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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
It is very important to understand clearly what is meant by the "relative decline" of strategic geography. In no sense does such a phrase imply "the end of geography" in the same sense that Francis Fukuyama famously spoke of "the end of history." (4) In terms of logistics, campaign planning, and topographical analysis, geography remains fundamental to the art of war, while geopolitics remains an important component of statecraft. (5) Nonetheless, a shift away from territoriality toward connectedness has diminished the effect of strategic geography as a primary rationale for defining a nation's defense and national security postures. The process of this transformation-in which older forms of linear conflict have been supplemented by new forms of nonlinear conflict-has been recognized by both Western and non-Western strategists. For example, the leading American strategic analyst Phillip Bobbitt has observed, "National security will cease to be defined in terms of borders alone because both the links among soci eties as well as the attacks on them exist in psychological and infrastructural dimensions, not on an invaded plain marked by the seizure and holding of territory. Similarly, two Chinese strategists have argued that we are entering an age of unrestricted warfare in which "there is no territory that cannot be surpassed; there is no means which cannot be used in ... war; and there is no territory or method which cannot be used in combination." (7)
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The result of globalization over the past ten years has been the development of an unpredictable and complex pattern of armed conflict. Under conditions of global strategic bifurcation the old distinctions-between civil and international conflict, between internal and external security, and between national and societal security--began to erode. It has become clear that in an era in which various transnational and substate forces were greatly empowered by technology, such issues as civil conflict, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction could no longer be easily quarantined within states or regions. From the early 1990s onward, these phenomena emerged as global strategic threats precisely because they acted to blur the distinction between internal and external crises. Under new conditions, transnational and substate forces threaten not just states but entire societies and thus the fabric of international stability itself. Consequently, traditional ideas about warfare have come under challenge as the political, economic, and military dimensions of security have more closely merged and state-on-state war seems to have been supplemented by new forms of substate and transstate c onflict. (8)
The changing character of conflict and war mirrored the bifurcation of the international security system in the 1990s. The various views expressed about the future of military conflict reflected the post-Cold War fragmentation of international security and the diffusion of contemporary war into a variety of different modes. War became at once modern (reflecting conventional warfare between states), postmodern (reflecting the West's cosmopolitan political values of limited war, peace enforcement, and humanitarian military intervention), and premodern (reflecting a mix of substate and transstate warfare based on the age-old politics of identity, extremism, and particularism). (9) It is important to note that none of these categories represents neatly divided compartments of activity; they overlap and interact with each other. The U.S. Marine Corps's recent doctrine of the "three-block war"--in which troops maybe engaged in a conventional firefight, peace operations, and humanitarian relief simultaneously in a single small area--captures the essence of this complex interaction. (10)
