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From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
Readying ourselves for conventional war does not, however, absolve us from undertaking a major transformation in the way we think about the use of military force. The most pressing intellectual task at the crossroad of the old and new centuries is rapid adaptation to new and merging forms of conflict. In the West we have to reconcile how we would like to fight with how we might have to fight. We must try to synthesize relevant features from the massive literature on the classical Gulf War/RMA model of warfare with the changing reality of conflict--both conventional and unconventional--as it presents itself. We have to undertake an intellectual exploration of the growing interaction between interstate, substate, and transstate conflict and conduct a rigorous investigation of the phenomenon of merging war forms--internal, international, postmodern, modern, and premodern.
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The merging of modes of armed conflict suggests an era of warfare quite different from that of the recent past. Fighting in the future may involve conventional armies, guerrilla bands, independent and state-directed terrorist groups, specialized antiterrorist units, and private militias. Terrorist attacks might evolve into classic guerrilla warfare and then escalate to conventional conflict. Alternatively, fighting could be conducted on several levels at once. The possibility of continuous, sporadic, armed conflict, its engagements blurred together in time and space, waged on several levels by a large array of national and subnational forces, means that the reality of war in the first decade of the twenty-first century is likely to transcend a neat division into distinct categories, symmetry and asymmetry. (30)
Indeed, it is arguable that the main reason for much of the intellectual confusion surrounding war at the turn of the century stems from the lack of a conceptual synthesis between the requirements of traditional conventional war and the emerging blend of interstate, transstate, and nonstate modes. (31) It is no accident that the most productive areas of military theory have been those that have attempted to concentrate on the expanding phenomenon of war. The most interesting new approaches have come from those who have endeavored to examine the growing complexity of conflict, its holistic yet multidimensional character, its sociological as well as technological dynamics. Conceptual progress has come from analytical work into war's connection to society as well as to the state; from assessing the convergence of modes of conflict and the growing requirements to control armed violence in an age of instantaneous media imagery; and from developing multipurpose forces that can wage warfare across the spectrum of c onflict.
In short, it is the interactive character of war--Clausewitz's famous chameleon "that adapts its characteristics to the given case"--that has proven the most original avenue for analysis. (32) The immediate future of war lies perhaps in two key areas. The first is the realm of multidimensional theories of war and conflict that call for multifunctional forces for intervention missions; the second is the evolving theory of counterwar, or "mastery of violence," which may assist military practitioners and policy makers to understand and deal with armed conflict as a multifaceted phenomenon.
