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Some Reflections on the Future of War
Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld
Yet another explanation for the decline in the quantity of weapons produced and deployed is the very great improvement in quality; this, it is argued, makes yesterday's large numbers superfluous. [28] There is in fact some truth in this argument. Especially since precision guided munitions have replaced ballistic weapons in the form of the older artillery and rockets, the number of rounds necessary to destroy any particular target has dropped very sharply; as the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 air campaign against Serbia showed, in many applications a one-shot, one-kill capability has been achieved. Thus a single mission flown by a fighter-bomber is said to be capable of inflicting an amount of destruction that once required hundreds, if not thousands, of such sorties.
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On the other hand, it should be remembered that for every modern weapon--nuclear ones only excepted--a counter may be, and in most cases has been, designed. However simple or sophisticated two opposing military systems may be, if they are approximately equal in technological terms the struggle between them is likely to be prolonged and result in heavy mutual attrition. [29] Expecting as they did more accurate weapons to increase such attrition--as in fact was the case both in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1982 Falklands War, each in its time the most modern conflict in history--late-twentieth-century states ought logically to have produced and fielded more weapons, not less. The fact that this did not happen almost certainly shows that states were no longer either willing or able to prepare for wars on a scale larger than, say, Vietnam and Afghanistan; even those two conflicts came close to bankrupting the two largest powers, the United States and the USSR respectively.
To look at it in yet another way, during World War II the capitals of four out of seven (five out of eight, if China is included) major belligerents were occupied by the enemy, and two more (London and Moscow) were heavily bombed. Only one (Washington, D.C.) escaped destruction of any kind. Since then, no first or second-tier power has seen large-scale military operations waged on its territory; the reasons for this are obvious. In fact, the majority of countries that have gone to war--or against which others have gone to war--have been quite small and relatively unimportant. In this period, Israel fought against the various Arab states; Iran against Iraq; the United States first against North Korea, then against North Vietnam, and then against Iraq; Peru against Ecuador (before the two states decided to resolve their differences by making the disputed territory a national park); and, for two months in 1999, "the most powerful alliance in history" against Serbia. Conversely, when the countries in question ha ve not been unimportant, as in the recent case of India and Pakistan, military operations have invariably been confined to border incidents, never even coming near the capitals.
As the twentieth century approached its end, major interstate wars appeared to be on the retreat. In terms of numbers, they were becoming quite rare; [30] in terms of size, neither the armed forces that they involved, the magnitude of the military operations they witnessed, nor (in almost all cases) the threat that they posed to the belligerents' existences even approached pre-1945 dimensions. From the Middle East to the Straits of Taiwan, the world remains a dangerous place, and new forms of armed conflict appear to be taking the place of the old. [31] Nevertheless, compared to the situation as it existed even as late as 1939, the change has been momentous.
