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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
In contrast, military writers like Robert Kaplan, Philip Cerny, and Ralph Peters proceeded to give us a vision of future war in which the form of social organization involved was far more important than the level of technology employed. (20) For Kaplan, the war of the future was the "coming anarchy" of a Hobbesian world of failed states; for Cerny it was the "neomedievalism" of warlordism and violent disintegration; and for Peters it was a struggle by Western forces waged against a world of warrior cultures and paramilitaries from Mogadishu to Grozny. In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington published his seminal study of a coming "clash of civilizations" in which conflict between world cultures and "fault-line wars" would dominate the geopolitical future. (21) Finally, in 1999, the British analyst Mary Kaldor put forward a theory of "new wars" in which identity politics and the privatization of violence would challenge the new global order. (22)
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By the turn of the century, the West was awash in a world of competing ideas about the future of armed conflict. War and conflict had, in effect, split like an unraveling rope's end into a multiplicity of strands. War could be whatever one sought in the cookbook of theory: it could be desert combat in the Gulf, street fighting in Grozny, or something between the two. Armed conflict could be asymmetric or low-intensity style "fourth generation" conflict waged by guerrillas and terrorists against the West's conventional military supremacy. In addition, the ominous New Terrorism of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare conducted by rogue nations and nonstate entities was also viewed by some analysts as representing a form of "nontraditional warfare. (23)
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE CHALLENGE OF FUTURE WAR
Given the proliferation of military theory and uncertain political conditions, what are the possible contours of future warfare over the next decade? What cautious speculations can we make about emerging trends? In September 1999, the bipartisan U.S. (Hart-Rudman) Commission on National Security/21st Century stated:
The future strategic environment will... be one of considerable turbulence.... The international system will be so fluid and complex that to think intelligently about military issues will mean taking an integrated view of political, social, technological, and economic developments. Only a broad definition of national security is appropriate to such a circumstance. In short we have entered an age in which many of the fundamental assumptions that steered us through the chilly waters of the Cold War require rethinking.... The very facts of military reality are changing, and that bears serious and concentrated reflection. (24)
If the Hart-Rudman Commission's judgment about the facts of military reality changing is correct--and many, including the present author, believe it is--those concerned with preparing for armed conflict in the early twenty-first century must expect to confront a range of old, new, and hybrid forms of armed conflict. During the Cold War, the West confronted a unidimensional threat from the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union-an adversary whose motives were certain and whose moves were predictable. In the new century, such conditions no longer apply. In the words of the present U.S. secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, new military thinking is now required to arm Western societies "against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, and the unexpected." (25)
