which areas attacks had been successful, and which had failed. As a result, there was no way of knowing which attacks should be reinforced. While the attackers hesitated, without orders, German troops would advance from the rear areas to attack them in turn. It was not until the deployment of radios in tanks and aircraft in 1940 that the problem was partially solved (Guderian, we should not forget, was a Signals officer.) So ironically, the killer weapon of the First World War would not even have been a weapon.

The solution to the domination of the battlefield by the machine gun was, unsurprisingly, first called the “armoured machine-gun destroyer”, later the “landship” and then codenamed “tank.” It was a weapon of attack (which is why the Germans spent little effort on them: they were mostly defending, after all. The concept was a mobile, protected weapon that could cross all terrain, and destroy machine-guns, as well as engaging enemy infantry, thus enabling the long-wished for breakthrough. But even then, the best that could really be expected was local tactical gains, since there was no way of the tanks signalling where they had been able to reach. (Airpower, the big non-event of World War 1 could not help here either, since the delay between taking photographs, developing them, and getting them to headquarters was far too long, even had there been some way of signalling to the tanks what to do next.)

Although at the time, then, the tank was seen as a wonder-weapon, with few counters, it was the product of a particular strategic situation, and only really had one application. It would have been pointless for the Germans to have deployed tanks in or near the front line, where they would quickly have been destroyed in the artillery barrage. During the 1920s and 30s, visionaries, some more realistic than others, began to develop ambitious plans for entire tank armies, invulnerable to  defensive measures, sweeping all before them and overwhelming entire nations. It’s fair to say that these plans bore no relationship to the actual technical capabilities of tanks at the time, nor to the ability of armies to command and control rapid movement on such a large scale. But more importantly, they only made sense for armies that expected to be on the strategic offensive. The Red Army developed its doctrine of Deep Battle under Tukhachevsky, a former cavalry officer, precisely to avoid, yet again, a war fought on its territory. The German Panzer doctrine was completely geared to aggressive warfare, to recover the territories lost in 1918, to settle with France once and for all, and conquer the coveted lebensraum in the East. It was also the doctrine of a country poor in natural resources that could only prosecute a short war, and a war of conquest.

This was not true of the French. The French Army of the inter-war period has been much criticised for its “defensive” orientation, as though somehow, it was not actually supposed to be defending. The fact was that by 1918 France had recovered all its territories, and in any potential war, by far the best strategy would be to let the Germans come to them. Anglo-Saxon historians have had great fun with the alleged lack of “offensive spirit” of the French Army, and its apparent passivity in the winter of 1939-40, but this misses the point entirely. To win, the Germans had to attack, so why not let them do so? After all, what would be the objectives of a French attack? It’s instructive just to look at the map. I’ve never seen a hypothetical French offensive plan for 1940, but what would its objectives have been, anyway? Berlin was 800km away by any reasonable route, and the French would need to occupy at least the Ruhr, Hanover and Hamburg in the North, and Munich in the South, on the way. And for what? As recent events in Ukraine have shown, it’s far better to let an attacker dash themselves to pieces against your defensive positions first.

The French had defensive positions in the Maginot line which were so strong that the Germans never thought of attacking them. They were therefore obliged to go through Belgium as they had done in 1914 (and this time the Netherlands as well) and the French and British would advance to meet them, retaining some troops against a possible German attack through the Ardennes. In such a defensive scenario, tanks were not used in the same way. The Germans relied on fast-moving armoured columns striking deep into the enemy rear, which is scarcely a defensive tactic. This is the reason for the much-criticised decision of the British and French to divide their armoured forces into small units to support the infantry. But the infantry had no other real weapon of defence against the tanks than another tank, so it made sense to give them protection, as they were defending. The kind of mass armoured tactics favoured by De Gaulle (who as far as we know had never been inside a tank when he waxed so lyrical about them) were not only quite unfeasible given the state of technology at the time, they were also quite unsuited to a nation that was on the strategic defensive. By contrast, the much-derided Maginot line was an excellent initiative. The fact that the Germans won—through sheer luck as much as anything else—has tended to obscure the fact that the two sides, with different strategic objectives, necessarily had different tactical doctrines and equipment as well.

It was not until late in the war that genuinely portable anti-tank systems were fielded in large numbers, but even then their effectiveness was limited. The idea of the tanks as the queen of the battlefield, only really countered by other and better tanks, formed part of conventional military thinking until the 1970s, which is why the Egyptian use of man-portable anti-tank guided weapons in the 1973 war was such an apparent surprise. Yet again, use depends on context. The Egyptian strategic objective was to recover the Sinai, which they believed they could best do by inflicting a military humiliation on Israel (a complete military victory in the Sinai was not feasible.) Thus, they chose the tactical defensive, crossing the Suez Canal and then digging in, waiting for the Israelis to attack and meeting them with barrages of anti-tank (and anti-aircraft) missiles, for which the Israelis were unprepared. Needless to say, pundits soon began to insist that the age of the tank was over, and that the future belonged to high-precision missiles. Yet in fact western nations were well aware of the problem and had been developing compound defensive armours for tanks for some years. The Russians developed more exotic counter-measures also, such as explosive armour and lasers. But again, the options chosen depended on what you were going to do with the tanks.

Moreover, even the most whizzo piece of military technology is of limited use unless it is part of a complete force. The idea floated briefly in Germany in the 1980s, of a citizen militia millions strong armed with anti-tank weapons, suffered from the small disadvantage that the enemy could simply stand off and kill them all with artillery and missiles. And how would you recapture territory you had lost, armed only with anti-tank weapons?

The point of this rapid canter through military technology is that recent developments that have received a lot of media attention may not actually change warfare that much, and so strategy that much, outside specific contexts. I’ll go on to discuss some examples now, focusing less on the purely technological aspects  and more on the political consequences. Let’s start by referring back to the quotation from George Orwell.

Where the technology used by each side is broadly comparable, battles are won or lost essentially through human factors issues. In African wars, the side with better training and leadership almost always won, because the equipment tended to be similar. Where the two sides were roughly equally competent and using similar weapons, as in the Rwandan Civil War from 1990-93, the result was a bloody stalemate. By contrast, when South African mercenaries improved the training of government forces in Angola in the 1990s, they quickly began to defeat the UNITA rebels. In both these conflicts, infantry was the main arm employed by both sides, and properly trained and led infantry forces made a big difference. On the other hand, whilst the equipment used by the US-led coalition in Iraq in 1991 was not much more modern and effective than that of the Iraqis, the result was a total victory with few casualties. Operational research simulations after the War could only duplicate that result (which had not been expected) by allowing about 90% of the difference between the two sides to be in training and leadership, not equipment.

The issues are rather different when the capacities and objectives of the two sides are asymmetric, as they tend to be these days: I want to develop this point over the rest of the essay. As I have pointed out repeatedly in other contexts, winning and losing at the strategic level, whether politically or militarily, is not a simple zero-sum game. If the objectives are different, then the outcome itself may be asymmetrical. So by any standards the Taliban “won” the war in Afghanistan against the United States and its allies. But the objectives of the two sides were fundamentally different: the West was trying to establish a western-style political and economic system in the country, complete with western-style armed forces. The Taliban was simply trying to expel the invaders and take power. The high-technology weapons fielded by the West, including drones and advanced jet aircraft firing missiles, had little overall impact because they were limited in number and difficult to apply successfully. Indeed, the sophisticated equipment given to the Afghan National Army actually turned out to be a disadvantage, because it required the ANA to fight a western-style war, with equipment it did not fully understand and which had to be maintained by US contractors. The Taliban by contrast used weapons and tactics that were consistent with their objectives. The suicide attack—sometimes called the “human drone”—could be much more accurate and effective than a missile fired from kilometres away, and was infinitely cheaper and simpler to mount.

One of the reasons why the West was able to fight in Afghanistan at all was the ease of force projection and sustainment, which was a result of the complete control of the airspace (and elsewhere, the seaspace) necessary for these functions. Whilst there was a threat from the Taliban forces in the mountains around Kabul (which made for some interesting landing and departure patterns at the airport) the Taliban could do little, in practice, to prevent the arrival of western forces and their subsequent sustainment. Indeed, most of the food eaten by westerners in Kabul came by lorry through Pakistan, and the transport companies had to pay bribes to the Taliban to let them through, thus contributing to their operational budget. (Life is strange sometimes.) But if the Taliban had had either the will or the weaponry to stop these convoys, or had been able to close the airport from time to time, then the occupation could not have continued, and the Taliban would have “won,” irrespective of how many of their fighters were killed on the battlefield. And it seems now to be the case that the Taliban have the military capability to prevent any renewed attempt at invasion anyway..

This is likely to be the pattern for the future. As I have argued elsewhere, the easy projection of western forces that made Iraq 1 and 2 and Libya so easy is probably coming to an end. Relatively low technology, correctly applied, can make such force projection too costly in terms of lives and money, or simply unachievable. It is for this reason that historically even the wildest militarist in Washington has never seriously talked about invading North Korea. The conventional forces of that country may be obsolescent, but it has had for decades an armoury of short and medium-range missiles that could devastate not only South Korea but also Japan, and destroy the infrastructure which would enable force projection to take place. Longer-range missiles have now been deployed as well. More recently, advances in nuclear technology and warhead design appear to have given them a capability to destroy US naval assets hundreds of kilometres away. There is no conceivable objective which could be worth the risk of such an attack, and in any case it is unlikely that the attack would succeed. So Sun Tzu would note approvingly that, at the political level, the battle for the independence of North Korea has been won without any fighting.

Now, the more general point here is that force projection requires, by definition, asymmetric capabilities. An attacker needs to get their forces to the right place safely, protect them, sustain them, reinforce them as necessary and finally withdraw them in one piece. The defender simply has to interrupt this tidy sequence. Moreover, it is highly improbable that the projecting nation, or nations, cares as much about the objectives of the operation as does the target country about its independence, and therefore its tolerance for casualties will be much lower. That being so, there is no reason for the target country to play the same game as the aggressor. It may be technically true that the US would “win” a fleet-to-fleet battle with the Chinese Navy, but there is no reason why the Chinese should want to play that game. Missile barrages targeting Carrier Battle Groups and an air defence umbrella projected several hundred kilometres out to sea would between them inflict far more damage on US forces than would be politically acceptable. Some people in Washington, at least, must understand this. Sun Tzu nods approvingly again.

This is likely to be the pattern for the future, but notice, once again, that the superiority is context-dependent. In these examples, the North Koreans and the Chinese are defending. As and when the Chinese themselves seek to project force, they will run into the same problems. To the extent that the Chinese can project force locally under a missile and air defence umbrella (as far as Taiwan for example) this can be managed: after that, it all depends where they want to go.

Generally, we seem to be approaching a point where even small countries with appropriate weapons can extract a price from major powers for attacking them that those powers are not prepared to pay. Orwell would doubtless say that we are approaching a form of democratisation of military capability: not within states, but between them. Defence is becoming, if not always easier, then at least more cost-effective, than aggression. A squadron of new-generation combat aircraft and their pilots represents such a massive investment that it can only really be used in circumstances where losses will be minimal or preferably zero. Sending a squadron of F-35s to bomb a “suspected rebel base” with a handful of free-fall bombs or missiles and losing two or three of them would be unthinkable. But such a threat could be posed by barrages of relatively old but still effective air defence missiles.

New technology and its proliferation is making the situation more complex. The West still thinks largely in terms of the physical occupation of terrain and the control of the airspace above it. For that reason, it has historically neglected other technologies, notably missiles, and long-range indirect effect weapons generally. (Its use of drones, for example, has been limited to deep attacks and assassinations, rather than any strategic objectives.) But the war in Ukraine has already demonstrated that you can effectively control territory in other ways. For decades, rebel groups and resistance movements used anti-personnel and anti-tank mines to make the movement of invading forces difficult and costly. Although the West succeeded in getting new production of mines banned by the 1997 Ottawa Convention, rebel groups continued to use what are rather tweely known as Improvised Explosive Devices to great effect, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This kind of technology remains one of the weapons of choice of the poor and the weak and, whilst it cannot give you effective control of an area (since obviously you are at risk from mines as well) it can deny effective control of the same area to your enemy or to an invader.

The Russian use of mines in Ukraine has received less publicity than other technologies, but remains important, and was a major contributor to the disastrous outcome of the Ukrainian 2023 offensive. But modern mine technology actually enables their use as a kind of limited offensive weapon, at least to recover territory lost to an invader. Mines can be carried by rockets and drones for considerable distances, and can force the enemy to evacuate an area because it becomes impossible to manoeuvre there, and finding and destroying mines is expensive, time-consuming and dangerous. However, modern technology means that mines can be programmed to self-destruct or simply become inoperative after a period of time, thus allowing your forces to move back in. In this way, a state with quite modest resources could effectively defeat an attack by a larger and stronger enemy. Once again, we are back to asymmetry of objectives: if these kinds of technologies had been available to the Iraqis in 2003, the level of casualties might quickly have escalated beyond what was acceptable to the West.

The same general argument applies to the airspace. Western concepts of domination of the air are based around very expensive and high-performance aircraft which would defeat the aircraft of the opposition, and enable ground operations to take place with friendly air support. But what if the opponent elects not to play the same game? There is now a proliferation of fairly capable, long range air defence missiles, and there will be more and better. These systems are generally mobile, and the launchers and the missiles are relatively cheap compared to aircraft. Training of missile operators takes months, rather than years, and operators are far easier to find and train than pilots. Effective control of their airspace, where it is unacceptably dangerous for the enemy to operate, will soon be within reach of a number of medium-sized nations.

Of course, the same arguments apply as with control of terrain. You can defend your own airspace with such systems, but it’s very difficult to project power outwards with that level of technology. In Ukraine, the Russians have used much more complex and expensive technologies to try to gain control over its airspace, but have not yet managed it completely. And almost by definition, control of the air does not automatically imply control of the ground: no country has ever been conquered by airpower alone.

Finally, there is the control of communications, especially maritime choke-points. This is an old story, though it has suddenly come back into the news with the activities of the Houthis in Yemen. Again, the issue is an asymmetric one: drones and relatively inexpensive missiles cannot give you control of the sea, but they can prevent others having it, and enjoying safe passage through it. As we have seen, commercial shipping companies are generally not prepared to take risks beyond a certain point, and that point may be very early on in the process of escalation. An occasional successful strike on a merchant ship, even if no serious damage is done, may be all that is needed to bring maritime trade to a halt. By contrast, trying to keep such routes open would demand massive, continuous and expensive efforts that would probably be beyond the resources of the West over any length of time. Moreover, because the loss of even one western naval ship to missile attack would be a political disaster, it’s doubtful if many states would want to take part in such efforts anyway. As experience in Ukraine has shown, sheer numbers of attacking missiles are important in themselves, and western ships that have exhausted their air defence assets, even if they have suffered no damage, will be pretty much obliged to leave the area.

A couple of general observations in conclusion. First, the argument about relative costs must not be taken too far. As we have seen, relatively cheap weapons like anti-tank missiles can defeat expensive and complex systems like tanks in certain tactical circumstances. But you can’t launch a counter-attack with missiles, and if all you have are missiles your own forces will be wiped out by artillery. It all depends, once more, on what you are trying to do. After all, consider the ultimate extension, of this argument. The human infantry soldier costs tens of thousands per year of Large Currency Units ($,£,€) in salaries alone, not to mention recruitment, training and equipping. So an individual soldier with five years service could represent an investment of half a million LCUs. Yet the soldier can be killed by a single bullet costing only a few LCUs. Yes, soldiers today are protected by (even more expensive) helmets and body-armour, but even then an older-calibre 7,62 round can penetrate some body-armours, whilst the 12,7 calibre certainly can. So that means the day of the soldier on the battlefield is over? Obviously not, since you require other soldiers to fire the bullets, not to mention fighting and winning the battle. You get the point I hope.

Which is to say that everything depends on context, but, by extension, context dictates what you can achieve. The age of drive-by wars against small countries is almost certainly over now, because such countries are rapidly acquiring the capability to inflict disproportionate damage upon attackers. Likewise, the absolute “freedom of the seas” may soon be consigned to history, given the ability of coastal nations to use relatively cheap missiles to disrupt shipping and threaten military vessels. Again, it’s important to get out of the mental habit of thinking of “winning” and “losing.” We have already seen how the Houthis are using their (relatively limited) missile capability to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and put pressure on the US to put pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The US and other western nations have massively more military power than the Houthis, but the two sides are trying to do fundamentally different things. Whether the Houthi objective of putting pressure on the US will succeed is impossible to say, but their interim objective of disrupting shipping is much easier to accomplish than their opponent’s objective of maintaining freedom of navigation.

This is likely to be the pattern for the future. Military power will become more localised and case-specific, and different countries, and perhaps groups of countries, will acquire different military potential against outsiders and against each other. Defence (or at least frustrating enemy objectives) is likely to go through a phase of being easier than attack (or at least achieving those objectives.) All this represents a new strategic situation, but one which will be amorphous and constantly shifting in detail. Whether western strategic punditry and western policy-making are up to the resulting intellectual challenges will be interesting to see.