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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans

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It has become imperative that all concerned with security issues pay greater attention to the merging of previously discrete forms of war. The conceptual basis for the study of warfare in the West must now be broadened to include a rigorous study of the interaction between interstate, substate, and transstate conflict and of the diffusion of contemporary military capabilities. We have to recognize that in an interconnected age, linkage and interdependence seem to pervade all aspects of armed conflict. Military analysts and force-structure specialists need to concentrate on the multifunctional use of force in highly complex operations. In addition, military professionals must learn to embrace the challenges of proportion, coercion, and dissuasion as well as the older tradition of battlefield destruction. In particular, what the U.S. Hart-Rudman Commission has described as "the spectrum of symmetrical and asymmetrical threats we anticipate over the next quarter century" must receive increased attention from both military theorists and policy makers. (26) In short, the challenge is to prepare for full-spectrum conflict.

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The task will be much harder than many defense analysts realize. The notion of a spectrum of conflict is not a new idea, but for most of the Cold War the Western understanding of war was based on generic intellectual categories of "conventional" (high-intensity) and "unconventional" (low-intensity) conflict. Most in the field of strategic studies thought in terms of separate worlds of conventional interstate (or high-intensity) and unconventional intrastate (or low-intensity) military activity. Unfortunately, the spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the early twenty-first century is distinguished by merged categories, multidimensionality, and unprecedented interaction. (27)

In an era when all security issues are interconnected and when the national security of Western states has become critically dependent on international security, single-scenario strategies and rigid military force structures have become anachronistic. Traditional concepts of deterrence and defense need to be supplemented by new doctrines of security preemption, security prevention, and expeditionary warfare. Moreover, the clear separation of peace and war must be supplemented by an acknowledgment that modes of war have merged. In a new age marked by networks and instant communications, the need is for advanced military forces with skills useful across a range of tasks that may involve preventive deployment, preemptive strike, war fighting, peace enforcement, traditional peacekeeping and peace building, and counterterrorism. (28)

However, the intellectual challenge facing military professionals is not, as Martin van Creveld would have us believe, to consign Carl von Clausewitz and two thousand years of Western military knowledge to the dustbin of history. Rather, the task is to learn how to fight efficiently across the spectrum of conflict. No responsible Western military theorist can accept at face value the thesis of the "obsolescence of conventional war" or the paradigm of asymmetric warfare as primary force planning or doctrinal determinants. In a dangerous and unpredictable world, military professionals and their political masters must prepare to fight in conditions of a "high-low mix"--to be ready to tame the big wildcats and not simply the vicious rodents, to be able to fight troops like Iraq's former Republican Guard as well as Taliban, al-Qa'ida militia, and terrorists. As every good operational commander knows, in the military art one can "trade down," but one can never "trade up." Moreover, all the evidence indicates that s uccess in peace-support operations requires the kinds of conventional firepower, mobility, and force protection available only to military establishments that are optimized for conventional warfighting. (29)

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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans

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