Clausewitz did not think so highly of the theory of warfare, he wrote that it is the easiest of all sciences. Who am I do disagree. Well, I am not much of a war theoretician, but wrote this post.
In the old times I heard a lot about the fast decision loop (OODA) and the network-centric concept and precision weapons, stealth techniques, all that, and also the other side of the story: improvised explosives, terrorists, propaganda warfare. This so called change of a paradigm gives you the impression of a modern war being very different from the wars of the 20th century.
But the paradigm of today and the future is not what Americans invented, and it is not mobility, firepower and whatever chosen third, which is many military people have tried to convince me to believe.
I will tell you the secret of today and the foreseeable future: it is firepower versus hide-strike-and missiles.
Of course you disagree with me. You always do. People always disagree with me, but in the end I am usually correct. I had to rethink the American concept for many years. It has some merits, I do not deny, yet it is not what we see, and it is not what I logically deduce, so it is wrong. Again these things are wrong.
You see, the issue is that we lost mobility in mid 19th century and despite these very fast airplanes and fast tanks and all and fast decision loop, what is lost is lost. Mobility was cavalry, but firepower grew too high. That is artillery, basically, and the bombers. It is all explosives. Very few people can outrun explosives, except in American movies.
So, we lost the cavalry. That means losing 5000 years of military tradition. Even the Greeks and the Romans – those who mostly depended on infantry – had cavalry. Cavalry was killed by magazine rifles and machine guns. Those were bad, but the devilish thing is artillery and mortars. Well, mortar is small but deadly, I will group it with artillery, indirect fire, all of it. It can blow to pieces any shelter, bunker or whatever. And so we lost mobility. Even tanks – a slightly modernized version of heavy cavalry – cannot manage against indirect fire. It went down like this:
Prussian armies firing volleys – Napoleonic attack by the spirit and leadership – magazine rifles, machine guns and artillery shooting anything that moves – tanks as heavy cavalry – coordinated artillery strike destroying tanks – swarming to avoid the artillery strike – battle helicopters – missiles shooting down helicopters.
And now we are here, it is still artillery and bombers in the Syrian civil war.
Let’s have just a short look to the past.
Before the First World Ware it was believed that the next war would be a short one because a long war would freeze into trench warfare and there was every reason to avoid such attrition war. Everybody knows which side wins in attrition warfare, the bigger one, but he smaller one has to try if it wants to gain a strategic advantage (that used to be land, ports, resources). Yet, WWI finished as a long war. Germans may have thought they had a working plan, but they were stopped by a technical surprise in Marne, the French 75 gun. Not only by that gun only, but the attack did not go like in the Sedan battle. Sedan was a technical surprise to the French, or maybe an intelligence failure.
In the Second World War Hitler tried to win fast by tactical surprises. Blitzkrieg and especially the secret deal with Stalin succeed as a tactical surprise to win Poland. A tank attack through the Ardennie forest was a tactical surprise that decided the war for France, Crete was taken by parachuters, albeit with heavy losses, and finally Operation Barbarossa looks like a tactical surprise: Hitler was going to attack, which is shown by the agreements with Germany’s partners in the attack, yet he waited until Stalin had set his troops for an attack: as Soviet troops were not in a defensive formation German troops managed to advance far and to take many Soviet soldiers as prisoners. Thus, it is incorrect to say that Hitler made a preventive attack. Naturally, he was forced to attack before Stalin, but that was the whole idea of the tactical surprise on which the operation was built. As German soldiers had only summer clothes, a short war was apparently what they expected, but incorrectly.
None of these surprises could be repeated and they did not finish the war. The atom bomb was a technical surprise, or preferably a technical advantage as the Japanese could not build comparable weapons, that ended the Japan-American war, but the war was a long one.
That is, in neither world wars anybody invented any way to keep the battle mobile and to avoid the power of the firepower.
Much later I heard many times the same claim that the next war would be a short one as the weapons are now much more destructive. It does not look like that is necessarily true. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan were long, so it the civil war in Syria. Short wars in Iraq have not brought peace. There are short wars and long wars.
When I made the conscript service almost half-a-century ago, the personal armament of a soldier was an assault gun. It is the same gun today. Ordinary soldiers still do not have night vision goggles since they do not need them. Artillery and mortars have not changed that much. Anti-tank weapons have changed as tanks have thicker and active armour. As the basic equipment has not changed that much, war still could be fought the same way as it was fought in the world wars, that is, a front line and two sides. In such a war, if there is time, both sides build trenches and bunkers. The character of the war is that first there is indirect fire (artillery, mortars and if needed bombers) to enemy lines for some time and then the armoured forces and/or infantry attacks. In this traditional method both sides try to keep their land and gain more land. The losses in dead used to be 1/3-1/4 of men in the army (before the war ended) and the size of the army about 1/10 of the population. Thus the losses as dead were about 1/35 of the population and mainly soldiers.
But this is not the way modern wars are fought. There is a belief that a front line cannot be held any longer, as weapons are now better. There is very little logic in such an opinion. The purpose of the indirect fire is to kill as many defenders as it can but the defending side used to be feeding more men to the defence lines, so they run out of men only after they run out of men. What has changed in this indirect fire strike because the weapons are better, e.g. more accurate? Not necessarily that much. Already in the world wars indirect fire could kill the majority of those under the fire, but it did not stop or even weaken the defence as long as replacements filled the gaps. What has changed because infantry weapons have improved? Also, not that much has changed. An infantry attack against machine guns has heavy losses, but so it always did and assault rifles and machine guns are about the same they were. Attacking with tanks is better, but tanks can be destroyed with anti-tank weapons. Tanks have developed, but so have anti-tank weapons.
So, they situation has not changed because of weapons, we have changed our thinking.
In a modern war, like in the civil war in Syria, the battles are not trench warfare. Instead, the defenders hide in a city. As a battle in a city is difficult, the solution in Syria is to bomb the city into ruins. That solves the problem, but it causes a lot of refugees. In Syrian civil war the losses as dead are so far 400,000-500,000 of whom 85% are civilians. The losses are mostly caused by the pro-government side, as that is the side which clears cities by bombing them to ruins in this civil war. The population of Syria was about 18.5 million. Therefore the losses are about 1/40.
This number 1/40 is similar to the losses about 1/35 for the older form of the war, but there is a difference: in the Syrian civil war the dead mostly civilians and the traditional war the dead are mostly soldiers.
The figure 1/35 is related to the number of young men: 1/35 of the population is about 3 year classes of men, a year class being a bit under 1% of the population. Total losses are maybe 3.5 times the number of dead, so it is about 10 year classes of men. After 10 year classes of men have been killed, wounded, or taken as prisoners, there is not enough left to stop the attacker. Therefore, in the traditional war, the side with too heavy losses agreed to a peace. In modern war there is no such concept as a peace. The parties may sign whatever agreements, but they have not given up the fight. Usually there is no declaration of starting a war either, we are now much less civilized.
In a military sense it may seem better that the losses are today divided among the whole population as the number of soldiers is decreasing more slowly, but killing of children and women decreases the year classes of young men and finally has a negative effect also to the war. But that is not the real problem. The problem is killing the old men as they are the only ones who understand why young men should die for geopolitical benefits. Killing these civilians, the old wise men, will make war very unpopular, so you need a dictatorship. I do not mean a military rule, as there has to be in the wartime. I mean a real dictatorship, unless you make your wars somewhere far away, preferably in a poor country that nobody cares about. But anyway, bombing cities the way it is done today creates a huge refugee problem.
But consider the mobility and notice that there is no special mobility. This is all firepower. And the other side tries not to give targets, because every target can be destroyed, but if there are no targets they can only destroy sites with minor military importance.
The other side, that is, the one who gets bombed, must do something. There are no rules in a war, but there have always been conventions. For instance, you do not poison wells or cut down fruit trees, as a convention. But it is not a rule. If some party becomes too superior, the inferior opponent will not follow these conventions as they are not rules.
Assume some country is crazy enough to spend so much money in military matters as to have a significantly faster development of military systems. There is a problem in this situation. I do not mean that such a country is easily taken over by an infiltration attack: if you want to speed up technical development, you have to be open and accept the best brains from where-ever. These brains from where-ever may be a part of a tightly knit group wanting power, or in the worst case, they are spies. This is also a problem, though few seem to realize it, but I mean a different thing. There are always soft targets. If you make attacking military targets impossible, you just throw away a convention and in fact force the other side to attack soft targets. Besides you forget that the other side may bet some help. There are helpful parties and even if they do not at the moment seem to do anything, it can change.
Think about airplanes. I can imagine a time in the far future when there are no planes over the battle field, except maybe stealth bombers somewhere high up, as they would be shot down by ground-to-air missiles. There would mainly be ground-to-ground missiles and nobody would be sorry that the planes disappeared, went the same way as cavalry, but without this long nostalgic tradition calling for more mobility.
It is not mobility what the real paradigm today is. It is invisibility and missiles, but modern missiles. There is no centre of weight: the goal is to avoid the decisive battle. And the opponent uses attack, not defence. Attack is easier than defence: the defender must defend against any attack while the attacker can choose the attack. The attack is to soft targets, if hard targets are too hard.
I have to finish with some aphorisms.
Nature is no longer such an advantage as it once was. Tactics should be based on deeper fundaments that the special character of the nature in the country. This I say to my countrymen.
But this I say to those fascinated by technical gimmicks. The more advanced technology is, the less skills and knowledge it requires from its user. Applied to military matters this means that building a professional army is against the long-term trend of technological development and it will lose the advantage it has in some time.
And this I just say to everybody. The oldest human stone constructions are not defence walls, they are astronomical observatories. Organized warfare came later. Wisdom originally meant the theory of times, that is, astrological times.
Well, I guess nobody understands the wisdom of that piece of deep thought, so I add some more understandable ones.
Small, well-equipped mobile units can defeat enemy units, but they cannot control land. Controlling land does not require the ability to defeat the small, well-equipped mobile units, it means controlling the land when the units are elsewhere.
Uprisings of people are seldom spontaneous and when they are, they very seldom succeed. In general, it is wise not to believe anything that is published in mass media.
Basic rules are still valid: local superiority wins a battle and supply lines are vulnerable, so not so much has changed, apart of the paradigm. Technology is not the key to winning, though it may look like it. Indeed, often it is so that some very good technical solution is invented during a war (like tanks, airplanes, rocket, missiles, assault rifles) but it does not have much importance in that war. It will have it later. There are some exceptions to this rule, like the atom bomb and submarines. I would like to make a difference between technical advantage and technical surprise, just like there is a difference between tactical advantage and tactical surprise. A surprise is lost when it is revealed while an advantage is difficult to overcome even if it is known.
Finally, as this blog is what it is, I want to mention intelligence and deception. Sun Tzu recommended tactical deception and good intelligence as the golden rule of warfare, but now it seems to have gone too far. While deceiving the enemy is often good (though the French deceiving Germans about the French 95 gun may have been one reason Germans dared to attack in 1914) but deceiving your own people leads to a loss of trust that will finally be fatal. The big lie will break down. This is one major difference of yesterday and today.