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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
WARFARE IN 2015: A TENTATIVE ANALYSIS
Given the growing complexity of the military art and of the use of force in statecraft, what are the characteristics of warfare most likely to be over the next decade? Four basic sets can be tentatively offered. First, war is likely to remain a chameleon, presenting itself variously in interstate, transstate, and nonstate modes--or as a combination of these. However, a word of caution is necessary: it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the possibility of interstate conventional war. If in some areas of the world, such as Western Europe, it is highly improbable, in much of Asia and the Middle East it remains a distinct possibility. (42) Nonetheless, in general terms, the merging of modes of armed conflict does suggest an era of warfare in which national, transstate, and substate forces may coalesce or find themselves in mismatched confrontations. Moreover, the conventional and the unconventional, the symmetric and the asymmetric, may occur almost simultaneously, overlapping in time and space.
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Second, advanced warfare will be largely joint-service in character. The revolution in information technology, especially as applied to command and control, long-range precision strike, and stealth, has so compressed time and space in military operations as to create an unprecedented nonlinear battle space characterized by breadth, depth, and height. During the 1990s, the concept of "battle space" replaced the linear battlefield that had defined armed conflict in the Western tradition from Alexander the Great to the Second World War. In essence, the concept of battle space has permitted a shift away from the organization of linear mass toward a simultaneous and "full-dimensional" concentration of effects. (43) This is especially significant with regard to the cumulative impact of missile firepower from air, ground, and sea. (44)
Third, most Western military experts believe that future operations will favor simultaneous attack by joint air-ground forces that are "situationally aware"--that have substantially complete and current views of the battlespace via computer and satellite. Advanced forces are also likely to be networked from "sensor to shooter"--that is, surveillance capabilities will be electronically connected to strike forces, and all of them to each other. (45) There will probably be fewer troops deployed on the ground, but the individual soldier--the "strategic corporal"--will have a greater potential impact on events. Growing weapons lethality and increased ability of soldiers to direct long-range precision "fires"--as seen in Afghanistan, where ground forces acted as highly effective sensors for air strikes--are likely to become features of warfare over the next decade. (46)
Fourth, the dominance of surveillance and strike means that joint operations by technologically advanced forces, capable of deep precision attack and quick maneuver, are likely to resemble large-scale ambushes. If an enemy can be remotely located, traditional movement to contact preceded by forward troops probing for the enemy will be replaced by well-prepared, deliberate, "deep" attacks using tactics that exploit rapid positioning for maximum effect. However, precision munitions are likely to be of limited use in close operations, in which infantry must be employed to finish off adversaries. (47)
