War In Our Time?

We need the men in white coats.

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The subject of Ukraine keeps muscling its way back onto my list of things to write about, although we’re in something of a hiatus at the moment, and I’ve said pretty much all I want to say about the politics and the strategy of the crisis for the moment. But what forced it to the front of the queue of subjects demanding that I write about them was less events on the ground, than the increasing climate of fear, bellicosity and apocalyptic anticipation that seems to have overtaken western pundits and politicians, irrespective of their political positions or their sympathies. Mix this with other pundits talking quite calmly about a war with China, and I think we have something here preciously close to a war psychosis, which could lead in some very strange and dangerous directions.

I was originally just going to concentrate on the extreme dissociation from reality that this kind of thinking represents. As far as that is concerned, although I will go a little into nerdish detail, my main point will be that the idea of fighting a war with Russia or China is a salivating fantasy for those who think and hope the West might win, and an apocalyptic vision for those who think and hope the West will lose. Neither has much to do with actual military capabilities and organisation. So this essay will be a slightly odd mixture, even for me, of esoteric symbolic and cultural analysis, and some very down-to-earth thoughts on military capabilities and deployments. But stick with me.

We can all agree that talk of war is everywhere, even if few people really have much idea what they are talking about (a point I return to below.) War with Russia, war with Iran, war with China, now I see even war with Venezuela, are all being discussed freely, both by those who are agitating for such conflicts and those who are terrified of them. Now the West is already supporting one side in Ukraine, and western forces have already attacked Iran, so it’s not clear if people understand what the difference would be in case of “war.” (In fact there is one, and it's very serious.) Indeed, neither supporters nor opponents seem to have given much thought to what “war” would actually look like, and what its practical consequences might be. “War” in this context seems to have floated clear of any reality, a signifier detached from the signified, a purely existential concept, reflecting a state (or even a state of mind) rather than an actual defined set of circumstances.

So let’s clear some of the dead wood away first. I’ve dealt with these issues in more detail here, but I’ll go through them quickly again now. The first thing to say is that “war” is now an outdated concept, and is no longer a sovereign right of states. Under the Charter of the United Nations, deliberate military action against another state, or even threatening such action, is outlawed unless it is part of an operation approved by the Security Council. This doesn’t mean that such attacks don’t take place, but it does mean that they have to use a variety of circumlocutions and disguises. No state now sees itself as being “at war” with another legally, though politicians and pundits often use that vocabulary out of carelessness and ignorance.

Traditionally, to be “at war” was a legal state that meant that your armed forces were targeted against the interests of your enemies everywhere. Thus, between 1914-18, British and German troops fought each other in Africa, and German, submarines tried to sink British shipping all over the world. Air raids were made on each other’s cities. We now have “armed conflict,” which is not the same as “war” since it is a de facto and not a de jure concept, and applies when certain objective criteria are met in certain geographical areas. Wars fought by the West over the last generation or so—even Iraq 1,0—have been more limited than that, and mostly focused on small and remote geographical areas. So the result is that most people who talk glibly about “war” today have no idea what it means, and seem to assume that it just means that we will go off somewhere and attack people. It doesn’t include the thought that they might strike us back.

So let’s get a bucket of cold water, and throw it over some of those who hope, or fear, that there will be a “war” between NATO and Russia. (I come to the practicalities of such things later: let’s just grant that it could theoretically happen.) What would such a war look like? It’s fairly clear that the West has no plans of any kind for such an eventuality, so let’s take the Russians first. Their objective would be to end the war quickly in their favour by striking key enemy facilities. They have long-range, high velocity missiles to do this, and that would be their preferred option. It is thought that some western missile defence systems have some capability against some Russian systems, but this remains to be demonstrated under operational conditions at scale.

So what would they do? Well, they would strike government buildings and strategic political and military headquarters. They would start with NATO HQ, with SHAPE in Mons, with the EU in Brussels, with Downing Street and the Elysée Palace, with the White House and the Pentagon. They would strike major air-bases and operational military HQs, as well as repair and maintenance facilities, and civilian airports which would be used for dispersal in a crisis. They would strike major ports, major rail transport hubs and power generation facilities, as well as armaments and ammunition factories. With enough warning, the damage to government functions could be contained through dispersion, but the West no longer has the apparatus of wartime redundancy that it once had. And nearly all of these missiles will find their targets.

In addition, of course, there is the economy. All aircraft flights would be stopped immediately, as would almost all shipping. Even if the Russians did not treat shipping entering western ports as a military target, simply announcing that their submarines would be in the region would stop trade dead, since no-one would insure the ships.

In such circumstances, striking concentrations of NATO military units might almost be beside the point. The fact is that the NATO contribution to the opening stages of a “war”against Russia would be limited to perhaps some air-launched missile attacks on St Petersburg and the naval base at Murmansk, from any surviving airbases in Scandinavia. But that would be an attack into one of the most heavily-defended military zones in the world, so as a course of action it is only acceptable on the basis that there is nothing much else to try, apart perhaps from nuisance attacks in the South of the country. In general, therefore, the problem is that the Russians can hurt the West far more in a “war,” than the West can hurt the Russians. So why is the West obsessed with war? I think we have to look first at the level of symbol.

The symbolic function of an anticipated war has always been important. As early as the 1850s the Irish Nationalist John Mitchel coined the famous phrase “send War in our time oh Lord,” hoping that war would being down the decadent, mercantile British state and permit Irish independence. (This is a common aspiration: how many in the West hoped in 2022 that Ukraine would be “Russia’s Vietnam?”) And it’s a historical cliché that before 1914 many looked to War in the abstract for the benefits it would bring: sweeping away outdated and corrupt political, economic and social systems for some; providing adventure and escape from dreary routine for others. Those worried about increasing domestic political strife or internal tensions within multinational Empires thought that a good war might promote unity. (Many got what they wanted, although not necessarily in the way they wanted it: in any event, no-one could say that the results of the War were trivial.)

It was, of course, the invention of atomic weapons that put a stop to this way of thinking: the anticipation of World War 2 had been traumatic, and the actual experience worse, but the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to mark the end of the theory that war could ever bring benefits, even incidental ones.

Nuclear weapons were not the first technology that was believed by some to be capable of wiping out the human race. That was poison gas, usually spread by a manned bomber, as in the early pages of Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930.) But with the dawning of the atomic age, something significant had moved, and for the first time the idea that a war could mean the literal end of humanity seemed widely plausible. It was less the devastation caused by the first nuclear weapons that made people think this way, but rather the fact that a single weapon could do so much damage. Logically, it seemed, a weapon a hundred or a thousand times as large could wipe out the whole world, if it was used in anger. The mechanism by which such a war would start was almost irrelevant: in popular culture, it ranged from mad scientists to mad generals to simple accidents.

So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that almost from the beginning pundits have been trying to sell us nuclear war as the logical next step in Ukraine. You may remember back in the Spring, the Ukrainians targeted an airbase in Russia which housed some nuclear-capable aircraft. Instantly, panic set in, and among the Internet sites and video channels that I scanned afterwards, I saw NUCLEAR WAR IS NOW INEVITABLE and COUNTDOWN TO WORLD WAR 3, and similar headlines. Now admittedly, this is partly about Internet clicks and views on YouTube, and admittedly also some pundits have a (justified) reputation for getting over-excited. But there were also some deeper symbolic patterns being played out, which I’ll come to in a second. In reality, the Russians didn’t really react—and certainly not against targets that had any connection with nuclear weapons—and within weeks the incident had been forgotten. Indeed, one of the subliminal messages of the recent Trump/Putin meeting in Alaska was that neither side cared enough about the outcome of the fighting in Ukraine to risk a war between them. Yet something is still going on below the surface.

Recall that nuclear weapons soon found their place in popular culture: often in surprising ways. For example, there was (and is now even more) a popular sub-culture devoted to the idea that there have been devastating wars during forgotten periods of human history involving nuclear weapons, and that distant memories of them are preserved in the Old Testament of the Bible, and in Indian epics like the Mahabharata. Such theories then move logically through Atlantis, the Book of Revelations, the Third Reich, the assassination of President Kennedy and the end of the Apollo Moon programme. Sometimes, on the other hand, extra-terrestrial visitors are beneficent and bring warnings about the danger of nuclear weapons, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951.) A few Google clicks reveal a flourishing sub-culture, even today, of UFOs warning Earth of the danger of these weapons, or alternatively trying to hijack command and control systems to start a nuclear war.

What’s pertinent here, is the didactic, eschatological element in many of those stories since the earliest times. Fire will come down from heaven and destroy the wicked, it is said, even as the innocent are saved. Nuclear weapons were talked about in a religious vocabulary from the very beginning, and it wasn’t too long after 1945—this was an age when people still went to church—that the obvious link between nuclear weapons and the Wrath of God started to be made. Indeed, whilst our age is no longer biblically literate, words like “apocalypse” are still thrown around freely when discussing nuclear weapons. That, perhaps, is why even the relatively few and primitive nuclear weapons of the post-war era were still thought capable of carrying out their Biblical role of bringing about the end of the world.

Divine interventions in the form of fire from heaven were, as in the above example, generally a punishment for sinful behaviour. (Recall in this context that the Book of Revelation begins with admonitions against the churches of Asia Minor for backsliding.) Quite quickly after 1945, the idea began to spread that nuclear weapons could actually be a form of retribution for humanity’s sins. On the fringes of the Evangelical community, this idea grew quickly, and still seems to be powerful today. And from the earliest days of the Ecological movement up to the present day, there has also been an exterminationist fringe that believes that humanity’s stewardship of the earth has been so deficient that we deserve to perish as a species, and nuclear weapons are a popular mechanism for achieving this. The sense that war could “break out,” that it could then “escalate” and finally “go nuclear” is very powerful in popular culture, and it both avoids tedious discussion of who would start such a war (since wars don’t have agency, after all), and why anyone would decide to use nuclear weapons, and also presents the end of the world as something outside and beyond human control: natural enough, given that the inspiration for this way of thinking is religious. (The SF writer Norman Spinrad even wrote a story called The Big Flash, where a rock group called the Four Horsemen brings about a nuclear apocalypse).

The careless according of agency to war in popular culture, the idea that wars just “happen” and then “escalate,” that they can escape control and move inexorably towards the use of nuclear weapons, is one of the reasons for the current war psychosis. The problem is that studying nuclear release doctrines and firing chains (difficult, for obvious reasons) isn’t nearly so interesting or exciting, and the few people who can talk knowledgeably about them generally don’t. So as usual, bad and sensational ideas drive out good.

In that context of generalised fear, putting these ideas together, and recalling that “war” in this context is symbolic, not literal, enables us to see more clearly the conscious and unconscious motivations of those who approve of a possible war, or claim to fear one. I’ll work through some of the main tendencies, accepting that they tend to blur into each other in some cases. (Unless otherwise indicated, henceforth “war” is taken to mean a general war between the US/Europe and either Russia or China.)

The easiest case to understand is those who want the US and NATO to “get involved” in the fighting in Ukraine. This desire for involvement is essentially symbolic: it has its ultimate origin in folk memories of the story of the Israelite conquest of the city of Jericho (Joshua, VI, 1-27), where the Israelites marched around the city and then brought its walls down with the sound of horns. This type of apocalyptic expectations for the consequences of largely symbolic action survives to modern times: the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo believed that their Sarin attack on the Tokyo Metro in 1996 at a station frequented by civil servants, would be sufficient to bring down the government. For their part, Al Qaida hoped to decapitate the US political, military and economic systems with one single blow in 2001.

So the deployment of western troops against Russia would essentially be symbolic. The mere fact of western involvement would decide everything. After perhaps a token resistance, Russian troops, confronted by superior weapons, leadership and training, would simply run away. The government in Moscow would fall, and the crisis would be over. For all that it may seem insane, this is only a souped-up version of the 2023 delusion that western-equipped and trained Ukrainian forces could easily beat the Russians. As we’ll see later, few of the proponents of this idea have the remotest concept of the geographical and operational issues involved, but because we are dealing essentially with magic, that’s not the point.

There are also those who have reasonable fears about what involvement in a war with Russia, even a limited one, might mean for our societies. In the West, we are generations removed from suffering the practical consequences of war, and our societies are much more divided and much more fragile than they used to be. The idea that societies will simply collapse under wartime stress is, so far as I can see, exaggerated, in that there is a long history of populations cooperating to confront disaster. And it is also true that such fears are not new either: they were very widespread in the 1930s, when German air attack was the threat, and of course during the Cold War, when the threat was from nuclear weapons. But the fear is at least a rational one.

Somewhere in the middle of the argument are those who have just had enough, who are weary of political mismanagement and corruption, of social decline and rising crime, of promises unkept and services in constant decline, of society falling apart, with no apparent way out. Just burn the lot down is an extreme, if comprehensible sentiment, and one that you encounter more and more these days. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver they hope that “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” If our societies are past rescuing, as some think they are, then this attitude is quite explicable.

And some would take a secret pleasure in imagining the consequences of aerial attack, as Orwell’s George Bowling long ago did in Coming Up for Air (1939.) Suppose rockets destroyed Wall Street or the City of London? Suppose among the first casualties were Reality TV stars, Internet influencers, overpaid footballers, advertising executives, AI snake oil salesmen, Private Equity managers …. and so on and so on. Maybe a certain number of dead hedge-fund managers and commodity traders is, as Madeline Albright would put it, a price worth paying to get rid of the current system. Well, it’s a point of view, but it presupposes something better to replace what we have, and that’s not automatically going to be the case. In 1939, George Bowling (speaking for the author) gloomily foresaw that, after the inevitable war,

“… there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases . . . It’s all going to happen. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.”

Overlapping with these feelings is a sense of very justifiable anger against the political figures who have led us into this shambles, and those who have encouraged them. For the moment it’s a minority view, but as the situation deteriorates more and more people will come to see a kind of karmic justice in the fall of an entire political class, or even their physical annihilation in a generalised war. Whether you take the common-sense view of stupidity, arrogance, entitlement, needless hostility and messianic sense of mission, or whether you believe in some secret cabal operating from an underground bunker beneath NATO HQ, making plans for war unknown even to national leaders, I don’t think anyone would dispute that Ukraine represents a foreign policy failure of a type and degree that has not been seen in modern history, and that those responsible should pay for it. Rockets on the Pentagon and 10 Downing Street may be one way in which that could happen, but, even then, you have to be prepared to accept the (probably) half-a-million dead of the conflict as well, as the price of evicting a political class and replacing them with … what, exactly?

It’s this tendency towards nihilism—an understandable product of a nihilistic age, and the lack of any obvious alternative to the current system—which is most worrying in these fervid imaginings about war. Our political class has so alienated its subjects that for some, almost any means of removing them is, at least theoretically, entertained as a possibility. But if we think of some of the defeats of modern history—let’s say the Crimean War or the defeats of France in 1870 and 1940 —each was followed by a national revival or series of revivals. But that required a widely-accepted political ideology and the capability and will to learn from mistakes and rebuild. I don’t see any of that today. Even if the result of the war is limited to a crushing western political defeat, without direct involvement by western forces, the political carnage among western leaders will be impressive. If Russia actually uses force against western countries or interests, the potential political consequences are unforeseeable in detail, but potentially extremely grim. For me, that’s among the most worrying, and least discussed, potential consequence of this whole ghastly affair.

But for some people, defeat, whether limited to Ukraine or actually involving “war” between the West and Russia, is something actually to be wished for, to an almost pathological degree, and almost as a kind of merited punishment. Much of this sentiment seems to come from the United States, although it has since spread more widely. Ever since the Vietnam War, and now into a third generation, there are groups in the US that detest their own country, see it as the origin of all of the evils of the world, and gleefully anticipate its military defeat and humiliation. In Russia, they have for the first time found a nation which is capable of doing this (China is a slightly different issue.) And of course there are large numbers of people around the world who would like to see the US taken down a peg or two. Whether that’s worth risking a major war to achieve, with completely unpredictable results, is a real question.

Stranger still, there are many in the US for whom defeat and ruin for Europe is to be welcomed as a result of a war with Russia. Some of this, of course, is the desire for revenge based on a feeling of historical inferiority and jealousy—the history, the culture, the food, the monuments—but there’s also the decades of insistence that the US was somehow “protecting “ Europe, and that Europe was not grateful, as well as that unattractive arrogance and disdain which Americans of all political colours can show for smaller and less powerful nations when the mask slips. The indecent glee of some commentators at the alleged forthcoming ruin of Europe is distasteful to behold. (For what it's worth, I think that Europe will weather the coming storm better than the US, but that’s another story.)

And finally, under the stress of war, the almost pathological hatred of Britain which is found in many places across the political spectrum in the US has become visible. Much of it is related to having been a colonial possession of Britain, and indeed I have never found a country anywhere in the world so unable to come to terms with its colonial past as is America. In fact the US is much more obsessed with its own image of the British Empire, complete with myths and misreadings of history and allegations of its continued shadowy power, than Britain itself is, or ever was. So it’s not surprising that towards the fringes of commentary on Ukraine, we find the British blamed for everything, including working secretly in the background for decades or generations to bring down Russia and safeguard its Empire, or something. (Stalin suffered from a particularly virulent form of this paranoia, which made him underestimate the Nazi threat.) Skimming the comments sections of some blogs and Internet sites, one comes across ideas about Britain and its role in the world that seem to be the product of positively disordered minds. (I think I laughed out loud at the suggestion that the war had been brought about by the “ZioNazi City of London.” But maybe it’s not really that funny.)

So it’s clear, I think, that the war psychosis I am discussing is not one thing, but a mixture of several, and is a product of hopes, fears and fantasies of different groups along the entire ideological spectrum. The “war” which is variously hoped for, feared and just assumed to be inevitable, is essentially a symbolic event, rather than a real one. It’s not really possible to discuss fears of an “accidental” nuclear war seriously (though several years ago I made a tentative attempt) other than to say that they are probably greatly exaggerated. But it is possible to do a quick reality check on the fantasies of the West engaging in a “war” with Russia, and to demonstrate that they are indeed fantasies.

As I have suggested, nobody in the West seems to have been able to wrap their neurones around the reality of what a “war” actually would be like. Several European leaders seem to confuse it with the idea of deploying some “peacekeeping force,” or of a “deterrent deployment” after a ceasefire. (I’d just observe that deploying a military force with no agreed idea of what you want it to do is inevitably a recipe for disaster.) The idea that targets in Europe and the US would rapidly be destroyed by highly accurate and powerful missiles launched from ships, aircraft and submarines, that the West has little defence against such systems and a very limited capability to respond in kind, seems to have completely bypassed the decision-making apparatuses of western capitals. But that’s what war would be like, and for reasons of geography, the West would find it very hard and very costly to conduct attacks on Russia that amounted to more than nuisance and propaganda raids. (But then an entire generation of western politicians has grown up with the idea that it’s the image that matters, not the reality.) So any “war” launched against Russia would have to be very limited in scope.

And this poses an immediate problem. The first thing you need to launch a war is not troops and equipment, but an objective. That objective, as we’ve discussed before, is political, and is normally described in terms of an “end-state” related to the real world. So “standing up to Russia” or “demonstrating resolve,” or other examples of word-salad are not objectives: those objectives have to be tangible and measurable. The only objective I can see that makes any sense at all would be to bring about the fall of the current government in Russia and its replacement with one which wanted to be friends with its attackers. Yes, I know, it doesn’t sound very logical, but that’s about the only political end-state that would make any sense at all.

So how do we do that, then? For practical reasons, direct attacks on Russia are ruled out, so the idea of German troops once more within sight of the Kremlin has to remain in the realms of fantasy. The only other conceivable option would be to inflict such a devastating defeat on Russia in the current Ukraine conflict that the government would be brought down and a pro-western one installed, which would be prepared to do what the West wanted. It’s worth mentioning that such a final outcome depends on a whole series of subsequent political events occurring over which we have no control, but such a devastating defeat is probably the only way in which such a sequence could even be started. So how do we do that then?

The assumption would have to be that the introduction of western forces would reverse the course of the war quickly and decisively, since western stocks of ammunition and equipment are limited, and any such force might be unable to engage in high-intensity combat for more than a matter of days. What would be needed? Well, in 2022, the Ukrainian Army had some twenty operational brigades in the field, well trained, well equipped and with years of combat experience. This force was largely destroyed by an inexperienced and outnumbered Russian Army in the first few months of the war, and has had to be rebuilt with western training and equipment several times. At no point during the war have the Ukrainians had the upper hand, and the only ground they have taken was when the Russians gave up territory they did not, at that point, have the forces available to control. Ever since, their gains have been limited to the small scale counter-attacks that happen in any war, and most of these gains were quickly reversed.

We cannot say precisely what forces the West could contribute to a “war” with Russia. But a force of four to five Brigades has apparently been proposed in some kind of “peacekeeping” or “deterrent” role, and we can assume that this number reflects military advice about what it might actually be possible to deploy. These are likely to be Mechanised Brigades, ie with relatively small numbers of tanks and modest amounts of artillery, and to be structured and trained according to pre-2022 assumptions and models. They will not have integrated drone units (since these do not exist) nor doctrine and training for fighting in an environment where drones dominate. This will be a multinational Force, using different equipment and (if recent experience is any guide) incompatible radios and logistics. It will require the creation of new HQs at the operational and tactical level, and presumably some kind of joint command with Kiev. It would have to operate under conditions of Russian air superiority, for which no doctrine currently exists. Western aircraft could try to dispute this air superiority, but the Russians rely primarily on missiles to achieve it, and it is hard to see how western aircraft could operate for any length of time over Ukraine without suffering enormous losses.

There’s a lot more to say, but I think that the above demonstrates that “war”against Russia is just as much of a fantasy as any other the other examples of symbolic lunacy described above. The difficulty, though; and perhaps the danger, comes from the fact that governments do actually have the power to launch operations of this kind, or at least try, and may persuade themselves out of desperation that they could be successful. Mr Macron has shown disturbing signs of this kind of thinking in recent weeks, and the French government is now apparently making plans for hospitals to receive hundreds of thousands of casualties from a future war.

As a coda, it should be obvious that talk of “war” with China represents a kind of symbolic parody of war with Russia, itself something of a parody already.. Bluntly, the West has no reason for war, no conceivable rational objective, and no chance of winning a confrontation that actually means anything. It is, I suppose, just about imaginable that China might try to invade Taiwan, and the US might feel the need to respond, but there is nothing in the least “inevitable” about a conflict. We are not helpless victims of history, and wars do not just “happen.”

To some extent of course, and as often in history, these hopes and fears are symbolic externalisations of the sense of crisis and disintegration of our own societies. We wish destruction on that which we hate and fear, and we fear destruction of that to which we are attached. For this reason, we are entering a very dangerous period, where people who should know better might start mixing up fantasy with reality, and acting as though they could have what they want, or what they fear, just by thinking about it. Maybe what we need is not more men in uniform, but more men in white coats.