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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
To defend Western societies, the nation-state model of war based upon threat analysis and against defined enemies will have to be supplemented by new modes of strategic thought that concentrate on alleviating the vulnerabilities of modern states to new nonstate threats. As the French military analyst Phillippe Delmas has warned, "Today's world is without precedent. It is as different from the Cold War as it is from the Middle Ages so the past offers no basis for comparison. ... Tomorrow's wars will not result from the ambitions of States; rather from their weaknesses." (51)
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To meet the challenges of tomorrow's wars, Western countries will need highly mobile, well equipped, and versatile forces capable of multidimensional coalition missions and "mastery of violence" across a complex spectrum of conflict. They will need new national security apparatus for threat and vulnerability analysis and consequence management in the event of traumatic societal attack. They will need enhanced international intelligence and diplomatic cooperation to ensure that military force is employed with maximum efficiency. They will need new norms of international law that allow joint armed forces to be used, when the enemy can be located, in far-flung preemption operations. (52)
The reality of Western societal vulnerability in conditions of liberal globalism represents a strategic transformation that obliges defense experts and politicians to think rigorously about the kinds of war that might lie ahead. We are confronted with a challenge of finding new ways of using force in merged modes of conflict in an international system that must confront simultaneously both integration and fragmentation.
The problems facing policy makers, strategists, and military professionals in the early twenty-first century, then, have changed dramatically and decisively from those of the twentieth. Military power and capability have expanded into a network of transnational interconnections. As a result, preparing for armed conflict is no longer only a matter of simply assembling battlefield strength to destroy defined adversaries.
Increasingly, military power is entwined in politics--as an instrument that shapes, polices, and bounds the strategic environment, that punishes, signals, and warns. The task for strategists is now one of disciplining available military power into a broad security strategy--one that embraces also diplomacy, intelligence analysis, and law enforcement--in a calibrated, judicious, and precise manner. In the prophetic words, written over thirty-five years ago, of the British strategist Alastair Buchan, "The real content of strategy is concerned not merely with war and battles but with the application and maintenance of force so that it contributes most effectively to the advancement of political objectives." (53) At the dawn of a new century, of a new and uncertain era in armed conflict in a globalized yet deeply fragmented world, these words aptly describe the many dangerous challenges that lie ahead.
