Spectator-Sport War: The West and Contemporary Conflict 9781626370135

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SPECTATOR-SPORT WAR

Making Sense of Global Security MICHAEL CLARKE,

SERIES EDITOR

SPECTATOR-SPORT WAR THE WEST

AND

CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT

COLIN MCINNES

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2002 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2002 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McInnes, Colin. Spectator-sport war: the West and contemporary conflict / Colin McInnes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-047-X (alk. paper) 1. War. 2. World politics—21st century. I. Title. U21.2 .M375 2002 355.02—dc21 2001048641 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

vii

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

1

2 Modern War and Total War

5

3 The Obsolescence of Major War

27

4 The Transformation of War

51

5 Airpower and the Use of Force

79

6 The Revolution in Military Affairs

115

7 Spectator-Sport Warfare

143

Appendix: The Incidence of War: Explaining the Data, Alex Bellamy and Rebecca Jones List of Acronyms Bibliography Index About the Book

153 163 165 183 187

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

would like to thank the following people for the advice, assistance, encouragement, and support they offered during this project in their various ways: Alex Bellamy, Mike Clarke, Stuart Croft, Mick Dillon, Pauline Ewan, Theo Farrell, Lawrence Freedman, Colin Gray, Dick Hallion, Rebecca Jones, Mike MccGwire, Tamarra Makarenko, and Terry Terriff. I would also like to thank the Security Research Group in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and QinetiQ for providing the opportunity to discuss some of the ideas in the book. An initial draft of Chapter 4 was first presented as a Millennium Lecture at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and I would like to thank Ken Booth and Caroline Haste for their encouragement in this. Part of Chapter 5 also appeared in earlier form as “Fatal Attraction? Air Power and the West” in Contemporary Security Policy 22, no. 2 (2001); I would like to thank the publishers, Frank Cass, for their permission to use it. Above all, I would like to thank Sally for her unstinting support and encouragement. This book is dedicated to her and our daughter, Emma.

I

— Colin McInnes

vii

1 INTRODUCTION

his book has very distinct origins. In late 1998 the editors of the journal Contemporary Security Policy, Stuart Croft and Terry Terriff, invited me to contribute an article to a special issue commemorating twenty years of the journal (Croft and Terriff, 1999). They asked for a piece reflecting on how the use of force had changed in the twenty years since the journal’s first issue. That force continued to be used on a depressingly regular basis was only too apparent. Moreover, the West was among those using force: within a matter of weeks of the request to write the article, British and U.S. aircraft had attacked Iraq; in March of the next year, as I began to write the piece, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began its first major military action over Kosovo.1 But an article focusing purely on the use of force struck me as too narrow in its focus. It was not simply that the manner in which force was used had changed; the experience of war for the West had also changed. This fact was brought home to me one evening during the period when I was writing the article. I had been watching a soccer game on television (if memory serves, a Champions League game involving Manchester United—though as those who know me will testify, I am no Manchester United supporter). Immediately following this, I watched a news program. The news involved a report on the refugees fleeing Kosovo. It struck me that my engagement with these two, very different events was somehow similar. Despite Britain being at war, my life had not changed, and I was distanced from events as they unfolded in the Balkans. I recalled my parents telling me of their experiences during World War II—of my father being evacuated from Newcastle to a relative’s farm in Devon and of my mother taking refuge in an air raid shelter in the back garden of her parents’ house in Birmingham (I think it fair to say that in this respect, my father had a better war than my

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mother). For them, war was a very real, personal experience affecting their lives directly. Further, both had friends and family who were involved in the war effort: my paternal grandfather worked for the Admiralty and my maternal aunt in a munitions factory. Nor was this unusual; in fact, the reverse was true. But for me, NATO’s war in Kosovo was an unreal event. No one I knew (or at least, no one I was aware that I knew) was serving in the Balkans. I was not suffering in any sense as a result of being at war. Indeed, the war had almost no impact upon my life whatsoever. But I watched it on television, listened to radio reports, and read about it in the papers. In short, I was a spectator. Like many others, I sympathized with those suffering and had strong feelings about certain aspects of NATO’s campaign. But I did little about this except change some lecture notes and add a few seminar topics (I suspect some blankets also found their way to the Balkans, but the credit for this is my wife’s, not mine). In fact, my level of engagement was little different from watching Manchester United on television—I was engaged while it was in front of me, and maybe I discussed the game with some colleagues, but it had little lasting impact and certainly did not change my life. For the majority in the West, war had become a spectator sport. This argument formed the basis for my article (McInnes, 1999). But the article left too many questions unanswered for me to happily leave the subject alone. With the encouragement of Richard Purslow at Lynne Rienner Publishers, over the next two years I began to address these questions. The result is this book. At its heart is the idea that the era of total war has for the West been replaced by one of spectator-sport warfare. Major wars between Western powers are now obsolete. When Western states use force, they do so from afar, involving directly only a limited number of representatives on the field of battle. Society no longer participates; it spectates from a distance. Like sports spectators, Westerners demonstrate different levels of engagement, from those who watch unmoved and soon forget to those who follow events, personalities, tactics, and strategies closely and empathize strongly with what is happening. But their experience is removed. They sympathize but do not suffer; they empathize but do not experience. In this new warfare, the enemies are no longer other states but regimes, leaders, or individuals. Enemy civilians are no longer targeted, and Western armed forces are not expected to suffer casualties—there is zero or near-zero tolerance for casualties, not only to Western forces but to enemy civilians as well. For this type of war, air power is preeminent, and in the future information technology may lead to “cyberwar”—targeting not an enemy’s forces but its information infrastructure, not with traditional weapons but with information weapons. In so doing, Westerners are entering a

Introduction

3

fantasy world, a world where war for the West appears to be bloodless, where it is sport by other means. The events of 11 September 2001—the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon—provide further evidence of this new form of warfare. Not only did citizens of the West watch the twin towers collapse, many of them watching live on television, but the popular reaction suggested that a norm had been broken. The attacks had been on Western territory, against the citizens of the West, with no effort to minimize the damage caused or the risk to the protagonists. The assumption not only prior to 11 September but in the aftermath was that spectators should not suffer; when they did on 11 September, the reaction was one of outrage and a sense that something had to be done. The analog here is with the soccer tragedies of Heysel and Hillsborough, both of which involved the deaths of spectators and led to a reaction to prevent the like from happening again. Although the database for my overall argument may be slim—in traditional definitions, only a handful of wars and rather more militarized disputes, principally in the 1990s—the trend lines are clear. What I attempt to do in this book is to suggest some of the reasons for this change, to identify the nature of contemporary war for the West, and to examine how force is used by the West. At this point, it is perhaps useful to clarify what I mean here by the West and by warfare as used in the term spectator-sport warfare. There is no adequate, agreed definition of “the West.” Although there is agreement that at its core lies North America and western Europe, the periphery is more problematic. Farther east in Europe, are the new democracies there part of the West, especially the new members of NATO? What about Russia? Are liberal democratic states in the Asia Pacific region—Australia, New Zealand, Japan—also part of the West? For the purposes of this book and the argument presented here, I understand the West to be established liberal democracies. In part at least, the forces that have produced these changes in the nature of war reside in the nature of established liberal democracy. Thus, the less well-established a liberal democracy is, the less that state may be considered to be part of the West. In this sense, peripheral does not necessarily mean geographically distant. The term warfare is similarly problematic to define. The influential Correlates of War project and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute both define war as interstate conflict between sovereign political bodies with geographically defined areas and in which over 1,000 casualties are incurred. But this leads to a whole series of anomalies, both over the narrow state-centric definition of war and over whether 1,000 casualties is an appropriate threshold (the Falklands War is not a war by this definition).

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I do not wish to enter into this discussion. Rather, what I am interested in is a shift in the nature of war away from an era of total war toward one where war is a spectator sport. In this latter form, large numbers of casualties are the exception, not the norm. Using a notional threshold figure whereby a conflict becomes a war is therefore inappropriate (indeed, some of the more extreme forms of cyberwar may envisage no casualties on either side). Nor does spectator-sport warfare need to be interstate, particularly if it is prompted by humanitarian concerns in a failed state. What it requires is a Western state to use military means against another political grouping. The structure of the book is “architectural” in that each chapter attempts to build on the preceding one. I begin by arguing in Chapter 2 that the period from Napoleon on may be considered one of total war. This does not mean that all wars were total—patently, this was not the case. But the experience and fear of total war dominated the era. In particular, I identify two key themes of total war, escalation and participation. I argue in Chapter 3 that major war in the West is now obsolete and that the era of total war is therefore effectively over. But because war still occurs, we are forced to conclude that the nature of war has changed for the West. In Chapter 4, I discuss this transformation of war, using the key themes of escalation and participation identified in Chapter 2, and develop a five-part framework as constituting the West’s preferred new way in warfare. In Chapters 5 and 6, I examine how this framework is implemented—how force is and may be used in the future. Chapter 5 considers why air power has become more attractive than land or sea power for the West; Chapter 6 examines the possible impact of information technology on the use of force and the debates over the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Chapter 7 ties air power and the RMA more tightly into the five-part framework before discussing what it means to be a spectator and the relationship between war and sport.

Note 1. NATO’s first military action had been Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in 1995. It had involved fewer forces over a shorter time frame, and, unlike Kosovo, it was conducted on behalf of the United Nations.

2 MODERN WAR

AND TOTAL

WAR

odern war has been dominated by the experience—and the fear— of total war. Nowhere has this been more the case than in the West. The experience of two world wars and the possibility of an apocalyptic third have loomed large in the minds not only of Western military professionals but of society as a whole. That the slaughter of World War I still resonates powerfully in the public consciousness over eighty years later, when only a handful of veterans survive to tell the tale firsthand, speaks volumes for the impact of that war on Western society as a whole. The aftermath of both world wars saw an aversion to war not only among those who were vanquished but among the victors as well. Indeed, the interwar refrain of “never again” was heard loudest among the victors. Nor were military professionals immune. After both world wars, strategists sought new ways of avoiding future wars escalating into total wars. In the interwar period, for example, strategies of maneuver and armored warfare were developed by thinkers such as Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1925, 1927, 1941) and Major General J. F. C. Fuller (1923, 1926) as a means of avoiding the attritional stalemate that appeared to characterize total war, and after World War II, theories of nuclear deterrence attempted to prevent major war from occurring in Europe at all (Brodie, 1959; Freedman, 1989). Of course, not all of the wars fought by the West in the twentieth century were total wars. Indeed, the majority were not. In particular, the period since 1945 saw Western powers fight wars outside Europe that were deliberately kept limited in nature. The United States in Korea and Vietnam; Britain in Malaya, Kenya, and the Middle East; and France in Indochina and Algeria all fought wars that were limited in their means, aims, and impact on domestic society. The first of these wars, the Korean War, led to the development of a whole literature to explain how and why it had been

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Spectator-Sport War

kept limited and how similar strategies could be used to prevent future wars from becoming total (Kaufmann, 1956; Kissinger, 1957; Osgood, 1957). But the use of the term limited does not imply a movement beyond total war. Rather it acknowledges the fear that wars could escalate, perhaps into total war. The limited wars of the Cold War were therefore fought in the shadow of total war, and the thinking that accompanied them was very much a product of the era of total war. Writing of a different period, Hew Strachan (2000a) has argued that the imperial and colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were total for the native populations involved and that even the British Army, which in the twentieth century developed the practice of minimum force in handling counterinsurgency campaigns (McInnes, 1996; Mockaitis, 1990), in the period between the Indian Mutiny and World War I practiced unrestrained warfare against ethnic groups (Strachan, 2000a: 354). The linkage between modern war and total war is a close one because the characteristics that identify a war as “modern” are also those that can lead to war becoming total. These characteristics are not related to military technology—modern here does not mean the use of the most up-to-date weapons. Rather it refers to the nature of war fought between industrialized societies. In the industrial age, warfare became industrialized. It was most obvious in the manner in which productive capacity came to influence, even determine, the outcome of war. Increasingly, victory was not the product of skill on the battlefield but of economic might. In World War II, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of the most tactically accomplished and skillful battlefield commanders of the war, commented: “From the moment that the overwhelming industrial capacity of the United States could make itself felt in any theatre of war, there was no longer any chance of ultimate [German] victory in that theatre. . . . Tactical skill could only postpone the collapse” (quoted in Ellis, 1990: 525). But industrialization and the production line mentality affected the character of the war, not just the outcome. The German attempt to exterminate Jews used production line techniques in perhaps the most “total” act of total war, and even battlefields came to resemble production lines. This development is most graphically illustrated by the infamous first day of the Battle of the Somme: troops were organized in such a way as to ensure a steady flow to the front line, where they were duly slaughtered with industrial efficiency (Middlebrook, 1984). Industrialization also allowed the scale of both battle and war to be greatly increased. Ever-larger armies took to the battlefield, numbering hundreds of thousands or even millions of men (and, very occasionally, women). Moving, feeding, and supplying these vast numbers required

Modern War and Total War

7

industrial-age technologies. Organizing such huge forces also required industrial-age techniques, with the result that commanders of armies came to resemble managers rather than leaders. This change was epitomized by the General Staff system introduced by the Prussians/Germans in the nineteenth century and used widely in the twentieth century. The task of the General Staff was as much to plan wars as to fight them. When Germany launched its attack on France in August 1914, for example, the work of the German General Staff appeared done: they had planned the movement of their armies, and all that was now required was for the troops to execute their orders (van Creveld, 1985; Tuchman, 1962). Although such inflexibility led to problems when plans went awry, as indeed happened in 1914, the importance of managing battle through planning was still very much in evidence throughout both world wars. Despite the much-lauded tactical flexibility of the German army, particularly during the blitzkrieg, successful command at the strategic level during World War II was as much about the flow of resources as how those resources should be used (Ellis, 1990). For every Rommel demonstrating flair and flexibility in battle, there was a Montgomery emphasizing the importance of a good plan based on building up material superiority (Hamilton, 1984; Montgomery, 1958). The growth of armies also meant that war could no longer be the preserve of those few who chose it (or were forced into it) as a profession. Rather it became an obligation of citizenship. Conscription was widely used in the West throughout the twentieth century, in peace as well as in war. Further, since industrial production was a key factor in victory, economies were mobilized for the war effort, with the result that large numbers of civilians, both men and women, became directly involved in war-related activities. Finally, the distinction between combatant and noncombatant was progressively eroded, most dramatically in the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II. In these campaigns, military force was targeted against the citizens of a country rather than focusing more narrowly on its armed forces. As a result, society became much more heavily involved in war. Modern war between industrialized societies appeared to involve the whole of society rather than a select few and in this sense was seen as total war. Modern warfare is therefore closely associated with industrialization, and total war is often seen as a product of industrialization. The concern of this book, however, is warfare in what may be termed a “postindustrial” age. In this chapter, I set the scene for such an examination by looking at the nature of modern, industrialized war. I do this through the lens of total war. In particular, I examine two key features of modern warfare that are closely associated with ideas of total war,

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namely participation in war and the escalation of war. To begin with, however, I briefly explore the origins and development of total war.

The Idea of Total War The historiography of modern war has been deeply affected by the idea of total war (Beckett, 1988: 1–3). Roger Chickering comments that “the history of military affairs is as much wedded to language and the discursive construction of meaning as is any other genre of historical writing. . . . Modern military history has been governed for the better part of the twentieth century by a ‘master narrative.’ It is emplotted in the concept of total war” (Chickering, 1999: 13). Our understanding of the development of modern war is firmly embedded in the concept of the progression toward total war, with each successive major war demonstrating increased levels of death and destruction, societal involvement, and the erosion of the distinction between combatant and noncombatant (see Chickering, 2000: 37–38). The starting point for this progression is the Napoleonic Wars. Through their greater involvement of society (the levée en masse) and Napoleon’s pursuit of absolute-war aims, these wars appeared to mark a break with the past. The late eighteenth century is therefore usually portrayed as an era of limited war, both in terms of its conduct and its war aims. The armies of the age were relatively small in size and maneuvered as much to avoid a decisive military engagement as to fight one (Duffy, 1974, 1985). Armies were also drawn largely from those who saw military service as their chosen profession rather than a social obligation, and societies remained largely unaffected by war. Michael Howard describes the late-eighteenthcentury European army as a “self-contained universe, a sub-culture with its own routine, its own ceremonies, its own music and dress” (Howard, 1976: 72). Armies were divided into officers, who were motivated largely by honor and ambition, and soldiers, for whom war was a business (Palmer, 1986: 92). In the nineteenth century, however, citizens became soldiers. The mass armies that emerged were nations in arms, and the wars they fought were “people’s wars” whose aims society as a whole could understand. The catalyst for this change was the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century and the chief architect Napoleon. The revolutions in America and France “not only brought about the more or less successful quest for participation of the citizens in the political process within their state [but] also led to tremendous wars in which those citizens took immediate part in order to defend

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their political aspirations” (Forster and Nagler, 1997: 4–5). Napoleon in particular was able to field and motivate large armies through the concept of the nation in arms, so that his wars were also the people’s wars. Further, his war aims were the total overthrow of opposing states through the use of devastating force. War was the key to Napoleon’s foreign policy, and his war aims were total victory (Gates, 1997a; Gooch, 1980: 25–49). Although the Napoleonic era introduced the practice of the nation in arms and the conduct of absolute war, both of which were key moves in the development of total war, it took the industrialization of the nineteenth century to create the qualitative leap in the scale of violence that characterized total war. The American Civil War, rather than the Prussian and German wars of the late nineteenth century, provides the watershed, both in terms of the growing impact of industrialization and in terms of the social effects of war. The American Civil War did not merely involve the whole population but was fought for a total end (the overthrow of the Confederacy), resulted in a massive loss of life (a much higher percentage of Americans were killed in the Civil War than in either world war), led to the deliberate, wholesale devastation of large areas of the country (particularly in William Sherman’s march from Atlanta and in Philip Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley), and produced radical social and political changes, including the end of slavery (McPherson, 1997). Although there is some debate over whether the American Civil War was a total war because of the continued distinction between soldiers and civilians (Neely, 1997), in most other respects it demonstrated the characteristics of a total war. Few would dispute the status of World War I as a total war. Although Roger Chickering has questioned how easily the first year of the war fits into a neat historical progression toward totality, by the middle years of the war, its intensity and scope could leave little doubt that it was the first total war (Chickering, 2000). Indeed, the term total war appears to have been first used by the German general Erich Ludendorff in his memoirs of the war, although in 1917 the French leader Georges Clemenceau described his strategy as la guerre integrale (Beckett, 1988: 1; Chickering, 1999: 16). World War I appeared to demonstrate not only violence on a scale unprecedented in Europe but the involvement of society as a whole in the war effort, the critical role of industrial production in determining the outcome of the war, and the ability of war to effect social change on both victor and vanquished (Bond, 1984; Marwick, 1974). These effects were further amplified in World War II. The geographic spread of the war was greater even than in World War I, the outcome was more decidedly affected by industrial productivity and numbers,

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and society was even more heavily involved (Bond, 1984: 172–200). World War II also saw the deliberate targeting of noncombatants in the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, culminating in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the attempt to exterminate the Jews by the Nazis. The war on the Eastern Front also demonstrated scant respect for noncombatants. Those overrun by the fighting were at best ignored (often leading to starvation) and at worst shot as traitors, often out of suspicion rather than because of evidence. In emergencies, such as the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad, civilians were ordered into combat with no training and, on occasion, no weapons. At Stalingrad, German troops used children to get water from the Volga River, who were then shot at by the Soviet forces (Beevor, 1998; Salisbury, 1986). Finally the nuclear age threatened totality of an apocalyptic variety: that if a third world war occurred, it might result in the total destruction of the planet. Deterrent strategies such as massive retaliation explicitly played upon the threat of nuclear attack against enemy society (Freedman, 1989; Kaplan, 1983). Even a “limited” use of nuclear weapons might result in not only huge casualties and immediate destruction but long-term radiation and environmental effects, including the possibility of a nuclear winter. “Total” is a powerful word and total war a powerful idea (Chickering, 1999: 17). Images associated with total war are easy to identify. At the forefront are images of large-scale death and destruction and of a lack of restraint in the conduct of war and in the ends pursued. Total war conjures up images of total means geared toward total ends. It also suggests the wholesale mobilization of society. Economies are geared to the war effort, propaganda is employed to ensure continued support of the war, and rights are curtailed for the greater good. But the shock of war, when spread throughout society, also suggests the potential for total war to bring about major social change (Beckett, 1988: 1). Total war also conjures up the image of the “fragile barriers” separating soldiers and civilians being eroded (Bond, 1984: 168). Civilians are not merely part of the war effort; they are seen as legitimate targets in war. Although civilians have been targeted throughout the history of warfare, in the past it has occurred because of a lack of discipline, for retribution, or for deterrent effect (pour encourager les autres). Attacking civilians in total war, however, encompassed all of these but was also designed to bring about a collapse in the support for the war effort or to affect industrial production. In other words, it became a central element of warfighting strategies. Although these images of modern war may be rooted deep in the popular mind, they do not provide an adequate definition of total war.

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Defining total war has proved unusually problematic because images of total war are not confined to the modern period. All wars are destructive. The Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648 devastated Germany and reduced its urban population by one-third, and battles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were “murderous affairs” with tens of thousands killed (Beckett, 1988: 3–4). Nor is the pursuit of total victory a purely modern phenomenon—the war aims of Louis XIV were hardly limited, and the Romans’ imperial ambitions led to the imposition of not only their rule but often their culture and religion (Chickering, 1999: 22). Total war is not alone in involving a trial of economic strength—as Alan Milward points out, “the phrase ‘economic warfare’ [has the] curious implication that there is some kind of warfare which is not economic” (Milward, 1987: 294). Equating total war with industrialization is problematic because some of the most “total” phases of modern war have involved some of the least industrialized areas, from the campaigns in Missouri in the American Civil War to the Eastern Front in World War II (Chickering, 1999: 19). Nor is the blurring of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants a distinctive feature of wars in the twentieth century. As suggested above, the history of warfare is littered with examples of noncombatants being killed in war, either deliberately or inadvertently. Indeed, the attempt to prohibit such actions through just war criteria implies that such actions can and often do happen (Walzer, 1980). If there is a problem in defining total war because the characteristics that are associated with it predate the era of modern war, then there is also a problem in that total wars fail to attain the level of totality that might be expected of them. As Brian Bond has put it, “total war is just as much a myth as total victory or total peace” (Bond, 1984: 168). In particular, the image of unrestrained warfare has seldom been matched by reality. Both the means and the ends of war have regularly demonstrated limitations. This has especially been the case with the divide between civilians and soldiers. Only rarely has the distinction been systematically blurred, and even then it was not wholly abandoned. Nor has war dominated society to the exclusion of all else. Even during the two world wars, everyday life could retain a healthy dose of normality (Chickering, 1999: 19). Similarly, the social consequences of total war may have been overestimated (Smith, 1986b). Although slavery was abolished after the American Civil War, widespread discrimination continued to exist, and although women played a greater role in the two world wars, when peace returned, many went back to lives that appeared to be little changed from before the war. The historical narrative of total war therefore encounters two problems. First, those features that are seen as characterizing total war were

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present before the French and American Revolutions, and second, total wars were not really total in that both their conduct and their impact was limited. A way around these two problems is to suggest that total war is more a Weberian “ideal type” than an accurate description of the character of modern war: “The phenomenon [of total war] can never be fully realized; it poses instead the absolute toward which the development of warfare is tending” (Chickering, 1999: 16). Total war in its absolute or ideal form has not occurred. Indeed, it may not be possible for wars that fully demonstrate all of the features of total war ever to occur. But modern warfare has revealed sufficient characteristics and trends that approximate to this ideal that they can be described as total wars— or at the very least, as occurring in the era of total war. Of these characteristics, perhaps the two most important are participation and escalation. Participation is essential because, as Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler comment, “In every modern war, the inclusion of the civilian population is essential for the war effort. Without the home front loyal and committed to a cause . . . ultimately the battle front collapses. Indeed, the domestic front is pivotal in sustaining a war” (Forster and Nagler, 1997: 20). But society not only participated in modern war to a greater extent than had previously been the case but was affected and changed by the experience of war more than had previously been the case—the positions of blacks after the American Civil War and women after World War I were changed, even if the extent of these changes has been exaggerated. And escalation is important because of the scale of the conflict. In writing on the changes introduced by the Napoleonic Wars, Carl von Clausewitz noted: “War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds; as one side dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which logically must lead to an extreme” (Clausewitz, 1968: 103). More recently, Raymond Aron wrote that modern war had an “irrepressible dynamism” such that “national wars naturally tend to expand into total wars” (Aron, 1955: 19, 39). I examine these two key characteristics of modern war below.

Escalation In modern war, escalation has been a dynamic, not a strategy. Moreover, it has been a dynamic that has proven difficult to control. In the eighteenth century the military strategist Jacques-Antoine de Guibert noted with satisfaction that contemporary wars, fought between dynastic monarchs using professional armies, were limited, relatively innocuous affairs (except for those unfortunate enough to be directly involved in

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combat). He warned against the use of the people in such wars due to the destruction that would follow. For Guibert, it was better for people to remain spectators, even when their land was invaded, because for them to attempt to defend their land would only prompt retribution and revenge (Palmer, 1986: 112). These ideas now appear quaint. With the shift from dynastic monarchies to nation-states, the idea that a people would stand idly by and thereby remain unaffected by a war being conducted around them became obsolete. From the American and French Revolutions on, it became increasingly difficult for the people not to become involved in their nation’s wars. And as societies and economies mobilized for war, not only the scale of war but the goals escalated. This dynamic was first noted by Clausewitz. Attempting to explain how the wars of the Napoleonic era differed from those of the previous era, Clausewitz concluded that the difference lay not so much in Napoleon’s strategy but in the political basis of revolutionary France. The French Revolution had enabled the full force of national energy to be galvanized into the war effort, a force Napoleon had exploited. For Clausewitz, wars that exploited and harnessed national energy were different in kind from the limited wars of Guibert’s time because of the escalatory dynamic that was released. War would escalate as each side sought out a material advantage over the other. Only factors external to the war would prevent it from becoming absolute—factors such as technological, geographic, or societal limitations. War was a collision of two living things that would react and adapt as events unfolded, but in the modern era, the reaction would be one of escalation, not limitation (Clausewitz, 1968: 102–122; Paret, 1986: 199). With rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, the technological and geographic limitations to absolute war were much reduced. Troops could be quickly mobilized, moved, and supplied over great distances, principally through the development of railways. Even the oceans were less of a barrier after the development of steam propulsion and ships made of metal. With the machine gun, modern artillery, and rifles, technology had also provided the means to destroy large numbers of people quickly and efficiently. Nor did society create a limiting factor—indeed, the situation was quite the reverse in the initial stages of World War I. As Michael Howard comments, once the Schlieffen Plan for the invasion of France had failed in late 1914, eighteenthcentury statesmen would have probably begun to negotiate a peace. But in the twentieth century, the war had unleashed powerful forces of popular enthusiasm, expectation, and indignation. Society did not expect its leaders to negotiate a peace but to redouble their efforts to win the war (Howard, 1976: 112).

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By World War I, therefore, the escalation dynamic was a powerful force in determining the character of the war. As the war progressed and the casualties mounted, leaders did not seek to minimize the bloodshed by scaling down the effort and the war aims; rather the reverse occurred. The aim increasingly became not victory on the battlefield but the exhaustion of enemy society. Battles and armies were means to bleed the enemy to death, a strategy explicitly adopted by the German general Erich Falkenhayn at Verdun in 1916 (Terraine, 1984: 96–97). This “strategy of the longest purse” was inherently escalatory—the stark choice was either to commit more resources to the war or to accept defeat. The irony was that in World War I, the greater the effort, the less was achieved as each escalatory move was matched by the other. As a result, the more the war ground down society, the more of society became involved in the war. By 1917 the strain was beginning to tell in Germany. But rather than seek an accommodation, the German government, under the direction of Ludendorff, escalated once again, taking the war beyond the military institution and mobilizing the whole nation to the single purpose of the war effort. The military now controlled not only the government but the economy and society and directed it at winning the war. As Michael Geyer comments, “strategy turned from an operating calculus of limiting and concentrating the war effort into a rationale for expanding and escalating the use of force” (Geyer, 1986: 548). Reaction to the destruction and devastation of World War I led interwar strategists to consider means of making force once again instrumental and purposeful. The main exception to this appears to be the Soviet Union in the 1920s, where Mikhail Frunze successfully argued that war should involve the mobilization of the whole Soviet economy to protect socialism (Rice, 1986: 661). But World War II proved, like World War I, to be inherently escalatory. The production and destruction of soldiers and matériel became the war’s guiding strategic principles. Technology again abetted the move toward Clausewitz’s ideal of absolute war. The significance of geographical distances was reduced, not least through the development of transoceanic maritime power projection capabilities. The Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor and the U.S. “island-hopping” campaign in the Pacific Ocean both demonstrated how power could be projected with devastating effect across huge areas of ocean, and in Europe Operation Overlord demonstrated that the English Channel was no longer the barrier it once was. Strategic bombers also proved capable of striking at long range, devastating cities hundreds of miles behind the front line within hours of launch. And technology provided leaps in destructive capability, with the trend in more efficient and destructive munitions culminating in the development and use of the atomic bomb.

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The nuclear age saw a new twist to the escalation dynamic with the apocalyptic possibility of a third world war. The process of escalation came under unprecedented scrutiny as strategists attempted to devise means of deterring war or, if war occurred, prevent it from developing into a global nuclear catastrophe. “Ladders” of escalation with identifiable steps were devised as a means of controlling war, the assumption being that if both sides were aware of what constituted an escalatory move, then provided it was made clear that escalation would be in neither side’s interest, the process could be controlled. Whether escalation could be controlled and whether control should be attempted became one of the central debates in nuclear strategy and one of the most complex. Although some argued that deterrence relied on the will and capability to escalate and use nuclear weapons, others argued that such threats were incredible and that a more controlled process of limited responses was required. But this in turn raised the question that, if escalation could be controlled, what would deter war? Most alarming was the scenario whereby war began because one or both sides believed they could control the process of escalation but were mistaken in this belief and catastrophe resulted (Ball, 1981; Clark, 1982; Freedman, 1989; Jervis, 1984; Kahn, 1965). Amid all this complexity, three things stood out. First was the centrality of escalation to modern war. Indeed, it would be only a slight exaggeration to state that nuclear strategy was all about theories of escalation. Second, despite all the theorizing, uncertainty still surrounded the escalation process. Few were convinced that in a war between the superpowers in Europe, escalation could be controlled—though many sought to find ways of making it possible. Control appeared to be possible only outside Europe, particularly when one or both of the two superpowers were not directly involved. In other words, superpower escalation could only be controlled when they were in indirect military conflict. Once they were in direct conflict, all bets were off. And third, in deterrence theory, escalation had become a strategy as well as a process or dynamic; it was a means of using military force (or more accurately, the threat of military force) toward a political end, namely the avoidance of war. The effects of escalation can be seen in a number of features of modern war, most notably the erosion of restraints on the conduct of war and the increased scale of the war. Ian Beckett argues that total war saw the “conscious abandonment of most if not all restraints” (Beckett, 1988: 8). War is a brutal act and battle a deadly affair (Keegan, 1991), but modern war appeared to reach new levels of brutality. Antony Beevor, in describing German conduct on the Eastern Front in World

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War II, writes of the “escalating brutality in which conventional morality had become utterly distorted. German troops, most of them, no doubt, loving fathers and sons at home, indulged in a sort of sick war tourism in Russia. . . . Most natural pity for civilians was transmuted into an incoherent anger based on the feeling that women and children had no business to be in a battle zone” (Beevor, 1998: 44, 57). And battles became more deadly. From the devastation of Gettysburg through the mud of Passchendaele to the horrors of the Eastern Front in World War II, battle became not only more dangerous but dehumanized. Soldiers were killed by weapons fired from afar, rarely seeing the enemy who fired them. The battlefield became empty—a depopulated area that could only be crossed at great risk. When soldiers did encounter the enemy, propaganda ensured that he or she was further dehumanized, that the enemy was portrayed as evil or monstrous, guilty of horrendous crimes. Occasionally, these claims were true, but more often they were yet another example of the lack of restraint. Nor was restraint demonstrated beyond the battlefield. Both world wars saw merchant shipping targeted and civilians bombed. War aims were no longer limited but extended to the overthrow of the enemy state. More efficient methods of killing were pursued and new methods such as poison gas and the atom bomb developed. Governments intervened in scientific research and development to ensure that no technological stone was left unturned in the quest for advantage. If victory required opening Pandora’s Box, then so be it. This picture of unrestrained warfare does require qualification, however. Battle is almost by definition a barbaric act, involving the conscious decision to take the life of other human beings. Modern battles are little different in this respect from those throughout the past millennia—albeit that the distance at which they are fought means that they have become increasingly dehumanized. Where modern battles differ, however, is in the treatment of wounded and of prisoners. Technology may have made killing more efficient, but advances in medical science also meant that wounded received better treatment. And despite the demonizing of the enemy, modern laws and norms of war meant that when the enemy was captured, he or she was treated better than ever before. Indeed, the exceptions to this, such as the behavior of both sides on the Eastern Front and of the Japanese in World War II, are notable because of their subsequent infamy. At the other extreme, despite his order to “shoot Germans” at el-Alamein, when the commander of the Afrika Korps was captured, General Bernard Montgomery treated him as a comrade in arms, discussing the course of the battle with him over dinner (Hamilton, 1984: 796–797).

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What underpins improvements in the treatment of both the wounded and prisoners of war is the idea that, in a people’s war, people matter and should be treated accordingly. The movement from dynastic warfare to the people’s war of modern times meant that the manner in which soldiers were viewed changed. They were no longer resources of little political value; they were a part of the body politic and deserved to be treated well for fulfilling their duties as citizens of the nation in arms. At the same time as propaganda dehumanized the enemy, so changes in the nature of armies produced a countervailing trend placing new limits on the treatment of enemy soldiers. Nor was there a total lack of restraint in the use of weapons. Chemical weapons were available during World War II but were not used, and the bombing of German cities and atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provoked—and continues to provoke—moral doubts. What this suggests is that, although restraints on the conduct of war were eroded, they did not disappear altogether, and some new restraints appeared in the requirement for better provision for the wounded and prisoners of war. If the erosion of restraints on the conduct of war was one of the features by which modern war had escalated, then a second was the scale of war. Modern war was fought on an unprecedented scale. The geographic spread of modern war was such that, during the American Civil War, large swaths of the country were directly involved in the conduct of the war. Although the popular memory of World War I in the West is of a relatively static front line, elsewhere fronts proved mobile, and the sheer number of fronts demonstrated the growth in the scale of war. World War II saw campaigns fought over hundreds, even thousands of miles, across the Pacific Ocean, East Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Soviet Union. By the end of both world wars, most of the world’s population was formally at war. The scale of casualties was equally awesome. The dominance of firepower in the industrial age led to industrial-scale killing. By 1916, after just two years of war, the French had suffered 3.35 million casualties and the Germans 2.46 million. Even the British, whose army in 1914 had been so small as to be described as “contemptible” by the German kaiser, had suffered over 1 million casualties by 1916 (Bond, 1984: 118–119). Nor was World War II noticeably less dangerous for troops in the front line. Life expectancy for soldiers was no higher than for those in World War I. John Ellis (1990) provides compelling data illustrating casualty figures for U.S. infantry divisions in northwestern Europe (see Table 2.1). What is remarkable is not just the numbers of dead and wounded but the percentages. In less than a year’s fighting—sometimes much less—a U.S. infantry division would regularly suffer over 60 percent casualties and

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Table 2.1 Casualty Figures for U.S. Infantry Divisions in Northwestern Europe During World War II Battle Casualties

Percentage

Division

Months

Dead

Wounded

Dead

Wounded

4 29 30 79 83 90 5 8 35 28 80

11 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 9 9

4,834 3,786 3,516 2,943 3,620 3,930 2,656 2,820 2,947 2,683 3,480

17,371 15,541 13,376 10,971 11,807 14,386 9,549 10,057 11,526 9,609 12,484

18.1 15.9 16.5 16.1 19.2 17.3 15.9 16.3 15.6 16.1 17.0

65.1 56.3 62.7 59.8 62.5 63.2 60.3 45.3 61.0 57.7 61.1

Source: John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War. London: Andre Deutsch, 1990, pp. 538–539.

over 16 percent deaths. Of course, infantry divisions were frontline formations, and support troops suffered far fewer casualties. But equally there were other areas of the war where casualties may have been much higher, including the strategic bombing offensives over Germany and campaigns on the Eastern Front, where mortality rates among prisoners of war meant that surrender often resulted in death. Overall numbers of deaths in war are notoriously difficult to calculate. Brian Bond concludes that World War I left over 10 million dead and a further 20 million wounded or seriously maimed. Over 5 million women were widowed by the war, and over 9 million children orphaned. In World War II, over 30 million people probably died in Europe alone and 50 million altogether. Figures are even more difficult to ascertain for World War II than World War I because of uncertainties over how many died on the Eastern Front, both directly and indirectly as a result of the war. But the figure of over 20 million Soviet deaths is regularly used, which if correct suggests that the overall total of 30 million for Europe may be conservative. Death and destruction were not limited to the armed services. In eastern Europe and the Balkans, civilian casualties regularly outstripped those of the regular armed forces, a figure swollen by the extermination of the Jewish communities in many eastern European cities. In Germany, more than 1 million civilians were killed by the war and its urban centers reduced to rubble, and Poland lost 15 percent of its population. Almost half of those killed by World War II in Europe were civilians (compared to a figure of one-twentieth for World War I), and over 16 million more people were permanently

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moved from where they had lived before the war (Bond, 1984: 102, 196–197). These figures are awful and awesome and barely begin to hint at the suffering imposed by the two world wars. Although some have argued that the level of death and destruction in the modern age has not been relatively higher than that experienced previously (Milward, 1987: 1), in absolute terms it has clearly been the case, and it is also debatable in relative terms. And with a nuclear third world war, even greater loss of life would have probably occurred. War has therefore escalated not merely in losing some of the restraints of previous ages but in the scale of death and destruction it could impose.

Participation The second characteristic of modern warfare is that of participation. As Arthur Marwick puts it, “Feudal wars were essentially waged by a small aristocratic minority which alone shared in the spoils, with the peasant masses on both sides suffering from their depredations. In modern war there is greater participation on the part of the larger, underprivileged groups in society, who tend correspondingly to benefit, or at least develop a new self-consciousness” (Marwick, 1974: 12). The most direct manner in which society participated in the war effort was by citizens taking up arms to fight. Although the Napoleonic period introduced the idea of a nation in arms and universal male conscription, it was resisted after 1815 by the continental European monarchs because of the social and political implications arising from such a move. With the growth of industrialization through the nineteenth century, however, European states and empires were able to mobilize and sustain larger armies. Technology also produced weapons that could be used after only a short period of training, allowing conscripts to quickly become proficient in their use. Thus industrial and technological developments led to the ability to field ever-larger armies, armies that could only be created by moving from a professional to a popular basis. Mutual fear and suspicion made the ability to field such armies a requirement. By the end of the nineteenth century, continental Europe had become militarized to an unprecedented degree. Power was equated with military power, which in turn derived from the size of armies that could be fielded (except armies such as those of imperial Russia, which, although large, were nevertheless seen as technologically backward). But this militarization was not solely the result of a technological dynamic. The forces of nationalism that had developed through the century allowed

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leaders to motivate citizens into bearing arms by a call to defend the state. Armed forces became the embodiment of the nation, not servants of a monarch, and war became a matter for the people. The distinction between soldier and citizen was progressively eroded, as was, eventually, the distinction between combatant and noncombatant (Beckett, 1988: 4–5; Howard, 1976: 100–112). The impact of modern war was felt not only by those increasing numbers of citizens who took up arms to protect the state but also by those who remained at home. Hew Strachan, for example, notes that the siege warfare on the Western Front “involved the civilian in the business of war as surely as it had in earlier epochs, but it did so in a radically different way” (Strachan, 2000b: 24). Whereas civilians were previously affected mainly by the passage of armies through the land—producing a range of consequences from the requisitioning of food and shelter to the suppression of liberties—they were now largely protected from these effects by the static front line. Although this was not the case in other fronts or in the more mobile moments of World War II, the Western Front marks a turning point. Civilians became involved in war as “a unit of resource in the mobilization of war industry. Increasingly it seemed that he (or she) had traded fundamental liberties—the right to strike or the freedom to shift employment—for the benefits of physical security. . . . Total war expressed itself at the home front in terms of loss of freedoms rather than loss of lives” (Strachan, 2000b: 24). Modern war, particularly the two world wars, proved a “colossal psychological experience” for the whole of society, affecting most aspects of social life, including the arts (which often benefited from increased state patronage during war), religious beliefs, and social attitudes (Marwick, 1974: 13, 80–83). It also placed huge strains on society, including food rationing and the removal of basic human rights. Indeed, the morale of society was considered so important that it was targeted in war, indirectly through blockades and directly through strategic bombing. There was little chance of escape from the knowledge that the state was at war, and, once the war was over, the shadow left on the public consciousness was unprecedented. To this day, the first act of Russian brides is to lay flowers at a war memorial; the wreck of the battleship Missouri at Pearl Harbor is a major tourist attraction, despite there being little of the battleship to see; the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., attracts large numbers of visitors despite the many competing and less emotionally challenging museums nearby; British politicians and the royal family unite every November to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and the purchase of poppies remains an act of individual charity spread through the nation. And then there are the books,

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plays, and films, some fictional and others not, which continue to touch on deep, shared feelings arising from the experience of modern war. More controversial is the argument that modern war acted as an agent of social change. In particular, it is argued that the participation of society in war had a leveling effect. Indeed, some have gone as far as to claim that there was a firm and direct correlation between the degree of social participation in the war effort and the subsequent leveling of social inequalities (Beckett, 1988: 2). This was especially so for socially disadvantaged groups such as women and blacks, who found new opportunities in war, but also for the economically underprivileged. David Lloyd George’s promise of a “land fit for heroes” after World War I may have proved hollow, but it reflected a sense that those who had sacrificed much for their country deserved to be treated well by that same country. The war and social change argument proved influential among Western historians, particularly after the publication of Richard Titmuss’s volume of the British Official History of the Second World War, Problems of Social Policy (Titmuss, 1950). Perhaps the most wellknown advocate of this thesis was Arthur Marwick (1974). He argued that modern war, unlike wars of previous ages, was a testing experience for the institutions of the state. These institutions might not always collapse, although it might be one consequence, as happened with slavery after the American Civil War. If the collapse was sufficiently widespread, it might have revolutionary consequences, as in Russia in 1917 and very nearly in Germany in 1918. But even if institutions did not collapse, they would often be changed by the challenge of war. Unlike Titmuss, however, who focused on “guided changes” derived from explicit government policies and actions, Marwick argued that unguided change also occurred in modern war and that “social change is not exclusively dependent upon the will and whims of politicians and social theorists” (Marwick, 1974: 14). Four areas of social change have set the agenda for subsequent historical debate: the introduction of social welfare programs and generally improved opportunities for the working classes, greater social and economic opportunities for women, improvements in the opportunities for blacks, and increased state intervention in the economy and control over society. On the first of these, Marwick talks of the “unique possibility” offered by war for working people to improve their lot and of increased social homogeneity, resulting not least from the “common level of dowdiness” caused by wartime restrictions and rationing (Marwick, 1974: 92, 157). In industry, the requirements of wartime production led governments to build better relations with labor, thereby enhancing the strength of unions. Increased awareness of and sensitivity to poor living conditions

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led to welfare programs such as those prompted by the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom. These programs did much to create better health care and social provision among the working classes. But there are clear limits to the extent of these changes. Some were already in hand. Dan Fox (1986) suggests that in the UK a consensus on a national health care system predated the war and that wartime developments merely elaborated on these schemes; in addition, infant mortality rates were already declining as health care improved (Winter, 1986). Other changes may have been exaggerated. For all of the social homogeneity prompted by the common crisis of war, social divisions and class distinctions remained during and after the war. Although there may have been some lessening in social stratification, barriers still existed, and the majority of wealth remained in the hands of more or less the same small minority (Summerfield, 1986). Although greater numbers of women entered full- or part-time employment during the two world wars, the long-term results of this are less clear. The demands of total war placed huge strains on the personnel pool, both to provide troops for the armed services and to increase industrial production. This strain was eased by the greater use of women for both administrative and industrial jobs. In World War I, the number of German women employed in industry increased from 1.4 million to 2.1 million; in Britain there were 800,000 more women in employment in 1918 than at the beginning of the war; and in the United States the number of women in employment increased by a factor of two and a half from 1917 to 1918. In World War II, the involvement was even greater: in the UK the number of women in full- or part-time employment increased by 3 million between 1939 and 1943, and in the United States the increase was 4.5 million between 1940 and 1945. By late 1944, 48 percent of all British civil servants were women. But many of these jobs were created simply to replace those held by male workers removed to other areas of the war effort and were not extended beyond the war (though significantly more women remained in employment after the war than before). Most women viewed these jobs not as an emancipatory experience but as wartime necessity. Nor were they treated as the equal of men. Pay for women remained significantly lower than that for men, and women were generally used only for certain administrative and light industrial jobs (Beckett, 1988: 15–18; Marwick, 1974: 159–161, 175). More problematic, however, are questions over how the political and social status of women was affected by their contribution to the war effort. The extension of voting rights to women after World War I in many European countries and the United States is often pointed to as an

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example of the link between wartime roles and postwar social change. But it is unclear whether such changes would have occurred regardless of the war. Further, although wartime employment may have exposed women to wider experiences, they did not translate into significantly increased opportunities after the war or to a major change in the social position of women. In particular, there was a marked return to traditional sex roles after World War II. Thus the two world wars did not revolutionize the role of women, but they may have contributed to the movement toward greater economic, social, and political emancipation (Beckett, 1988: 15–18; Marwick, 1974: 76–77, 160–175; Smith, 1986b). For blacks, the American Civil War clearly had a revolutionary impact on their role and status. But discrimination did not end after the war. Indeed, discriminatory practices were legally enforced in some U.S. states into the second half of the twentieth century, and levels of poverty still remain high among black communities throughout the Western world. Although both world wars led to increased black employment, particularly in the United States, the effect was transient, and levels of unemployment remain high among black communities. Where the world wars, and particularly World War II, did have an impact was in terms of raising black consciousness. The wartime propaganda of fighting for freedom was not lost on black leaders, and issues of segregation in the armed services and the treatment of black officers highlighted discriminatory practices. The effect of participation in the war effort was not merely economic, therefore, but also served to raise black consciousness. Discriminatory issues were not resolved by the war, but they were highlighted, laying the groundwork for them to be addressed a generation later (Beckett, 1988: 15; Marwick, 1974: 73, 77, 177). The final area of social change concerns the increased role of the state in both the economy and society. Greater state control over the economy would appear to be a natural consequence of the importance of industrial production in total war. Therefore, although Prime Minister Herbert Asquith attempted to retain free market principles in Britain in World War I, the pressures of war were such that intervention became necessary. In Germany in 1917 the pressures were so great that under Paul von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the state took over almost all aspects of the economy. In the United States, the Roosevelt administration’s wartime investment in heavy industry was a key move in regenerating the economy after the Depression. For some states, such as the Soviet Union, state control was nothing new, but for others the world wars appeared to have heralded a major shift from nineteenth-century liberal economics toward the planned economies of the twentieth century. But the extent of this change can be exaggerated. Many of the changes

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toward greater centralization, planning, and state intervention had begun prior to both wars, and the extremes of wartime control were greatly reduced after the war. Increased state control was not limited to the economy, however. The state had an impact upon the lives of individuals to a much greater and more formal extent throughout both wars. Emergency powers ranged from military conscription through forced employment to curfews, and propaganda and censorship ensured that the government’s view prevailed (Harris, 1986; Milward, 1987).

Conclusion The idea of total war has proved powerful not only in the historiography of modern war but in the images of war and popular consciousness in the West. Whether one considers the (almost successful) attempt to “bleed the French white” at Verdun; the slaughter of Kitchener’s “New Army” of volunteers on the Somme; the mud of Passchendaele; the bombing of London, Coventry, Dresden, and any number of other German cities; the sheer awfulness of the Eastern Front; the eradication of the Jews by the Nazis; the bitterly fought battles of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal; or the fear of nuclear apocalypse, these are the images of modern war. The heady combination of industrialization and nationalism had produced the means and legitimization for slaughter on an unprecedented scale, and this is what we remember most. Entire nations were bound up in struggles that consumed millions of men and women, created suffering throughout society, changed social relations, and led to the fall of states and empires. Modern war reached new levels of totality in the means used and the ends pursued, who it involved, and the depth of that involvement. The problem with this argument, however, is that only a few wars were fought with such intensity. For example, John Terraine refers to the “trinity” of modern industrial wars—the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II—suggesting, perhaps unintentionally but probably accurately, that these stand alone in the history of warfare (Terraine, 1980). They are also the three leading candidates for total wars. Most of the wars fought by the West since 1800 were limited rather than total. Even those that are widely considered as either being “total” or as contributing to the movement toward totality proved limited in some way. But this argument misses the point in two important respects. First, total war is an ideal type that may not be attainable but that nevertheless defines the character of warfare. Therefore, although Terraine’s trinity may all have been less than total in some form or other, they nevertheless

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conform to the type of war that may be described as total. Second, wars that were not “total” were nevertheless fought in an age where the possibility of escalation existed, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the use of the term limited to describe these wars suggests that “unlimited” wars were possible. Thus total war described an age, a period of warfare, rather than all wars fought in this period, and the shadow of the age fell longest over the West. It was where Terraine’s trinity were fought, and if limited wars escalated, this is where they would lead sooner or later. Thus for the West, modern war became inextricably bound up with the idea of total war. In this chapter, I have discussed two of the key features of total war: escalation and participation. Wars escalated both because of the means available and the changed nature of the polity; further, they involved society both in providing the increased manpower required for these wars and in the manner in which society itself was attacked either directly through strategic bombing or indirectly through the deliberate, targeted disruption of trade. These two themes form the key to understanding how war has been transformed and are discussed at length in Chapter 4. The next chapter discusses why war for the West is no longer total and why major war has become obsolete.

3 THE OBSOLESCENCE OF MAJOR WAR

orce continues to be used as a tool of politics with depressing regularity, not least by the West. In the final two years of the twentieth century, both the United States and Britain used force against other states—in December 1998 against Iraq in the crisis over UN weapons inspectors and in the first half of 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis. In 2001 they again used force against Iraq and against Afghanistan. But the likelihood of a major war involving Western powers appears remote and one between them unthinkable. What therefore distinguishes the Afghan, Iraqi, and Kosovo operations and other operations undertaken by Western powers during the post–Cold War era is their limited and local nature. None threatened to escalate into total war. Western leaders played down the potential for what Samuel P. Huntington (1996) termed a “clash of civilizations” over Afghanistan, preferring instead to describe it as a war against terrorism and to emphasize that their quarrel was not with Islam but against the Taliban regime for sponsoring terrorism. In contrast, crises during the Cold War were defined, for the West, by the fear of escalation. Wars such as those in Korea and Vietnam were described as “limited” because of the possibility of escalation and their perceived role in the global containment of communism. More dramatically, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 Yom Kippur War demonstrated how local conflicts could acquire global dimensions. In both crises, U.S. nuclear forces were placed on alert, and the possibility of escalation from a limited, local conflict to global nuclear war was, if not likely, then at least conceivable. It was in this context that Seyom Brown could write in the 1980s that major war is “the central survival question facing our species” (Brown, 1987: vii). But toward the end of the twentieth century, Michael Mandelbaum was moved to write: “Major

F

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war is obsolete in the way that slavery, duelling or foot-binding are obsolete: it is a social practice that was once considered normal, useful— even desirable—but that now seems odious” (Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 34). This statement is in stark contrast to ideas expressed earlier in the century by thinkers such as J. F. C. Fuller, who saw war as “rooted in human nature and . . . an inherent and indispensable part of human evolution” (quoted in Gat, 1998: 148). Of course, just because something is obsolete does not mean that it cannot happen, as Mandelbaum himself acknowledges (Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 24–25). But global catastrophe is now more often couched in terms of environmental or natural disasters than major war—disasters ranging from global warming through new diseases to Hollywood’s 1998 penchant for the apocalyptic possibility of meteor strikes, as seen in the feature films Armageddon and Deep Impact. As Mandelbaum points out, Hollywood relies upon accurately gauging Western zeitgeist for the profitability of its major films (Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 21, 24, 37 n.14). Significantly, Hollywood’s apocalyptic blockbusters no longer feature nuclear war as the danger to be saved from (though more limited acts of nuclear terrorism against Western and particularly U.S. cities have been featured, revealing concerns over asymmetric strategies, and the impact of the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 remains to be seen); film producers now look elsewhere for their apocalyptic scenarios. War, of course, still occurs. The costs and suffering of war—human, material, and financial—are for many still extreme. But the impact of war has become localized rather than general, and for the West at least, the era of total war appears to be over. An equally significant and related feature of contemporary wars is that they are fought by Western powers, not between them. The possibility of war between Western states or fought in western Europe appears remote, at the very least. This is in stark contrast to most of the twentieth century, with its two world wars originating in Europe and the prospect of a third centered on Europe. One of the more astonishing features of the latter part of the twentieth century was the manner in which Franco-German rivalry lost its military dimension. Through the industrial age, competition between these two major European powers resulted in three wars, two of which escalated into “world wars.” But war between France and Germany now seems incredible. During the Cold War, this change might have been explained by bloc politics: the overwhelming military presence of a superpower in western Europe and the threat of another on its borders. The end of the Cold War and unification of Germany saw not an erosion but a strengthening and deepening of this rapprochement, however, not least with monetary union and the

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development of a common foreign and security policy within the European Union (EU). War for the West has instead become a more limited and localized affair fought against non-Western states. The West may still encounter war, but these wars are of choice rather than necessity, usually fought some distance away. Western society is not generally at risk in these wars, only its representatives in the form of the armed services. As a result, the experience of war for the majority in the West has become that of a spectator (Mann, 1988: 184–185; 1996: 235). The attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were in part shocking because they broke the pattern that had been developing whereby Western society was not directly targeted in war, but it is also interesting that although the response was deemed to be “war,” the events of 11 September were described largely as “terrorism.” The phenomenon of war as a spectator sport is discussed more fully later in the book (see Chapters 4 and 7). A key reason for its emergence is the obsolescence of major war in the West and, almost as a corollary, the rise of local wars in Western consciousness.1 Whether it is the victim of rape in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, or an Iraqi soldier fleeing Kuwait City for Basra, the consequences of war are extreme. But for this book, the key point is that these extreme consequences are localized and no longer constitute the West’s direct experience of war. Despite the exposure to suffering offered by the globalized media, those who watch, hear about, or read about such events in the West are inevitably removed from them. They may empathize but do not experience; they may sympathize but do not suffer. Nor is there any real threat of their suffering directly. Aside from asymmetric responses such as state-sponsored terrorism, these wars are fought at a safe distance from the West. But for this to have occurred, the prospect of major war involving the West needs to have disappeared. Why this might be so is the focus of this chapter.

The Costs of War Traditionally, the debate over the utility of force has been couched in terms of Clausewitzian instrumentality—that there is a linkage between the use of force and its perceived political benefits. As Stephen van Evera has put it, “War is more likely when conquest is easy” (van Evera, 1999: 4). But as the costs of using force increase, so its utility will decline for a given political end. Developments that raise the costs of force will therefore affect the willingness to resort to war and the incidence of its use. More subtly, as Richard Betts has argued, it is not the

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costs but the perceived costs of war that matter. In response to van Evera, Betts has written: “It is not that conquest actually is easy, most often it is not, yet is mistakenly perceived to be easy” (Betts, 1999: 167). Nor are the costs of war always appreciated in advance. Prior to World War I, Western militaries and their political leaders expected that a war in Europe would be over quickly and that the outcome would be decided by vigorous offensives. None of the major powers anticipated a war lasting more than four years, characterized by static attritional warfare and costing the lives of so many young men (Strachan, 2000b). Similarly, initial U.S. involvement in Vietnam was minimal; only slowly did it escalate into a combat role that would eventually lead to defeat and the traumatization of U.S. foreign and defense policy for more than a decade. Identifying the costs of military involvement in advance is therefore hugely problematic. Perceptions over not only the costs but the utility of force have varied widely. The Belgian decision to resist the German army sweeping through Belgium en route to France in August 1914 may have been militarily an exercise in futility—they had no hope other than to delay the German advance at a risk of thousands of Belgian lives and occupation under German control for the duration of the war. But it was seen as a price worth paying for Belgian honor (Tuchman, 1962: 98–111). Assessing the costs and benefits of using force are therefore highly subjective and not always readily susceptible to rational calculation. Two factors have emerged that affect the understanding of the costs of war and that in turn make it a less attractive policy option. First, a number of trends—political, sociological, and technological—have combined to increase the likely costs of major war. Second, the experience of industrialized warfare and of the costs involved has changed expectations of the nature and utility of war. Few now expect major war between leading industrial powers to be anything other than extremely costly. Western powers miscalculated the costs of World War I in part because they had not previously been involved in a major war in which both sides were using industrialized technologies; after World War II, no one seriously expects a third world war to be anything other than apocalyptic, and the likely costs are explicitly used to deter such a war. For classical strategists such as Clausewitz, war was instrumental and purposive and had political utility. Although unpersuaded by pseudoscientific notions of the “geometry of war,” for Clausewitz and the generations of military officers that followed his writings, war was the servant that could be used for some higher aim. Through the twentieth century, however, the Clausewitzian perspective was increasingly challenged. Michel Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz—that politics is war

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by other means—suggested the manner in which war had overtaken the reasonable limits of Clausewitz. As Daniel Pick writes, “War is the subject, politics merely one manifestation, one forum war may adopt. The war machine circumscribes both the state of war and peace; indeed it does away with the sharp division between them. The state is now cast as the instrument of the war machine” (Pick, 1993: 259). More common is the portrayal of war as senseless, wasteful, and purposeless. From Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a different picture of war emerged in popular culture and was reflected in writings on war (for example, Beevor, 1998; Middlebrook, 1984). This shift culminated in the academic literature critical of nuclear weapons and the nuclearization of defense (for example, Booth, 1987; Prins, 1983; Rogers, Dando, and van den Dungen, 1981). What both of these perspectives suggest is a disillusionment or rejection of the idea of war as a useful instrument of politics. War is much less and much more. One of the more important trends in increasing the costs of war since the French and American Revolutions has been the emergence of mass armies. It was begun by the Napoleonic levée en masse and peaked in the West with conscription during the two world wars. Quite simply, larger armies increased the number of combatants and therefore the potential casualties in battle. As Clausewitz pointed out, war after Napoleon was inherently escalatory as each side sought to avoid defeat (Clausewitz, 1968: 103). A key element in this process of escalation was to increase the size of armies through the mobilization of an ever-larger percentage of the population. In addition, technological developments since 1800 have allowed increasing numbers of troops to be efficiently moved, fed, equipped, commanded, and killed. Industrialization allowed armies numbered in the millions to take the field. Railways in particular allowed large numbers of troops and matériel to be moved quickly to the front line. Beyond railheads, the development of the internal combustion engine allowed trucks to replace horse-drawn carts (though the latter were still very much in evidence in World War II). Factories and Fordist production techniques enabled the mass production of everything from ammunition to clothing, keeping armies supplied. And the telegraph and radio allowed commanders to remain in touch with armies so large they could not be seen in their totality, spread across battlefields sometimes measuring hundreds of square miles. As armies grew, so did casualties. On 18 June 1815 at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington’s army numbered 68,000 (Gates, 1997a: 268); on the infamous first day of the Somme just over a century later, General

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Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army suffered over 57,000 casualties, including three-quarters of those officers who went “over the top” that day (Middlebrook, 1984: 262–264). In 1945 the U.S. Army numbered 2 million men, but forty-seven infantry regiments in nineteen divisions had suffered 100–200 percent casualties during the war, most of whom had been replaced (Weigley, 1967: 439);2 in two weeks in the summer of 1944, at the same time as the Allies were launching Operation Overlord, Soviet forces in Byelorussia “obliterated” up to twenty-eight German divisions, some 350,000 men (Erickson, 1985: 304). These are fearsome statistics that barely begin to convey the direct suffering involved. But not to field such large armies risked defeat. Warfare therefore became an ever more costly undertaking in the West—though it is significant that the unprecedented suffering of World War I was not sufficient to prevent World War II. Increased numbers killed on the battlefield was not the only way in which war became more costly, however. The development of war in the first half of the twentieth century saw conflict spread beyond traditional notions of the battlefield, blurring the divide between combatant and noncombatant and involving trials of industrial and productive strength as much as military proficiency. In World War II in particular, factories and people became targets. Strategic bombing meant that war was carried beyond the battlefield, and large areas overrun by battle were devastated. Civilians in their millions died, directly and indirectly, as a result of World War II, not least Jews and other social groupings exterminated en masse by the Nazis. Whole peoples were displaced, with refugees causing unimaginable problems during and after the war. Civilians therefore shared the human costs of war in a manner unlike in World War I. What made this increased level of suffering particularly significant was not simply the scale of death and destruction. Wars in general cause a high level of suffering, and although the scale may have been greater in the twentieth century than before (though some previous wars, such as the Thirty Years’ War, caused statistically similar levels of casualties), whether this constituted a qualitative change is uncertain. Rather, compounding the impact of this suffering were changed political and economic conditions. With widespread industrialization in the nineteenth century, control of the land became less important than productive capacity and capital, including human capital (people). At the same time, the rise of nationalism changed the basis of political legitimacy. Political power began to spread from the few to the many (Kayser, 1990: 48– 58). These developments changed the political and economic calculus of war. Loss of life was now a significant political factor at the same

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time as mass armies meant that large numbers were losing their lives in war. War between industrialized powers threatened the lives of large numbers of the polity on the battlefield and beyond. Further, high casualty rates ran contrary to other social trends. In particular, improved health care and social provision began to raise expectations of life expectancy. Prior to the twentieth century, famine and disease posed greater risks to more people than did armed conflict, but for the industrialized powers in the twentieth century that was no longer the case: “armed conflict came into its own as the most fearsome, and feared, cause of unnatural death” (Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 22). Antoine de Saint-Exupery once commented that war was a disease; as the impact of other diseases were reined back in the West, that of war stood in stark contrast. Although loss of life in war had become a politically significant fact, it might be mitigated by the promise of riches. War might be costly, but it might also reap significant rewards. Yet at the same time that war was becoming more costly, the economic and financial gains were becoming less clear. Stephen van Evera argues that wars are more likely when “resources are cumulative—that is, when control of resources enables a state to protect or acquire other resources” (van Evera, 1999: 4). For van Evera, if the costs of war exceed the value of what is gained, then negative cumulativity results and there is no incentive to war. Whereas in agricultural times cumulativity was high and the incentive to go to war for profit was therefore similarly high, in industrial and particularly knowledge-based economies, cumulativity has been reduced (van Evera, 1999: 114–115; Betts, 1999: 171–172). As Carl Kayser argues: Governments have become popular and populist even when not democratic; the welfare of the general population, conceived in a broad sense, is their chief business. . . . even authoritarian and repressive governments in modern societies need the consent, however tacit and grudging, of the mass of the governed. Economic well-being and social peace are the chief elements on which this consent rests. Making war can rarely contribute positively to these goals. (Kayser, 1990: 57)

Mandelbaum comments rather more pithily: “Most people are more interested in becoming wealthy than in risking their lives in war” (Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 25). With industrialization, the material gains of war became less apparent. Economies were pitted against each other such that even victory might prove financially ruinous, as Britain found after World War II.3 Economic growth and capital could both be adversely affected by even a successful war, whereas the economic gains from conquest were much more questionable (Kayser, 1990: 54; Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 23). Although there may on occasion have been

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economic incentives to invade another state (Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait being one such example), and equally there is evidence of some invasions bearing economic dividends—for example, Alan Milward calculated that Nazi Germany profited from the occupation of France in 1940–1944 (Milward, 1987: 139–140)4—these situations are exceptional. In the main, industrialized states find it easier and much less risky to secure what they need by trade than by war. The utility of major war therefore suffered a double blow through industrialization: the costs of war increased, particularly for the majority of the population who were increasingly significant politically; and the potential gains were reduced and alternative means of increasing national wealth were increasingly more efficient and effective. With the movement toward knowledge-based economies, the material gains from invasion are even less apparent. In these economies, wealth is no longer linked to ownership of land or the means of production, physical assets that may be captured by force majeure. Worse, invasion may lead to constraints on information exchange and creativity, which are imposed either by the invading power or self-imposed by those who have been invaded. Such constraints are anathema to a knowledge-based economy reliant on the rapid exchange of information and celebration of creativity, on innovation and on entrepreneurship. Thus invasion appears counterproductive if the aim is to increase wealth through the acquisition of new assets. The trend against war can be seen through the manner in which force is now justified in the West. To obtain public approval, the use of force has to be convincingly portrayed as a measure of last resort and even then to be used only in exceptional circumstances, such as selfdefense or “crimes against humanity.” One of the most striking aspects of the use of force by the West after the Cold War has been the extent to which governments have justified their actions by reference to international law. Adam Roberts has commented on the traditional “tendency of some strategic writers to downplay the importance of the laws of war . . . [which] have not been seen as central to the conduct of international relations” (Roberts, 1991–1992: 54, 56). During the 1990s, however, such a casual attitude was far from the case. International law was central in justifying Western actions in the Gulf War, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and in the controversy over NATO’s actions in Kosovo. These examples strongly suggest the declining acceptability of force as an instrument of politics in the West—force may only be used in extreme circumstances and if sanctioned by international law. John Mueller has gone further, suggesting that major war is now “sub-rationally unthinkable” in the West (Mueller, 1989: 240). By this Mueller means that war is unthinkable not

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because of the results of explicit cost-gain calculations (which would make war unprofitable rather than unthinkable), but rather because there has been a change in mental habits such that a major war such as the two world wars is no longer even considered as a policy option by the West. The horror of World War I, confirmed by experiences in World War II, changed the social evaluation of war. The comparative peace and stability of the Cold War was for Mueller a result not so much of nuclear deterrence but of a wholesale aversion to the very idea of war in Europe. In contrast, the West experienced what John Lewis Gaddis (1987) termed “the long peace.” Crucially for Mueller, this peace became habit forming. The West no longer finds the notion of major war involving citizen armies and tens of thousands, perhaps millions of casualties, acceptable. Having experienced both the horror of this form of war and the benefits of the “long peace,” it has made its decision (Mueller, 1989; see also Kayser, 1990). Nuclear weapons are in many respects an extreme case of these trends whereby the increased costs and reduced gains of war have affected its utility. Western strategies of deterrence explicitly played upon the notion that nuclear escalation would be inevitable in war, leading to apocalyptic consequences. Even a “limited” use of nuclear weapons would have enormous costs, immediate and long-term, to people, property, and the environment. As a result, the use of force would be selfdefeating: the gains would be far outweighed by the costs involved (Freedman, 1989). In this sense, the development of nuclear weapons was not revolutionary but merely confirmed and enhanced existing trends concerning the use of force. Azar Gat argues that “ideas of containment, cold war and limited war . . . reflected a growing aversion in [Western] societies to the phenomenon of war in general” (Gat, 1998: 302). For Gat, the ideas of Cold War thinkers such as George Kennan in the United States and Liddell Hart in the United Kingdom were fundamental in promoting an “advanced Western” view of war, one that drew upon and developed traditional liberal notions of war. According to this view, war was increasingly at odds with the world trading system, the social and economic expectations of Western peoples, and domestic values and practices. Gat further argues: “Among Western elites there was now a growing awareness of the limitations of military force, especially under modern conditions, and of the complexity of exchanging military victories into political gains” (Gat, 1998: 302). At its most extreme, the disutility of nuclear war has led to arguments in favor of proliferation as a means of conflict prevention (Lavoy, 1995; Mearsheimer, 1990; Sagan and Waltz, 1995; Waltz, 1981). The more orthodox reaction is that the costs of a nuclear war would be so

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high that the risks should be minimized by controlling the spread of these weapons. President Bill Clinton’s reaction to the 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan reflected this latter sentiment: “I cannot believe we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th century when we know [that the possession of nuclear weapons] is not necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national greatness or national fulfillment” (quoted in Delpech, 1998–1999: 57–58). Those who argue in favor of nuclear proliferation do so on the basis that it would make war obsolete; those who argue against do so on the basis that even if war is made obsolete by proliferation, it is not impossible, and that the costs of nuclear war by accident, miscalculation, or misadventure would be too great to countenance. What both sides of the argument share is an assumption that the costs of war are not only politically significant but a major disincentive to war. Thus the debate over nuclear proliferation indicates, albeit in a somewhat extreme manner, Western sensitivities over the costs of war.

The Democratic Peace A second important factor affecting the likelihood of war, particularly major war in the West, concerns the impact of an increased number of liberal democratic states (Doyle, 1983; Russett, 1993; Maoz and Russett, 1993; Owen, 1994; Weart, 1998). As Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder have commented, that liberal democracies do not fight each other is “one of the best known findings of contemporary social science” (Mansfield and Snyder, 1995: 5). If liberal democracies do not fight each other, the argument runs, then the spread of liberal democracy through the West in the latter half of the twentieth century makes major war there unlikely. The significance of this point is not merely academic but was a major element in informing Western policy during the 1990s. The United States replaced its Cold War policy of containing communism with a post–Cold War policy of encouraging the spread of liberal democracy in eastern Europe. This shift from containment to enlargement was explicitly based upon the argument that, in President Clinton’s words, “democracies rarely wage war on each other” (quoted in Farber and Gowa, 1995: 123). Washington’s policymakers therefore saw the spread of democracy as being good for peace and stability. But an equally important finding is that liberal democracies are not war-shy when confronted by nonliberal states. Indeed, Michael Doyle has argued that the very factors that make liberal democracies unwilling to fight

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each other—democratic representation, a commitment to and belief in human rights, and transnational interdependence—make them willing to confront nondemocratic states (Doyle, 1995: 180–181). Further, states in the process of democratization also appear to be war-prone (Mansfield and Snyder, 1995). If democratic peace theory is correct, then what it suggests is the development of a “zone of peace” among liberal democracies but a “zone of conflict” elsewhere, including those states in the process of democratization. Critically for the argument of this book, democratic peace theory suggests that the era of total war between Western industrialized states is over because of established democratic norms in the West, but it also suggests that their being liberal democracies does not prevent Western countries from intervening elsewhere. If Doyle is correct, then the incentives to intervene elsewhere may actually be increased. Further, far from promoting peace and security, the transition to democracy may prove difficult. Democratizing states may be prone to outbursts of violent conflict that may in turn involve the West in military support for newly emergent democracies. Thus for the West, the shift from total to local war is reinforced by the findings of democratic peace theory. The argument that liberal democracies do not fight each other has two main strands, one based upon empirical evidence and the other upon a causal link between democracy and peace. On the first of these, the empirical evidence appears to show that no liberal democracy has ever fought another, or at the very least the number of occasions when such states have fought is statistically insignificant. Bruce Russett, drawing on work he did with Zeev Maoz on militarized disputes between 1946 and 1986 (Maoz and Russett, 1993), concluded that democratic dyads were significantly (statistically) less likely to engage in conflict—whether wars or minor disputes—than were pairs of states where one or both members were not democratic. . . . nondemocratic dyads were “infinitely” more likely to make war on each other. They were four and a half times more likely to use force against each other than were democratic dyads. As for disputes, non-democratic dyads were more than three times as likely as democratic dyads to engage in any sort of militarized dispute. These big differences confirm that the inhibition against violence between democracies applies at all levels, and that it is most powerful as a restraint on war. (Russett, 1995: 173–174; emphasis added)

For advocates of democratic peace theory, this finding is more than a statistical anomaly. Rather it is suggestive of a wider phenomenon that democracies do not fight each other.

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The empirical evidence is contested, however, and critics have identified a number of problems with both the methodology used and the extent of the evidence available (Farber and Gowa, 1995; Layne, 1994; Spiro, 1994). First, critics have argued that the data sets used by advocates of democratic peace theory are dependent upon restrictive definitions of democracy and war, definitions that produce a certain set of results. Christopher Layne has argued that advocates use “intellectual suppleness,” tinkering with definitions and thereby producing a somewhat more favorable result (Layne, 1994: 40). David Spiro has similarly argued that advocates “selectively adopt definitions of key variables so that data analysis yields the results they seek” (Spiro, 1994: 55). But if these definitions were changed, then the empirical evidence is much less clear-cut and in some instances suggests a greater propensity for democracies to go to war with each other than democratic peace theory would allow, especially if more relaxed definitions are used (for example, if less ethnocentric definitions of democracy are used or a lower casualty rate adopted in order that a militarized conflict be designated a war). Henry S. Farber and Joanne Gowa argue that, using their more relaxed definitions, “there is no statistically significant relationship between democracy and war before 1914 [and that] in the case of disputes short of war, we find that the probability of these disputes will occur is significantly higher between members of pairs of democratic states than between members of other pairs of states” (Farber and Gowa, 1995: 124; emphasis in original). The problem is that the critics of democratic peace theory have themselves to produce definitions of war and democracy for their own data sets, and these definitions are not above being questioned (for example, Russett, 1995; Maoz, 1997). The definitions used by the advocates of democratic peace theory are often at least as rigorous and sometimes more so than those used by critics. Further, even when more “relaxed” definitions are used, the pattern (particularly in the twentieth century, when democratic dyads are more statistically significant) remains broadly consistent with democratic peace theory. Exceptions are possible: in World War II, for example, Western democracies declared war on democratic Finland. Some advocates of democratic peace theory omit this example since no casualties were inflicted on Finland by the Western democracies and vice versa. But by altering the definition of war from a certain level of casualties to, say, a formally declared political relationship (a state of war), then Finland could be included in data sets. But as one of the leading critics, Christopher Layne, himself admits, exceptions are normal in social science and do not necessarily invalidate a hypothesis (Layne, 1995: 182). Political behavior is analyzed

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in terms of trends and patterns rather than iron laws to which no exception can be granted. In this light, the empirical evidence strongly supports democratic peace theory. A somewhat different version of this criticism is offered by Ido Oren (1995). Oren questions the objectivity and transhistoric validity of definitions of democracy, suggesting instead that definitions of democracy used in democratic peace theory reflect U.S. values. Crucially, Oren goes on to suggest that these definitions are then altered to fit circumstances so that friends are included and enemies excluded. The claim that democracies do not fight one another is not about democracies per se; it is better understood as a claim about peace among countries conforming to a subjective ideal that is cast, not surprisingly, in America’s self-image. . . . [Democracy] is not a determinant so much as a product of America’s foreign relations. The reason we appear not to fight “our kind” is not that objective likeness substantially affects war propensity, but that rather we subtly redefine “our kind.” (Oren, 1995: 178)

The example Oren uses is the changing U.S. perception of Germany. Oren argues that prior to World War I, key opinion formers in the United States, including President Woodrow Wilson, viewed Germany as a constitutional state. This perception only changed when relations soured in 1917 and war appeared likely. Oren’s argument appears flawed on two counts, however. First, it assumes that German political structures were the same in 1917 as in the late nineteenth century, when Woodrow Wilson argued that Germany was a constitutional state. But by 1917, war was beginning to affect Germany’s political structures. In particular, under Ludendorff and Hindenburg a more autocratic and militarized state appeared (Geyer, 1986). Second, the argument that definitions of democracy conform to U.S. norms rather than objective criteria can be turned on its head. The reason that definitions of democracy conform to “U.S. norms” is because key features of the U.S. polity— free and fair elections, constitutional provision for basic human rights, and constraints on executive power—are key features of liberal democracy, whether in the United States, Britain, France, or elsewhere. A more telling point is made by Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey: that definitions of democracy change over time and that the transhistoric nature of democratic peace theory fails to accommodate this shift adequately (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999: 405–407). But their point is not to undermine democratic peace theory; rather, they examine the relationship between liberalism and force by historicizing the concepts of war and peace and placing them in the context of globalization. Specifically,

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they do not challenge the notion that liberal democracies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries do not fight each other (the point that is central to my argument here). A second criticism leveled at the empirical evidence is that in studies of “near misses” (that is, situations where democracies have been on the verge of war with each other but have not actually crossed that particular threshold), the reason that war did not occur has had little to do with the democratic makeup of the states involved. If democratic peace theory is correct, then the democratic nature of both parties should act as a restraining force and should be identifiable. But studies suggest that the decision not to go to war has less to do with the internal political system of states than with more traditional explanations such as calculations of power and interest. The problem with this line of argument, however, is its methodology—how to divine the role of internal political structures in the decision not to go to war. Michael Doyle has pointed out the difficulties in relying on secondary sources. Historians write with a specific purpose in mind and a particular focus. Because they do not mention the limits imposed by a democratic polity does not mean that they did not exist, merely that historians were not looking at that particular issue. For Doyle, therefore, only by a more thorough examination of primary sources can this line of criticism be maintained (Doyle, 1995: 181–182). But even then problems arise. Statements from leaders during a crisis—whether in public or in private—may be driven by a number of concerns and will not necessarily reveal motivations, particularly if these motivations are subconscious or structural in nature. The democratic nature of the parties involved may not be identified in statements or documents as a factor in decisions on whether to go to war; but this absence does not necessarily mean that democratic leanings did not have an effect at a conscious or even subconscious level. Further, such analyses miss an important point, namely the number of disputes that are resolved amicably between democratic states without ever becoming a “near miss.” Democratic peace theory suggests that a Kantian “state of peace” exists between democratic dyads. Disputes are resolved by peaceful, cooperative means. Focusing on “near misses” distorts the real impact of the democratic peace, which is to change the nature of relations between states such that conflict is unusual and armed conflict exceptional (Russett, 1995: 165–167). A final area of criticism concerns the number of examples available to support the democratic peace thesis. Not only are wars rare phenomena, but democracies are even rarer. Until recently, there have been only a relatively small number of liberal democratic states, creating few dyads of potential warring parties. As a result, critics suggest that the

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statistical evidence is too sparse to yield meaningful results. Further, as John Mearsheimer has argued, “there have not been many cases where two democracies have been in a position to fight each other” (Mearsheimer, 1990: 51). After 1945, when the number of democracies increased, thereby creating a much greater number of democratic dyads from which to draw statistical data, alliance politics meant that most democracies were constrained in their ability to go to war with each other. Simply put, Cold War bloc politics transcended other issues that might have led to war. Democracies tended to be aligned, to a greater or lesser extent, with the Western bloc. Self-interest—in this case deterring the Soviet threat—imposed limits on their actions, including their willingness to go to war with each other. Thus there are few hard tests whereby liberal democracies might have gone to war with each other but for the fact that they were liberal democracies. The absence of such hard tests between the admittedly relatively small number of liberal democracies might be seen as indicative of a tendency toward cooperation between liberal democracies rather than conflict, the existence of a state of peace. In particular, the transcendent pressures of bloc loyalty can be overstated. The communist bloc—arguably as fearful of the West as the West was of it—nevertheless split into two camps with a militarized dispute on the Sino-Soviet border. The Chinese invaded Vietnam in 1979, and the Soviets used force twice inside the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. In other words, being part of a “bloc” during the Cold War does not automatically impose the sort of pressures and discipline that make war, or the use of force, impossible. At the crudest level, when Hungary and Czechoslovakia threatened bloc loyalty, the Soviets responded with force; when France left NATO’s integrated military structure and attempted to pursue a “third way” in its foreign policy, the use of force was not even considered by other NATO members. Nor is it the case that the small number of democracies makes conclusions difficult to draw from statistical data. It is important to distinguish between the number of democracies and the number of democratic dyads—that is, the number of relations between democracies each year (or other time period). The latter is much greater than the former and provides sufficient data for trends to be identified. Moreover, the lack of data cannot refute the democratic peace hypothesis; the best it can do is to argue that the theory is not yet adequately supported. Alternatively, rather than a congruence of interests and bloc loyalty, Raymond Cohen has suggested that the peaceful relations in the West can be better explained by a degree of cultural homogeneity. The democratic peace for Cohen only holds true for the North Atlantic area in the

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post–World War II era. But this area also demonstrates a shared set of values that impose stability. The Western democracies were—are—part of a “North Atlantic club” with shared norms and values. It is this similarity, rather than democratic political structures, that accounts for a surprisingly peaceful era in a previously war-torn area of the world, one that encountered three major wars in almost as many generations. Cohen also suggests that democratic peace theory ignores intervention, particularly covert intervention, by one democracy in the affairs of another (such as that by the United States in Chile in 1973). Although the number of casualties may not be sufficient for these interventions to figure in some databases, in the sense that these interventions may involve the use of armed force against another state they may be considered wars of sorts (R. Cohen, 1994).5 But if Cohen is correct, then so long as this cultural homogeneity persists, the prospect of major war remains unlikely. At worst, what can be expected are minor interventions, more often of a covert nature. In other words, Cohen is offering an alternative explanation rather than challenging the argument that major war is obsolete. But there are good reasons to question Cohen’s analysis. The West displayed as much cultural homogeneity in the period before 1945 as after (including the period before World War I) but still encountered war; other culturally homogeneous areas—such as the Arab world, Catholic Latin America, or the Indian subcontinent—have been warprone; and the empirical evidence suggests that democracies are not only less likely to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of other states (covertly or overtly) but are themselves less likely to be the target of such interventions (Russett and Ray, 1995; Maoz, 1997: 177–181). Much of the debate over the liberal peace has therefore concerned the empirical evidence and criticisms of it. Despite these challenges, however, the empirical argument remains strong: there is good reason to believe that, based upon the historical record, democracies do not fight each other. The problem is to demonstrate why this lack of conflict might be the case. Without such a link, the democratic peace is in danger of being seen as a historical anachronism, or even mere coincidence, particularly given the scarcity of democracies. After all, if major interstate war is a rare phenomenon and the number of democracies has been historically few, should we be surprised that few or no democracies have fought each other? The possibility of coincidence is even more real if a large number of democratic dyads have been part of alliances such as NATO, which impose some form of collective discipline. Even when the qualifications to these arguments made above are taken into account, the data pool is not large, and the empirical evidence may therefore still be open to doubt. In other words, the number of democracies

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is not large enough to dispel all doubts that peace between them is a historical anomaly. Therefore, and unsurprisingly, a number of critics of the democratic peace have focused upon the causal link as an area of weakness in liberal peace theory (Layne, 1994, 1995; Farber and Gowa, 1995). Is there a causal link between shared democracy and a “state of peace”? Traditionally, two key arguments have been offered. The first concerns shared norms. When disputes arise within democratic states, they are resolved through peaceful means such as compromise and thirdparty adjudication rather than through the use of force. This practice creates a norm that is then externalized when dealing with other democracies. In other words, resolving disputes peacefully represents a preferred practice. Since this preferred practice is shared by democracies, it can be used in disputes between democracies as well as within them. Relations between liberal democracies are therefore characterized by a willingness to be accommodating and to compromise rather than push a disagreement into a military confrontation. Further, the democratic nature of another state confers a degree of legitimacy on its claims in a dispute. As Michael Doyle has commented, democracies, which “rest on consent, presume foreign republics to be also consensual, just and therefore deserving of accommodation” (Doyle, 1983: 230). A pattern of cooperative relations may therefore develop between democratic states. This in turn may lead to the creation of a community of interests that dissuades states from using force against each other. Farber and Gowa question whether there is such a causal link based on norms, however. They suggest that adherence to a norm secures the social order and therefore serves the interests of leaders (and, in certain instances, society). As a result, it is very difficult to distinguish the operation of norms that regulate conflict (and therefore support the liberal peace argument) from interests (which presumably, for Farber and Gowa, would not). Nor can convincing empirical evidence be found supporting the operation of norms that are independent of interests. For Farber and Gowa, the absence of war can be explained as much by interests as by norms. Further, since all wars are costly, they argue that it is in the interests of all societies to pursue negotiation over war, not just democratic societies. The extent to which democratic norms add to this more general preference for war avoidance is “not obvious” (Farber and Gowa, 1995: 125–126). But what is “not obvious” to them is, in fact, central. Granted that most states most of the time have a preference to negotiate rather than to go to war over their differences, for some states at some point that preference will change—otherwise, wars would only happen through accident or miscalculation. Adolf Hitler chose to invade

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the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein chose to invade Kuwait. For both, the use of force became a policy preference. What is striking, however, is that democracies do not choose to invade each other. To argue that interests can explain this does not explain why other states find it in their interest to use force. Alternatively, shared norms can explain this variance in behavior by raising the threshold at which violence becomes a preferred policy option. The second argument offering a causal link between shared democracy and the absence of war is based on the nature of democratic polities. Democracies produce institutions that constrain the power of leaders. Decisions such as that to use force are subject to democratic accountability rather than the whims of leaders. Since the decision to use force is likely to be costly, most especially for those directly involved, it is assumed that democratic accountability will make it more difficult for leaders to go to war. This condition is not sufficient by itself to explain the democratic peace, however. Democracies have proven to be as war-prone as nondemocracies in their use of force in general; it is only in the specific instance of its use against other democracies that the checks on the use of force appear to be insurmountable. Why is this? One possibility is that it is easier for democratically elected leaders to persuade their people that the use of force against a nondemocracy is legitimate than it is against another democracy. Enemy leaders can be portrayed as misguided, wrong, even evil, and their actions similarly caricatured. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are only the latest in a long line of nondemocratic leaders to be demonized by the West. Their actions can be safely portrayed as illegitimate, even evil. In these instances, the use of force by the West may appear to be a reasonable response against an unreasonable enemy. But if the leader of an opposing state has been democratically elected, this case cannot be made. Thus the democratic accountability of the other is what counts in providing a causal link between shared democracy and the absence of war.

Interdependence and Globalization A third reason for the obsolescence of major war in the West is the combination of increased interdependence, globalization, and in western Europe, the process of economic and political integration through the European Union. In some senses, these are distinct phenomena. Interdependence concerns links between states, principally economic and financial links (including, but not exclusively, trading links). Globalization,

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however, refers not only to these economic and financial linkages but to the interpenetration of states—structurally, institutionally, and culturally. Much has been written on the subject of globalization: the concept can sometimes be vague and ill-defined, it occurs in a variety of disciplines, and a range of approaches have been used in discussing it. Nevertheless, the literature can be productively divided into three broad fields: those who argue that the process of globalization is both linked with and responsible for the rise of global capitalism, those who argue that globalization promotes liberal democracy and the emergence of a consensus on democratic norms, and those who argue that globalization has resulted in a new shared culture that transcends national boundaries (Rosenau, 1996; Holton, 1998; Held, 1997; Mittleman, 1996). The view that emerges from all three is that whereas interdependence theorists view states as relatively cohesive and distinct bodies and the linkages between them as limited largely to the economic and financial fields, globalization theorists see the boundaries between states as weakening and becoming porous, with links encompassing a variety of areas. Finally, the process of European integration, which began with FrancoGerman economic cooperation after World War II and acquired a more obvious political dimension with the Single European Act and the Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice Treaties, has had a major impact upon relations among member states in western Europe. The process was initially and explicitly concerned with addressing Franco-German rivalry, which had produced three major wars in seven decades. But by the end of the twentieth century, it had developed into a new vision of an economically and politically united Europe. As a result, although conflict still occurs within the European Union—over the ban on British beef and farm subsidies, for example—it no longer has a military dimension. Despite interdependence, globalization, and European integration being to some extent distinct phenomena, they are also related in two important respects. First, they all concern the rapid growth of links between states, particularly but not exclusively since World War II (see, for example, Camilleri and Falk, 1992; Holton, 1998; Jones, 2000). Second, and crucially for this chapter, it is assumed that these links reduce the likelihood and value of war. The reasons for this assumption are threefold. First, the growth of cooperative regimes provides guaranteed benefits that are shared (though not necessarily equally) among all parties. In contrast, aggression is a more risky venture in which the benefits are not guaranteed and the costs, even for the victor, may be much higher than any benefits. Therefore, forms of cooperation such as trade are more productive means of maximizing wealth and welfare than aggression (Barbieri and Schneider, 1999; Copeland, 1996; Keohane, 1990).

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Richard Rosecrance, for example, argues that states must choose between being “trading” or “territorial” states. Trading states promote wealth through commerce, whereas territorial states pursue policies of military expansion. By the late twentieth century, not only was military expansion too costly for most states to consider, but the gains from trade would be shared and therefore the risks of war reduced by the prospect of mutual advantage (Rosecrance, 1986). As Katherine Barbieri and Gerald Schneider point out, existing trade patterns are too valuable to place at risk in war. In most cases, states with good trading relations will prefer to pursue peaceful means of resolving disputes because the costs of losing these in a war will be too high. But war is still possible, and the impact of trade on conflict is contingent on a set of factors, including enforcement, monitoring mechanisms, and the size of the international system (Barbieri and Schneider, 1999). A variant of this view is trade expectations theory. Dale Copeland argues that what matters is not the current level of trade but future expectations—that if trade is expected to grow, then the incentive to go to war is reduced and vice versa (Copeland, 1996). Rosabeth Kantor emphasizes not so much the trade in goods as the flow of capital, people, and information. She argues that the forces for economic globalization create and will continue to create greater interdependence, but that the private sector and multinational companies are the real engines behind this trend. They will—and for Kantor should—become increasingly important in determining the policies of states, promoting trade and peaceful cooperation rather than military conflict (Kantor, 1999). Paul Smith similarly argues that the world system is becoming increasingly integrated because of the power of capital and that this globalization of capital reduces the likelihood of conflict. For him, violent conflict is endemic to “precapitalist” states and the escape from this predicament is to follow the “guiding Northern light” of the capitalist West (Smith, 1997). Finally, Manuel Castells argues that the process of economic, technological, and cultural integration within Europe has had a major impact upon the likelihood of conflict. Economic integration has been a key factor in producing a high standard of living for member states. These gains and the prospect of continued economic advancement would be placed at risk if conflict occurred. As a result, military conflict has become obsolete within the European Union (Castells, 1998). What is common to all of these positions is the argument that the advantages of cooperation, and especially of trade, are usually and significantly more attractive than the risky option of war. Interdependence and globalization therefore act as restraints on war, and as a consequence, war is unlikely in a highly interdependent system such as the

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West. This does not mean that war in general is necessarily obsolete. The process of globalization may produce insecurity in the Third World in particular through developments such as the raising of expectations over economic and social conditions and the possibility of a cultural backlash against the imposition of Western values. A persistent theme in the literature is the possibility—even necessity—of some form of Western intervention. For some, intervention would secure democratic reforms and human rights, as seen implicitly in the work of Robert Holton (1998) and James Rosenau (1994). For Eleonore Koffman and Gillian Youngs (1996), international migration as a result of global restructuring creates insecurity. It can only be addressed by securing human rights, which may require Western intervention. In contrast, Anthony Giddens (1990) argues that the West promotes globalization because of a hidden agenda of neoliberalism and continued northern domination of the South. If the latter cannot be secured through the global economy creating dependent relationships, then some form of intervention may not be ruled out. Although intervention in all these cases may not mean military intervention—indeed, the preference would probably be to use other forms of power—nevertheless, the possibility of some form of military intervention is implicit. These arguments suggest that, although war between Western states may be obsolete because of increased interdependence and the process of globalization, military conflict between the West and elsewhere is still possible. A second, somewhat different reason that increased interdependence makes war less likely has to do with the nature of the global defense industry. This argument suggests that as defense industries become international and as trade in weapons and the components of weapons increases, so states become dependent upon others for the equipment with which to fight wars. In 1999 the British minister for defense procurement, Lord Gilbert, commented: “We are in an interdependent world and there are areas of supply where other countries are wholly dependent on what we provide for them. Equally we are dependent on supply from abroad for a great many other elements, important elements in our defense capability” (HCDC, 1999: Q.77). Governments are therefore increasingly reliant upon outsiders to provide the means with which to fight their wars and may be constrained in their use of force by these dependencies. Further, as economies become increasingly intertwined, so the ability to disentangle one from another in a military conflict becomes ever more difficult and costly. Although these factors may not prevent war from occurring—such dependencies may not be felt for some time and may be overcome with time—they nevertheless act as a complicating matter. At the very least, they may reduce military capability and

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therefore the chance of success in war. War is a risky business and strategy an exercise in risk management. These dependencies add further risks to the equation and thereby increase the pressures not to go to war. A third reason why interdependence reduces the likelihood of war concerns the spread of cultural norms and shared values and the way in which these values are no longer located at the nation-state level but have become transnational phenomena. Within the European Union, for example, Roland Axtmann argues that close cultural links have promoted peaceful relations (Axtmann, 1996). A more general suggestion is that globalization encourages the spread of liberal capitalist values, including those of democracy and human rights (see, for example, Holton, 1998; Kaldor, 1999: chap. 4). Indeed, Rosenau has argued that globalization has resulted in a world preference for democratic government (Rosenau, 1994). In this way, globalization links with democratic peace theory: if globalization promotes democratic urges and democracies do not fight each other, then globalization will result in more peaceful relations between states. At its most extreme, however, globalization involves a shift in the nature of political communities. Because globalization is not simply an advanced form of interdependence but involves the penetration and erosion of traditional (state) boundaries, new political groupings are possible. Transnational political groupings have begun to emerge and indeed may become commonplace. Motivated by global concerns or perhaps by shared interests or beliefs that transcend national politics, these groups are already beginning to change the nature of international politics. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace or human rights groups such as Amnesty International, for example, have no national allegiance but are rather transnational players capable of mobilizing opinion on a worldwide scale. Concomitant with this process of globalization is one of fragmentation. States, particularly in the developed world, are beginning to lose their homogeneity as local issues and subnational groupings assume greater significance. Loyalty to the state is being eroded and replaced by loyalty to more parochial groupings and to transnational issues. Potential allegiances are changing from those determined by geography and history (most obviously, traditional allegiances to the nation-state) to those of choice, aided by improvements in communication technology such as the Internet. According to Jean-Marie Guehenno, “Today’s process is not just the global interaction of existing political entities, nor is it just the emergence of new actors that would compete with those entities. It is characterized by the weakening of existing mediating institutions, public and private, and the direct confrontation of individuals

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with global forces” (Guehenno, 1998–1999: 9). This argument does not mean that states are unimportant, but it does suggest that the forces that motivate political action are changing and are no longer wholly located within the state. Major war is therefore becoming more difficult because the values and interests that lead to conflict are no longer automatically framed in the context of an interstate paradigm. The state remains the main provider of the means for major military confrontation, but major international confrontations are no longer solely located within the framework of interstate relations.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have suggested three reasons why major war has become obsolete within the West: the costs of war have risen and the benefits have been reduced such that war is no longer a useful instrument of politics; the spread of democracy acts as a powerful inhibitor; and the processes of increased interdependence, of globalization, and of economic and political integration within the European Union have transformed political relations. None of these arguments is without some difficulties. The costly American Civil War was not sufficient to prevent the United States joining in two world wars; the devastation of World War I failed to prevent European powers from engaging in World War II a generation later. Nor do rational cost-benefit calculations necessarily guide policy—leaders may act irrationally, they may miscalculate the costs of war, or they may be willing to take risks. Similarly, doubts exist both over the empirical evidence for democratic peace theory and over the causal factors behind it. Finally, interdependence and globalization also produce costs—they create dependencies and undermine national sovereignty. States may react against these trends, wishing to reestablish some national control over their economies and culture. The downside of increased interdependence and globalization is a sense of lost identity and vulnerability to outside forces that may provoke a violent reaction. As Copeland argues, “Realists turn the liberal argument on its head, arguing that economic interdependence not only fails to promote peace, but in fact heightens the likelihood of war. . . . states dependent on others for vital goods have an increased incentive to go to war to assure themselves of continued access of supply” (Copeland, 1996: 10). Nevertheless, taken together, these three arguments produce a powerful case that major war within the West is now obsolete—in John Mueller’s (1989: 240) terms, “sub-rationally unthinkable.” But two further caveats need to be injected here. First, because something is obsolete does not

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mean it is impossible. Major war remains a possibility for as long as states with armed forces exist, no matter how unlikely. More important for this book, however, is that these arguments do not mean that war between Western powers and others is obsolete—the literature on both the democratic peace and globalization argues that in certain circumstances it may become more likely. What this book suggests, therefore, is that the era of total war is over and that the nature of war for the West has been transformed. The nature of this transformation is the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1. On the relationship between total war and major war, see the beginning of Chapter 4. 2. A regiment might suffer over 100 percent casualties because, over time, the dead and wounded would be replaced with new troops who might, in time, become casualties. 3. Calculating the economic costs and gains of war is notoriously difficult, as Alan Milward has argued. He further contends: “It is quite unrealistic to argue that the economic ‘loss’ caused by [World] War [II], the ‘cost’ of the war, was a serious matter for the post-war world. The most serious legacy came rather from the fact that the outcome of the war was a decided economic ‘gain’ to some countries and an economic ‘loss’ to some others. It was the redistributive effects of the war, not its ‘cost,’ which made the problems of reconstructing the post-war economy so difficult to solve in spite of the rapid recovery of output in the separate national economies” (Milward, 1987: 336). 4. Though Milward (1987: 259–271) also makes the point that agricultural production in occupied countries fell during the war. See also Kayser’s discussion of Milward’s arguments (Kayser, 1990: 55–56). 5. Both the Correlates of War project and the data produced by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, for example, require 1,000 casualties for a conflict to be considered a war.

4 THE TRANSFORMATION

OF

WAR

began this book by arguing that for much of the twentieth century, war in the West was dominated by the experience and the fear of total war. Even so-called limited wars fought by Western powers outside Europe were fought in the shadow of total war. But if the analysis in the preceding chapter is correct, namely that major war between Western powers is obsolete, what then are the implications for war, particularly for the West? If a major war is a war in which high levels of resources are involved and the stakes are high, then total war is a form of major war. Consequently, if major war is obsolete for the West, then so is total war. In this chapter, therefore, I examine the transformation of war for the West, from the era of total war to that of spectator-sport warfare. Chapters 5 and 6 examine how this change has affected the West’s way in warfare, particularly the preference for the coercive use of air power and the promise of a Revolution in Military Affairs. To understand how war has changed, first it is necessary to reiterate the two key themes of total war identified in Chapter 2, namely escalation and participation. They offer an important perspective on the transformation of war. Chapter 2 noted how, in the age of total war, escalation was not so much a strategy as a dynamic. Although Clausewitz noted that the tendency toward absolute or total war was limited, not least by technology and society’s will to continue, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wore on, these limits on escalation were increasingly pushed back. Technology provided more efficient means of killing large numbers of people. Geographical limitations were overcome by improvements in transportation, enabling armies of hundreds of thousands to be moved and supplied over large distances. Communications technology allowed operational commanders to remain in control despite the battlefield stretching over hundreds of miles and enabled politicians

I

51

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to control a war stretching over continents. And with nationalism providing a new, powerful political dynamic, societies proved willing to sacrifice increasing numbers to secure victory. Thus after the battles of 1915, when the attritional deadlock and slaughter of the trenches first became apparent on the Western Front, the response was not to sue for peace but to redouble efforts to win the war. In this instance, more resources meant more people being sent to war, not only volunteers but conscripts as well. In World War II, the disaster of Pearl Harbor did not lead the United States to accept a fait accompli, nor did the loss of the Philippines produce a negotiated settlement to end the war, as might have been the case in previous centuries. The fall of France did not lead Britain to seriously consider peace; rather it led to the appointment of a prime minister who gloried in the notion of national sacrifice to defend what was considered valuable and who was subsequently revered for this attitude. After defeat at the gates of Moscow and then at Stalingrad, Nazi Germany did not contemplate a negotiated peace, settling for some of the massive territorial gains acquired during the summers of 1941 and 1942; even if it had, the Soviet Union would not have accepted it. With the limits on war therefore being pushed back, there is a sense of historical progression through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that is reflected in military historiography (for example, Bond, 1984; Gooch, 1980; Strachan, 1983). In this historical progression, the means of fighting war and the ends to which war was fought moved ever closer to Clausewitz’s idea of absolute war. The second key theme of total war is participation. Total war involved the participation of society in the war effort in two ways. First, citizens took up arms in defense of the (nation-)state. Wars were increasingly fought by the people for the people. Military service became an obligation of citizenship and the army the embodiment of the nation. Indeed, the army (and occasionally the navy) often came to be seen as representative of all that was best in a nation. War was no longer a matter for the few but for the many, involving the participation of a significant proportion of society. Second, the impact of war was felt beyond the battlefield. The will of society to fight was so important that civilian morale was targeted both directly (in the form of strategic bombing) and indirectly (through economic blockade). Because war was increasingly fought between societies, society became a target in war. Civilians were affected not only in becoming targets themselves but in the impact of war on social life generally. Social attitudes, religious beliefs, and even the arts were all affected by total war. War could also act as an agent of social change, as seen in the emancipation of slaves in the American

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Civil War, the changing role of women in the two world wars, and increased opportunities for the working classes. Although the lasting impact of these changes has been questioned, the impact of war on social life and society in general proved very considerable, as the literature of the age demonstrated. From the desperate poetry of the trenches to Joseph Heller’s black comedy, Catch-22, the impact of war on the lives of ordinary people became a major theme of twentieth-century literature and, in the second half of the century, film. Significantly, perhaps the last great war film of the twentieth century, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, was based upon the prospective loss of a third son to an ordinary family. Society was therefore engaged in the war through fighting it and producing for it; it was affected by war in terms of its beliefs, attitudes, and opportunities; and it suffered both directly and indirectly. This picture of war, however, is now unrecognizable in the West. These are the wars of history, not of today. War involving the extensive participation of society and the threat of escalation is obsolete. The reasons are articulated in Chapter 3—namely the costs involved, the spread of democracy, and the impact of increased interdependence, integration, and globalization. Although not impossible, these wars have become “sub-rationally unthinkable” (Mueller, 1989: 240). But war in general is not obsolete, even for the West. The literature on the democratic peace has suggested that democracies may actually prove to be war-prone, just not with each other (for example, Doyle, 1995: 180–181; Mansfield and Snyder, 1995), and the 1990s demonstrated the West’s involvement in a succession of conflicts, including the Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo, as well as its willingness to use force on an interstate basis (the air strikes against Iraq in 1998, following Baghdad’s failure to cooperate fully with UN weapons inspectors, is a notable example). Similarly, in 2001, the United States responded to terrorist attacks by using force against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These wars, however, were wars of choice, not survival, where the stakes and commitment were very different from wars—even limited wars—in the age of total war. War for the West has changed and changed very significantly. Crucially, not only the conduct of war but the nature of war has been transformed.

New Wars Not surprisingly, this change has prompted considerable debate, particularly over the nature of what Mary Kaldor has termed “new wars” (Kaldor, 1999; see also Luttwak, 1995, 1996; Ignatieff, 2000; van Creveld, 1990–1991). Although these debates differ in the area of interest or

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explanation of change—ranging from the end of the Cold War to the impact of technology, the rise of intrastate conflicts over interstate conflicts, the increased practice of intervention, and changing technology— what characterizes all of them is the idea that the nature of war has changed from the era of total war. For the West, war is no longer a matter of survival (even if at one remove, as was the case with limited wars); rather, war now is a matter of choice. The argument presented here concurs with this analysis that war for the West is now a matter of choice and that the age of total war is over. But it uses as its point of departure in discussing the nature of these “new wars” a metaphor first coined by Michael Mann before the end of the Cold War. In 1988 Mann argued that limited conventional wars involving client states aided by “our” professional advisers and small expeditionary forces in “our backyards,” do not mobilize the nation as players but as spectators. . . . wars like the Falklands and the Grenadan invasion are not qualitatively different from the Olympic Games. Because life-and-death are involved, the emotions stirred up are deeper and stronger. But they are not emotions backed up by committing personal resources. They do not involve real or potential sacrifice, except by professional troops. (Mann, 1988: 184–185)

At the time, comparatively little attention was paid to this metaphor. Not least, despite the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Cold War was still very much a reality. The threat of global nuclear catastrophe centering on a war between East and West may have been unlikely, but it was still sufficiently a possibility to act as a focus for attention. Equally, the examples used by Mann appeared to be exceptions rather than the new rule. The Falklands in particular appeared to be more of a historical anomaly than present-day reality, a throwback to the days of empire rather than a reflection of Britain’s place in the contemporary world. Indeed, the year before the Falklands War, the British government’s defense review had concluded that effort should be focused even more on Europe, a decision that arguably contributed to the Argentinean decision to invade (for example, Grove, 1987: 350–358; Hill-Norton, 1983: 117– 118). The Falklands War could also be dismissed as atypical due to its unusual geographical remoteness. A war fought at such a distance would more obviously lend itself to the “spectator-sport” metaphor than the more likely conflicts nearer home, particularly in Europe. Further, the small scale of the conflict meant that not only a minority of the population but a minority of the armed services were involved. In particular,

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the British land forces were largely drawn from “elite” regiments such as the Parachute Regiment, the Special Air Service (SAS), the Marines, and the Guards. Finally, the idea that war may be described as a spectator sport failed to prompt debate because of Mann’s failure to develop the metaphor in a significant manner. Although he has used it since (for example, Mann, 1996: 235), it remains essentially underdeveloped. In addition to Michael Mann, both Martin Shaw and Michael Ignatieff have referred to war as becoming a spectator sport. Shaw’s focus is on militarism and the “post-military society,” and he discusses spectator-sport warfare in the context of the work of Michael Mann. As a result, Shaw (1991: 78–82, 198–199) does little to develop the metaphor. In his book on the Kosovo conflict, Ignatieff begins by arguing that the war was “unreal” or “virtual.” He argues that the citizens of the West “were mobilized not as combatants, but as spectators. The war was a spectacle: it aroused the emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do. The events in question were as remote from their essential concerns as a football game, and even though the game was in deadly earnest, the deaths were mostly hidden, and above all, someone else’s” (Ignatieff, 2000: 3–4). Ignatieff’s book does more to examine the nature of war as a spectator sport than either of those by Shaw or Mann. But his real concern is with the events of Kosovo and the implications of this new form of warfare, not least on the limits placed on the use of force when war is removed from direct experience: “If war becomes unreal to the citizens of modern democracies, will they care enough to restrain and control the violence exercised in their name?” (Ignatieff, 2000: 4). The metaphor of spectator-sport warfare is used and developed here as a way of understanding the new nature of war. The key argument presented in this chapter is that the dynamic of escalation has been replaced by wars that are localized in their conduct and their impact. As a result, the West may become involved, but the impact of war does not usually spread to the West, the exception being in asymmetric conflicts such as the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. It is perhaps revealing that these are termed “asymmetric,” implying that they do not conform to the West’s preferred way of conducting war, or indeed how the West expects such wars to be fought. The removal of war from everyday life in the West is critical. In the age of total warfare, it was difficult to avoid the fact that the state was at war, but now it is only too easy. Rather than participating, Western citizens have become spectators and the armed forces their representatives. In this chapter, I detail the move to spectator-sport warfare by examining how the two key themes of total war—escalation and participation—have changed. In subsequent

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chapters, I examine how this move affects the manner in which force is used and (in Chapter 7) what it means to be a spectator and to compare war with sport.

From Escalation to Localization The dynamic of escalation has changed in three ways. First, wars such as the Gulf War and those in the Balkans no longer spread geographically but are localized, not only in terms of the fighting but in their impact as well. Second, in the age of total war, the enemy was the state, which meant that the full resources of the state could not only be used in the prosecution of the war but that the enemy state could be legitimately targeted as well. In these new wars, however, the enemy is no longer the state but a regime or leadership, a Saddam, Mohamed Farah Aideed, or Milosevic. The nature of the enemy places limits upon the conduct of war, most notably in what may be considered a legitimate target, and is related to the third main change, the effort to minimize collateral damage. Lowering the casualty rate has become a key feature of the West’s new way in warfare but is clearly at odds with the manner in which total war escalated to involve the targeting of productive capacity regardless of collateral damage to the civilian population and even the targeting of the civilian population itself. That war has become localized has not been much commented upon. Indeed, if anything, the reverse has been true, with Western politicians justifying intervention on the grounds that war may spread. During the Kosovo crisis, for example, British prime minister Tony Blair commented: “We must act . . . to save the stability of the Balkan region, where we know chaos can engulf all of Europe” (Blair, 1999a). Intervention has therefore been portrayed as a latter-day form of containment, with the associated implication that escalation remains a possibility. Attention has instead focused upon an apparent shift away from interstate wars toward intrastate ones. Martin van Creveld has argued: “Large-scale conventional war—war as understood by today’s principal military powers—may indeed be at its last gasp; however, war itself, war as such, is alive and kicking and about to enter a new epoch” (van Creveld, 1990–1991: 2). For him, this new epoch of “post-trinitarian” warfare is one in which intrastate conflicts are the new norm and interstate conflicts are fast becoming obsolete. Van Creveld’s analysis is largely empirical in nature. Drawing upon the historical record, he argues that the “trinitarian” form of war identified by Clausewitz is obsolete. For almost two centuries, strategists

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have argued that war is fought by states for political purposes against other states, using formally constituted militaries that are distinguishable from the civilian population, but now, “should present trends continue, then the kind of war that is based on the division between government, army and people seems to be on its way out. The rise of low-intensity conflict may, unless it can be quickly contained, end up destroying the state. Over the long run, the place of the state will be taken by warmaking organizations of a different type” (van Creveld, 1990– 1991: 192). For van Creveld, war is therefore becoming—indeed, in many parts of the world has already become—“non-trinitarian.” War is now largely fought within states for internal political purposes, where forces are often indistinguishable from the civilian population. Thus interstate war has been replaced by intrastate war as the coinage of conflict: [N]one of the perhaps two dozen armed conflicts now being fought all over the world involves a state on both sides. . . . In most of Africa the entities by which the wars in question are waged resemble tribes—indeed they are tribes, or whatever is left of them under the corrosive influence of modern civilization. In parts of Asia and Latin America the best analogy may be the robber barons who infested Europe during the early modern period, or else the vast feudal organizations that warred against each other in sixteenth century Japan. In North America and Western Europe future warmaking entities will probably resemble the Assassins, the group which, motivated by religion and allegedly supporting itself on drugs, terrorized the medieval Middle East for two centuries. (van Creveld, 1990–1991: 197; italics in original)

Van Creveld observes this shift as a trend and explains it by reference to factors such as the declining utility of force in recent interstate conflicts and the impact of nuclear weapons. Although he was writing at the time of the Gulf War, which initially appeared to call this analysis into question, subsequent conflicts in the 1990s reinforced this apparent shift so that it became the new orthodoxy (Buzan and Herring, 1998: 143–146). In arguing that there has been this shift in the nature of war, van Creveld was supported by some of the literature on globalization, which has noted since the end of the Cold War a parallel trend to globalization in the fragmentation of states (Clark, 1997: 180–196). As states fragment, so the potential for conflict is heightened, as seen in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Further, commentators have argued that the end of the Cold War has allowed nationalism to resurface as a major source of internal conflict (for example, KodmaniDarwish, 1991–1992: 43; Mandelbaum, 1998–1999: 32). These conflicts are essentially intrastate in nature. Although they may be the product of secessionist movements seeking independence, such as in Chechnya,

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they are still fought within the context of an existing state, even if that state is fragmenting or has lost internal legitimacy in the secessionist area. There are, however, a number of problems with this new orthodoxy and in particular with van Creveld’s largely empirical analysis. First, the argument that interstate wars are on the decline because of the low incidence of such conflicts misses the point. Not only have interstate conflicts usually been rare events, but in the past there have been periods where such wars have been extremely rare, particularly during parts of the nineteenth century, which van Creveld would presumably see very much as the era of trinitarian warfare. Second, although rare, interstate wars still occur, as Figure 4.1 indicates. Indeed, Figure 4.1 suggests that far from declining, the number of interstate wars since 1945 has remained relatively stable, whereas the number of militarized interstate disputes has risen. Moreover, many of the definitions of what constitutes a “war” depend upon a certain casualty figure. Both the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the influential Correlates of War project, for example, require 1,000 casualties for a conflict to be deemed a war (SIPRI, 1991: 345; Small and Singer, 1982). There are examples of force being used on an interstate basis, but because few casualties occur, they do not figure in these analyses—as was the case with British and U.S. air strikes against Iraq in 1998 following the removal of UN weapons inspectors and in 2001 over improvements to Iraqi air defenses. Similarly, examples of the West using military power and sometimes force in operations other than war—such as peace support operations in Bosnia—may not figure in such analyses, although they are clearly examples of military power or force being used at an interstate level. These examples suggest that the Correlates of War data on militarized interstate disputes form a highly significant measure. Third, the fact that intrastate conflicts have been more common than interstate conflicts is hardly new, as shown in Figure 4.2. And although the ratio may have changed somewhat, the broad picture remains recognizably the same. In other words, the empirical data do not convincingly support the argument that intrastate wars have replaced interstate wars. What van Creveld identified as a new phenomenon and others have developed into a post–Cold War orthodoxy is a relationship that had been common throughout the Cold War, if not before. Interstate wars tend to be rare occurrences and intrastate wars much more common. These commentators were correct in sensing a change, but the change is not in the relationship between inter- and intrastate wars. Rather, it is that war is now localized and that escalation—specifically in terms of the geographic spread of a conflict—is no longer a serious fear, despite

Figure 4.1

The Hostility Level and Frequency of Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1945–1992

Image not available

Source: Derived from the data in Tables A.1 and A.2, pp. 154 and 155.

Figure 4.2

Annual Balance of Interstate and Intrastate Conflicts, 1974–1999

Image not available

Source: Derived from the data in Tables A.1 and A.2, pp. 154 and 155.

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the rhetoric of some politicians. I do not mean that analyses of state fragmentation are wrong—the empirical evidence seems to support this analysis. Rather I mean that the consequences of state fragmentation are not that such wars may spread to the West, threatening stability and security, but that the West may usually intervene without the risk of war spreading. Revealingly, in the past a state’s intervention in a conflict would have automatically risked making that state a legitimate target in war, but the West’s intervention in Kosovo, U.S. intervention in Somalia and Haiti, and even coalition operations in the Gulf did not lead to war spreading to the West, nor was this risk a serious possibility. War was localized. In part, local conflicts do not escalate into more general ones because there is no global conflict into which they can be subsumed as sideshows. During the Cold War, local conflicts acquired global dimensions as the game of superpower rivalry played itself out. States and even whole regions of the world became pawns in what was too easily portrayed as the game of expansion and containment. Thus local conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia readily acquired a global dimension. In such circumstances, the fear of escalation to global conflict could be real, seen most clearly in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But Boris Yeltsin’s threat of Russian intervention against NATO over Kosovo (Lockwood, Aris, and Smucker, 1999) failed to ignite a wider crisis and was quickly forgotten, and the “red card” incident at the Pristina airport (where the orders of NATO’s commander in chief, General Wesley Clark, may have led to NATO troops firing on Russian soldiers) has occasioned little comment (HCDC, 2000: QQ.717–721; Jackson, 2000: 16). Similarly in 2001, Western governments were keen to avoid portraying their response to the attacks of 11 September as an attack against Islam; rather it was a more focused war against terrorism. The lack of a global conflict in the 1990s and beyond has created a double dynamic. First, it means that local conflicts stay local, even when Western powers intervene. There are no fears of or pressures to escalate geographically because there is no wider conflict to which to escalate. Second, it means that Western powers have much greater freedom to intervene because the risks involved no longer include the possibility of global conflict or of their society being targeted. The exception to this is the fear of a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam (Huntington, 1996) but as noted above Western governments and indeed most Islamic governments have been careful to avoid portraying the campaign against Afghanistan as anything other than a limited response against the terrorist attacks on the United States.

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In this respect, concern over the potential of asymmetric warfare to escalate a conflict into attacks on Western society, whether by ballistic missiles or terrorism, is revealing (Badey, 1998: 52–55; Daalder, Goldgeier, and Lindsay, 2000: 9; Simon and Benjamin, 2000: 58–75; Wilkening, 2000: 15). It suggests two things. First, there is no expectation that a war would spread to the West, unless the other side changes the rules of the game and adopts different strategies. This is an important point because the language of “symmetrical” and “asymmetrical” warfare implies that the former is the standard and the latter the exception. And the standard is clearly that war will be fought away from the West and will not spread to the West. Second, asymmetric warfare reflects a concern that a sufficiently motivated or technologically adept opponent might target Western societies and that this is something to be avoided. In other words, Western societies should no longer experience war, and war should be kept some distance away. The phenomenon of “spectator-sport warfare” is therefore a result, in part at least, of the demise of major wars in favor of local wars that have little or no escalatory potential. Wars such as the Gulf War and Kosovo are not experienced directly in the West; rather they are viewed from afar. When Western states do intervene in such conflicts, they do so knowing that the conflict is unlikely to spread to their own territory and that only a limited number of representatives—mostly the armed forces of the state— will be directly involved. The remainder spectate from a safe distance, empathizing but not experiencing, sympathizing but not suffering. But if wars are to be fought away from home, then the capability to project force becomes essential. As former UK defense secretary George Robertson wrote, “We must be prepared to go to the crisis rather than have the crisis come to us” (Robertson, 1998: 2). During the Cold War, power projection capabilities were eroded, particularly in Western Europe, as attention focused on defending NATO against an attack from the East. But in the era of spectator-sport warfare, the ability to project force is critical. The second key change affecting the dynamic of escalation is the nature of the enemy. In the age of total war, the enemy was the opposing state. Although the enemy may have been personified in a Hitler, a Stalin, a Churchill, or the kaiser, they were generally representative of a much wider enemy into which people could easily be subsumed. Therefore, propaganda demonized not only enemy leaders but also enemy soldiers and society en masse. A “literature of atrocity” appeared with the purpose of dehumanizing the enemy. For example, Rudyard Kipling described the Germans in World War I as “animals who have scientifically and philosophically removed themselves inconceivably outside civilisation” (quoted in Pick, 1993: 145). As Samuel Hynes explains,

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England and her allies needed a brutal enemy. At a time when international conferences were writing rules for civilized war, democratic nations had to be mobilized for a war that would be total and uncivilized. Hatred of the Germans would have to be generated among both the troops and the civilian population and for that a propaganda of atrocities would be a flammable fuel. A general rule applies: To make a people forget their humanity in war, make their enemy inhuman. (Hynes, 1998: 225)

There is some evidence questioning the extent to which this was always the case. That a people rather than a regime was identified as the enemy varied somewhat even in the two world wars. John Dower has argued that in World War II the United States viewed the Nazi regime as the enemy, but ordinary Germans were not held to blame. At the same time, the United States viewed the Japanese people as the enemy (Dower, 1986). But on the Eastern Front in World War II, the Germans en masse were seen as the enemy by the Soviets; for Germany, the Jewish people were to be eradicated in their entirety; and the willingness of the British to bomb German cities (and to a lesser extent, German bombing of British cities) suggests that the people were at some level considered to be the enemy—it would be highly unusual to attack a target that was not considered to be the enemy. Although Montgomery famously invited the captured commander of the Afrika Korps to dinner during the battle of el-Alamein in 1942 (Hamilton, 1984: 796–798), his battle orders rather more revealingly encouraged his troops to “shoot Germans” (Montgomery, 1958: 127); and although some divisions were formed from national minorities such as the Ukrainians to serve with the Germans on the Eastern Front and even some Soviet prisoners of war were formed into fighting units, these action were exceptional and done with some reservation (for example, Ziemke, 1966: 105). Indeed, what was more noticeable was the fact that Germany failed to make more of the nationalist divisions in the Soviet Union and the potential for turning Russians against the oppressive and brutish regime of Joseph Stalin. In the age of spectator-sport warfare, however, the enemy is no longer the state but a regime or even an individual leader. Thus U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher commented on Somalia that “[Aideed] is the principal obstacle at the present time. I think something has to be done to bring him under control so we can get on—so the Somalians can get on with nation-building. . . . if we can somehow rein him in [then] his followers will not be nearly as big an obstacle” (Christopher, 1993). Similarly, in a U.S. State Department briefing, Michael McCurry singled out Aideed as the “enemy”: “It is clear that he [Aideed] continues to pose a great threat to the UNOSOM mission and

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that, for very good reasons, the world community is determined they need to deal with him very directly” (McCurry, 1993; emphasis added). On air strikes against Iraq, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright remarked: “Let me also echo the President by stressing that our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people. On the contrary we recognize that Iraqis have been the primary victims of Saddam Hussein’s failure to cooperate internationally and his reign of terror domestically” (Albright, 1998). During the Kosovo crisis, Albright commented: “[Milosevic] does not care about the Serbian people, with whom we have no fight, no struggle. We have a struggle with the Serb leadership that is moving forward in these very dreadful massacres and harassing of the Kosovar Albanians” (Albright, 1999). President Clinton reinforced this position, stating: “Our quarrel is not with the Serbs in Serbia, it is not with the Serbs in Kosovo, it is not with Serbian Americans; it is with the leadership [of Milosevic] who believes it is alright to kill people and to uproot them and to destroy their family records and to erase any record of their presence in a land simply because of their ethnic heritage” (Clinton, 1999). In Britain, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook made a similar point in a message to the Serb people: [NATO’s bombing] is not intended against the Serbian people. It is not intended to undermine your country. . . . our objective has been to strike against the power-base of President Milosevic. . . . I bitterly regret having to enter into conflict with your country. It started because President Milosevic chose to ignore our warnings and conduct the most awful cruelty in Kosovo. It can end when he calls a halt to that cruelty, and lets the people of Kosovo, and the people of Yugoslavia, have the peaceful and prosperous future they deserve. (Cook, 1999)

Even in the Gulf War, this shift was apparent. John Warden, one of the key figures in the development of the air campaign, commented: “In our first meeting with General Schwarzkopf we stressed the importance of making clear to the Iraqis and to the rest of the world that our problem existed because of Saddam Hussein’s policies—not because we hated Iraq or the Iraqis. By presenting the war in this way, we wanted also to make clear to the Iraqis that they would fare well in a postwar world which did not include Saddam” (Warden, 1997: 179). Similarly, George W. Bush and Tony Blair both emphasized that the military campaign in response to the 11 September terrorist attacks was not a war against the Afghan people but against the Taliban regime, Osama bin Laden, and his terrorist network. In this shift from counterstate to counterregime targeting, Western politicians explicitly distance themselves from presenting the people— Serbs, Somalis, Iraqis, or whomever—as the enemy. Indeed, the people

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are often presented not as the enemy but as suffering under a repressive regime. The target is not the state but the leadership, what it values, and its ability to maintain a grip on power. General Klaus Naumann, chair of NATO’s Military Committee during the Kosovo conflict, commented: “I think there are three categories which hurt a man like Milosevic. The first is the police, who maintain control in the country. The second is the media. . . . The third are those industrial barons who provide the money so that he can stay in power” (Naumann, quoted in HCDC, 2000: xli). Notably absent from this list are the people who live in the state. The implication is clear: if the “enemy” is an individual or a regime, then not only is it illegitimate to escalate and hit other targets, particularly if the war is being fought for humanitarian purposes (Wheeler, 2000), but such escalation may also lack purpose. Similarly, in the Gulf War, the United States Air Force (USAF) presented a fivering model representing the way in which Iraq worked as a system, with the leadership at the center (see Figure 4.3). Although Warden is careful to distinguish between decapitation attacks targeted solely against the leadership and the more systemic campaign on which the coalition air forces embarked, what is clear is that the aim was to impose strategic paralysis rather than to destroy the state and that “the leadership ring [was] of central importance” (Warden, 1997: 175). Attacks against the state were to be replaced by attacks against the system that allowed Saddam to run the state. New limits related to a new perception of what constitutes the enemy have therefore emerged on targeting policy. As a result, war no longer escalates to involve the whole of society. The final way in which the escalation dynamic has changed is the attempt to minimize collateral damage. It has become a hallmark of the West’s way in warfare throughout the 1990s and beyond and is in part related to new perceptions of the enemy discussed above. Considerable efforts are now made to avoid causing collateral damage. U.S. defense secretary William Cohen commented after the 1998 air strikes against Iraq: “We’ve taken great care to minimize casualties among innocent civilians in our strikes. . . . To the extent that there are civilian casualties, only Saddam and his brutally destructive regime are to blame” (Cohen, 1998). Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remarked: “In carrying out military action [against Saddam], we will do all we can to minimize civilian casualties” (Albright, 1998), and President Clinton argued that “we did everything we could to carefully target military and national security targets and to minimize civilian casualties. . . . There is, I believe, no way to avoid some unintended civilian casualties and I regret it very much. But I believe far, far more people would have died eventually from this man’s regime had we not taken this action” (Clinton, 1998).

66 Figure 4.3

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The Five-Ring System

Fielded forces Population Infrastructure Key production Leadership

Source: John Warden, “Success in Modern War: A Response to Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win,” Security Studies 7, no. 2 (1997): 174.

After the first night of NATO bombing in the Kosovo war, Prime Minister Tony Blair reported: “We have chosen targets as military targets but specifically geared to the instruments of Milosevic’s military capability, we have done everything we can to minimise civilian damage” (Blair, 1999b), and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the Serb people: “We have taken the greatest care to ensure that we hit military targets. . . . In spite of this, NATO action has caused considerable misery and stress for you. I regret that. But I assure you that we shall continue to take enormous care to ensure that civilians suffer as little as possible” (Cook, 1999). Efforts to minimize collateral damage in Kosovo even spread to those aircraft flying in harm’s way returning with their full payload because they could not guarantee hitting the target and therefore might risk causing collateral damage. During Operation Allied Force, only 40 percent of Royal Air Force (RAF) strike missions led to weapons release mainly because of fears of collateral damage (HCDC, 2000: lviii–lix). Similarly, the first weeks of the campaign against the Taliban were marked by precision strikes and an attempt to minimize collateral damage. Even when B-52 bombers began “carpet bombing” in November 2001, it was limited to Taliban frontline positions.

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Despite the effort given to minimizing collateral damage and the improved technology and availability of weapons for this purpose, collateral damage still occurs. In the Gulf War, only 10 percent of U.S. strike aircraft were capable of precision attacks, but in Kosovo, 90 percent were (Department of Defense, 2000: 88), and the RAF originally intended to use only precision-guided munitions in the latter operation (HCDC, 2000: lx). Despite these improvements in weaponry, during Operation Allied Force, out-of-date intelligence led to the Chinese Embassy being bombed; a train was destroyed while crossing a bridge under aerial attack; and air strikes against Korisa led to the deaths of some Kosovar civilians. In February 2000, a Human Rights Watch report estimated that there had been ninety incidents of collateral damage involving fatalities and between 488 and 572 Yugoslav civilians had been killed by NATO air strikes (Human Rights Watch, 2000). Overall, however, UK defense secretary George Robertson was able to conclude that “the noteworthy thing is that there were so few [mistakes] in relation to the size of the campaign” (Robertson, 1999: 11). The U.S. Department of Defense’s after-action report similarly concluded: “[Operation] Allied Force was the most precise military operation ever conducted. No military operation of such size has ever inflicted less damage on unintended targets” (Department of Defense, 2000: xiii). In a similar vein, the UK Ministry of Defence’s “lessons learned” white paper argued that “Kosovo was one of the most accurate air operations ever mounted, and resulted in very few instances of collateral damage” (MOD, 2000: 35). What is interesting, though, is the reaction to such mistakes. On 17 May 1999, some seven weeks into Operation Allied Force, Time magazine commented: “NATO’s air campaign [in Kosovo] has begun to rack up an ugly record of accidental civilian casualties.” At the time, the Associated Press’s running tally of NATO’s “unintended targets” had identified ten bomb misses in the campaign, historically an extraordinarily low number, particularly given the fact that the number of NATO strike sorties by that time was well in excess of 3,000 (Correll, 1999: 1). Why is it then, that despite a very low percentage of bombs reported as causing collateral damage, there is such a strong reaction? In part, it may be due to raised expectations—when the rhetoric of precision is coupled to powerful images of bombs hitting targets with unnerving accuracy, there is an expectation that bombs will not miss and that collateral damage will not occur. When mistakes do occur and collateral damage is inflicted, then these illusions are shattered, and a reaction sets in. In addition, there is a suspicion among Western militaries that for the media, the story “bomb hits target” quickly loses its newsworthiness, particularly when repeated on a daily, even hourly basis. But the story “bomb

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misses target,” coupled both to pictures of suffering and government protestations of surgical precision, is more rare and more newsworthy. Media behavior, however, can only be a partial explanation. After all, it is not the West that suffers from collateral damage but the enemy, while it is Western pilots who are risking their lives in these missions. Why, then, is there such a high level of concern over the enemy suffering for Western mistakes? Why is it that Western society appears happier for a pilot to fly into harm’s way and not drop his bombs, therefore having possibly to return later and risk his life again, than it is for him to drop his bombs and risk missing the target? The first part of the explanation has to do with the changed identification of the enemy discussed above. If the enemy is no longer the people but a regime or leadership, then bombs that miss do not hit the “enemy” but innocent civilians. In World War II, there were few qualms about causing collateral damage because ultimately, it was still the enemy that suffered when bombs missed their target. But when bombs missed their targets in Belgrade or Baghdad in the 1990s, it was not the enemy that suffered but the innocent and the vulnerable. Civilian casualties were particularly problematic if the action was prompted by humanitarian concerns, raising the possibility that more harm might be done by intervention than by not using force. But it also reflects a sense that wars are no longer fought against a society but against its leadership. Society is not the enemy—indeed, citizens, whether Iraqis, Serbs, Haitians, or Afghans, may also be suffering under the very repressive regime against which Western action is targeted. To kill them, maim them, or destroy their property would therefore compound the harm being done to the innocent rather than alleviating suffering (Wheeler, 2000). Second, a tacit bargain has been struck whereby if the enemy population is no longer at risk, then Western society similarly should not be placed at risk. If the West attacked civilian targets or caused collateral damage, it might make Western society a legitimate target; such actions would invite retaliation in kind. But by avoiding enemy civilians and by minimizing collateral damage, the West encourages the enemy to reciprocate.

From Participation to Spectatordom This latter argument is important not just because it reflects the natural desire to avoid harm but because it also reflects changes to the second feature of total war, namely participation in war. If society participated in total war, sometimes willingly as in the autumn of 1914, sometimes less so, then in these new wars it has no such desire. Instead, society

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spectates. The West’s wars are no longer fought by nations in arms; rather they are fought by their representatives on the field of battle. War is no longer an obligation of citizenship but the business of professionals. Those involved have chosen to do so through a career choice and accept unlimited liability as part of their professional contract. The West therefore limits the cost of war in two ways. First, by making war the business of professionals, Western societies absolve themselves from some of the responsibility of placing soldiers in harm’s way. For those involved, war is their chosen occupation, and death and injury are occupational hazards. Using force does not involve risking society but those elements that have accepted such risks and are willing to represent the West. In this respect, the armed forces do not so much reflect society as are different from society, a fact reinforced by their different legal status, traditions, and even mores and seen perhaps most clearly in the debate over gays in the military (Dandeker, 1999). The British Armed Forces Overarching Personnel Strategy characterizes the relationship this way: “The Armed Forces should reflect the society they serve, but there must also be an acknowledgment, by society and by the Armed Forces themselves, of the need to be different and of the emphasis that must be placed on the core values and standards which in some respects diverge from those which obtain in society at large” (quoted in HCDC, 2001: vii). Martin Shaw has suggested that we are now entering a “postmilitary society” where the idea of “national” service and of the military acting as a vehicle for national cohesion is becoming obsolete. The social contract that formed part of Clausewitz’s trinitarian perspective on war is being replaced by a business relationship. War is a profession or perhaps even trade and the soldier a professional or artisan employed to engage in the business of war (Shaw, 1991; Coker, 2001). In this context, it is interesting to compare the experience of the French government in the 1990s in deploying forces on operations away from France with those of Britain and the United States, both of which have professional forces supplemented by volunteer reserves (elements of the U.S. National Guard and the British Territorial Army, for example, were both deployed in Bosnia). For French conscripts, operations in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia were not obligations of citizenship to ensure the survival of the state but wars of choice on the part of the French government, in which society as a whole was reluctant to participate. In contrast, U.S. and British forces were more willing to accept these deployments because they were professionals who, in their career choice, had accepted such risks. Indeed, in some instances, they welcomed the opportunity to put their professional skills into practice (for

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example, Benson, 1993: 16-25). But, of course, not all those who had joined professional forces had done so with these risks in mind. In particular, some may have joined to gain specific qualifications for careers elsewhere (in certain branches of engineering, for example), and others may have joined in the 1980s during the Cold War with little expectation of such conflicts leading to their own involvement. There is considerable apocryphal evidence to suggest that, in the British Army at least, the Gulf War proved a shock to some simply because they had not expected to be involved in such a conflict. Army life meant peacetime exercises in Germany; tours to Northern Ireland, which by the 1980s had become relatively safe (Kennedy-Pipe and McInnes, 2001); and the occasional tour elsewhere. To go to war was an unpleasant surprise—it was not what they had joined up for. The second way in which the West limits its participation in and the costs of war is by restricting the numbers involved in operations. In this respect the Gulf War, with the involvement on the coalition side of over 2 million soldiers, sailors, and air personnel, was unusual (Cordesman and Wagner, 1996: 114). In contrast, the numbers used for operations in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and the air campaigns against Iraq in 1998 and 2001 were much smaller, numbering at most a few tens of thousands overall; national contributions often numbered just a few thousand. For Kosovo, NATO balked at the prospect of an opposed ground entry probably involving no more than 150,000 troops, despite a population numbering several hundreds of millions, almost 4 million men and women under arms, and a further 5 million reservists (IISS, 1999: 300); its preference instead was for an air campaign involving just 800 aircraft (HCDC, 2000: xxxiv–xxxviii, c). As these numbers show, the West’s wars are now fought by just a fraction of its population, limiting not only exposure to suffering but also the sense of participation and shared endeavor. In an important sense, however, the numbers involved are not small. Although the few tens of thousands involved in contemporary operations pale in comparison with the armies of the era of total war, they are still large in terms of the numbers placed in harm’s way. Further, each one of these is politically significant. As a result, Western society now expects risks to be minimized not only to itself but to its representatives as well. Although in an important sense, the military is different from society, it is also a part of society, is drawn from society, and reflects elements of society. They may be representatives, but they are our representatives. John Keegan commented that at Agincourt, the English suffered only two “notable fatalities” (Keegan, 1991: 112); the substantial number of other casualties was politically insignificant. But in Bosnia

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and Somalia, each U.S. soldier was politically significant. When confronted by a mob on the quayside in Haiti, the USS Harlan County, a ship of the most powerful navy in the world and of the sole remaining superpower, turned around rather than confront the mob and risk casualties. Cori Dauber lists a revealing series of quotations reflecting this phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the “body bag problem,” arguing that the United States is reaching a position of “zero tolerance” for casualties (Dauber, 2001).1 These include Bob Novak in 1994: “It’s not going to be a bloodbath or anything bad, but one American to die for this dubious venture is too much”; Pat Buchanan in 1995: “I don’t think the President’s made the case why a single American soldier should put his life at risk there”; Senator Phil Gramm in 1993: “Is it worth one more American funeral to be in Somalia for six more months? I say the answer is no”; and Lieutenant Colonel Larry Joyce (U.S. Army, retired): “I have to tell you, in sincerity, that I don’t believe the entire country of Somalia is worth one American soldier’s life.” This final quotation is particularly noteworthy since Larry Joyce Sr. was being interviewed on Larry King Live not because of his military expertise but because his son had just been killed in Somalia. His reaction is interesting not only because of the personal tragedy involved but because of the inference that this was a military family in which a son followed in his father’s footsteps. Larry Joyce had much more direct experience of the costs of military operations in the 1990s than Pat Buchanan, Phil Gramm, and Bob Novak; few Americans would have had such a direct encounter, and particularly such a tragic encounter with operations in Somalia. Ordinarily, military families might be expected to accept such losses more willingly as a sacrifice imposed by their profession. Successive generations would understand the risks involved. For Larry Joyce Sr., however, the loss of his son did not appear to be a justifiable sacrifice. Clearly the changed nature of the polity explains much of this shift from the days of Agincourt. Carl Kayser has pointed out that as late as the eighteenth century, political power in the West was based on control of land and invested in the hands of a few major landowners. Thus the capture of land was an important gain in war, whereas loss of life—with the exception of a small elite—might not have particular political significance. With widespread industrialization in the nineteenth century, this view began to change. Land per se became less important than capital and productive capacity (and therefore the labor force). At the same time, the rise of nationalism changed the basis of political legitimacy, with the development of a more inclusive and integrated polity (Kayser, 1990: 48–58). But industrialization and nationalism cannot explain the change from the era of total war. After all, the nature of the polity has not changed

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significantly since World War II, particularly for those Western states most heavily involved in operations during the 1990s (Britain, France, and the United States). Why, then, were these states willing, however reluctantly, to accept casualties in the hundreds of thousands in the era of total war, when they are unwilling to risk the lives of more than a handful in these new wars? One explanation is that casualty (in)tolerance is a function of interests and consensus (Burk, 1999; see also Luttwak, 1995, 1996; Mueller, 1994). When interests are high and there is elite and popular consensus, then tolerance for casualties is high, as in the two world wars; if either or both are lacking, however, then tolerance for casualties is much lower. Because these new wars are wars of choice, then by definition the interests are lower. National survival is not at risk, nor are core interests. Western society may sympathize with the plight of those caught up in these wars, but they will not suffer from them (except, perhaps, those very close to the region who may suffer some localized disturbances and refugee flows). Therefore, any Western casualties as a result of involvement in these wars are an unnecessary cost imposed by choice rather than a necessary cost imposed by pressing national interest. Further, “choice” implies options rather than obligation; it implies debate over a range of possible courses of action rather than compulsion to act in a particular manner. As a result, consensus is less likely as people express preferences for different options. Thus in wars of choice neither national interest nor consensus is likely to be strong, so that even if the requirement for military intervention is accepted, tolerance of casualties is likely to be low. In other words, not only is society unwilling to suffer in these wars, it is unwilling for its representatives to suffer as well. Neither the unwillingness of society to countenance suffering to itself, nor its reluctance to see its representatives incurring casualties are absolutes. Rather they are limitations. Interests and consensus may operate sufficiently to allow some casualties, but the level of interests and fragility of consensus may be sufficiently low to place limits on the number of casualties before intolerance sets in. Further, there may be examples in which interest or consensus is sufficiently high to permit relatively high casualty levels before intolerance sets in. Thus in the 1990–1991 Gulf War, the U.S. government was willing to accept the possibility of considerable casualties, not least to Marines crossing the border from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, because the interests at stake were considered sufficiently high and a relatively high level of consensus had been built up. Equally, even when there is a relatively low level of interest or consensus, casualty levels may be sufficiently low as to be tolerated. Thus in Bosnia, although there was a steady trickle of British

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casualties, the trickle never became a flood, and interests and consensus were sufficient to tolerate them. This is not to say that the U.S. military, or those of the West more generally, is casualty-shy. Indeed, prior to the ground offensive in the Gulf, the British armored division was moved away from the U.S. Marines’ area of operations, in part because the Marines appeared willing to accept a large number of casualties (de la Billiere, 1992: 149–152).2 Rather an assumption has crept into Western thinking, an assumption that domestic public opinion will not tolerate high casualties. Therefore society limits its participation in wars of choice by using representatives and by limiting casualties, either by placing fewer in harm’s way or by demonstrating an unwillingness to become involved (or maintain involvement) once casualty levels mount. But a further trend has also begun to appear, namely that casualties to enemy armed forces are also to be limited. Evidence of this trend was apparent on the road to Basra at the end of the Gulf War. Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait City were attacked and devastated by coalition aircraft. But the reaction to this was mixed. The coalition commander, Norman Schwarzkopf, expressed few reservations about destroying these forces—in a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary, he argued that they were criminals who had raped and pillaged Kuwait City. The implication of Schwarzkopf’s comments is that he had no compunction about attacking them, not because they were soldiers but because he saw them as little better than criminals. But his legal justification for attacking them could not be based on such arguments (such accusations would presumably have had to have been proven in a court of law, and individuals rather than the force as a whole would have been on trial). Rather they were legitimate targets in war because they were enemy soldiers. In the White House, however, a rather different mood had set in. Thomas Gates, the national security adviser, reported that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, viewed the slaughter as “unchivalrous. . . . he even used the term un-American” (BBC, 1996). Both Powell and Schwarzkopf, albeit in different ways, seemed to be articulating the view that attacking a target simply because it consisted of enemy soldiers was no longer sufficient; rather, additional justification had to be supplied.3 Similarly during Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia, there are indications that targets were attacked not simply because they were military units but because they posed a threat, either to UN forces or to safe areas.4 During Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, NATO did not target the Serb military per se but only the military leadership, the air defense system, and those forces engaged in ethnic cleansing in Kosovo itself (HCDC, 2000: xxxii–xxxiii, xlii–lvi).

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Although there are exceptions to all these examples, there does appear to be a trend emerging whereby it is insufficient to attack enemy forces simply because they are wearing a uniform. The traditional just war distinction between combatant and noncombatant forces no longer seems to apply. Rather, additional legitimization is required, specifically that forces are preventing mandated actions (for example, enemy air defense forces preventing Western air operations) or are engaged in those activities that prompted intervention in the first place (for example, Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait, Serb forces in Kosovo engaging in ethnic cleansing, or the activities of Serb forces on Mount Igman near Sarajevo during Operation Deliberate Force). This trend is not simply a case of restraint for the sake of keeping the war limited, although there is an important benefit: by no longer requiring the enemy’s armed forces to be engaged and destroyed, much less effort is required and the risk to Western forces is much reduced. Rather the trend reflects the very nature of these new wars. If the enemy is no longer the state but a leadership or regime, then it does not necessarily follow that the opposing military in its entirety constitutes the enemy. Nor does it necessarily follow that targeting the military may be the best means of attacking the regime. Klaus Naumann, chair of NATO’s Military Committee during the Kosovo war, commented about Milosevic: “What bothers him presumably least is the armed forces. For a man with his thinking, they are expendable” (Naumann, quoted in HCDC, 2000: xli). Although some elements of the military may be clearly identified with the regime and therefore represent useful and legitimate targets (the military command, for example, or certain forces closely associated with the leadership, such as the Iraqi Republican Guard), others may have no obvious loyalty or connection to the regime—they may simply be citizens in arms and therefore only once removed from citizens without arms who are deliberately avoided as potential targets, even as collateral damage. If this is so, then it represents a startling departure from the era of total war. The legacy of Napoleon has been that to defeat an enemy one first has to defeat its armed forces. In new wars, however, the enemy’s military is no longer the target of military operations; indeed, attacking them may serve little purpose and may lack legitimacy.

Conclusion: The West’s New Way in Warfare I began this chapter by drawing upon the analysis of previous chapters. Specifically, I argued that the era of total war was characterized by the dynamic of escalation and by the participation of society in war. I then

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posed the question, if major war between Western powers is now obsolete, as argued in Chapter 3, how have these two features changed? In this chapter, I argue that war has been transformed because the dynamic of escalation has been replaced by new limits on war and because society no longer participates in but spectates upon war. In particular, wars are localized. Even when Western powers intervene, the impact of these wars remains geographically limited and is unlikely to spread to the West. Those in the West may sympathize, but they do not suffer. Because war is fought away from the West, expeditionary capabilities are required. Indeed, it may be argued that in the new security framework, “defense” is no longer the central task of Western militaries. It is a residual role, but one unlikely to be realized in practice. Rather the new focus is intervention away from the West, which requires forces capable of being deployed to where they are needed. But this localization of war also means that the West, and in particular Western society, is physically removed from war. The localization of war is therefore not only a limit upon its escalation but also affects the participation of Western society in war. War is further limited by a changed definition of the enemy. The enemy is no longer portrayed as the state but as a regime or leadership, perhaps even an individual. As a result, targeting is limited to the leadership and its control on power (which may include infrastructure targets and the military). To attack people is no longer a legitimate act of war, not because of a return to just war principles of noncombatant immunity but because the people are no longer the enemy. Nor should these people suffer unnecessarily through collateral damage, which is to be minimized. If the enemy is no longer the people but their leaders (who in turn are often portrayed as oppressing their people), then the people of a state are not at fault; they are not the enemy but the victims and should be spared further suffering wherever possible. Moreover, attacking people either directly or through causing collateral damage is to be avoided because of a tacit bargain: if Western powers avoid killing people, then Western society itself is not a legitimate target. The participation of society in war is minimized not simply by this tacit bargain and by the geographical distance involved from war but through the use of professional armed forces. By their chosen vocation, they are not only different from society (reinforced by different codes of law, mores, and even dress) but absolve society of some of the responsibility for placing them in harm’s way: war is an occupational hazard when joining the military. But this difference is partial—the armed forces are still members of society, albeit a distinct subgroup, and they have family and friends in society—and responsibility for placing them

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in harm’s way cannot be wholly absolved through their choice of profession. They are society’s representatives, and it bears some responsibility for the way in which it uses them. This attitude has manifested itself in the body bag problem. Casualty intolerance has become a shibboleth for modern operational methods. The risks to the armed services are therefore to be minimized, both by deploying in relatively small numbers and, as shall be seen in the following chapters, by operating in a manner designed to avoid casualties. Finally, a trend can be identified whereby the enemy’s military is no longer a target per se; rather additional legitimization is required before it can be attacked. Attempting to destroy the enemy’s military en masse would also be a more significant undertaking, requiring additional resources and risking more casualties to Western forces. War, therefore, is becoming less a matter of destroying the enemy’s military as a means to a political end and more a discriminate political tool with significant limits placed on actions. Thus the two key features of total war can be replaced by a fivepart framework for the conduct of these new wars: the localization of new wars and the desire to fight away from the West have led to an expeditionary focus and capabilities; the changed definition of the enemy has resulted in changed targeting priorities to emphasize the enemy leadership and its means of control; because people are no longer the enemy, collateral damage should be minimized; the exposure of Western forces to risk should be minimized; and the enemy military is no longer a target per se, such that engagement with the main body of enemy forces is no longer necessary or desirable. The tragic events of 11 September 2001, when hijacked aircraft were deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, were shocking in part because they broke this framework. The attacks were not “over there” but at the heart of the West, against the capital of the United States and against probably the most famous and one of the most-visited cities of the modern West. The target was not discriminate but—at least in New York—against ordinary members of Western society. Damage was not minimized, and the perpetrators were willing to commit suicide in the act. Finally, there was no real attempt to discriminate between categories of enemy military; simply working in the Pentagon was sufficient, regardless of what tasks people were engaged in and whether they were military or civilian employees. The events of 11 September broke the pattern and therefore caused outrage. Indeed, this outrage suggests the potency of the framework outlined above. Just as not all wars in the age of total war were “total,” so not all wars in the age of spectator-sport warfare need conform

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fully to the framework; but when they do not, then the reaction is one of outrage. Thus Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network were quickly portrayed as evil precisely because they did not conform to Western ideas of how war should be fought. Further, 11 September has been described both as “asymmetric” and as terrorism rather than war. Both terms imply that it does not conform to the standard, expected pattern of warfare for the West. Indeed, reversing the framework (as 11 September did) provides a framework for asymmetric warfare. In contrast, the military reaction to 11 September by the United States and its allies does appear to conform to the framework identified above: it is being fought in Afghanistan, and efforts are being made to ensure that it does not spread to the Middle East or lead to further attacks in the West; the targets are identified as the Taliban regime, alQaida, and Osama bin Laden; efforts are being made to minimize collateral damage, and Western leaders are making it clear that the Afghan people generally are not the target of the campaign; air power is being used extensively to minimize risk to Western forces, and only limited numbers of ground troops have been deployed to date; and it was only several weeks into the campaign that Taliban forces were attacked en masse, by B-52s carpet bombing positions in the north. The impact of a five-part framework for the West’s conduct of operations is discussed in the next two chapters.

Notes 1. The origins of this attitude are often seen as the Vietnam War, reinforced when President Ronald Reagan received the bodies of U.S. Marines killed in Lebanon and shipped back to the United States. The argument is that Western public opinion (and particularly that in the United States) will be adversely affected by the sight of troops returning in body bags. Saddam Hussein explicitly played on this fear when, during the Gulf War, he threatened the “mother of all battles.” 2. Interestingly, when Brigadier Patrick Cordingley, the commander of the British 7th Armoured Brigade (the “Desert Rats”) admitted to the likelihood of British casualties, his comments caused a furor back in the UK for which he was entirely unprepared. The London Evening Standard ran a front-page story warning “prepare for a bloodbath,” and there were calls for his removal. Cordingley made what he saw as a relatively innocuous comment; the nation appeared not to like what it heard (Cordingley, 1996: 113–118; de la Billiere, 1992: 120–122). 3. The debate over the British sinking in 1982 of the Argentinean warship General Belgrano during the Falklands War reflects similar concerns but in certain important respects is different. As with the road to Basra, it was insufficient for a target to be attacked simply because it was military. Where the Belgrano

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incident is different, however, is that the British were explicitly conducting a limited campaign and had identified a maritime exclusion zone. The sinking of the Belgrano was problematic because of doubts over whether the British actions were in compliance with their stated rules of engagement. In other words, the debate was not over whether it was right to sink an enemy warship but over whether that warship was a legitimate target, given the rules of engagement. 4. Operation Deliberate Force opened on 30 August 1995 with some 300 sorties against the Serb air defense network and artillery positions that threatened safe areas. It was followed by a pause to allow the Serbs to consider their position. Only then were further military targets attacked (IISS, 1996: 134).

5 AIRPOWER AND THE USE OF FORCE

n the previous chapters, I have discussed the changing nature of war for the West. In particular, I have argued that the dynamic of escalation has been replaced with the phenomenon of localization and that wars no longer involve the participation of society, but rather that the majority have become spectators with direct involvement limited to a few representatives. In this chapter and the one following, I deal with changes to the way in which the West uses force. The two are closely linked: changes in the nature of war affect the way in which force is used. In the 1990s, this change was evident in the West’s preference for airpower; in the future it may lead to information technology being used in such a way as to create a Revolution in Military Affairs. Although it is popular to see technology as driving such changes (for example, Owens, 1996), the manner in which technology is viewed and weapons are used is at the very least contextualized by views on the nature of war. Prior to World War I, the reaction to industrialization was to emphasize the primacy of the offensive, despite strong indications of the power of defensive firepower and the emergence of a “zone of death” on the battlefield (Howard, 1986; Travers, 1987). Just as the manner in which force was used at the beginning of the twentieth century was influenced by views on the nature of war, so it is at the turn of the twentyfirst century. In this chapter, I consider the West’s use of airpower at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. The use of airpower has not only increased but has become the preferred instrument of force by the West. In the 1990–1991 Gulf War, it established the conditions necessary for rapid coalition victory; “no-fly zones” have been established over both Iraq and parts of the former Yugoslavia; and air campaigns were used to finish the war in Bosnia (Operation Deliberate

I

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Force) and Kosovo (Operation Allied Force). Airpower on its own may not be sufficient in most circumstances (a point discussed below). Indeed, the Gulf War required a ground offensive to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait; Operation Deliberate Force coincided with Serb setbacks elsewhere, including losses on the ground (Stone, 1999: 30); and although John Keegan famously recanted on his original position to declare that Kosovo represented a triumph for airpower acting alone (Keegan, 1999), a host of other factors may have been as significant and arguably more so in influencing Serbia’s decision to concede (Department of Defense, 2000: 10–11). Nevertheless, airpower has become synonymous with the West’s use of force. It may not be the only instrument used, but it is often the first and is usually seen as the key to establishing not only military superiority but eventual victory. The significance of airpower is nothing new. Since the interwar period, its advocates have consistently argued that airpower is “the dominant factor” in modern war (Armitage and Mason, 1983; Gray, 1996: 121–134; Hallion, 1999). By World War II, even ground force commanders openly acknowledged its importance. The Germans showed the advantages of using airpower to support ground operations in the early blitzkrieg campaigns. The Allies and the Soviets followed suit. By the end of the war, air superiority was a key factor in deciding the outcome of ground operations. Standing on the Normandy beaches soon after D-Day, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s son reportedly commented to his father: “You’d never get away with this without air supremacy.” “Without air supremacy,” Eisenhower replied, “I wouldn’t be here” (quoted in Hallion, 1999: 24). Although doubts remained during and after the war over the effectiveness of strategic bombing, few doubted the significance of airpower in the ground support role. Indeed, during the 1980s the U.S. Army described its war-fighting doctrine as the “AirLand Battle” (Department of the Army: 1982, 1986; emphasis added). Similarly at sea, World War II had seen the demise of the battleship in favor of the aircraft carrier and the vulnerability of both surface and subsurface ships to aircraft. After the war, carrier battle groups became the main strike force of Western navies, not least in the U.S. Navy’s 1986 Maritime Strategy (Watkins, 1986), while even relatively small ships such as frigates increasingly relied on helicopters as their principal weapons platform. What is new is that the significance and, more important, the attraction of airpower has increased. In terms of its significance, airpower no longer simply supports ground or sea operations; it is now preceding them, enabling them, and even replacing them. As Colin Gray has commented:

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History teaches that Rome used its potency on land to acquire an unequalled and indeed unchallengeable sea power. Britain in its turn used superiority at sea to generate leverage for success on land. The United States uses its preponderance in the air and in space to secure advantage on land and at sea, either as a multifaceted contribution to land and sea conflict or as license to wage an operationally all but independent campaign of bombardment from the overhead flank of terrestrial warfare. (Gray, 1996: 55)

Gray’s final point is of particular significance. Traditionally, airpower has only operated independently of land or sea power in terms of strategic bombardment—the Allied bombing campaigns against German and Japanese cities in World War II being the preeminent examples. But these were bludgeons rather than rapiers. Airpower can now be used in a discriminating manner against key targets, both strategic and theater, to bring coercive pressure on an enemy. Airpower is attractive in part because it is an area of comparative advantage for the West, particularly the United States. The United States is the preeminent—some might argue the only—air power. Throughout the 1990s and beyond, Western aircraft, and most particularly U.S. aircraft, have been able to roam the skies above enemies with relative impunity, bringing devastating force to bear with uncanny accuracy. As Eliot Cohen has put it, “If the claims of air power advocates are correct, the United States has acquired a military edge over conventional opponents comparable to that exercised in 1898 by the soldiers of Lord Kitchener against the sword-wielding dervishes of the Sudan” (Cohen, 1994: 111). But the attraction goes beyond the simple fact of it being an area of comparative advantage offering a “military edge.” Rather the nature of modern airpower suggests that force may be used without undue risk. In seventy-eight days of operations during the Kosovo conflict, not one NATO airman or woman lost his or her life. For nations unwilling to shed blood in wars of choice, airpower offers “gratification without commitment” (Cohen, 1994: 109). Success can now be achieved without having to engage the main body of enemy forces in messy and protracted combat. Further, airpower can be used in a discriminating manner. The wholesale destruction of enemy cities is no longer the sole option available to strategic airpower. Precision guidance coupled to high-quality intelligence gathering enables individual buildings or even sections of buildings to be targeted with high confidence. Airpower now offers “the fantasy of near bloodless use of force” (Cohen, 1994: 121). In this chapter, therefore, I focus on airpower as the West’s preferred instrument of force. I begin by discussing the advantages and,

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perhaps more important, the limitations of land and sea power. I then consider in somewhat greater detail the advantages and attraction of airpower for the West, as well as its limits, before looking at the uses of airpower, particularly as part of a strategy of coercion but also as a weapon in a campaign of “brute force” (Schelling, 1966: 2–6). Finally, I look at two of the key debates concerning contemporary airpower. The first of these debates concerns airpower as an independent agent. Kosovo brought to the fore the question of whether airpower can be used alone or whether it is dependent upon sea and land power to be truly effective. The second debate concerns whether airpower is best used in a theater or strategic manner, a debate centering around the work of Robert A. Pape (1996, 1997a, 1997b).

Land and Sea Power Although the West has demonstrated an increasing preference for airpower, land and sea power are hardly obsolete. Both land and sea power continue to possess certain advantages and characteristics that airpower lacks. As a result, there may be occasions when either or both are essential to the West’s use of force. Further, the different characteristics and relative advantages air, land, and sea power possess have led to an increased interest in joint operations, whereby the three elements are combined not only in a single plan but operate closely together, each exploiting the other’s advantages in a synergistic manner. Cooperation between what were distinct services has developed from the strategic through to the tactical level, and joint operations have become the shibboleth of Western military doctrine (O’Keefe, Kelso, and Mindy, 1992: 3–4; U.S. Army, 1994: 2–2; MOD, 1998: 8–1 to 8–10). Indeed, the very nomenclature—replacing “combined operations” with “joint”—is suggestive of much greater and closer cooperation. But land and sea power also possess disadvantages, particularly for the form of warfare that the West wishes to engage in, one characterized by minimum exposure and low collateral damage that still brings pressure directly to bear upon an enemy’s center of gravity, particularly its leadership. And although the talk may be of “joint” operations, the balance between the three services may differ considerably. Some joint operations may be dominated by ground forces and others by naval, but the preference is for operations where airpower dominates, perhaps even to the exclusion of others except in a support capacity. The importance of land power and ground forces—armies—has traditionally been based on the fact that the key element of the Westphalian

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international system, the state, is territorially based. Wars have usually been fought for control of land, either because of the resources there or because that is where people live. As Martin Edmonds has written, “Security is rooted in the land. Territory is an irreducible minimum of human existence; it is on land and about control over what is done with it that ultimately humans fight among themselves” (Edmonds, 1992: 180). Land also has a symbolic value. From French concerns over Alsace-Lorraine at the beginning of the twentieth century to British concerns over the Falkland Islands near the end, land has been of such significance that states have been willing to shed blood to take or retake it, sometimes regardless of the resources or numbers of citizens living there. Control of land and people has therefore traditionally been seen as an essential element in a military campaign and a determining factor in the outcome of war. And it is land power that accomplishes these goals. Although airpower may be able in certain circumstances to deny the use of land, and sea power through a blockade may affect conditions on the land, it is only land power that can gain control of land, hold it, and use it. In this sense, air and sea power are indirect, enabling agents. As Colin Gray, no mean advocate of air and sea power, has put it, “land matters most.” For him, “strategic effect ultimately must have its way in a territorial context,” for even when wars are characterized by air and sea campaigns, “the whole object of the exercise is to influence the behaviour of an enemy who needs to be controlled where he lives, on land” (Gray, 1999: 207). Further, although airpower may be able to precisely target buildings, military installations, and armored vehicles, even when the latter are on the move, small groups of lightly armed forces— whether light infantry, guerrillas, terrorists, militia, or armed police—are much more difficult to attack from the air, particularly if they are dispersed and intermingled with the civilian population. But as John Stone has pointed out, these are precisely the sort of forces that might be involved in those acts of ethnic cleansing or similar humanitarian outrages that prompt a Western reaction. In these circumstances, the West’s preferred military tool—airpower—may do little directly to stop those acts that most concern the West, as was the case in Kosovo (Stone, 1999: 27, 31). Only ground forces can intervene directly to stop these actions. Land power also suffers from a number of disadvantages, however. Not least, ground forces are comparatively large, difficult to deploy, and costly to keep in theater. Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner estimate that by the start of the Gulf War, the coalition had deployed just over 600,000 air force personnel (mostly in support capacities) and over 5,500 fixed-wing combat aircraft; but over 1.75 million ground force personnel were deployed, a far greater percentage of whom were combat-related,

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with over 76,000 major combat vehicles (Cordesman and Wagner, 1996: 114). Similarly in Kosovo, the number of NATO aircraft available at the end of the conflict numbered just over 800, but a ground force of 150,000 to 200,000 was estimated to be required for an opposed entry. Even the eventual unopposed entry required a force of 50,000 (HCDC, 2000: c–ciii, cvi–cvii). Further, deploying forces such as these into theater takes weeks and months rather than days. Although soldiers may be airlifted into theater, armored vehicles in particular usually need to be moved by sea, and the staggering quantities of matériel required to sustain operations require a major sealift for all but the smallest deployments. The United States apart, few Western nations possess the sealift or airlift capacity to move large numbers of personnel and vehicles. Therefore, ships have to be taken up from trade and aircraft hired. Doing so may prove costly but may also prove a limitation if the ships and aircraft are in short supply or made unavailable. During the Kosovo campaign, for example, the UK hired Antonov heavy-lift aircraft to move forces into theater. These aircraft were registered in Russia, and Moscow’s opposition to NATO operations meant that few flights were undertaken during the bombing campaign (HCDC, 2000: lxx). Once in theater, ground forces are heavily dependent upon host-nation support, not least for supplies of food and water, and poor infrastructure may handicap movement. Ground forces are also much more exposed than aircraft. Technology and training may still provide an important combat edge (Biddle, 1996, 1997), but they are insufficient to reduce casualties to near zero. Although some land campaigns have seen remarkably low casualties—the Gulf War is a leading example—these are the exception, and even then, casualties do occur. Indeed, the loss of eighteen U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia proved sufficient to undermine the U.S. willingness to stay in theater. Underpinning these disadvantages is not only an unwillingness to take high casualties in wars of choice but also the fear of being dragged into a long, attritional struggle (Stone, 1999: 27–28). Ground forces appear to be much more difficult to extricate for both political and military reasons—moving forces out of theater can render them vulnerable, and the sight of troops returning home is a potent symbol of failure. Once ground forces have been committed, they tend to stay; when success is not achieved, numbers are increased. As a result, involvement increases, the risk of casualties heightens, and what started as a limited operation undertaken by choice may become an extended commitment from which it is difficult to disengage. The template for this is Vietnam, but the more recent experience of the Implementation Force (IFOR) and the Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Bosnia also demonstrates how difficult it is to end a ground force commitment.

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Ground forces may also be inappropriate, not only because of the number of casualties that they might suffer but because of the number that they might cause. Whereas in the age of total war, conflict occurred between societies and between states, in the age of spectator-sport warfare the enemy is more often portrayed as an individual leader or leadership elite. As suggested in the previous chapter, killing large numbers of opposing soldiers may be less acceptable because they are no longer portrayed as the enemy. But military doctrine continues to favor decisive military engagements (battles of annihilation) as the means of securing victory in the ground war (British Army, 1994: 2–2; U.S. Army, 1994: 2–4 to 2–5). Thus political aims—the coercion or overthrow of a leadership—may be inconsistent with military means, namely the destruction of an enemy’s armed forces. Finally, as land becomes less important as a resource and the state becomes less significant as an international actor, so the traditional basis for the significance of land power is eroded. In the age of total war, Edmonds was probably correct in arguing that “security is rooted in the land” (Edmonds, 1992: 180). But it appears to be less so today, in the age of information technology, globalization, permeable boundaries, and fragmented states. The extent to which this trend is applicable outside the West, however, is a moot point. Certainly the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union at the end of the 1990s suggested that control of land remained a central political and military aim there. If true, then land power, for all of its limitations, may still prove an essential, if not always the most desirable, element of military power for the West. Naval power enjoys and suffers from a somewhat different series of advantages and limitations from land power. Its three main advantages in contemporary conflicts are presence without exposure, poise, and range. Unlike ground forces, which are in direct and often very close contact with the enemy, naval forces stand off from an enemy’s coastline and exert force from afar. Their exposure is therefore limited, despite being present and an enemy being very aware of that presence (the special case of submarines apart, when their presence off an enemy coast may be left deliberately ambiguous to create uncertainty in the mind of an enemy). A related advantage is poise. Naval forces may remain off a crisis area indefinitely, able to escalate or de-escalate as required. This ability makes them valuable tools in responding to a crisis. The simple presence of a ship or ships may be used to indicate concern or to back up threats (implied or explicit). If force needs to be used, then the response may be graduated and tailored to meet the specific requirements of each crisis. If more proactive responses are required, they may range from a trade embargo to establishment of a maritime exclusion zone or no-fly

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zone, to limited strikes by cruise missiles or more extensive strikes by naval aviation, up to an amphibious operation projecting ground power ashore. As the U.S. Navy commented in From the Sea, a key statement on its post–Cold War roles, navies can build power from the sea or can just wait indefinitely, demonstrating concern without commitment (O’Keefe, Kelso, and Mindy, 1992: 2–4; George, 1993: 127).1 Finally, naval power offers global reach. Unlike air and land power, ships enjoy freedom of movement on the high seas and are highly sustainable when deployed. They offer direct access to much of the globe and can establish a semipermanent presence in an area of concern (the British Armilla Patrol, for example, was established in the Gulf in the early 1980s and has persisted into the twenty-first century). Moreover, they can move considerable quantities of personnel and matériel to where they might be needed, and they possess strike capabilities of their own. This mobility and global reach has its down side, however. Ships move slowly, and it can take a considerable amount of time for a naval force to be assembled. Substantial naval forces may take weeks to arrive in theater—certainly several days—by which time the crisis could have deteriorated significantly. Although forward presence in key areas may mitigate this problem, the number of ships that can be used in this way is limited, and the relatively slow response time of naval forces remains a constraint. What is striking about contemporary naval power is the extent to which the traditional blue-water tasks of defending the sea lines of communication and achieving command of the seas have become much less significant. Throughout the era of total war, these tasks dominated naval planning and the conduct of maritime warfare—whether the U-boat campaigns in the Atlantic during both world wars, the carrierbased battles in the Pacific to secure command of the sea during World War II, or the defense of the Atlantic sea lines of communication in the Cold War. The West’s naval supremacy today is such that command of the seas and secure sea lines of communication are almost taken as givens. Instead, littoral operations have become the focus of navies, in particular the ability to project power ashore (O’Keefe, Kelso, and Mindy, 1992: 2). Therefore, although naval commentators may reflect on little having changed in terms of maritime strategy (Baer, 1999; Till, 1999), Western navies are now called on to play very different roles from those that dominated the era of total war. The key naval advantages of presence without exposure, poise, and reach come into their own in littoral operations. Naval forces are able to move into a crisis area without requiring the acquiescence of nearby states; once there, they can remain on station almost indefinitely without exposing themselves to undue risk; and they can respond flexibly to the

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evolving crisis, increasing or reducing force as required in a precise and controlled manner (O’Keefe, Kelso, and Mindy, 1992: 6–7). All of these are important in spectator-sport warfare, as discussed in the previous chapter. But sea power is also limited in a number of key respects. In particular, its presence is off a coastline and therefore is felt only indirectly, compared to ground forces or even airpower. Nor can the amount of force projected be compared to that of an air force or army. Even U.S. supercarriers carry only a handful of strike aircraft, and the smaller European carriers possess even fewer; and for all of the success of cruise missiles launched from ships and submarines in striking accurately at targets deep in the enemy rear, both the number available and weight of ordnance are limited.2 Similarly, few Western powers other than the United States possess large marine forces, but even the U.S. Marine Corps can only project a few thousand men and women to shore directly from the sea. Crucially, however, it may be argued that naval aviation and marines are in reality expressions of air and ground power respectively, albeit that they are launched from the sea. They operate not at sea but in the air and on land. But in littoral operations, it is these forces that matter. Navies tend to be seen as enabling forces, therefore, allowing air and ground power to operate more effectively (Gray, 1999: 221, 225; Grimes, 1993: 128). Sea power, in the sense of fighting a war at sea, no longer figures prominently in naval planning; instead, Western navies support air and ground power by getting them to where they need to be, keeping them there, offering command facilities, and sometimes providing the air and ground forces themselves. Navies may sometimes be necessary, but in littoral operations they are rarely sufficient. Despite enjoying local control of the sea, the United States lost the Vietnam War. British success in the 1982 Falklands War was utterly dependent upon the Royal Navy’s global reach and ability to secure control of the seas around the islands but was only secured after a ground campaign. In the Gulf War, despite a massive coalition naval presence, these forces were peripheral to the main effort, the ground and air war, and U.S. maritime supremacy was insufficient to coerce Aideed in Somalia. And NATO’s dominance of the Adriatic proved of only marginal significance during the variety of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

The Attraction of Airpower The advantages of airpower—what are sometimes called its “characteristics” or “features”—are well documented, and there is considerable

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consensus over them, not least among its proponents (Gray, 1996; RAF, 1996: 13–15; Towle, 1996). These are speed, range, ubiquity, flexibility, observation, and precision. To these are sometimes added lethality and the opportunity for independent action. Aircraft are inherently faster than ships and ground forces. Their speed allows them not only to project force more rapidly into a theater of operations but also to attack targets promptly, thereby maintaining operational tempo. In the Gulf War, aircraft and airlifted ground forces arrived in theater in a matter of days, sometimes hours; in contrast, forces moved by sea took weeks, even months to arrive. In 1987 the rapid deployment of French aircraft to Chad was instrumental in repelling Libyan attacks. Similarly, with response times in tactical situations as low as a few minutes, airpower can be quickly brought to bear upon targets of opportunity or to support forces under pressure. In contrast, maneuvering or reinforcing ground forces can take much longer. Airpower is therefore highly responsive at strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Airpower has considerable “reach,” in some cases global reach. It can use its range to hit targets beyond the reach of ground forces. It provides both an overhead flank and direct access to an enemy’s center of gravity. Indeed, as Colin Gray has remarked, whereas naval strategists are fond of pointing out that 70 percent of the world is covered by water, the entire globe is covered by air (Gray, 1996: 67). With the enormous range of some modern aircraft such as the B-2 bomber, no target is beyond attack. Aircraft can also use bases located away from danger. In 1982, an RAF Vulcan bomber based on Ascension Island attacked targets in the Falkland Islands; in 1986, U.S. F-111s from the UK bombed Libya; in 1991, B-52s also based in Britain bombed Iraqi positions in the Gulf; and in 1999, B-2 bombers based in the United States and RAF Tornados based in Germany attacked targets in Yugoslavia. During the Kosovo operation, no NATO fixed-wing aircraft were based in the Balkans; most of them operated from Italy, Corsica, or ships in the Adriatic. A very flexible instrument, airpower can be used as an independent agent at both the theater and strategic levels or as an enabling agent for other forms of military power. It can be used with startling precision against key targets or as a bludgeon, devastating large swaths of ground. The same aircraft may also engage in a variety of different missions during a campaign. U.S. F-16 aircraft are equally adept at the ground attack and counter-air roles, and the European Tornado aircraft was explicitly designed as a multirole aircraft. Perhaps most important, though, is that airpower can be tailored to meet the specifics of each crisis. Wars do not come as a single type or even as several different types

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but invariably demonstrate unique or unusual features. The flexibility of airpower allows it to be matched to the requirements of each crisis or war, whether it is for tactical ground support or long-range precision strikes; establishing air superiority (or, more usually for the West, air supremacy) in a theater of operations, such as in the Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo; or executing a single or limited series of strikes against strategic targets, such as the 1998 and 2001 operations against Iraq. Of course, ground and naval forces are also flexible in that they can be used for a variety of purposes, on their own or with support from other services, and can be tailored to meet the demands of different crises. But the specific advantage of aircraft is the ease with which they can move between the different levels of war—tactical, operational, and strategic. Thus B52 bombers originally designed to attack strategic targets were used against Iraqi troops in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and tactical F-117A stealth bombers were used for strategic missions over Baghdad. Airpower has a superior ability to observe. From artillery spotters in World War I to radar-equipped Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems (J-STARS) and the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) in more recent conflicts, aircraft have used their height to observe and to provide information to other forces, including other aircraft. Some go as far as to include satellites as part of airpower (or “airspace power”), given their ability to observe from a great height (Jones, 1998: 208). Indeed, the USAF has recently declared: “We are now transitioning from an air force into and air and space force on an evolutionary path to a space and air force” (USAF, 2000; emphasis added). This power of observation allows commanders to see not only what is happening on the battlefield but also what is happening beyond it. With this information, they can act to preempt enemy moves rather than react to them, thereby retaining the initiative; they can target particular enemy formations to “shape the battlefield”; and they can identify mobile targets and targets of opportunity. As a result, the battlefield may become transparent to commanders, though semi-opaque is probably the more likely outcome, given the difficulties in interpreting information and in communicating it in real time. But once this ability to provide large quantities of information is coupled to air supremacy, then the advantage is potentially decisive. Again, the Gulf War provides an excellent example. The coalition established air supremacy at an early stage, which allowed them to gather detailed information on Iraqi forces while denying the enemy information on coalition activities. Thus the movement of an entire coalition armored corps into the western desert went unnoticed. This corps formed the basis of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s wide left hook, catching the Iraqis by surprise and off-balance.

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Without air supremacy, surprise probably could not have been achieved, and aircraft provided the necessary information on the location and disposition of the key target of Schwarzkopf’s attack, the Republican Guard. In other words, air observation—both the ability to acquire and to deny information—was a critical element in coalition success. In the era of spectator-sport warfare, however, airpower offers a number of distinct advantages beyond these more traditional features, advantages that have made it the weapon of choice for the West. Most obviously, the precision available to modern airpower allows collateral damage to be minimized and even casualties to the enemy’s armed forces to be reduced. Such care is often seen as vital in ensuring domestic and international support for a campaign. Indeed, it has almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with air forces proclaiming their ability to strike with precision and thereby fueling expectations of a nearly bloodless campaign in which enemy civilians are successfully avoided and only the regime is targeted. Such expectations prove problematic when collateral damage does occur, from the destruction of an Iraqi air raid shelter in 1991 to the accidental bombing of the Vavarin bridge and Chinese Embassy during Operation Allied Force. Although some collateral damage is always possible (even probable) in air campaigns, particularly those of any size or duration, the trend is clearly toward both a reduction in collateral damage and a perceived desire among Western governments to continue to reduce casualties. The use of air-launched precision-guided weapons dates back to the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Wars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but their role in minimizing collateral damage and thereby maintaining popular support for an operation came to prominence in the Gulf War (although it also figured in the 1986 U.S. air raids against Libya). At the time of the Gulf War, only 10 percent of U.S. strike aircraft were capable of delivering precision weapons, and less than 10 percent of the overall number of bombs dropped were precision-guided (Department of Defense, 2000: 88). By the mid-1990s and Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia, the link between the precision guidance offered by airlaunched munitions and the minimization of collateral damage was explicit. USAF chief of staff General Michael Ryan stated: “Minimizing not only collateral damage but also carnage was first and foremost in my mind” (quoted in Tirpak, 1997: 8). Similarly, U.S. secretary of the air force Sheila Widnall commented that “the NATO air operation was operationally robust but it was politically fragile. With the first report of civilian casualties, the entire operation would have been put at risk, but that report never came” (quoted in Correll, 1996: 2). The percentage of

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precision-guided weapons used had by the mid-1990s increased to 60 percent. Paul Kaminski, a senior weapons official in the Department of Defense, commented that “the bomb damage assessment photographs in Bosnia bear no resemblance to photos of the past, where the target, often undamaged, is surrounded by craters. . . . The photos from Bosnia usually showed one crater where the target used to be, with virtually no collateral damage” (quoted in Tirpak, 1997: 2–3). By the end of the decade, Operation Allied Force could be described by the U.S. Department of Defense as “the most precise and lowest-collateral-damage air operation ever conducted” (Department of Defense, 2000: xvii, 84). Over 90 percent of U.S. strike aircraft were capable of delivering precision-guided munitions, and they formed the bulk of NATO strike aircraft (Department of Defense, 2000: 88). The decision to avoid collateral damage was a crucial element in the campaign, even to the extent that certain key targets might not be hit because of fears of collateral damage. Driving this decision was the fear that alliance solidarity and popular support would be eroded by pictures of innocent Serb civilians being killed, wounded, or even losing their property as a result of NATO’s bombing campaign (Department of Defense, 2000: 86; HCDC, 2000: xlii–xliii). No such fears were entertained by Winston Churchill in allowing Bomber Command to attack German cities in World War II, nor even by the Americans in the Vietnam War, who were more concerned that bombing Hanoi might be seen as escalatory by the enemy than they were about the impact of collateral damage on U.S. public opinion. The desire to minimize collateral damage is a clear break with the era of total war. Even more startling is the attempt to reduce casualties among the enemy. The carnage on the road to Basra at the end of the Gulf War was nothing new in the history of warfare; more unusual was the West’s reaction of horror to this, arguably influencing President George Bush’s decision to call a cease-fire. As I argued in the previous chapter, in the era of spectator-sport warfare, the target is not the people or even the mass of enemy forces (many of whom may be conscripts and therefore are perceived as having been coerced into fighting rather than participating willingly). Rather the enemy is the regime, often identified as an individual (Saddam in Iraq, Aideed in Somalia, Milosevic in Yugoslavia). Airpower is at an advantage not only in being able to minimize collateral damage through precision strikes but in being able to strike directly at the regime and its center of gravity without first engaging in a bloody ground offensive. Thus in December 1998, with the withdrawal of UN arms inspectors from Iraq, British and U.S. aircraft conducted a strategic offensive campaign that was entirely divorced

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from a tactical ground offensive, and the initial phase of Operation Allied Force attempted to coerce the Yugoslav regime without first systematically attacking its ground forces in Kosovo. Because it is an area of comparative Western advantage, airpower also offers comparatively low risk. Airpower is inherently sensitive to technology, and the West’s lead in aerospace technology means that its aircraft can operate with much reduced risk. In contrast, no matter how capable ground forces might be, they are inherently more exposed to risk. The first British fatality in Bosnia, for example, was driving a Warrior armored vehicle, deliberately brought to the region because of fears over the vulnerability of soft-skinned vehicles such as Land Rovers. Despite this increased level of protection, he was nevertheless killed by a ricochet from a sniper’s bullet (Jones, 1993: 3). Further, the number of people involved in an air operation is substantially fewer than those required for ground forces. Estimates varied for the number of forces needed should an opposed ground force entry have been required into Kosovo in 1999, but almost all exceeded 100,000, and some came close to double that; in contrast, the air campaign involved just 829 strike aircraft being available to NATO, not all at the same time (HCDC, 2000: lviii). The West’s technological lead, coupled with the decision to fly at a height where handheld surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) could not reach the aircraft and the extensive use of standoff weapons such as cruise missiles, meant that no allied lives were lost and only two aircraft downed in a campaign lasting seventy-eight days and involving over 38,000 combat sorties (Department of Defense, 2000: xvii, xxiii, 91). Operation Allied Force may have been unusual in that no allied aircrew lost their lives, but very low casualties have been the norm since the 1986 U.S. raid against Libya and Operation Desert Storm. In contrast, RAF Bomber Command suffered a death rate of 47.5 percent among its aircrews during World War II (Ellis, 1990: xix, 552), and during the Vietnam War, the 1972 Linebacker 2 campaign saw sixteen B-52 bombers lost in eleven days (Armitage and Mason, 1983: 109–110). This recent phenomenon of an extremely low loss rate has, moreover, become the popular expectation. Weaned on a succession of campaigns in which Western airpower has operated with near impunity, the popular belief has arisen that airpower is not only a precise weapon that can (or more accurately, should) avoid causing collateral damage, but one that can be used at little or no cost to the West. For the West, then, airpower means that fewer of its own armed forces are placed in harm’s way during combat operations and that the risk of harm is greatly reduced by a lead in aerospace technology. This advantage is significant given the “body bag” problem—the perception

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that Western domestic support would be eroded by large numbers of its armed forces returning in body bags. What constitutes “large” is undefined and is probably a function of the interests at stake combined with elite and popular consensus (see Chapter 4, “From Participation to Spectatordom”). The body bag problem is usually seen as a “lesson” of Vietnam. It was reaffirmed by the deaths of 239 U.S. Marines by a car bomb in Beirut, was actively played on by Saddam’s talk of “the mother of all battles” in 1990–1991, and was instrumental in the pullout of U.S. forces from Somalia. Indeed, prior to Operation Allied Force, NATO’s commander in Europe, U.S. general Wesley Clark, was widely reported as having ordered that there be no allied casualties and that commanders were to avoid losses at all costs. Though this order was later denied, the very fact that such a story could be given credibility is a revealing insight into the body bag issue (Tirpak, 1999b: 6). Those in the West may sympathize as they look on at those suffering, but they do not expect to suffer unduly themselves. Nor do they expect substantial numbers of their representatives on the field of battle to suffer either. The pain of war is not just to be experienced at one remove but, even then, is to be minimized or even removed. The West does not wish to participate in the suffering but to spectate while its representatives act as a force for good in the world. Western airpower, through its relative invulnerability, is much better suited to meeting these goals than the more exposed ground forces and is therefore the preferred instrument for wars of choice, where interests may be low and consensus fragile.

The Limits of Airpower Although airpower has become the preferred tool of military power for the West, it is not without limitations. Traditionally, they have been related to technological factors, some of which are inherent, whereas others can be mitigated as technology improves. These limitations include problems with range, payload, accuracy, and operation in poor weather; the high cost of airframes, weapons, and aircrew; limited loiter time over target; and poor intelligence (RAF, 1996: 14–16; Towle, 1996: 9– 13). In the age of spectator-sport warfare, however, four problems have come to dominate. These are the limitations placed on the use of airpower by the requirement to minimize collateral damage, the sometimes limited and occasionally counterproductive impact of airpower, the limited reach of airpower, and its cost, both financial and political. The imperative to minimize collateral damage and the advantages of airpower in this respect have already been discussed. But this imperative

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also has a major impact on the efficiency and impact of air operations. In Bosnia, for example, NATO aircraft were unwilling to implement the no-fly zone for fear that target aircraft, particularly helicopters, might be carrying wounded, politicians, or civilians (Clarke, 1996b: 178). In Operation Allied Force, the rules of engagement were deliberately framed to avoid collateral damage. As a result, pilots were authorized to release bombs only if they could see the target and be assured of no civilian casualties (Tirpak, 1999a: 3). Unsurprisingly, this requirement meant that a substantial number of missions did not lead to weapons release, particularly when cloud cover made it difficult to identify targets definitively.3 Further, NATO opted for a campaign of gradually increasing pressure on Milosevic, again to minimize the damage caused and therefore maintain alliance solidarity and public support. But these restrictions led to frustrations that airpower was not being used effectively. USAF general Michael Ryan commented that “the campaign did not begin the way that America would apply airpower—massively, striking at strategic centers of gravity that support Milosevic and his oppressive regime.” Instead, political pressure, especially from other NATO allies, restricted the initial use of airpower. As a result, Ryan concluded that the first month’s bombing, during which time the Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, was ineffective, and NATO was forced to expand its air campaign (Tirpak, 1999c: 2). Similarly, USAF lieutenant general Michael Short, who commanded NATO air forces during Operation Allied Force, commented: “I think we were constrained in this particular conflict to an extraordinary degree and were prevented from conducting an air campaign as professional airmen would have wanted to conduct it. . . . We were restricted by enormous concern for collateral damage and unintended loss of civilian life.” Short’s preference would have been for the Serb leadership to suffer an immediate and massive blow rather than a campaign of gradually increasing pressure, to wake up “after the first night . . . to a city that was smoking. No power to the refrigerator . . . and no way to get to work.” Instead, Short wryly observed, ten to twelve days into the campaign, they were still holding rock concerts in downtown Belgrade (Tirpak, 1999d: 3). The argument is that the concern over collateral damage and other political niceties unduly limit the effectiveness of airpower, but the danger of ignoring these concerns is all too apparent. The level of public expectation and the political costs of collateral damage and other mistakes are extreme. It is therefore unlikely that airpower will be granted the unfettered role some of its senior commanders believe that it needs to maximize its effectiveness. Instead, its use will in all likelihood remain constrained and its effectiveness thereby reduced.

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A second series of concerns relates more directly to the impact of airpower. The ability to attack targets, especially with precision strikes, is highly dependent upon accurate and timely intelligence. But not even the United States currently possesses sufficient tactical and strategic intelligence-gathering capabilities to provide this kind of information (Department of Defense, 2000: 59). Further, camouflage and deception can still prove remarkably effective. During the Gulf War, for example, coalition aircraft were unable to distinguish between Scud missile launchers and decoys, buses, and tankers (Freedman and Karsh, 1993: 308–309). More recently, during Operation Allied Force, the Serbs used a variety of means to hide or protect both their military forces and fixed installations such as bridges and buildings. The means used by Serb forces ranged from exploiting natural cover and hiding military vehicles in buildings, through deploying decoys and camouflage, to dispersing forces among civilian traffic. This latter tactic both hid forces and, even if they were detected, reduced NATO’s ability to attack them because of fear of collateral damage. As the Department of Defense’s After-Action Report acknowledged, “Future adversaries are likely to study Serbian denial and deception techniques and [this] could present more advanced threats to future operations” (Department of Defense, 2000: 62–63). Operation Allied Force also demonstrated the difficulties in using airpower against light infantry and militia targets, the very forces used for the ethnic cleansing of villages in Kosovo (Byman and Waxman, 2000: 25). Finally, despite remarkable advances in technology and in particular in imaging, the continuing considerable difficulties in determining whether targets have been hit and destroyed by air attack (what is termed “bomb damage assessment”) means that the “fog of war will persist” (Cohen, 1994: 119; HCDC, 2000: lv). The impact of airpower is therefore limited by the (in)ability to identify targets and then confirm their destruction. But problems with intelligence do not end there. Even if targets can be successfully identified and their destruction confirmed, it is difficult to gauge the impact upon an enemy’s decisionmaking. In a land campaign, territory gained can be measured and progress assessed accordingly, albeit rather crudely. In a naval blockade, the numbers of ships prevented from arriving or departing can give some indication of the economic impact of a campaign. But with a coercive air campaign, the relationship between destroying targets and changing enemy decisionmaking is much more difficult for intelligence analysts to gauge. Such a campaign also requires some intelligence insight into which targets are especially valuable to an enemy leadership. Determining the importance of targets to an enemy is a difficult and potentially controversial activity, if attacking

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those targets risks an erosion of domestic support for a campaign. A coercive air campaign may successfully hit and destroy a particular target set that intelligence analysts believe the enemy values highly, only to be mistaken in this belief and the impact therefore much reduced. Identifying these targets correctly is the first problem. But even if they can be identified, it is extremely difficult to gauge how much of an impact destroying them is having upon an enemy leadership. An enemy is unlikely to share its thoughts on the matter, indicating how much pressure it is feeling. As the campaign develops, therefore, planners will have little hard information on how it is affecting the enemy leadership. Even if they can accurately gauge the damage inflicted (something that the aftermath of both the Gulf War and Kosovo demonstrated is fraught with difficulties), assessing whether it is likely to be successful in coercing the enemy is a different and much more difficult calculation. A major complication here is the extent to which an air campaign, rather than placing a regime under pressure, may actually solidify support for it. During the Kosovo campaign, NATO’s bombing initially resulted in apparently spontaneous rallies in Serbia in support of Milosevic, although over time this support fell, and both popular and elite dissatisfaction could be seen. Saddam remained in power throughout not only the Gulf War but the decade following, with no serious threat of a widespread popular uprising. In Somalia, air strikes by U.S. helicopters may have helped both to provoke an anti–United States mood and to legitimate Aideed as a local leader resisting the United States, and Russian bombing in Chechnya helped to unite opposition (Byman and Waxman, 2000: 21). Historically, the ability of airpower to produce a mood of dissatisfaction, resentment, or even panic among the civilian population has been regularly articulated, beginning with H. G. Wells almost a century ago (Wells, 1908) and reaching its operational climax with Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s campaigns against German cities during World War II (Hastings, 1979). The success of such campaigns has been mixed at best, however. The reasons that some campaigns are more effective than others are still not understood. Critical variables may be a regime’s ability to suppress dissent through propaganda and other tools of state control, the stakes involved, and the length of a campaign (initially, support for a regime may increase in the face of the common crisis of strategic bombardment, but over time it may fall). But these uncertainties at the very least serve to complicate assessments of the likely impact of an air campaign and at worst suggest that a campaign may prove counterproductive, at least initially. As a result, the ability of airpower to act as a coercive tool may be compromised.

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Airpower also has a limited ability to affect what happens on the ground, in part because of the brevity of its presence. Airpower is an impermanent form of military force, entering and exiting a target area quickly both through technical factors (limited fuel constrains the ability to loiter) and the desire to limit exposure to possible attack from SAMs. Aircraft may also fly thousands of feet above the ground to avoid attack, particularly from the large numbers of handheld SAMs, such as U.S.-made Stingers and Russian SA-7s and SA-14s, which are readily available. Although this height may give them an air of invulnerability that makes them appear formidable, it also distances them from what is happening on the ground. Only ground forces can occupy and control territory; the best airpower can do is to deny its use to the enemy, and not always then. During the first weeks of NATO’s Kosovo campaign, for example, air strikes were unable to prevent Serb forces from engaging in ethnic cleansing or to prevent the exodus of Albanian refugees; in Bosnia, NATO air strikes in May 1995 were not only unable to protect safe areas but led to UN ground forces being taken hostage in Gorazde and elsewhere. A third set of concerns relates to the reach of airpower. Although range can be a major advantage, as discussed above, it also reveals the limits of airpower. Global reach may be possible, as demonstrated by an RAF Vulcan bomber attacking the Falkland Islands in 1982 and B-2 Stealth bombers attacking targets in Serbia from their bases in the United States in 1999, but few aircraft are capable of these extreme ranges. Such missions also impose huge strains on aircrews. The roundtrip for a B-2 bomber attacking targets in Serbia took thirty hours (Tirpak, 1999a: 4). Even at a lesser distance, RAF Tornado crews were placed under considerable strain in flying from their base in Germany to Yugoslavia on a daily basis. These raids also revealed that the weather could change during a long flight so that, even though conditions above the target were perfect when the aircraft took off, by the time they reached the target several hours later, the weather could have deteriorated, causing the mission to be aborted (HCDC, 2000: lvii). Such missions also require considerable tanker support as well as overflight rights. In the 1982 Falklands War, the one successful use of strategic bombers involved a single Vulcan bomber, with one more in reserve, eleven tanker aircraft, and six air-to-air refuelings (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990b: 314). Similarly, obtaining overflight rights proved to be a major problem for the 1986 U.S. raid against Libya, and the failure to secure all those required greatly complicated the mission. In the most extreme circumstances, the failure to obtain overflight rights may even

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preclude missions (though, interestingly, U.S. cruise missiles fired on the first night of the air campaign against Iraq in 1991 reportedly flew over Iran without securing permission from Tehran; the Iranians knew nothing about this at the time, or if they did know were unable or unwilling to do anything). Some of these problems may be alleviated by basing aircraft nearer to or within the theater of operations. But doing so is not always possible because of a lack of political support in nearby countries or a lack of suitable bases. For example, B-2 bombers could have cut their flight time to Serbia dramatically by being based in Europe rather than the United States, but their stealth design required specialized shelters and facilities, and the United States had yet to acquire a deployable version of these in 1999 (Tirpak, 1999a: 4). Even less specialized aircraft may require considerable support when operating away from home bases, adding not only to the cost and complexity of a mission but placing a limit on the number of aircraft that can be deployed (RAF, 1996: 16). Therefore, although the global reach of airpower may be of enormous advantage in spectator-sport warfare, it is not unproblematic, and there are very real limits placed on it. A final limitation concerns the costs involved in deploying airpower, most obviously the high financial costs of developing, purchasing, operating, and maintaining modern combat aircraft. Capable aircraft are not cheap but are essential if casualties are to be kept low. Although Serb air defenses were not considered state of the art, they still forced NATO aircraft to fly at 15,000 feet to avoid handheld SAMs and prevented the use of low-flying aircraft such as AH-64 Apache helicopters and, for a time, A-10 ground attack aircraft (Department of Defense, 2000: 70; Tirpak, 1999a: 6). Less capable aircraft and weapons may not only risk the loss of planes and aircrew but increase collateral damage, both of which may erode support for a campaign. But the high costs of capable aircraft mean that few are bought, risking overstretch. This is particularly so if campaigns are fought simultaneously or within a short time of each other, as happened in 1998–1999 with Operations Desert Fox and Allied Force following quickly on each other. Indeed, General John P. Jumper, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, admitted that Operation Northern Watch over Iraq had to be virtually shut down to provide aircraft for Kosovo (Tirpak, 1999b: 7). Precision weapons are also expensive, so that few tend to be bought, and as a result, the military risks running out of munitions at a key moment. Cruise missile and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) stocks ran perilously low during Operation Allied Force, and the RAF was only spared running out of laser-guided bombs by poor weather preventing their use on all but a minority of days (Tirpak, 1999a: 4; Department of Defense,

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2000: 93; NAO, 2000: 31). A modern air campaign also requires considerable support. In the air (and space), needs include intelligence gathering, bomb damage assessment, electronic warfare support, air superiority fighters, and air-to-air refueling; and on the ground, aircraft deployed from home bases require extensive support to be moved into theater to maintain aircraft availability. Few can afford the full range of capabilities. Even within NATO, Operation Allied Force revealed that real disparities existed between allies (Clark, Ellis, and Short, 1999: 8; Cohen, 1999: 6; Cohen and Shelton, 1999: 10; Department of Defense, 2000: 24). Indeed, it may well be that only the United States can conduct anything other than a minor campaign against a poorly equipped adversary with high confidence. The use of airpower might not just be financially costly, however. The loss of even a single aircraft might have symbolic and political resonance beyond its narrow military worth. If airpower is a symbol of Western potency—both to domestic audiences and international ones— then losing an aircraft is a costly business. Rather than compete directly against Western strength, enemies may use asymmetric strategies. The U.S. Department of Defense argues that the campaign over Kosovo was not a traditional military conflict. There was no direct clash of massed military ground forces in Operation Allied Force. Milosevic was unable to challenge superior allied military capabilities directly. . . . Therefore he chose to fight chiefly through asymmetric means: terror tactics and repression directed against Kosovar citizens; attempts to exploit the premium the alliance placed on minimizing civilian casualties and collateral damage; creation of enormous refugee flows to create a humanitarian crisis, including in neighboring countries; and the conduct of disinformation and propaganda campaigns. (Department of Defense, 2000: 6)

Almost a decade earlier, Saddam Hussein had pursued asymmetric strategies in the Gulf War, targeting Israel (a nonbelligerent) with Scud missile attacks, using Western hostages as a “human shield” to defend key sites, releasing oil into the Gulf, and implicitly threatening to use chemical weapons to offset coalition conventional strength. Such strategies need not be limited to the theater of operations. Rather, enemies may attack Western military bases outside the theater of operations or centers of population, either with terrorist attacks (such as those against the World Trade Center) or ballistic missiles as that technology spreads. The concern is such that during the 1990s international terrorism occupied the place vacated by the Soviet Union as the United States’ archenemy (although the threat appeared at that time to be nonstate rather

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than state-sponsored terrorism; see Badey, 1998), and the distant threat of ballistic missile attack has been sufficient to reactivate the debate over missile defenses in the United States (Daalder, Goldgeier, and Lindsay, 2000; Wilkening, 2000). At the very least, asymmetric strategies conducted outside the theater of operations threaten to turn war in the West back from being a spectator sport to one in which the people are much more directly involved, and therein lies their attraction to potential enemies.

The Uses of Airpower: Brute Force and Coercion As David Gates has commented, the strategic objective of any conflict is to break the enemy’s will (Gates, 1997b: 242). It may be done in a variety of ways, but the classic distinction is that of Thomas Schelling’s between brute force and coercion (Schelling, 1960, 1966). The aim of brute force is to deny the enemy the use of certain assets by their destruction. Classically, these assets would be its military forces, though possibly other targets may be hit, such as communications facilities. In contrast, the aim of coercion is to compel the enemy to do your will either by the threat of force or by the limited use of force, with the threat of more to come. For Schelling, with coercion it is not the act of violence itself but the threat of more to come that is important: “Brute force succeeds when it is used, whereas the power to hurt is most successful when held in reserve. It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply” (Schelling, 1966: 3). Coercion offers an inducement to comply and is therefore a form of negotiation, what Schelling called the diplomacy of violence: “the power to hurt is bargaining power. To exert it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy” (Schelling, 1966: 2; see also Freedman, 1998b: 20–23). Alexander George similarly talks of “coercive diplomacy” as a strategy whereby threats are “injected” into an enemy’s calculations, persuading it to comply rather than resist. Like Schelling, George does not distinguish so much between force and diplomacy but between different levels of force. The threat may be to use force, but equally it may be to use increased force. The level of force required in a coercive campaign may indeed be quite considerable, sufficient to hurt an enemy and thereby persuade it that the threat of more would be against its interests (George, 1994). As Lawrence Freedman concludes, “The study of coercion is concerned with the role of threats in international politics. The distinguishing feature of coercion is that the target is never denied choice, but must weigh the choices between the costs of compliance and of non-compliance” (Freedman, 1998b: 36).

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It is this element of negotiation that is missing from strategies of brute force: in coercion, there remains a way out for the enemy. It is a more obviously psychological strategy: the coercer must gauge what acts of force will affect an enemy’s decisionmaking. But assessing this threshold is far from easy, and the mechanisms for successful coercion remain poorly understood (Clarke, 1996a: 84). Coercion is also a dynamic process (Freedman, 1998b: 33–36). As threats and the use of force escalate, so an enemy will in all probability respond with moves of its own. Coercion is therefore a two-sided, iterative game in which the situation may change and with it calculations of costs and benefits (Byman and Waxman, 2000: 10–11). This uncertainty in turn makes it much more difficult to gauge an enemy’s breaking point—the level of force that, with its implied escalation, will lead the enemy to give way. Once force is used, the resolve of an enemy leadership may stiffen, political balances within an enemy state may shift, and domestic support for a coercer’s actions may change (Clarke, 1996a: 74). Progress becomes difficult to gauge—success is not a function of numbers of missions undertaken or targets destroyed but of changes in political will that may not be obvious during a campaign (Pape, 1997a: 96). Even once a campaign is over, a simple binary divide between success and failure may be inadequate (Byman and Waxman, 2000). The dynamic nature of the conflict may mean that goals change during the conflict, and the element of negotiation involved in coercive strategies suggests that the campaign may end not when all the stated goals are achieved but when sufficient goals are reached. An enemy may accede to some demands, which may be deemed sufficient by the coercers. They may be particularly willing to modify their goals if continuing the campaign would cause more harm than the good achieved in securing the additional objectives, or if domestic support is wavering in the face of a protracted campaign in which concessions have already been offered. In these circumstances, what constitutes success? Coercion, therefore, is not an easy strategy to implement, requiring difficult judgments over the level of force required in a changing, dynamic environment. In contrast, the success of a strategy of brute force appears much easier to gauge: simply put, it is the military denial of an enemy’s political objectives. This element of denial in a strategy of brute force has led Michael Clarke to suggest that denial would be a better term, avoiding some of the latter’s connotations of overwhelming violence (Clarke, 1996a). Although in some respects, Clarke’s use of the term denial provides a useful distinction, it also suggests a reactive strategy. Force may be used proactively, however, particularly in cases of aggression (Iraq’s use of force against Kuwait and that by the Bosnian Serbs against the Bosnian government may only be considered “reactive” through linguistic and political sleight

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of hand). Denial may also form part of a coercive strategy, whereby the ability to deny an enemy what it wants persuades it to desist (Pape, 1996, 1997a). The fact that denial can be seen as an element of both a strategy of brute force and one of coercion suggests that the distinction between the two is not always clear-cut. Indeed, campaigns such as Kosovo involve elements of both coercion and brute force—the strategic campaign was designed to coerce, but the attacks against Serb forces in Kosovo were as much about the use of brute force to prevent ethnic cleansing as about coercing the Serb leadership. Coercion has nevertheless become the favored strategy for the West. It offers a more discriminatory use of force, the potential for violence to be limited and tailored to specific political objectives. As USAF chief of staff General Ronald R. Fogleman argued in 1996, a new U.S. way of warfare was emerging. Whereas previously, the United States had relied “on large forces employing mass, concentration, and firepower to attrit enemy forces and defeat them in what many times became costly but successful battles, . . . [force can now be used] to compel an adversary to do our will at the least cost to the United States in lives and treasure” (quoted in Correll, 1996: 1). This new way of warfare was not limited to the United States. In the UK, a key army paper on future war echoed Fogleman’s sentiments by emphasizing that operations must achieve success “for the minimum cost in blood and treasure” (Army Doctrine Committee, 1997: 7), and General Rupert Smith, commander of the 1st British Division in the Gulf and of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, commented: “One [now] fights in such a way as to preserve one’s force” (Smith, 1996). The implication of Fogleman’s comments was that technology in general and airpower in particular allowed the United States to avoid attritional campaigns and therefore minimize costs to itself. But a second trend was emerging, namely that the costs imposed on an enemy should also be limited. In particular, Western governments attempt to avoid public protest over the use of force by minimizing collateral damage: from the Gulf War to Kosovo, Western governments have attempted to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. The reasons for this are explained in Chapter 4 (see “From Escalation to Localization”). What is important to note here is that in such a situation, coercion, with its deliberately limited use of force, offers a more appealing strategy than that of brute force. Further, not only does coercion encourage a more discriminate use of force, but it is a strategy that can be presented as being targeted against the enemy leadership rather than against the people in general. Paralleling the rise of coercion as the West’s preferred strategy has been the view that airpower is “the ultimate instrument of military

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coercion” (Clarke, 1996a: 67). Airpower offers an economy of violent effort through its ability to precisely target key assets. It can attack strategic targets directly without having to engage the main body of enemy forces, thereby focusing attacks on the enemy leadership. It is potentially a far more discriminatory tool than land power while at the same time minimizing exposure of friendly forces. In the wake of Western campaigns in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia, it has also come to be seen as an image of potency, of the West’s ability to strike wherever and whenever it chooses with impunity. In a coercive campaign, when the threat of more to come is a critical element, this image of potency may prove vital in persuading an enemy leadership to give way (Clarke, 1996a: 74–83). Airpower is not always the ideal tool, however. Some circumstances may require ground to be taken and held; others may require an embargo implemented by naval forces stopping and searching ships. Airpower can also make mistakes. When collateral damage occurs, as it has and probably will continue to do, domestic support may be weakened and enemy resolve stiffened. If the level of violence required is overestimated, then by avoiding more traditional military targets, airpower will be unnecessarily destroying infrastructure and other targets (power grids, communications facilities, etc.) that may be important for the civilian population. Unlike ground forces, which will generally be used to engage the main body of enemy forces, usually seen as a legitimate target in war, airpower may be used against strategic targets whose legitimacy is more questionable, particularly if the level of violence is overestimated. But equally if the required level of violence is underestimated, then a campaign may become overly protracted, eroding domestic support and allowing an enemy state to accustom itself to the state of war it finds itself in. Ground forces may be tasked to take and hold ground or to destroy certain enemy formations, and their progress can be easily gauged; coercive airpower, however, is a much less certain activity and the progress of a campaign much more difficult to judge. If the level of violence is underestimated, then a campaign may prove ineffective without the coercer realizing it. These reservations notwithstanding, airpower remains probably the most effective coercive tool for the West. But this is not to say that it cannot also be used in campaigns of brute force. Historically, airpower has been used as much in campaigns of brute force as coercion. At the heart of a strategy of brute force is the destruction of the enemy’s center of gravity. At the operational level, doing so will involve some part of its fielded forces (the Republican Guard in the Gulf War, for example); at the strategic level, this destruction will usually include the military more

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generally. There is then no escaping the destruction, physical or moral, of the enemy’s armed forces or some element thereof in a campaign of brute force. The ability of airpower to concentrate firepower quickly and responsively throughout the battle space, including targets deep in the enemy’s rear, has been a prized asset on modern battlefields. From World War II and the Korean War to the Gulf War, airpower has been a key element in wars of brute force fought by the West, and the possession or lack of air superiority (or even more preferably, air supremacy) has been a critical factor in determining the outcome of battles, campaigns, and even wars (Hallion, 1999). But whereas in campaigns of coercion, airpower may be used independently, in those of brute force it is more often used in conjunction with other forces, particularly ground forces. Although air superiority is almost always a necessary condition for military victory, it is not always sufficient in campaigns of brute force. Indeed, more often it is insufficient. The impact of airpower in the Gulf War in particular has occasioned considerable debate. On one side are those who argue that it paved the way for an easy coalition victory and that ground forces encountered relatively little serious opposition because of the air campaign that preceded ground operations. The Gulf War therefore represents something of a watershed in demonstrating that airpower had “come of age” and that land and sea power were relegated to supporting roles. On the other side are those who argue that the level of destruction on fielded forces was overestimated; that ground forces were forced to fight on numerous occasions, particularly against the Republican Guard and Iraqi regular army; and that victory was a product of a number of factors, of which air supremacy was only one (Biddle, 1996, 1997; Cohen et al., 1993; Keaney, 1997; Mahnken and Watts, 1997). Whichever is the case, two facts remain. First, Western airpower gives it a major advantage in campaigns of brute force. It may be a product of a number of factors—technology, skill, training, even the sheer numbers of modern aircraft available—but the effect is real. If the West, particularly the United States, chooses to deploy its airpower in sufficient numbers, then in all probability it will win militarily. No other air force can withstand these forces and, unable to challenge for air supremacy, will be at a critical disadvantage. Second, the West’s advantage in airpower will lead it to lean heavily on this in a joint force. This is not to say that airpower will dominate any campaign of brute force—in terms simply of numbers, it will almost always not be the case. But airpower will form a very significant element of the West’s use of force, probably more so than for many other military powers.

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Crucially, however, if the analysis in the preceding chapter is correct, then indiscriminate campaigns of brute force may be increasingly rare. A trend is emerging whereby enemy soldiers per se are not legitimate targets of war; rather additional legitimization is required. It is no longer sufficient for an enemy to be wearing a uniform to be attacked; the enemy must also either be engaged in actions that warrant Western intervention (the invasion of Kuwait or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, for example) or be capable of directly preventing Western-mandated actions. These requirements would seem to place additional limitations on a campaign of brute force and question its future viability as a military strategy. As the coalition’s ground offensive against Iraq demonstrated, such campaigns may still prove possible in certain circumstances; but Operation Allied Force also suggested that, for a variety of reasons (including the risks of high casualties), such campaigns are unlikely to be preferred to those that emphasize coercion.

Airpower Alone? Despite its limitations, the attraction of airpower remains strong, as seen by the West’s extensive use of it in military campaigns from the Gulf War onward. Its attractiveness has raised the question of whether airpower alone might be sufficient as a coercive instrument and whether land and maritime forces might be relegated to support functions. In his study of airpower in World War II, Richard Overy concluded that, despite the prewar predictions, “Aircraft did not replace navies and armies. . . . Successful warfare still depended upon the movement of armies to occupy land and the movement of ships to provide supplies and men” (Overy, 1980: 203). Airpower made the use of sea and land power more effective, and in some theaters, it was indispensable. But it was not sufficient to secure victory and operated in support of, or in harness with, other forms of military power. As Benjamin Lambeth has argued, however, the Gulf War “marked, for many, the final emergence of airpower as the dominant instrument of combat power” (Lambeth, 1997: 65, 81). Airpower did not simply assist in securing victory; it determined the outcome of the military struggle. Despite the rhetoric of joint operations, for airpower advocates the Gulf War demonstrated a new military reality: that the tables had been turned and land and sea power now supported airpower (Lambeth, 1999: 63–70). Some, however, would take this conclusion even further, arguing that because airpower can strike at key political and economic targets, it can bring sufficient pressure

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upon an enemy leadership to coerce it into acceding to the West’s demands without extensive recourse to sea and land power (Byman, Waxman, and Larson, 1999; Warden, 1992). This coercive ability is in part a result of improved technology in the form of increased ordnance, greater precision, and better intelligence gathering, which has transformed airpower’s capabilities. But it is also due to the transformed nature of war, whereby the target is no longer the state or the people but the enemy leadership—arguably a much easier target to coerce. For these airpower advocates, therefore, the Gulf War suggested that airpower had reached a new level both in its ability to dominate the battlefield and thereby determine the outcome of the war and in its potential to exert coercive pressure on an enemy leadership by precision strikes against strategic targets. Airpower made the outcome of the ground campaign a formality and indeed had determined the outcome of the war before the first coalition soldier set foot in Kuwait. This success was followed by the use of airpower in Bosnia (most especially Operation Deliberate Force) and then Kosovo, where airpower played an even greater role in successfully exerting pressure on the Serbian leadership. At the end of the Kosovo campaign, the military historian and influential columnist John Keegan famously recanted on his earlier position, arguing that Kosovo had shown airpower to have come of age in being able to act independently. As Keegan put it, There are certain dates in the history of warfare that mark real turning points. Now there is a new turning point to fix on the calendar: June 3, 1999, when the capitulation of President Milosevic proved that a war can be won by air power alone. . . . The air forces have won a triumph, are entitled to every plaudit they will receive and look forward to enjoying a transformed status in the strategic community, one they have earned by their single-handed efforts. (Keegan, 1999)

Given the relative advantages of airpower for spectator-sport warfare—most especially its reach, its ability to minimize collateral damage, and the reduced exposure of friendly forces—the question of whether airpower can act as an independent coercive agent is of particular significance. If it can, then force may be successfully used at relatively low cost; if not, then the use of force will remain a risky and potentially expensive option. NATO’s Kosovo campaign certainly seemed to suggest that airpower might be able to act alone—that after seventyeight days of bombing, the Serb leadership gave way, without NATO having to use ground troops. This success followed that of Operation Deliberate Force, where airpower was used to coerce the Serb leadership over Bosnia (Tirpak, 1997). As Richard Hallion has argued, “As a

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result of NATO’s first sustained air campaign, all military and political objectives were attained: safe areas were no longer under attack or threatened, heavy weapons had been removed from designated areas, Sarajevo’s airport opened (as did road access to the city), and a path to a peace agreement had been secured” (Hallion, 1999: 47). As a result, it was not difficult to construct the case for airpower on the basis of recent experience. But neither of these two cases are quite as straightforward as first appears. Operation Deliberate Force also included substantial artillery attacks from British and French forces on Mount Igman, and the mounting Bosnian government and Croat ground offensive also placed considerable pressure on the Serbs. In Kosovo, airpower was only one of a number of pressures being exerted on the Serb leadership: the threat of a NATO ground offensive was growing, the Russians offered no support to Belgrade, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) operations in Kosovo were increasing, and Milosevic had been indicted on war crimes (FAC, 1999–2000: paras. 119–120; Byman and Waxman, 2000; Department of Defense, 2000: 10–11). Arguing that airpower alone determined the successful outcome of both Operation Deliberate Force and Operation Allied Force therefore appears problematic, though its key role in both is suggestive. Airpower also suffers from two major limitations in its ability to decide campaigns independently. First, for all of the advances in weight of ordnance carried and its accuracy, airpower can still only deliver a fraction of the firepower available to artillery, which means that pressure has to be applied over time, particularly if military forces are being targeted. Therefore, NATO air strikes were unable to prevent Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in part because they lacked the firepower. Second, airpower is unable to take and hold disputed territory. Only land power can do that. Although airpower can do much of the work in preparing the way for land power and can perhaps deny the use of territory to an enemy, if territory is to be (re)gained and then held, ultimately, land power will have to be used. Airpower may be necessary, but on its own it may not be sufficient.

Strategic Versus Theater Strikes The limits of airpower in holding and controlling territory raise a separate question: To what extent is control of territory and the destruction of an enemy’s military forces, particularly its ground forces, important in coercing an enemy? Admittedly, in a campaign of brute force such actions might be decisive (though perhaps not always). But in a campaign

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of coercion, might not discrete strikes against strategic targets prove more effective—strikes that do not require the occupation of territory until the campaign is over? This question has prompted a debate over the relative utility of strategic and theater strikes in which the USAF, the preeminent airpower, has been a staunch advocate of strategic attack. USAF general Michael Short commented that the attacks on Serb forces in Kosovo did little to help achieve NATO’s war aims. It was only when the emphasis shifted to attacking strategic targets that coercive pressure was successfully applied. Attacking forces engaged in ethnic cleansing had not prevented those atrocities, nor had it placed the Serb leadership under sufficient pressure to persuade them to desist. Rather, Short argues, it was attacks upon state control and infrastructure and the threat of more attacks to come that finally persuaded the Serb leadership to give way (Tirpak, 1999d: 1–2). Similarly, USAF chief of staff General Michael Ryan commented: “Airpower could not stop the door-to-door . . . thuggery and ethnic cleansing that [was] going on directly. . . . The only way you were going to be able to do that [was by] taking it to the heart of the matter—in this case Belgrade” (Tirpak, 1999c: 2). If the USAF is correct in the utility of strategic airpower, then given U.S. strategic air capabilities, the implications are significant. In the words of Robert Pape, “America can cheaply control the world” (Pape, 1997a: 94). But Pape contests whether strategic airpower is so dominant and as a result has prompted one of the more significant debates concerning airpower (Pape, 1996, 1997a, 1997b). From a study of the empirical evidence, Pape concludes that strategic bombing is only marginally effective as a coercive tool and that attacks against theater targets are likely to be more effective in persuading an enemy that it cannot achieve its military objectives. For Pape, strategic bombing is only likely to be effective in long wars of attrition, when material and economic factors come into play, but not in short wars lasting a few weeks or months. In contrast, theater airpower is effective in both long and short wars. Pape considers three strategic bombing strategies—punishment, decapitation, and denial—and concludes that none is an effective coercive tool.4 Punishment strategies—attacking strategic targets of high political, economic, or social value to make living conditions intolerable— have consistently failed to persuade the people of a state to pressure the leadership into conceding defeat. Moreover, the idea that a modern punishment campaign, using a relatively few aircraft and cruise missiles and constrained by tight political guidelines, might succeed when during World War II, several years of unrestricted bombing involving thousands of aircraft failed is, for Pape, optimistic, to say the least. Societies tend to be highly resilient and capable of absorbing considerable pressure.

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An alternative and more recent strategy is that of decapitation. Modern societies are increasingly dependent upon a few key elements of infrastructure, including telecommunications links, transportation, and power grids. These static targets are highly vulnerable to modern munitions. Further, authoritarian regimes tend to centralize key aspects of state control, making political, military, and police headquarters buildings attractive targets. A relatively few strikes at these targets may reap considerable dividends, paralyzing an enemy state and creating problems for the leadership in maintaining its control at a time of grave national emergency. But such strategies make a number of assumptions that may not always hold good. In particular, they assume that the key vulnerabilities enabling decapitation can be identified, that the state is sufficiently “modern” to possess and value these vulnerabilities, that the enemy leadership does not possess redundant networks of state control, and that pressure will lead to fragmentation and dissent within a state. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that transportation and telecommunications links cannot be cut for long, that relatively few communications links are required for effective command and control, and that even if these can all be cut, authority may be predelegated to theater commanders. Finally, Pape considers strategic denial—attacks against an enemy’s military-industrial capabilities to deny it the ability to replace battlefield losses. These attacks are unappealing to the enthusiasts of strategic bombing since they require a long, attritional campaign. Such a campaign would be expensive for those prosecuting it and would cause considerable damage, potentially including substantial collateral damage. But more to the point, according to Pape, such attacks would be unnecessary. Even if defense industries were left untouched, they could not replace battlefield losses sufficiently quickly to enable a war of even medium intensity to continue for very long. Quite simply, peacetime economics mean that defense industries no longer have the capacity to surge production in all but a few areas. A strategic bombing campaign aimed at denial would therefore be ineffective because it would be aimed at a largely irrelevant target. In contrast, Pape argues that when airpower is used for denial purposes against theater targets—that is, against military targets in the theater of operations—then it is a much more effective coercive instrument. Pape argues that the Gulf War demonstrated the effectiveness of theater airpower in a campaign against ground forces that was instrumental in coercing Saddam Hussein to abandon Kuwait. Predictably, Pape’s thesis has attracted comment and criticism, in three areas in particular that are partly related to his understanding and

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analysis of the Gulf War. First, his interpretation of the effectiveness of strategic bombing has been challenged. In particular, John A. Warden accuses Pape of underestimating the effectiveness of strategic bombing, both in coercing Saddam but also in ensuring the conditions for a postwar peace in the Gulf. Warden was a key member of the team that put together the air plan for Operation Desert Storm. He argues that the plan put forward was designed not only to eject Iraq from Kuwait but “to attack Iraq in order to change Iraq, the system, so that it would be compatible with the envisioned post-war peace.” Warden goes on to explain: At the end of a rollback war which involved no serious attack on the interior, Saddam would have been out of Kuwait, but would have suffered no significant strategic damage. . . . Despite losing up to half of what he had in Kuwait, he still would have had one of the most capable armies in the world. . . . In the real world, it was the terrible weakening of Saddam’s strategic base which forced him to accept unconscionable peace terms and which has allowed a handful of American airmen to keep him within the bounds defined by the United States. (Warden, 1997: 175, 186–187)

For Warden, then, the destruction imposed upon Iraq’s fielded forces was much less significant than strategic strikes, not only in forcing Saddam to give way but also in allowing the imposition of terms for peace that were favorable to the United States. Second, Pape’s advocacy of the effectiveness of theater bombing has been questioned, especially his argument that theater bombing coerced Saddam into retreating from Kuwait. Not least, the withdrawal did not begin until after the coalition ground campaign had been launched (Watts, 1997: 124, 143). By adopting a slightly different reading of the same evidence that Pape uses from a number of conflicts, Watts argues that theater airpower has proved no more successful than strategic airpower. He adds that Pape uses a “parsimonious” model to interpret the evidence, one that does not fully take account of the problems of the evidence. Each war is different, but Pape simplifies this complexity to develop his theory. With a more relaxed definition of categories, one suggested by the messy nature of both history and historical evidence, Pape’s results are much less compelling (Watts, 1997: 141–149). Finally, Pape’s divide between strategic and theater attacks and between strategies of punishment, decapitation, and denial has been criticized as artificial. Strategic and theater campaigns may be conducted simultaneously, and a mix of strategies often occurs. In the Gulf War, for example, strategic targets in Baghdad were bombed, as were theater forces in Kuwait, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Report to Congress:

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Kosovo After-Action Report explicitly states: “Within a few days of the start of NATO’s campaign, alliance aircraft were striking both strategic and tactical targets throughout Serbia” (Department of Defense, 2000: 8). Distinguishing between these strikes, especially determining which were the more effective in coercing an enemy leadership, is too difficult a task to attempt with any confidence. Modern airpower quite simply has not been used in the neatly defined categories necessary for Pape’s model. Pape’s thesis has yet to attain widespread acceptance, and the USAF for one has decided that strategic strikes remain the more effective option. What the debate does reveal, however, is that the case for the effectiveness of strategic strikes has not been proven. In particular, doubts remain over the effectiveness of strategic decapitation that would make war quick and easy for the West. Nor does the evidence convince that airpower can guarantee success in war, particularly if airpower is used on its own. Where Pape is correct is in his skepticism of some of the more extreme claims in favor of strategic airpower. It may not always be the case that airpower remains more of a blunt instrument than a rapier and that campaigns are likely to take longer than expected to be successful; but there remains more than a possibility that a lengthy war may be the result of an air campaign. NATO did not expect its air campaign in Kosovo to last seventy-eight days, but it did; its air forces (and the USAF in particular) may not have wanted to engage Serb fielded forces in Kosovo in a lengthy campaign, but that is what happened. But what Pape misses in his analysis is the political dimension: that the use (and success) of airpower may be limited by political constraints as well as operational and doctrinal factors. Indeed, these political constraints over how airpower is to be used may prove to be critical in wars of choice where domestic and international support is key. In some instances, politics may dictate in favor of strategic strikes, particularly when a limited, short campaign is essential (U.S. air strikes against Libya are an example), whereas in others, political constraints might argue against strategic air strikes. Whichever is the case, it is unlikely that doctrine and strategy will get a free ride from political interference.

Conclusion The attraction of airpower for the West is clear. It enables the prompt use of force and is capable of being employed at long range. It offers minimum exposure of friendly forces, both because of the small numbers involved (many of which may be deployed adjacent to the zone of conflict rather than within it) and because of the West’s lead in this most

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technologically sensitive of combat arenas. Air-launched precisionguided munitions are capable of extraordinary accuracy, thereby reducing the risk of collateral damage. In contrast, both land and naval forces suffer from a variety of disadvantages that reduce their attraction. But airpower is problematic as well. In particular, the nature of airpower is impermanent. It cannot hold or control ground. Despite advances in intelligence gathering and analysis, capabilities here still prove a major limitation, both in the identification of targets and the assessment of damage done. Nor does precision guidance mean a “bloodless war”— mistakes have and will continue to be made, with the result that collateral damage has and will still occur. Most important, there is still insufficient evidence to demonstrate that airpower can act alone: it may be necessary to secure military victory, but it is not sufficient except in the most extreme circumstances of a limited campaign against targets vulnerable to attack. Even then, the long-term benefits may be questionable. The Israeli raid against the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, the 1986 U.S. raid against Libya, and British and U.S. raids against Iraq in December 1998 and 2001 are all examples of airpower being used on its own, but in all instances the campaign was limited in terms of targets and duration and produced limited long-term benefits. More significant air campaigns, such as Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf, Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia, Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, are at best inconclusive in demonstrating the ability of airpower to secure victory on its own. Finally, the manner in which airpower is used is subject to debate. The debate between proponents of strategic and theater strikes remains unresolved. Although the preferences of the USAF, the most powerful air force in the world and the most influential air force in the West, remain clearly in favor of strategic strikes, whether they are more effective than campaigns against fielded forces, even in coercive campaigns, remains at best uncertain. There is no guarantee that airpower will not become a bludgeon and that campaigns might not become protracted, despite the potential for the reverse. More important is that such doctrinal preferences may prove to be of secondary concern in the face of political priorities. Whether it is more effective to strike at strategic targets may become politically irrelevant if theater targets are engaged in humanitarian outrages and Western public opinion demands that something be done. In contrast, the debate over coercion or brute force appears to have been resolved in favor of the former—although distinguishing between the two may not always prove to be as easy in practice as it is in theory. Nevertheless, the issue of how best to use airpower for

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coercion and even the viability of coercion remains subject to debate. Airpower has emerged as the preferred Western instrument of force, but it is not the only instrument likely to be used, and the manner of its use remains a subject of debate.

Notes 1. The Royal Navy has similarly emphasized the advantages of poise. See, for example, Blackham, 1993; McInnes, 1998: 131–132; Royal Navy, 1995: 60. 2. During the Kosovo conflict, for example, rumors persisted that UK and U.S. stocks of sea-launched cruise missiles were becoming depleted. 3. The weather had a major impact on Operation Allied Force. Most precision-guided bombs rely on laser designators to illuminate the target. Lasers cannot penetrate cloud cover, and given the requirement to fly at 15,000 feet to avoid handheld missiles, NATO aircraft were particularly constrained when the weather was cloudy. (HCDC, 2000: lx). 4. In his 1996 book, Bombing to Win, Pape includes a fourth category, “risk” (Pape, 1996: 66–69). It is based on Thomas Schelling’s ideas of the threat of more to come, is similar to a strategy of punishment, but specifically avoids certain targets and threatens to escalate if the enemy does not give way. In a later article (Pape, 1997a), risk is dropped as a separate category and is subsumed into a more general category of punishment.

6 THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

n early 1991, coalition air and ground operations devastated Iraqi forces in and around Kuwait. Under intense media scrutiny, new weapons such as cruise missiles, stealth fighters, and Patriot air defense missiles appeared to perform technological wonders, giving the coalition a decisive military edge (Cordesman and Wagner, 1996; Schwarzkopf, 1992: 501). But many of the weapons used were only the latest iterations of systems or weapons types that had been in use for decades: tanks, manned aircraft, or artillery. Even cruise missiles could be traced back to the German V-1s of World War II (Huisken, 1981). These weapons may have been better than those of previous generations—and sometimes dramatically so—but they were essentially the same in both form and function. Similarly, the strategy underpinning coalition operations was familiar, if taken to new heights of technological complexity: to achieve air superiority followed by a rapid, surprise armored breakthrough closely supported by airpower. This was the approach used by the Germans in their blitzkrieg campaigns of World War II and by the Israelis in the wars of 1956, 1967, and 1973. The use of an envelopment strategy—the “wide left hook” to outflank Iraqi ground forces—was similarly well established, being the hallmark of German operations between 1870 and 1945 and the basis of Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216 B.C. (Bellamy, 1990: 17–18). By the end of the 1990s, however, the weapons and thinking behind Operation Desert Storm were beginning to look obsolete. The impact of information technology promised a Revolution in Military Affairs, in which operations by ground, sea, and air forces against other ground, sea, and air forces would not only be transformed but relegated to supporting roles. The real battle would be for information. The acquisition, denial, and efficient processing of information would be the great

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enabler in battle and in war, much as it had become elsewhere (Biddle, 1998: 1–2). Not only was it the case that “knowledge, more than ever before, is power,” but crucially that the West—and the United States in particular—had a decisive edge in this technology and that this technology could be used to “deter or defeat traditional military threats at relatively low cost” (Nye and Owens, 1996: 20). For its advocates, the RMA reinforces “the best aspects of the Western Way of Warfare, encouraging tendencies towards efficiency, discriminating use of weapons and low casualties” (Freedman, 1998a: 50). The RMA therefore encourages the development of spectator-sport warfare by offering the promise of the successful use of force at minimum cost, at arm’s length, and with minimal collateral damage. To a greater extent even than airpower, information is the tool par excellence for spectator-sport warfare.

Technology and the “System of Systems” Unlike the nuclear revolution, the RMA is not the product of a single technology. Rather it covers a host of systems and weapons—from cruise missiles using satellite navigation aids, through remotely piloted vehicles capable of relaying real-time imagery of the battlefield, to advanced computers with sufficient processing power to manage vast quantities of information from a variety of sensors. Similarly, unlike Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the 1980s (which was popularly dubbed “Star Wars”), there is no debate that the technology will appear. Indeed, much of it is already available. Nor is there much debate that it will work, though how well is a moot point, particularly when large numbers of high-technology systems have to be linked together in a synergistic manner. Instead, the RMA is a debate over ideas. At worst, the debate is one of semantics over the precise meaning of “revolution” and whether the RMA is a “revolution in military affairs” or merely a “military technical revolution” (Gray, 1997: 5–14; Holden Reid, 1998: 17–19; Freedman, 1998a: 7–10). More usefully, it focuses on the implications of a range of technological developments for military strategy and tactics, the structure of forces, and even the nature of war. The origins of the RMA are as controversial as its nature. Those who wish to downplay the “revolutionary” significance of the RMA do so in part by tracing a continuum of technological change. They suggest that change has been incremental and that important innovations occurred before the tag of the RMA could be applied. Change has been absorbed into traditional structures and ideas and will continue to be so with less than revolutionary consequences. Those who argue for a more radical interpretation of these changes, however, emphasize discontinuities, albeit

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while recognizing that these changes have their historical roots. For these proponents of the RMA, change can be sudden, particularly when cumulative change occurs. Although technologies may have been emerging over a period of time, it is only when they reach a certain level of maturity and their implications are recognized that revolutionary change occurs. This is what they believe is happening with the RMA—that a number of technologies that have been emerging over a period of time can be coupled to rapid technological advances in other fields to allow a revolutionary change in the way in which military power is used and forces organized (Owens, 1996). A common starting point for both approaches is the advent of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) in the late 1960s, particularly their use in the 1973 war in the Middle East. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a number of analysts began to suggest that the Egyptian use of PGMs, particularly antitank and surface-to-air missiles, appeared to herald the death of the blitzkrieg (Bertram, 1979; Gray, 1976; Mearsheimer, 1983: 155–161; Record, 1976). Further, analysts also argued that the platforms associated with modern warfare—the armored vehicle, manned aircraft, and surface ship—were becoming “baroque” systems (Kaldor, 1981), requiring ever more expensive means to deal with a growing number of threats. These platforms and the types of war they represented were becoming obsolete in the face of technological change. Although many of these claims were exaggerated and substantial problems remained with the use of precision-guided munitions (Stone, 2000: 78–79), nevertheless their appearance on the modern battlefield did suggest that changes were afoot. The significance of PGMs was enhanced by developments during the 1970s and 1980s in both surveillance and targeting and in command and control. The potential synergy of these technological developments was demonstrated in the early 1980s by NATO’s new “mission concept” of Follow-On Forces Attack (FOFA, or “deep strike”). FOFA exploited the Soviet preference for echeloning its forces in depth. New technologies (now collectively termed “emerging technologies,” or ETs) would allow NATO to identify, target, and destroy second- and third-echelon formations before they could reach the battlefield, thus relieving pressure on NATO’s front line. The traditional airpower mission of interdiction was transformed into a new mission capable of destroying enemy forces on the move deep in rear areas (OTA, 1987; Rogers, 1983). Similar developments were also reflected in the U.S. Army’s 1982 and 1986 field manuals under the banner of the AirLand Battle (FM 100-5, 1982, 1986). Throughout the 1980s, there was a very real sense of technological change affecting conventional forces (Cohen, 1996: 37). But as Lawrence Freedman points out, new developments in both technology and doctrine

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were not seen as constituting a “revolution.” Freedman offers three reasons for this view (Freedman, 1998a: 22–27). First, a residual postVietnam skepticism over technological fixes remained. Consequently, there was a preference for doctrinal solutions to military problems rather than technological solutions. This was particularly the case with the “military reform movement” of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of the more creative strategists of the time were dubious about the ability of technology both to perform its stated mission and to transform the battlefield. Instead, they focused on reviving the art of generalship and argued for the continued existence and relevance of traditional military concepts and ideas (Stone, 2000: 97–98, 106–122). Second, NATO’s European members possessed long-standing concerns over improving their conventional forces. Not only was it widely believed that such improvements would be extremely costly, but it was also feared that improved conventional forces might undermine the United States’ nuclear guarantee to western Europe by offering the pretense of a conventional option. Finally, Freedman suggests that the military remained wedded to traditional platforms for both professional and political reasons. Traditional platforms were not only easier to “sell” to Congress but represented a known quantity (Freedman, 1998a: 22–27). The implications of NATO’s pursuit of new technologies had not been lost on the Soviet Union, however. As early as the 1970s, the Soviets had begun to consider whether technology, especially the ability to strike accurately at long range, was not only requiring changes in tactics but threatening to change the offense-defense relationship in favor of defense (Donnelly, 1978; Erickson, 1977). NATO’s decision to vigorously pursue emerging technologies in the early 1980s suggested even more radical changes. Under successive chiefs of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov (1977–1984) and Sergei Akhromeyev (1984–1988), the Soviet military identified these new changes as constituting a “military-technological revolution.” 1 In particular, Ogarkov argued that not only was the pace of technological change increasing and becoming more significant in itself, but that new conventional weapons were becoming as effective as small nuclear devices against armored assaults. Soviet plans for a war in Europe rested on a massive but tightly organized armored offensive. Yet new conventional technologies promised to provide NATO with “reconnaissance-strike complexes” capable of identifying and destroying armored columns in a remarkably short timeframe. These developments threatened the whole basis of Soviet military planning. Compounding these concerns for Ogarkov was the role of information technology in the military-technological revolution. The ability to acquire, process, and disseminate information through computers

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was a central element in the reconnaissance-strike complex. But in a country that could not make a reliable personal computer (PC), competing in this new information-driven arms race appeared a forlorn task (Cohen, 1996: 39; Herspring, 1986; IISS, 1996: 36). Although the Soviet General Staff appreciated the potentially revolutionary nature of these new technologies, its focus was limited to the tactical and operational implications rather than more wide-ranging structural and organizational changes (Cohen, 1996: 39). Nor did the Gulf War do much to highlight these wider implications. Nevertheless, it did establish the credentials of these new technologies. For although some of the technologies had been used in conflicts during the 1980s, including the 1982 Israeli Operation Peace for Galilee and the British campaign to retake the Falkland Islands (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990a, 1990b; Gabriel, 1984), these were comparatively limited affairs both in scale and the technology used. In contrast, the Gulf War saw the widespread and deliberate exploitation of leading-edge technologies. The apparent success of these technologies not only transformed perceptions of U.S. conventional strength but provided the first hard evidence of a technological revolution (Freedman, 1998a: 28–31). In particular, advantages in air-space power, real-time intelligence gathering, communications, and precision-guided munitions provided the coalition with a decisive edge over the Iraqis. Although subsequent analyses have drawn attention both to some of the failings of technologies used in the Gulf War (not least the Patriot missiles) and the dangers of drawing lessons when conditions proved so flattering (see, for example, Biddle, 1996; Freedman and Karsh, 1991, 1993; Postol, 1991–1992), as Freedman commented, “It did not take much imagination or leaps of technological fancy to see how this form of warfare could be taken further” (Freedman, 1998a: 31). The Gulf War therefore reaffirmed a belief in the efficacy of military technology, particularly in the United States. But other developments also prepared the ground for the RMA. The end of the Cold War had transformed the strategic landscape. No longer were the United States’ European allies fearful that improved conventional forces might lead to a reduced nuclear guarantee. Rather, in the changed circumstances after the Cold War, conventional military forces appeared more likely to be used. The Gulf War, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia all saw Western military forces being used and suggested that this would be the future pattern. If forces were to be placed in harm’s way on a more regular basis, then areas of comparative Western advantage were to be exploited in order to ensure success at minimum cost. In particular, fears that casualties would reduce popular support for these operations

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placed a premium on those technologies that reduced or minimized the danger to Western forces. Further, the widespread use of computers in both civilian and military environments had demonstrated how working practices could be changed by new technology, especially how information technology could permeate and transform even the most mundane of activities. The time was now ripe for a revolution brought about by technology. Unsurprisingly, given the above, it would be the United States that led this revolution. Behind the idea of a revolution in military affairs is a sense of rapid and sustained technological change in the acquisition, management, and use of information, both civil and military. In 1996 commercial satellite launches exceeded those of the government for the first time, the vast majority concerned with communications and broadcasting. In 1997 the U.S. company EarthWatch used a Russian rocket to launch the world’s first civilian spy satellite. Mobile phone use has proliferated, with phones now capable of sending and receiving data (including e-mail and Internet connectivity). Satellite navigation receivers, using the U.S. global positioning system (GPS), are capable of determining the user’s position within a few meters anywhere on the Earth’s surface. Retailing at a few hundred dollars each, they are widely available and extensively used by yachtsmen, by hikers, and increasingly in automobiles (providing a remarkably effective tool when linked to road maps stored in a computer memory). Above all, there are the massive advances in computing power and software design. In the 1970s, there were perhaps 50,000 computers worldwide. In 1981, IBM introduced the first PC. Within fifteen years, the use of PCs had become ubiquitous in the West, with upward of 150 million in use worldwide. Processor speeds had increased several hundredfold, memory had increased from 64,000 to 8,000,000 bytes, and hard disk storage had increased from a few megabytes to gigabytes. Even more astonishing was that prices had remained relatively constant—a state-of-the-art PC cost roughly the same in the early twenty-first century as in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, advances in computer interconnectivity and modem speeds had led to the widespread use of the Internet. By the turn of the century, the Internet had developed into a major means of communication, source of information. and forum for commercial opportunity, with dot-com ventures being quoted on the stock exchange (Freedman, 1998a: 51; Libicki, 1995, 1996a). Whether such rapid technological advances can continue is a moot point (Libicki, 1995). But what is significant here is their military impact. Admiral William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

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and arguably the father of the RMA, identified three key areas of technological change for the military: intelligence, command and control, and precision force (Owens, 1996: 1–2). The first of these involves surveillance and reconnaissance of both enemy activity—including the position of forces and communications and computer use—and of friendly forces. The aim is that commanders will know precisely where both the enemy and their own forces are (although the former has been a traditional military concern, the latter is perhaps surprisingly an all-toofrequent problem, particularly in fast-moving operations). Satellites, remotely piloted vehicles, and airborne reconnaissance are just some of the sensor platforms now available to commanders to locate troops on either side. Moreover, information from these sensors can be shared throughout the command chain, enabling strategic-, operational-, and tactical-level commanders to receive detailed real-time intelligence of their own forces and of enemy activity. The second area, command and control, also involves communications, computer applications, and intelligence (C4I) and allows commanders to take the raw data from surveillance and reconnaissance to produce a picture of the battlefield. Although commanders throughout history have possessed pictures of the battlefield—from being personally involved in close combat, through viewing the entire battlefield from a vantage point, to relying on telephones and radios (van Creveld, 1985)—the extent and accuracy of these pictures have varied. Not only does the RMA promise a more accurate and timely picture of the battlefield than ever before, but also C4I will allow this picture to be used to assign and target forces much more effectively. Advanced C4I can therefore lead to dominant battlespace knowledge (DBK), whereby accurate intelligence is received, processed, and acted upon sufficiently quickly as to keep the enemy at a critical disadvantage. Third, advances in guidance technology allow the precise use of force over extreme ranges. Cruise missiles have a range of several hundred miles, for example, but with satellite navigation an accuracy of a few meters. At lesser ranges—but ranges still measured in dozens of miles—missiles such as the Stand-off Land Attack Missile (SLAM) and Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) provide similar levels of accuracy. And all of these were used in 1991 in the Gulf War (Department of Defense, 1992: 752–753, 773, 782–783, 786–788). In the future, both range and accuracy will increase. For Owens, however, the revolutionary impact was not in these discrete advances but occurred when the three areas were put together to create a metasystem, or what he termed a “system of systems” (Libicki,

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1996b: 5; Nye and Owens, 1996; Owens, 1996: 2). Owens identified the “powerful synergies” existing between these three areas that, if properly exploited, would revolutionize capabilities: The growing capacity to infuse DBK into all our forces will be coupled with the real time awareness of their status and the understanding of what they can do with their growing capacity to apply force with speed, accuracy, and precision. This means we will increasingly match the right force to the most promising course of action at both the tactical and operational levels of warfare. Further, we will have an increasing capacity to apply tailored forces faster, with more precise weapons and over greater distances. The advances in ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] will allow us to know the effects of our actions—and understand what those effects mean—with far more fidelity, far earlier than anything we have experienced to date. This will give our forces a great fighting advantage. This battle assessment, in turn, will make subsequent actions more effective. As a result, we truly will be able to operate within the opponent’s decision cycle. This new system-of-systems capability, combined with joint doctrine designed to take full advantage of these new fighting capabilities, is at the heart of the RMA. (Owens, 1996: 2)

Historically, commanders have suffered from a lack of information; the RMA promises a wealth, perhaps even a surfeit of information, that can be organized and presented in real time. When combined with weapons that can be accurately targeted over long distances, a very wide range of targets on and beyond the battlefield can be hit promptly and with some certainty. The promise of “near perfect mission assignment” and “precision violence” will, according to RMA advocates, enable force to be precisely and efficiently targeted against an enemy’s center of gravity, elevating information above more traditional concerns of maneuver and attrition (Freedman, 1998a: 6; Gray, 1997: 31).

The Impact of the RMA The impact of these technologies on the conduct of war—and even on the nature of war—is therefore uncertain. Few deny that the technologies associated with the RMA will have some form of impact, but its extent and the nature of the changes resulting from it have become a matter of some controversy. Opinions range along a spectrum of possible changes, from a minimalist “add information technology [IT] and stir” school of thought to more radical visions of “cyberwar” (see Table 6.1). In this section, I will examine the positions at either end of the

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Table 6.1 The RMA: A Spectrum of Possibilities Add IT and Stir

The Digital Battlefield

Cyberwar

Battle characterized by force-on-force engagements

Battle characterized by hide-and-seek

Movement from force-onforce to force versus IT and IT versus IT

Structure of forces little changed

Structure of forces radically changed—small, with great firepower and interconnectivity: fire ants

Force structures less important as hard and soft kill/protection of IT becomes critical

Dominant battlespace knowledge critical to support force

Battlefield transparent— weapons slaved to an information mesh

IT is both a weapon and target of war

Gulf War template— first modern war

Gulf War last war of the industrial age

Nature of war changed

spectrum as well as a middle position that argues that the digitization of the battlefield will lead to radical changes in the conduct of operations and to the manner in which forces are organized, such that force-onforce engagements will remain a feature of future wars, but the priority will shift to hide-and-seek, with dispersed forces able to concentrate firepower from diverse sources whenever targets are identified. Add IT and Stir This is the least radical position on the spectrum of possible changes and envisages a linear development from trends already apparent in the 1980s and possibly even before (Biddle, 1998; Gray, 1997). The Gulf War acted both as a template and as a harbinger of change for this position. It demonstrated how information superiority—dominant battlespace knowledge—could be exploited by forces structured in an orthodox manner and using traditional strategies. It also demonstrated how information superiority could be an important factor, perhaps the decisive factor in determining the outcome of battle. Much as air superiority proved critical to success in the late stages of industrial-age warfare, so information superiority will prove critical in information-age warfare. Although this position would accept that the RMA offers the potential for increased performance and capabilities across the board, the qualitative change concerns the combination of improved communications, increased battlefield transparency, and long-range precision guidance. The result of these developments can be stated simply: much more can be seen on the battlefield, what can be seen can usually be hit, and

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what can be hit can usually be destroyed. The Gulf War provides an example of these developments when, on 25 February 1991, the U.S. Marine Corps’ advance into Kuwait was the subject of an Iraqi armored counterattack. The coalition was able to identify the Iraqi force as it assembled and not only alert the Marines to the danger but to attack the force preemptively. By the time the Iraqis attacked, they had been reduced to less than brigade strength; the Marines then used close air support, PGMs, tanks, and artillery to successfully beat off the attack (Department of Defense, 1992: 274). This example also illustrates the manner in which new technologies can allow much quicker decisionmaking, creating opportunities to get inside the enemy’s decisionmaking cycle and thereby shape the battlefield.2 Further, improved communication and digitization also allow information to be more readily shared between friendly forces. Kenneth Allard describes a routine IFOR close air support mission in Bosnia as involving a NATO AWACS aircraft in the Adriatic vectoring British Harriers to Norwegian forward air controllers to provide support for a Swedish-led brigade (Allard, 1996: 1). This least radical position would therefore accept that changes have occurred. In particular, dominant battlespace knowledge and improved communications have, and will continue to have, a major effect on both the conduct and outcome of military operations. But there are also limits to the changes introduced by the RMA. New technologies may provide better means of hiding or avoiding detection. Stealth technologies, which attempt to reduce the electronic and infrared signature of platforms and thereby avoid detection, may be used more widely. As NATO operations in Kosovo demonstrated, even relatively low-tech attempts to camouflage and deceive may prove remarkably successful. Despite an air campaign involving 829 NATO aircraft flying over 38,000 sorties and using large numbers of laser-guided bombs, Serb armored forces in Kosovo appear to have avoided any significant losses, and large numbers of hardened military facilities remained relatively intact (HCDC, 2000: xliv–liii, lviii). Similarly, air strikes in the first few weeks of the campaign in Afghanistan failed to find Osama bin Laden, and the premodern condition of Afghanistan’s infrastructure presented only a limited number of targets. Advocates of this position therefore accept that commanders can never possess a perfect understanding of the battlefield in real time. The battlefield will never be wholly transparent. A second limitation concerns the politico-strategic dimension. As Colin Gray has argued, the RMA may offer high technology, but that does not ensure good strategy and politics (Gray, 1997). War remains a political act, and strategy still requires good decisions to be made. If the

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grand strategy is wrong, then no matter how dazzling the operational art, the political result—which is what ultimately matters—will be in doubt. Third, information may be of increasing importance, but it is only a means to an end. Battle will still be decided by force-on-force engagements, albeit that dominant battlespace knowledge may give one side a decided advantage. Weapons systems and platforms that can survive the harsh environment of military operations will still be required, and military planners will require proof that new platforms work before relinquishing existing platform types. Armored vehicles, manned aircraft, surface ships, and submarines all possess proven qualities of endurance in war, and the case still has to be made that they can no longer fulfill their roles. Stephen Biddle, for example, argues that in order to gain control of defended territory, ground forces must close with an enemy. Only armored vehicles possess the necessary mobility, protection, and firepower to accomplish this task (Biddle, 1998: 29–30). Further, it is unclear whether precision targeting will reduce the requirement for large numbers of weapons and allow a “leaner but meaner” (and cheaper) force structure. Martin Libicki puts the case this way: “It required 2,500 bombs to hit a single target point during World War II. To hit a single target in Vietnam, using more accurate target systems, required roughly 50 bombs. To do so in the Gulf War required one laserguided bomb. Devotees of information warfare speculate that twenty years hence we should know precisely which one of fifty potential targets must be bombed to achieve the desired effect” (Libicki, 1996c: 262). The implication is that smaller forces used more effectively and attacking in a highly discriminate manner will replace the relatively indiscriminate use of force that characterized warfare for much of the industrial age; that the broadsword will be replaced with a rapier. But in practice, this has not proved to be the case. Operations against Iraq in 1991 and Serbia in 1999 suggested that large numbers of bombs and missiles would still be required in any major operation and that the West’s stock of PGMs could be quickly exhausted. Finally, the RMA’s effect may not be as pervasive and all-encompassing as some of its more extreme advocates would suggest. In Bosnia, for example, Allard argued that the information revolution largely stopped at divisional level and that as a result, life had not changed very much for the average soldier on the ground: “Despite the techno-hype, subordinate brigades and battalions typically conduct operations much as they did 20 years ago: with acetate-covered 1:50,000 maps, outdated communications gear, and only those sensor or reconnaissance systems organic to ground units” (Allard, 1996: 2).

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The Digital Battlefield This middle position on the spectrum provided in Table 6.1 offers a more radical interpretation of how armed forces and the battlefield will be affected by information technology. It is characterized by the assumption that advances in long-range firepower and battlefield transparency will cause a movement away from the traditional focus of force-on-force engagements dominated by firepower and protection toward what Libicki has termed “hide-and-seek” (Libicki, 1994, 1995, 1996b; Vickers, 1997: 40). If industrial-age warfare was characterized by the race between firepower and protection, then information-age warfare has made this race redundant. No matter how fast or how wellprotected a platform, if it can be seen, it can be destroyed. Traditional ideas concerning the concentration and movement of force, ideas that have been the currency of conventional warfare since Napoleon, are obsolete because large concentrations can be too easily identified and therefore destroyed. Similarly, movement in the open will become increasingly difficult, even with stealth technologies. The emphasis has shifted to dispersed forces able to share information by digital means and capable of calling down fire from a variety of long-range weapons systems either hidden from view or out of harm’s way (possibly from naval forces offshore). Enemy units are likely to be engaged from outside the battlefield by nonorganic firepower, with ground forces increasingly playing the role of sensors rather than combat units. Indeed, the traditional requirement for ground forces to occupy contiguous ground to avoid encirclement may disappear. Instead, dispersed nodes of ground forces with 360-degree orientation will be linked by digital means both to each other and to fire support. Rather than concentrating force at the decisive point in battle—the schwerpunkt—the emphasis will be upon concentrating long-range firepower on a particular point from dispersed locations. Time will become more important than space: ensuring that firepower arrives at the correct moment will become more important than moving forces to the contact point or ensuring that they occupy ground that is of strategic or tactical significance. Nor are traditional ideas of sequential warfare relevant, whereby frontline forces are engaged in an attempt to break through defenses that will then be exploited by mobile forces ranging into the enemy’s rear. Rather the enemy will be engaged simultaneously throughout the theater of operations, with rear areas attacked at the same time as frontline forces. Finally, command structures will be transformed. Much as modern corporations found that, with the introduction of information technology,

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centralized decisionmaking structures with multiple layers of bureaucracy were obsolete, so militaries will find that orthodox hierarchical organizing principles will be replaced by “fighting networks.” Currently, militaries are organized along vertical lines, with information being passed up a chain of command to where decisions are made and then passed down again, perhaps to other units. The structure resembles a layered pyramid with units talking to layers above and below (what is sometimes termed “vertical integration”). With the RMA producing a requirement for dispersed forces capable of contacting remote fire support, however, the priority shifts to horizontal integration—the ability of units at the same command level to talk to one another. The new decisionmaking structure is decentralized and resembles a mesh rather than a pyramid (Freedman, 1998a: 13, 62–63; Hartzog and Canedy, 1997: 179–221; Libicki, 1996b; Vickers, 1997: 34–35). Many of these ideas are reflected in thinking behind Army XXI, the U.S. Army’s plans for a digitized force in the twenty-first century (Hanna, 1997; Hartzog and Canedy, 1997: 179–185). Experiments and exercises to test these ideas began as early as 1994, and a brigade-sized force of 5,000 has been in training since 1996. This force was fully digitized, including computers and satellite navigation receivers mounted on all 900 of its vehicles and wired into an expanded, digital communications net called the “tactical Internet.” The tactical Internet included information on the location of friendly and enemy forces. The former was generated automatically, whereas the latter was provided by a range of reconnaissance and surveillance resources, some organic to the force and others not. The aim was to enable both the horizontal integration of forces and to make available a constantly updated, accurate picture of the battlefield throughout the brigade (Hanna, 1997). Perhaps the most articulate advocate of this form of the RMA has been Martin Libicki of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Libicki envisages the future battlespace as a “mesh” of sensors and forces. The mesh will allow forces to find and destroy anything worth hitting. But because an enemy may also deploy advanced sensors and weapons linked by digital communications, friendly forces will become equally vulnerable. For Libicki, the paradox of the mesh is that those platforms that establish it in the first place may themselves become vulnerable. Manned surveillance aircraft, such as the radar-equipped J-STARS, will be visible and therefore vulnerable; even unmanned drones will be targeted and may become untenable on future battlefields. Similarly, brigade- or battalion-size forces, which are considered relatively small by today’s standards, may prove too large and vulnerable for the future battlespace. Libicki therefore suggests that the logic of

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the RMA will force the development of what he terms “fire-ant warfare,” consisting of very large numbers of small objects. They may involve cheap sensors distributed in high density across large areas or microprojectiles similarly distributed across the battlespace to avoid concentration but capable of being targeted remotely. These objects will be so small that destroying them costs more than they are worth individually. Further, the mesh will have no center of gravity on which an enemy force may focus its efforts. But when the dispersed elements of the mesh are linked together digitally, they collectively provide a formidable military capability. Such a mesh may be established relatively quickly—certainly more quickly than the time it would take traditionally structured forces to be projected into an area of conflict. Nor would it require the same level of logistical support (though the computing support would be hugely increased). The result would not only be a radically new force structure and a battlespace requiring new operational techniques but a fundamental change in the relationship between information and warfare. Whereas members of the “add IT and stir” school of thought believe that information will remain a support service, allowing weapons platforms to operate ever more effectively, Libicki believes that the RMA will result in weapons becoming a dispatch mechanism slaved to the mesh (Libicki, 1994). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the views of Libicki and other radicals have received considerable criticism (for example, Cohen, 1996; Freedman, 1998a; Gray, 1997). Criticisms range across a number of issues but crystallize around four. First, the technology may not deliver all that is promised. In particular, the idea that the battlefield will become transparent is contested. For the critics, battle is inherently a confused and messy affair in which information is easily contaminated or misinterpreted, communication is difficult, and messages often misunderstood. Further, the huge flow of information envisaged as an integral part of the digital battlefield will create new problems. Managing vast quantities of information in a high-pressure, time-urgent environment is a formula for mistakes to be made. Even if simulations work, the stress of a real battle with an enemy actively trying to confuse through a variety of methods and technologies (some predictable, others not) will mean that the fog of war will not lift. If the battlefield remains confused, with forces unable to always find the enemy or distinguish friend from foe, then Libicki’s mesh collapses. There is also a degree of political naïveté in expecting politicians who are providing the strategic direction of the war to allow operations to unfold, when modern communications offer them a means of intervening and controlling (or attempting to control) events themselves. Further, horizontal integration may work in a corporate

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setting but is unproven in the rather different military environment. A dispersed, decentralized force may appear good in theory, but maintaining command and control over such a force will prove difficult. Command and control cannot be ignored—at the very least, decisions must be made over the allocation of forces to tasks and of weapons to targets. It is unclear how such decisions will be implemented in a mesh of small units talking to each other rather than to more traditional command layers above. Second, critics point out that traditional military principles have proved surprisingly resilient to technological revolutions. Many of the principles of war that appear in contemporary military handbooks predate the revolutionary impact of industrialization. Further, visionaries who acclaim the potential of new technologies to transform war have more often been proved wrong than right—the advocates of strategic bombing in the interwar years are a favorite example of this phenomenon. Caution is therefore recommended before committing to a radically new approach to war. Third, the RMA may result in a number of unintended or unforeseen consequences. In particular, the reaction of adversaries is difficult to gauge. But if it proves increasingly difficult to compete with technologically well-endowed, RMA-inspired Western militaries at their own game, then adversaries may simply change the rules of the game and adopt asymmetric strategies. Finally, the RMA radicals tend to overlook the political context in which force may be used. The RMA may alter the means by which coercive force is applied, but it will do little to address the ends. It is therefore in danger of prioritizing second-order questions of how to fight over first-order questions of why and when to fight. Cyberwar The most radical position on the spectrum of possibilities is what may be termed “cyberwar.” It takes the use of IT one stage further by suggesting both that it may be used as a weapon in a future conflict (conceivably even the key weapon), and that it may also be the main target. The Gulf War demonstrated how, deprived of intelligence and the ability to communicate with and between forces, the Iraqis were at a critical disadvantage. Not least, early attacks on the air defense system, including radars and communications, allowed the coalition to achieve air supremacy and thereafter dictate the course of the war. These systems were attacked in a traditional manner, using platforms such as ships and aircraft firing weapons armed with explosives. But what if the

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Iraqi air defense system could have been brought down by attacking it with software? What if communications equipment and computers could be paralyzed by attacks from other IT systems? Given the growing centrality of IT to the functioning of any modern organization, including militaries, the ability to attack and destroy IT would be a crippling blow. In a future conflict, such a blow might be decisive. Therefore, at the far end of the spectrum of possibilities is a scenario whereby IT has become so important to the workings of any complex organization that the ability to render it inoperable, particularly through the use of other IT systems, replaces traditional notions of the use of physical force as the ultimate arbiter. These “wars” would be fought by remote control, perhaps from the other side of the globe. Physical violence would be unnecessary, as would movement. Territory would lose its military significance. All that would matter is who maintained control over information. These notions may appear far-fetched, and their implications for the future conduct of war are certainly revolutionary. But incidents of cyberattacks are already being reported, together with the suspicion that more have not been reported because of the fear of undermining confidence in systems and service providers. Most of these concern propaganda and include activities such as hacking into and rewriting documents on official websites. In 1998 the United States reported what it considered to be the first politically motivated cyberattack against a state, when Sri Lankan embassies were targeted by an Internet terrorist group associated with the Tamil Tigers. The group—the Internet Black Tigers—attempted to swamp the e-mail systems of these embassies, thereby denying them the use of e-mail. On 26 January 1999, highly organized cyberattacks began on computers in Ireland that supported the East Timorese Internet domain “.tp” (Ballantyne, 1999: 31–32). More dramatically, Winn Schwartau has argued that “the United States is at war, a war that few have bothered to notice. The twentieth century information skirmishes that are the prelude to global information warfare have begun. . . . Offensive pugnacity will be aimed at the informational and financial infrastructure upon which Western economies depend” (Schwartau, 1997: 47–48). Two assumptions are critical to the idea of cyberwar. The first concerns the ubiquitous use of computers and the role of information. From the 1990s on, information has increasingly bound organizations together. In particular, IT has become essential to the operation of these complex bodies. New information infrastructures have begun to replace more traditional structures, and dependency on information has grown accordingly. If the IT system is brought down and information flows are

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halted, then organizations may cease to function. Vulnerable sectors include banking and financial services, government, power generation, public services (including the military and emergency services), telecommunications and the media, transportation, and water supply. On those occasions when systems within these sectors have collapsed, the result has been disastrous; if a concerted attack against some or all of these sectors was successful, the result might be one of collapse. As society becomes more information-based, so it becomes more dependent on information networks operating efficiently. And as Freedman comments, in strategy, dependency means vulnerability (Freedman, 1998a: 52). Further, since most of these sectors are civilian and many are privately owned rather than government-run, ensuring adequate levels of protection may be difficult. Nor can they be protected in traditional ways by the deployment of military force. Therefore, the second assumption behind cyberwar is that IT and information nets are vulnerable to attack by a variety of means. Some of them may be physical—such as the destruction of mainframe computers or of communication nodes such as telephone switching stations and satellite relays. But the most effective weapons may be those that infiltrate information systems and bring them down from the inside. They may involve hackers who break into a system through the Internet, viruses introduced into a system, or “logic bombs” embedded in the operating code of a computer system that may be activated by a given signal or event. The potential vulnerability of a state to such attacks was suggested when a “hackers collective” claimed, while giving evidence to Congress, that to disrupt the entire U.S. infrastructure would take a team of just thirty hackers working together (Ballantyne, 1999: 31; Freedman, 1998a: 52; Hayes and Wheatley, 1996: 2–3; Hoo, Goodman, and Greenberg, 1997: 135; Libicki, 1994; Robinson, 1999: 56; Schwartau, 1997: 48–49). The concern to date over IT vulnerabilities is that terrorist organizations, or even individuals alienated from or disaffected with society, may use these techniques to cause localized damage and disruption. But in its most extreme form, advocates of cyberwar suggest that one state may use these techniques to paralyze another state, effectively winning a war before a shot is fired. In the United States, the Department of Defense identified three types of possible attacks (Hayes and Wheatley, 1996: 3). The first were “routine attacks,” largely of a criminal nature, such as electronic vandalism or financial theft. These attacks would have a limited or diffuse impact on national interests, although their impact upon those institutions targeted might be more severe. The second category of “potentially catastrophic” attacks was also limited in number and in choice of targets but would have unpredictable consequences,

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which might prove catastrophic for the national interest. The example given was that an attack upon a single bank would not necessarily affect the financial sector as a whole, but that a series of attacks, particularly if coordinated, might have major repercussions for the worldwide banking and finance system, spilling quickly over into the global economy with potentially disastrous results. Therefore, although individual attacks might be limited, the cumulative effect might snowball into something much more serious with national and international implications. Finally, the third category was that of “catastrophic attacks,” which, if successful, would create major, long-term damage to the national interest. What is interesting here is the underpinning assumption of vulnerability—that the target of attack determines the damage done rather than the level of defense provided. What is also interesting is the general uncertainty surrounding just how much impact such attacks might cause. This radical vision of future war has been criticized on two main counts. The first is that it overestimates the fragility of computer networks while at the same time underestimating the effectiveness of countermeasures. As Freedman has commented, “The more information warfare systems are adopted, the more governments and other organizations will become sensitive to the risk that information has been deliberately compromised” (Freedman, 1998a: 57). Countermeasures may include hardening against physical attack, the use of firewalls to protect systems from outside interference, increased redundancy in both hardware and software, and a general raising of consciousness concerning the need for computer security (Hoo, Goodman, and Greenberg, 1997: 146–149). Indeed, current perceptions concerning the potential vulnerability of computer systems may simply be a product of their novelty and the rapid expansion of their use. As the technology beds down, gaps in security will be plugged, particularly if there is a high-profile collapse in security that raises awareness about the risks involved. Ultimately, the most vulnerable element of computers may be the hardware, which will be vulnerable only to physical attack. If so, warfare will return to more familiar patterns of the use of force. The second reservation about cyberwar concerns the extent to which attacks on computers may prove incapacitating. It is not simply a question of determining the correct targets out of the proliferating number of computer systems and when best to attack them, though this problem should not be underestimated. In evidence given to Congress in 1999, for example, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, argued that information-based attacks against the Serb leadership, including their bank accounts, might have speeded the end of the war in Kosovo (Clark, Ellis, and Short, 1999). But the evidence for

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this assertion was thin, partly because no one has attempted it before. For all the studies on vulnerabilities to information attack, the reality may prove very different. Previous examples of attempts to identify critical vulnerabilities of new technologies have suggested that there are considerable problems involved. Early in World War II, for example, the British decided that German ball-bearing production was a critical industry vulnerable to the new technology of strategic bombing. Reality proved very different as ball-bearing factories were difficult to destroy, the industry proved surprisingly redundant to attack, and British bombers were forced to attack in daylight to see their targets, making them in turn vulnerable to German fighters and air defenses. The head of Strategic Bomber Command, “Bomber” Harris, concluded that there were no “panacea” targets that would lead to the collapse of the German war effort. Instead of a silver bullet, Harris concluded that strategic bombing was a bludgeon to be used in an attritional campaign against German cities (Hastings, 1979). The problem involves more than target selection, however. It includes the extent to which organizations and societies are vulnerable to these attacks. Complex structures may appear fragile but are often more resilient than expected and possessed of greater redundancies, not least in adapting to changed (worsened) circumstances. Again, the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II provide a useful corrective to some of the more extreme claims for cyberwar. German society and industry proved surprisingly resilient to British and U.S. attacks over a period of several years, and the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaigns remains a matter of debate (Overy, 1980; Pape, 1996). Ironically, if advocates of cyberwar are correct in assuming that information-led societies will be vulnerable to attack, then it is the West, with its proliferation of computers and their widespread use in both the public and private sectors, that will be most at risk, rather than its enemies.

Conclusion: Catching the IT Bug? Interest in the RMA can partly be explained by the simple fact that the technology is here. IT has permeated most aspects of life in the West, and the military is no exception. Identifying the meaning and implications of the technological revolution is the stuff of the RMA, and one of the key questions is whether these revolutionary technologies will have a similarly revolutionary impact on the conduct of war. In this respect, the RMA debate is of a very particular kind in that it is led by the technology. Strategists are playing catch-up rather than dictating the technological agenda.

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Not all debates follow this pattern. One of the key technological debates in the later stages of the Cold War concerned the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was driven less by what was technologically available than by what was considered strategically desirable. Indeed, one of the key areas of debate was whether or not SDI was technologically feasible. For some, it represented the technological “high frontier,” a challenge that the United States should accept and one that would place it firmly ahead of the Soviet Union in the arms race; others saw it as fool’s gold, a twinkle in the eye of certain scientists that would be unrealizable in practical and financial terms (Carter and Schwartz, 1984; Miller and van Evera, 1986). The RMA debate is nearer that over the impact of nuclear weapons because it is a technology to which strategists will have to react. But even here, there are differences. Governments essentially controlled nuclear technology, and the military had a large impact on research and development programs. The military and civilian strategists were able not only to construct the terms of the debate but to influence the direction in which the technology would go (see, for example, Mackenzie, 1990). The IT revolution, however, has been driven by private companies whose interest is primarily in business and private customers. Many of these companies are wary of and resistant to government interference in their activities. In contrast to most high-technology ventures after World War II, government contracts form only a small part of research into information technology, and their ability to shape the speed and direction of technological change is much reduced. Therefore, not only is this a technology to which strategists and military planners have to react, but it is also one over which they and their governments have remarkably little control. The ubiquity of information technology only partly explains the interest in, and in some quarters, the enthusiasm for the RMA. Interest in the RMA is not simply a result of IT being out there; what the RMA offers is appealing to the West in general and to the United States in particular. For its advocates, the RMA creates the possibility of limiting yet further the duration, effects, and risks of war, thereby making military operations more politically acceptable. In so doing, it also moves the experience of war in the West firmly toward that of a spectator rather than participant. A number of features of the RMA contribute to this effect. First, improved targeting coupled to extended weapons range will allow ever-greater force to be applied while those who deliver it stand off from the target. Digitization and automation will also reduce the numbers of troops required for operations. The direct implication of these features is that fewer troops will be placed in harm’s way, thereby

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reducing the number of potential casualties. Information dominance and DBK will also allow friendly forces to operate in a more secure environment. Enemy attacks will be prevented, either by denying the enemy intelligence on possible targets or by disrupting its command, control, and communications infrastructure. As a result, concerted attacks against friendly forces will become more difficult. Further, if such attacks do materialize, DBK will allow them to be dealt with before they can become a threat (Hartzog and Canedy, 1997: 182). As force-onforce engagements are progressively replaced by attacks on IT using IT, so the number of troops required for traditional military engagements will fall. At the far end of the RMA spectrum, not only will the outcome of operations be determined by IT, but operations will be conducted largely or solely by IT, reducing yet further the number of troops placed in harm’s way. The opportunity offered by the RMA to reduce the number of potential casualties is important in a number of respects. It is important since the potential human costs of war may be reduced. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen are not only legitimate targets in war according to the just war criteria but are often placed in positions of extreme danger. In reducing this exposure, the RMA suggests that fewer will die. Further, because of better intelligence and precision targeting, the number of enemy soldiers, sailors, and aircrew killed should—at least in theory—be reduced. If support for military operations in Western democracies is contingent upon a low number of friendly casualties, as suggested in Chapter 4, then the RMA’s potential to reduce the risk of casualties holds considerable appeal. Reducing casualties also aids the shift toward spectator-sport warfare by further distancing society from the costs of war. War will no longer be a shared experience. Fewer will be involved in military operations. Fewer friends and families will suffer the loss of or injury to loved ones. Instead, military operations will be conducted by a small number of people in increasingly specialized fields, not so much fighting the enemy as operating systems, many of which will be far removed from what remains of the battlefield. A second feature of the RMA that contributes to its appeal to the West is that it reduces the risks involved in war more generally. It does this by playing to a comparative advantage. The IT revolution is a Western-led revolution and, more specifically, a U.S.-led revolution. As Joseph S. Nye and William A. Owens comment, “Knowledge more than ever before is power. The one country that can best lead the information revolution will be more powerful than any other. For the foreseeable future, that country is the United States. . . . This information advantage can help deter or defeat traditional military threats at relatively low

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cost” (Nye and Owens, 1996: 20). The RMA plays to Western, and particularly American, strengths and thereby reduces the risk not only of losing but of incurring unacceptable costs. At the very least, it offers a more effective and discriminate use of military force, at best a silver bullet capable of bringing down enemy defenses at a stroke. The United States’ edge in information technology has also led some advocates to suggest that in some situations, its military involvement might be simply that of an information provider. Libicki has commented: “Rather than sending forces into harm’s way, the United States can achieve the same end, with far greater freedom, if it sends bitstreams to a wellprepared defender” (Libicki, 1996c: 267). Similarly, Nye and Owens talk of an “information umbrella” replacing the Cold War nuclear umbrella: “Like extended deterrence, [the information umbrella] could form the foundation for a mutually beneficial relationship. The United States would provide situational awareness, particularly regarding military matters of interest to other nations. . . . Just as nuclear dominance was the key to [U.S.] coalition leadership in the old era, information dominance will be the key in the new age” (Nye and Owens, 1996: 27). What this vision offers, therefore, is not simply continued U.S. engagement but U.S. leadership without the risks of forward basing and of sending U.S. troops into danger. But as Gray has argued, not only does the RMA play to American strengths, but it also plays to American fantasies. Quick and easy victories are difficult to come by. All wars hold risks, and victory can never be guaranteed. Moreover, the vulnerabilities of enemies may differ. Some may be more susceptible to RMA-style warfare than others (Gray, 1997: 18–20). But the appeal of the RMA fantasy is revealing. For Gray, the fantasy is a problem in that it misses the brutal reality of war: that war is unpredictable; that enemies do not acquiesce by playing your game; that mistakes are made; that no matter the technology, if the strategy is not right then the war will fail; and that in war, people die. The RMA therefore creates both an illusion of what war will be like in the information age and false expectations of the risks and potential costs involved. When operations go wrong, or when mistakes are made, the illusion will be shattered, and support for operations, based on these false illusions, may similarly suffer. But Gray’s use of the term fantasy is also revealing in another sense. The RMA is a vision of war as the United States would like to fight it: controllable, quick, clean, and with victory assured. As a result of the RMA, the risks of war and its costs are reduced, minimizing the effect on society at large. The costs are such that society does not suffer in this form of warfare. There is no draft: the individual’s engagement is one of choice rather than civic responsibility,

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and more often than not, that engagement is removed from direct participation in the conflict. There is no widespread mobilization of resources, no rationing, and no shortages because war is not fought by industrial muscle. There is no prolonged suffering because war will be over quickly. And there is no fear of the consequences of defeat because victory is assured. A third appealing feature of the RMA is its ability to reduce collateral damage. Better intelligence and precision guidance should lead to a more discriminating use of force. Further, if force-on-force attacks are progressively replaced by attacks against IT systems, possibly even by IT systems, then the prospect of collateral damage is reduced even more. The Gulf War and Kosovo both showed how precise modern weaponry could be, but they also demonstrated how politically damaging targeting mistakes could be. The assumption is that as better information and intelligence becomes available over what is a target and what is not and over where mobile targets are in real time, then mistakes and civilian casualties will be reduced. Of course, mistakes may still be made. Human error remains a possibility, particularly when analyzing large quantities of complex data under pressure and in a short time. Deceptive measures may confuse sensors as well as analysts, and if the enemy attacks friendly IT systems, corrupted data may also lead to mistakes being made. Furthermore, as the quality of intelligence and the precision of munitions improves, so the ambition of targeters may increase. In particular, military targets located in or near civilian centers may be deemed suitable for attack. For example, to date government and military offices located in civilian areas have tended to be attacked at night to reduce the risk of collateral damage, the assumption being that nearby civilian offices will be empty at that time. The consequence of this is that the target offices are also empty (except perhaps for unfortunate cleaners and night security staff, hardly priority targets in this sort of war). But improved targeting may lead to these offices being attacked during the day, a much more risky venture if any mistakes are made. Another example might be attacks against a suite of offices in a building used for both civil and military purposes. Again, this probably would not be a credible target at present because of concerns over collateral damage (which in turn acts as an incentive to house key assets in such buildings, using the risk of collateral damage as a deterrent). But with improvements in the future, these may become possible targets. Once these more ambitious targets become realizable, there may well be pressure to attack them. Therefore, the risk of a mistake will remain of a similar order because, although the technology has improved, ambition

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will push back the types of target that can be hit, creating pressure to attack them. Finally, as technology improves and attacks become more discriminating, so the expectation of negligible to zero collateral damage may become commonplace, particularly among the civilian population and media. When mistakes are made, this false expectation may rebound more harshly than when the technology promised lesser wonders, affecting popular support for military operations. This sensitivity over collateral damage is an interesting feature of the movement toward spectator-sport warfare. What underpins it is the assumption that a society is not the target of military operations, but its leaders and security forces. Just as Western societies have become removed from direct participation in war, so the assumption is that enemy societies should be treated similarly. With regard to the RMA, Freedman has commented that “the series of developments that are brought together in the RMA have the connecting theme of the separation of the military from the civilian, of combatants from non-combatants, of fire from society, of organized violence from everyday life” (Freedman, 1998a: 17). This separation is a fundamental feature of the movement toward spectator-sport warfare—that society is distanced from war and other military operations. The RMA takes us further along this path by reinforcing the assumption that civilians should not be targeted or even be the victims of collateral damage because they are not participants in the war. The RMA therefore holds a number of potential benefits to the West, particularly in reducing the exposure of troops to danger, in minimizing the risks of war more generally, and in reducing collateral damage. In other words, it fits the pattern of war the West would hope to fight. It also reinforces the move toward spectator-sport warfare. This is true of all three variants of the RMA outlined in Table 6.1 above, and the further we go along the spectrum of possibilities, the more RMA supports the new kind of war. At the less radical end, the “add IT and stir” school of thought would allow certain forces to stand off from targets and engage the enemy at a relatively safe distance. When force-onforce engagements do occur, and battle is closed, dominant battlespace knowledge will provide a decisive edge. Victory will therefore be more likely. Finally, increased precision and better intelligence will allow strategic targets to be engaged with reduced risk of collateral damage. The more radical “digital battlefield” will enhance all of these advantages by a significant margin. In particular, information-adept forces would be able to operate within the enemy’s decisionmaking cycle, seizing and retaining the initiative in battle. The reduced significance of force-on-force engagements—in particular, the movement

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toward concentrating firepower at long ranges rather than the more traditional concentration of force in the contact battle—will minimize exposure of friendly forces. And ever-greater transparency will increase the ability to use force in a discriminating manner, making force more effective and minimizing collateral damage. Finally, “cyberwar” takes matters a stage further by prioritizing IT as both the weapon and target in war. As firepower becomes less significant than the means to target it, then the use of physical force will be reduced. War will no longer be characterized by large-scale death and destruction but by highly selective attacks on information systems, some of which may not use physical force. But the RMA also cuts the other way. It not only offers the potential for the sort of war the West would wish to fight but creates pressures and vulnerabilities that may result in the opposite. Most obviously, if the RMA is the West’s preferred type of war and one in which it holds a comparative advantage, then potential enemies would be foolish to fight that sort of war. Instead, enemies might choose asymmetric strategies explicitly designed to increase the cost of war to the West. They may include the use of weapons of mass destruction to increase casualties from a Western military intervention, protracted guerrilla wars designed to create frustration by denying a quick, cheap victory (such as some Western commentators feared might occur if NATO undertook a forced entry into Kosovo), and terrorist attacks on Western outposts (such as the attacks in August 1998 on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). Most significantly, they may involve terrorist attacks on the West itself, such as the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, making Western society the target rather than its armed forces. These asymmetric strategies are specifically designed to attack perceived Western vulnerabilities, not least the fear over casualties and the attempt to distance Western societies from the costs of war. Therefore, the RMA creates an incentive for enemies to fight precisely the sort of war the West does not want to become engaged in. But it also creates a slightly different set of vulnerabilities. The RMA highlights not only the potential of information technology to make force more effective but the vital nature of that technology to postindustrial society. The use of IT has become ubiquitous, and with that has come a dependency, particularly in the West. Further, the ability to target these systems is not the sole preserve of the West. Cyberattacks may therefore be used both by and against the West. A new arms race may develop between offensive and defensive cybersystems. And although the West may possess an advantage at the leading edge of this technology, not all

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systems may be adequately defended against attack. A sophisticated attacker will therefore identify those systems that are poorly defended. What is important to note is that these may not be military systems, many of which are likely to be well protected. Instead, utilities and public services may be targeted, causing disruption to Western society rather than to its militaries. Ironically, therefore, the RMA not only offers the West the potential for minimizing the risks and costs of war but also highlights the West’s vulnerabilities, allowing a way for potential enemies to increase the costs of war and draw Western societies into its prosecution. The RMA is here; it is now. To use the spectrum discussed above, at present we are at the “add IT and stir” stage, with some indications that the United States might be attempting to move toward the stage of the “digital battlefield.” What we do not yet know is where it will end— whether cyberwar is a real possibility or something nearer science fiction than strategic reality. In this sense, the RMA should perhaps be viewed rather differently from the nuclear revolution. In 1946 Bernard Brodie famously remarked that, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategy had been revolutionized (Brodie, 1946: 76), but with the RMA, the revolution is not a single event but a process of change. Discerning the meaning and significance of the RMA is difficult because we do not know what it will become. It is also different from the nuclear revolution because that had a limited effect upon societal relations, whereas the impact of IT is pervasive, and to a certain extent, the military is playing catch-up rather than setting the agenda. The RMA is therefore outside the control of the military in a manner in which the nuclear revolution was not, and as social paradigms change because of IT, so the military will have to adapt rather than resist. Depending on the nature and extent of these changes, traditional military principles and practices may have to be rethought in a revolutionary manner.

Notes 1. The phrase military-technological revolution had a very specific meaning. The Soviet military distinguished between the political-strategic level and the military-technological level. The former concerned the nature and purpose of war and the latter the means of carrying it out. Nuclear weapons therefore constituted a revolution in military affairs because they affected the politicalstrategic level, whereas developments in conventional weapons merely affected the means of fighting wars. 2. The “decisionmaking cycle,” or what is sometimes called the Boyd cycle or OODA (observation-orientation-decision-action) loop, refers to the

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time taken to acquire information, process it, decide upon the correct course of action, communicate that information to the relevant forces, and then observe the results. By moving through these various stages more quickly than the enemy, a force may gain an advantage. Emphasis upon the decisionmaking cycle has been accompanied by the resurgence of interest in concepts of maneuver warfare, where speed of decision can be as important as mobility on the battlefield (Lind, 1985: 4–6; McDonald, 1997: 149–160).

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ar for the West has been transformed. Since 1800, the Western view of war has been dominated by the fear of total war and the images that go along with it. As Roger Chickering has commented, total war provides a “master narrative” for the historiography of modern warfare (Chickering, 1999: 13). However, major war is now obsolete in the West and, with it, total war. The costs of war, the spread of liberal democracy, and increased integration, interdependence, and globalization have all made war less useful as a tool of policy, even unthinkable. But this does not mean war for the West has become obsolete. The empirical evidence since 1990 shows that the West has been able and willing to fight wars. But these new wars are wars of choice, not survival. And the two main features of total war, escalation and participation, have been replaced by five new elements:

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1. The localization of war, leading to expeditionary strategies and force requirements. 2. The targeting in war of an enemy leadership or regime, not society. 3. The requirement to minimize collateral damage. 4. The requirement to minimize risk and exposure for both Western society and its armed forces. 5. The belief that enemy armed forces are no longer the target in war or necessarily the means to victory.

Spectator-Sport War and the Use of Force These five elements can be seen in the way in which the West has used force over the past decade, particularly its use of airpower. Airpower 143

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has become the preferred tool of violence for the West, and its use is ubiquitous. This is not to say that land and sea power are unimportant or that they have no role—far from it. But the preference is for airpower to be used as much as possible, and today land and sea power are rarely used without it. Airpower is attractive not least because it readily fits the pattern outlined above: 1. Expeditionary capabilities. Airpower is comparatively easy to deploy and comparatively quick compared to land and sea power. Indeed, in certain instances the range of some aircraft means that forces need not even be deployed to the theater of operations but rather can be used from existing bases. 2. Leaders as targets. Airpower allows quick and direct access to the enemy leadership and other strategic targets by way of the “overhead flank.” In contrast, land forces must fight their way through to an enemy leadership. 3. Collateral damage. At worst, airpower is a bludgeon, but at its best, the precision offered by modern air-delivered munitions means that it can be a rapier of startling accuracy. 4. Minimized risk. Airpower is a massive Western comparative advantage. The technological lead of the West means that its air forces are able to roam the skies with relative impunity, providing a symbol of Western potency and the ability to act without incurring costs. From the Gulf War on, Western air losses have been astonishingly low. 5. Enemy forces. Airpower can attack the enemy’s strategic center of gravity directly and can provide an effective coercive tool. As a result, there is no requirement to engage the mass of enemy forces or to fight to the center of gravity via a series of bloody land battles. If airpower is the West’s current preferred weapon of war, then the Revolution in Military Affairs represents the future. The application of IT to warfare presents not one vision of how war will be fought but a spectrum of possibilities. At the most conservative end of the spectrum is the “add IT and stir” school, whereby the RMA allows the military to do the same things, only better. In this sense, it is not revolutionary, though in offering the West a comparative technological edge, it may facilitate the quick and easy prosecution of operations. A more radical position is that of the “digital battlefield,” which sees battle as still being important but transformed into hide-and-seek, with distributed firepower linked through an information mesh. The most radical position is that of the cyberwarriors, who see IT as transforming warfare.

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Cyberwarriors question the need for force-on-force engagements. Instead, IT systems, supplemented by traditional force, can bring down enemy IT systems, thereby paralyzing enemy leadership, society, and armed forces. What unites all of these positions is how they fit into the framework identified above, playing to fantasies of a quick, easy, and clean victory through technological virtuosity: 1. Expeditionary capabilities. The RMA allows key assets to be kept at home. Traditional capabilities—tanks, planes, and ships—are less important than data collection and fusion, which may be done remotely. Fewer platforms need to be sent into theater, and the more important matériel stays at home. 2. Leaders as targets. The RMA allows even more discriminate and direct targeting of a leadership, which is achieved both through better intelligence gathering and analysis and through the more precise application of force. Indeed, the RMA raises the potential of attacking soft targets, such as the bank accounts of enemy leaders. Tools of control may be attacked, and enemy information may be undermined through the use of propaganda or the disruption of communications (including the ability to access websites and alter their contents). 3. Collateral damage. The RMA will further reduce collateral damage through dominant battlespace knowledge, increased transparency, better intelligence in real time, and supremely accurate targeting. 4. Minimized risk. War will be fought at ever-greater range, placing fewer in harm’s way; fewer but better platforms will reduce exposure; and force will be less important than information. 5. Enemy forces. What matters to the RMA is not platforms but information. And although DBK may lead to battlefield success, the real promise is in the avoidance of battle and direct access to the enemy’s political center of gravity.

The Media and War As a result of these developments, the two central features of total war—escalation and participation—are no longer applicable to the West. Instead, Westerners have become spectators, watching their representatives courtesy of the global media. The media have become the “window on the world” (Taylor, 1997: 20), providing Westerners with the images and information necessary to spectate on war. Indeed, for the majority in the West, the media are the only experience of war, and the

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representations of war that they provide therefore become war. Westerners are “witnesses to history via the media rather than . . . actual participants in it” (Taylor, 1997: 99). Much of the recent discussion of the role of the media in wartime has focused on two questions: whether the media can mobilize public opinion to force government action (the so-called CNN effect), or whether politicians can successfully resist such pressure and even exercise some form of control over the media (what is sometimes called “media management”); and whether the media determine the message that is then consumed passively by the public, or whether the public interprets the message with some degree of independence from the media. Initial ideas suggested that the mass media had considerable influence over public opinion, shaping attitudes and determining agendas (Carruthers, 2000: 8; Thornham, 1998). This “media effects” school of thought recognized that the media did not simply reflect reality; rather it was edited. Images of the world were constructed via “an active process of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping, of making things mean” (Thornham, 1998: 215). The news media determines the public’s view of the world: the camera determines what people see and, just as important, what they do not see. This process in turn may be influenced by those who control the media or have influence over it, whether the political establishment, the owners of the media, or other powerful political groups. Such control need not be direct and specific but may be routine through the ability to initiate, define, and provide information to the media (Carruthers, 2000: 8). The problem with this school of thought is that it assumes consumers to be passive, which results in a tendency to overstate the power of the media to determine audience perceptions (Curran and Liebes, 1998: 14; Livingstone, 1998: 240). Instead, media reports and images may be subject to multiple interpretations, and audiences may resist the message provided by the media. In other words, audiences are not “absorbent sponges” (Carruthers, 2000: 8) but are capable of exercising independent thought and judgment. Some researchers welcome this independence as demonstrating that the media and other powerful institutions are limited in their ability to determine the values of society (Livingstone, 1998). Diverse readings of texts and the capacity for interpretation mean that consumers—spectators—are more active than the media effects school would suggest. But there are still limits. The ability to question the media is limited not simply by the lack of alternative sources of information (although this may change with the Internet), but also by the “journalistic ideal of objectivity,” which confers authority onto the media (Pedelty, 1995: 7). The media may not be objective—in

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particular, they may subscribe to certain values and attitudes that influence their presentation and selection of news—but the perceived objectivity and integrity of journalists, particularly when coupled to the “audio-visual truth” of images (Torchi, quoted in Gow, Paterson, and Preston, 1996: 5), disguises bias. Further, news is couched in terms of common cultural reference points and unquestioned values. It is presented as “common sense,” and opposing viewpoints are seen as irrational (Pedelty, 1995: 7–8; Thornham, 1998). Thus Milosevic, Saddam, Osama bin Laden, and others who oppose Western values are portrayed as irrational, madmen, criminals, or simply evil, with the media playing upon the shared values of the West to create a “them and us” mentality, in which Westerners are implicitly in the right and therefore the other is explicitly wrong. In such instances, the selective presentation of issues is obscured. Finally, the ability to interpret the message does not necessarily translate into meaningful possibilities for political action. Nor does the existence of different interpretations necessarily mean active resistance to dominant readings. The challenge to the media’s perspective and the orthodoxy that they may create is therefore weak (Pedelty, 1995; Preston, 1996: 115). Thus although consumers of the media may not be “absorbent sponges,” they remain spectators. What is striking is that the debate is couched in terms not of galvanizing public action but of influencing public opinion to allow others to act (or not to act, as the case may be). In this sense, the role of the media in contemporary war is very different from that of propaganda in previous wars. In total war, the news was usually under the control of the government, and images were used not merely to influence public opinion but to galvanize the public into action, whether on the home front or in the armed services. Even if the news was not under the direct control of the government, the pressure to be “patriotic” was overwhelming. News was therefore used to influence behavior. Even in the Vietnam War, the media were widely seen as being responsible for galvanizing the antiwar protests (Taylor, 1997: 122–123). In contrast, the protests over Kosovo were much less significant than those during the Vietnam War. Of course, one reason was that, unlike during the Vietnam War, conscription and the draft were not introduced. But this difference merely reinforces the shift that has taken place, by which civilians in the West have become spectators of whom no direct action is required (aside from expressions of sympathy such as aid collections for those suffering elsewhere). In spectator-sport war, it is opinions that matter, and here the media play a role. How great a role is unclear, and indeed the independence of the media has been questioned given their reliance upon governments for information and

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images (Shaw, 1996: 74; Young and Jesser, 1997: 2). As Philip Taylor comments, media management in war involves a form of exchange whereby the media trade in their independence for access to and information about the war (Taylor, 1997: 121). In the Gulf War, for example, the “lesson” of Vietnam was learned and the media successfully managed. Not least, frontline reporting was restricted, and instead, much of the information was provided at a distance by the State Department, Pentagon, and White House briefings, further removing Western civilians from the war that was being fought (Carruthers, 2000: 16–17).

Spectators, Sport, and War In this war at a remove, Westerners may sympathize but do not suffer, may empathize but do not experience. But this does not mean they are not engaged. Rather the engagement may be at a variety of levels akin to those of a sports spectator. There are those who watch, unmoved, seeing little of interest or relevance. There are those who are moved for the moment, who share in the transitory joy or sorrow, but soon forget as more direct and immediate stimuli appear. Still others may become knowledgeable in the tactics, strategies, and personalities but are devoid of direct experience. Then there are those for whom the conflict becomes an all-encompassing obsession, involving travel to be near the event but never actual participation (the analog here might be the aid convoys to Bosnia). Like a sports spectator, much of what Westerners see is filtered by the media, the content edited for some purpose, with expert commentary to guide the audience on its way, and the experience as a result becomes further removed. The media decide not only the content of an event that will be shown but also which events will be covered. Of course, they do not have a free hand. Some events—sporting or otherwise—are so important that there may be competition over who has the right to cover them or over who covers them best. But even then, the media have a role not only in editing but in shaping the event, either by their very presence or by financial inducements. The relationship between sports spectators and participants illuminates the relationship between Western society and war further still. Participation in sport is often associated with professionalism, physical (and mental) prowess, and an idealized manly virtue.1 Successful sportsmen and women are portrayed as heroes, possessing “mythical qualities” such as courage and determination—“guts” and “bottle” (Allison, 1986: 5; Mangan 1996c: 36). Witness, for example, the treatment accorded to Steve Redgrave after the Sydney Olympics, not least the

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fact that he was made a knight of the realm, an honor redolent with notions of military honor. Such sporting heroes are seen as virtuous and honorable, not least because of their conduct. The ideal of fair play provides the basis for an ethical framework, promoted to “prevent anarchic turbulence on and off the field” (Mangan, 1996c: 34–35). In contrast, those who break sporting norms and engage in unfair practices are portrayed as villains. Thus, in boxing it is legitimate to punch an opponent’s head, arguably risking brain damage, but to bite his ear is considered beyond the pale. In war it is legitimate to kill thousands of conscripts, many of whom may be serving against their will, but to attack a strategic target and kill a handful of civilians as collateral damage provokes moral outrage. Nor is it legitimate to hijack a civilian airliner and crash it into buildings, civil or military. In contrast, spectatordom is a leisure activity, the “antithesis of sport” (Holt, 1989: 144). As Richard Gruneau notes, spectator sports may also be diversionary activities catering to a public taste for spectacle, revealing cultural decline and a “harbinger of the end of civilisation” (Gruneau, 1993: 86–87). Sports spectatorship, however, is more than mere entertainment. It is not simply a passive activity whereby those watching have no impact upon events on the field of sport and merely react to what happens. Rather spectators create the norms by which the sport is played. Consider soccer. If an attacking forward beats a defender and opens up an opportunity to score, it is considered fair to commit a foul to prevent this from happening—it is even expected of the defender. It is against the rules of the game, but very much within the norms of the sport. In other words, the spectator has drawn up a set of norms that governs behavior. Similarly in war, the spectator, in particular via the media, imposes rules on the participants that may go beyond the rules of strategy or laws of war. Thus in Kosovo, USAF lieutenant general Short wished to adopt a traditional air strategy of a massive knockout blow but was prevented from doing so because public opinion would not stand for it. Instead, and much to his very public chagrin after the war, he was forced to accept a campaign of limited strikes that gradually escalated. Sport and war are governed by norms reflecting society’s expectations about how they should be conducted. Richard Thomas (1986) points out that the “rituals” that characterize modern sport symbolize an ethical framework that can be viewed as “a statement about national culture.” Spectators contribute to a moral dialogue about the virtues valued by a society; and the way in which participants behave, or are expected to behave, cannot be divorced from the society they represent and the spectators constitute (Ashworth, 1971: 45; Caillois, 1971: 29).

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Spectator sports are also closely identified with ideas about community, loyalty, and national identity (Holt, 1989: 144). They are “ritual representations of confrontation” (Faure, 1996: 4): spectators identify with participants and “vicariously experience their actions and emotions—triumph when they win, dejection when they lose” (Dunning 1971: 6; see also Edwards, 1973: 51, 58; and Thomas, 1986: 175). But individual spectators also identify with the larger group of spectators, providing a communal experience that transcends other social barriers (Allison, 1986: 14). Physical proximity is not required for this. The crowd does not have to be present as they watch their representatives for such bonding to occur; rather they can be linked by the media. At major sporting occasions—England playing Argentina in the 1998 soccer World Cup, Redgrave winning a fifth Olympic gold medal—spectator sports become expressions of identity with community and promote social cohesion and national solidarity (Dunning, 1993: 148; Mangan, 1996a: 1). But spectator sports are not only communal bonding experiences; they may also prove instruments of division between communities. Although Taylor notes the ability of sport to transcend national allegiances and promote goodwill (Taylor, 1986: 36–37), it is also capable of the reverse, creating enemy images, a “them and us” mentality, which leads to “aggression, stereotyping and images of inferiority and superiority” (Mangan, 1996a: 1). The parallels between sport and war are similarly illuminating. The two share similar competitive structures. Their language can be, and often is, readily transferred from one to the other. Both share similar celebratory impulses: the ticker tape parade of Gulf War veterans eerily echoed the streams of ripped newspaper greeting soccer clubs in Italy, Argentina, and elsewhere, and Jesse Owens received the same ticker tape parade as Norman Schwarzkopf. Interestingly, the criterion for a good game is often that participants are evenly matched. As Eric Dunning points out, “teams and individuals are never interested in playing against opponents who are weaker than they are. Under such circumstances, they would know that they would win and no test would be involved” (Dunning, 1971: 7; see also Ashworth, 1971: 45–46). Sport, like much of war, is therefore unpredictable, and the element of risk is involved. But when this element of risk is removed (as the West is attempting in the way it now fights its wars), sport becomes a spectacle. Gregory Stone points out that professional wrestling in the United States is no longer a sport but a spectacle in which participants adopt distinct roles for the spectators. The goal of the game here is for the hero to defeat the villain, for good to triumph over evil: “The ‘villains’ and ‘heroes’ of the wrestling stage are in character. They are the dramatis

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personae of a pageant—an expressive drama. Consequently, their roles are predetermined” (Stone, 1971: 59–60). In much the same way, war for the West has become a spectacle rather than a sport. The risks are reduced, the outcome is never in doubt, and the heroes and villains are readily identifiable.2 The spectator-sport metaphor is therefore useful beyond merely the suggestion that the West no longer participates in its wars but rather observes them. It suggests that those who still participate in war—representatives on the field of battle—have distinct virtues that set them apart, but if they fail to live up to these high standards, then they become villains. It further suggests that war has become a spectacle and that when the spectacular is replaced by the mundane, interest will flag. Spectators also impose an ethical code of behavior upon their representatives. They set the boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable conduct. Spectatorship also provides a communal bonding experience, establishing identity but also creating difference and potentially producing enemy imaging. And both sport and war are risky activities in which the results cannot usually be determined in advance. What is unusual in spectator-sport warfare, however, is the manner in which the risks are reduced. The participants in this form of warfare are not evenly matched, and the result is not usually in doubt (at least, not the military result, though the nature of the postconflict settlement and the political situation following a war are much harder to determine). In this situation, war becomes theater with heroes and villains each playing their part. The West’s identification with the heroes—the defenders of liberal values, the villains being authoritarian leaders—serves to reinforce Western identity and to educate publics about who “we” are in relation to “them.” But if war has become a spectacle, when the spectacular is replaced by the mundane, interest will flag. Long, drawn-out campaigns where little happens and victory is not in sight therefore risk losing public support. The spectator-sport metaphor also helps us to understand the events of 11 September 2001, when hijacked aircraft were deliberately crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. These terrorist acts created not only spectacular images but also rendered the West empathic spectators—in watching the destruction, the citizens of the West were made aware of their vulnerability to subsequent acts. Being a spectator was used by the terrorists not to distance the citizens of the West from the attacks but to bring them closer. An essential part of the spectator-sport metaphor is the idea that those watching empathize. The attacks on the World Trade Center in particular produced feelings of empathy: not only were these ordinary citizens working in the West, but they were in

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one of the most famous buildings of one of the most visited cities of the West. Second, the idea of being a spectator implies a degree of helplessness, of merely watching rather than being able to intervene. Nothing could be done to save the twin towers; nothing could be done to save those jumping from them; all that could be done was to spectate. Even the U.S. military was reduced to the role of spectator on 11 September. Finally, being a spectator creates the expectation of removal from events, of watching rather than participating. That citizens of the West were suddenly made targets and victims upsets these expectations and creates a sense both of outrage and that the government must react. Much like other tragedies in which spectators became victims (the soccer tragedies of Hillsborough and Heysel are analogs here), there is a demand for action to prevent them from happening again, to ensure that spectators will not suffer in the future. Finally, it is important to remember that war is not sport. Spectator-sport warfare is a metaphor. Bill Shankly famously quipped that soccer was not a matter of life and death, it was something much more serious. War is a matter of life and death for those involved, and its consequences are deadly serious.

Notes 1. Both sport and war are gendered activities. The virtues expressed in both are “manly” virtues, and sport has often been seen as preparation for battle, not least for instilling the same qualities (Allison, 1986: 5; Mangan, 1996b: 10–11; van Creveld, 1990–1991: 183–185). 2. What is interesting is what happens when the predicted result does not happen—as with the United States in Somalia (and, two generations previously, in Vietnam). Disillusionment, self-doubt, even pique—refusing to play in the next game—begin to appear.

APPENDIX THE INCIDENCE OF WAR: EXPLAINING THE DATA compiled by Alex Bellamy and Rebecca Jones

ables A.1 and A.2 show the number of militarized interstate disputes per year between 1945 and 1992 and the hostility level of those disputes. More accurately, they illustrate the frequency and nature of militarized interstate disputes that occurred during the period in question. Table A.2 illustrates the frequency of interstate war as a percentage of the number of militarized interstate disputes in a given five-year period. The statistics were generated using data compiled in the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute Database (1996). The disputes included in the table are thereby based on the definition of war used by the Correlates of War (CoW) project. An interstate war is defined as an armed clash between the armies of two or more sovereign states that results in at least 1,000 battle deaths (see Small and Singer, 1982). Although Table A.1 illustrates an irregular pattern of occurrence of militarized interstate disputes in this period, it is evident that the occurrence of interstate war remains somewhat stable. Although the CoW database provides detailed information on the frequency and nature of militarized interstate disputes, it makes no reference to other types of conflict. Intrastate and extrasystemic wars are ignored, and therefore the data provide an incomplete picture of militarized disputes and war throughout the period (Whelon et al., 1996). Only 18 percent of all wars are classed as interstate according to the CoW definition (Barkawi, 1998; Holsti, 1996), which is based on the definition of the state in terms of sovereignty and clearly defined geographic borders. However, arguably, the period between 1945 and 1992 was characterized by considerable change in state formation and the making and remaking of historical sovereign state boundaries, which was in part a result of decolonization during the period. Thus, based on this evolutionary period, the definitions and classifications used by the

T

153

Table A.1

The Hostility Level of Militarized Disputes, 1945–1992

Year

No. of Interstate Militarized Disputes

1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

14 6 4 7 20 16 14 16 21 20 16 23 17 35 34 30 31 31 33 29 34 27 30 22 32 15 25 17 21 25 30 29 35 30 20 30 25 35 34 36 36 40 66 31 23 11 11 24

Threat of Force

1 1 2 2 1 2 1 3 2 1 1 2 2 2

1 3 1 7 2 3 2 3 3 2 1 1 1

Display of Force

Use of Force

3 1 1 1 4 3 2 3 4 4 5 6 2 6 5 5 9 7 4 3 6 2 5 3 4 2 7 1 7 5 4 5 9 8 7 12 11 9 10 2 4 6 8 3 2

10 5 1 5 16 12 12 13 17 16 20 16 14 28 27 23 20 24 27 24 24 22 23 18 25 10 14 16 14 18 22 24 24 20 13 14 14 22 24 33 32 30 55 26 20 9 5 21

4 3

War 1 2 1 1

1 1

1

1 1 1 1 1 1 2

1 1 1 2 2 1

1

1 1

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Appendix

Table A.2

Five-Year Period

Interstate War as a Percentage of Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1945–1992 (five-year periods) Number of Threat of Disputes Force

1945–1949 1950–1954 1955–1959 1960–1964 1965–1969 1970–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984 1985–1989 1990–1992 (three-year period)

Display of Force

Use of Force

War

War as Percentage of Total Disputes

37 70 105 118 112 72 103 107 163

4 1 2 2 4 4 4 3 1

7.8 1.1 1.5 1.3 2.8 3.9 2.8 1.9 0.5

35

1

2.2

51 87 135 154 145 103 144 160 196

4 6 9 5 4 6 9

10 16 24 28 20 22 33 44 23

46

2

7

CoW project cannot account for all the conflicts that occurred. Not least, a war between a sovereign state and a local militarized group in a Third World state does not fall into the CoW definition of interstate war and is thereby a blatant example of how the narrow definition of war employed by the CoW project excludes nonstate actors who are engaged in warlike scenarios with a sovereign adversary. Of particular significance to this project is that the CoW data do not allow a comparison between the incidence of interstate wars (or militarized disputes) and intrastate conflicts. The data for Table A.2 were therefore generated using a variety of sources, including the SIPRI Yearbook; annual editions of Royal United Services Institute and Brassey’s Yearbook; annual editions of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Strategic Survey; Evan Luard, War in International Society; Patrick Brogan, World Conflicts. The data are presented in detail below as “The Incidence of Warfare.” The threshold for inclusion into these statistics is based upon the SIPRI definition of a “major armed conflict.” According to SIPRI, a major armed conflict is responsible for at least 1,000 battle-related deaths, recorded from the beginning of the conflict. As with any definition of conflict or war, the application of such a rigid threshold produces anomalies. By not charting the number of battle-related deaths on a year-by-year basis, but instead to the commencement of the conflict, some conflicts appear year after year, even if the level of violence has been relatively low in a particular year. Thus, throughout the 1980s, Northern Ireland appears in the statistics, as does the India-Pakistan conflict, despite the fact that both had become relatively low-level conflicts. Conversely, the figures for 1990 do not contain an entry for one of the most significant acts of

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overt international aggression since the end of World War II, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This is because SIPRI recorded fewer than 1,000 battle-related deaths in this action. Accuracy is reduced because precise casualty figures are difficult to obtain for protracted conflicts such as those in Cambodia and Chad. Finally, SIPRI only commenced their yearly studies of major armed conflicts in 1986, and the most recent information is not yet available. In using other sources, therefore, we have attempted to carry across the SIPRI definition, though this cannot be a pure science, both because of the lack of accurate information and because other sources consulted inevitably employ different techniques in defining “conflicts” and “wars.” The taxonomy deployed here is somewhat different from the SIPRI taxonomy. SIPRI located three types of conflict: interstate conflicts, internal conflicts, and state-formation conflicts. We share the SIPRI definition of an interstate conflict as being one in which the armed forces of (at least) two internationally recognized states are battling each other. SIPRI offers only a narrow definition of internal conflict as being a conflict in which a government is pitted against an organized opposition demanding control over the government. A state-formation conflict is an internal conflict in which a group is seeking a fundamental revision to the state, such as the secession of a specified territory. The latter two aspects of this taxonomy are not helpful to our project, as they exclude those conflicts that are neither properly interstate nor solely internal. Thus, we replace “internal conflict” with “intrastate conflict,” which we define as a conflict in which one or none of the combatants is an internationally recognized state. The final category, which we introduce, is that of “other” conflicts. For example, these may be conflicts in which more than one internationally recognized state is in combat with a rebel group (such as the Cambodian and Vietnamese governments against the Khmer Rouge in 1989), or where the armed forces of several states are involved but are not in direct conflict with each other (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999). From year to year, the status of some conflicts changes. For example, in 1991 there was an interstate war between Yugoslavia and Croatia. Although Croatia was not formally recognized by the European Union (EU) until 15 January 1992, by the end of 1991 Croatia had declared independence, and it had been recognized by Germany and recognized in principle by the EU. Furthermore, SIPRI defines this war as “govt. Yugoslavia v. govt. Croatia.” By 1992, however, the conflict was defined as an intrastate conflict because the Yugoslav National Army had withdrawn and the conflict was now between the rebel Serbs and the government of Croatia. There are several other instances of conflicts shifting in nature like this one.

Appendix

157

The Incidence of Warfare: A Chronology 1970

Interstate conflict: United States–Vietnam Intrastate conflict: Cambodia, Laos, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Philippines

1971

Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan, United States– Vietnam Intrastate conflict: Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Oman, Uganda, Cambodia, Laos, Northern Ireland

1972

Interstate conflict: United States–Vietnam Intrastate conflict: Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Burundi, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Cambodia, Laos, Northern Ireland, Oman

1973

Interstate conflict: United States–Vietnam, Arab states– Israel Intrastate conflict: Chile, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Cambodia, Laos, Northern Ireland, Western Sahara, Oman

1974

Interstate conflict: United States–Vietnam, Turkey-Cyprus, China-Vietnam, Iran-Iraq Intrastate conflict: Ethiopia, Iraq, Pakistan, Chile, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Cambodia, Laos, Northern Ireland, Indonesia (East Timor), Philippines, Iran, Western Sahara, Ethiopia, Niger, Oman

1975

Interstate conflict; United States–Vietnam Intrastate conflict: Lebanon, Cambodia, Indonesia, Western Sahara, Ethiopia, Laos, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Turkey, Bangladesh, Argentina, India, Oman, Indonesia Other: Angola, Lebanon

1976

Interstate conflict: South Africa–Namibia Intrastate conflict: Argentina, Indonesia (2), Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Pakistan, Chile, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Israel, Sudan, South Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Western Sahara Other: Angola, Lebanon

158

Appendix

1977

Interstate conflict: Ethiopia-Somalia Intrastate conflict: Turkey, Argentina, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Chile, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Northern Ireland, Israel, India, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sudan, Western Sahara Other: Angola, Lebanon, Zaire

1978

Interstate conflict: Tanzania-Uganda, Somalia-Ethiopia, Rhodesia-Zambia, Israel-Lebanon, Morocco-Algeria, Vietnam-Cambodia Intrastate conflict: Nicaragua, Iran, Israel, Northern Ireland, Burma, South Yemen, Bolivia, Western Sahara, Turkey, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Uganda, Iraq Other: Chad (government of France versus rebels), Zaire

1979

Interstate conflict: Vietnam-Cambodia, Tanzania-Uganda, Iran-Iraq, China-Vietnam, Rhodesia-Zambia, North Yemen–South Yemen, China-Laos, Pakistan-Afghanistan Intrastate conflict: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Burma, Uganda, Northern Ireland, Israel, Philippines, Iran, Western Sahara, Ethiopia, Iraq, Indonesia Other: Afghanistan, Lebanon, Chad, Angola (South Africa, South-West African Peoples Organization), Cambodia

1980

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, Ethiopia-Somalia, South Africa–Angola, China-Vietnam Intrastate conflict: El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, Iran (2), Northern Ireland, Tunisia, Guatemala, Colombia, Philippines, Western Sahara, Israel, Chad, Mozambique, Chile, Burma, Turkey, India, Upper Volta, Indonesia Other: Lebanon, Afghanistan, Cambodia

1981

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, China-Vietnam, South Africa–Namibia, India-Pakistan, South Africa–Angola, Sudanese rebels–Libya, Ecuador-Peru Intrastate conflict: Nicaragua, Mozambique, Peru, El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Belize, Guatemala, Uganda (2), Burma, Bolivia, Bangladesh, South Africa, Israel, Western Sahara, Honduras, Indonesia Other: Central African Republic (government of France versus rebels), Cambodia, Chad (Libya-Cuba), Afghanistan, Lebanon

Appendix

159

1982

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, United Kingdom–Argentina, South Africa–Angola, South Yemen–Oman Intrastate conflict: Syria, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Peru, Western Sahara, Somalia, El Salvador, Ethiopia (Eritrea), Uganda, Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Burma, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Israel Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Lebanon

1983

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, South Africa–Angola, United States–Grenada Intrastate conflict: Sri Lanka (2), Sudan, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Iran, Iraq, India, Indonesia (2), Burma, Israel, Turkey, Guatemala, Philippines, Pakistan, Syria, Bangladesh, Western Sahara, Northern Ireland Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Lebanon

1984

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, South Africa–Angola, China-Vietnam Intrastate conflict: India (2), Sudan, Sri Lanka, Mozambique (2), Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chile, Peru, Colombia, South Africa, Israel, Burma, Western Sahara, Uganda, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Lebanon

1985

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, South Africa–Angola Intrastate conflict: Nicaragua, Mozambique, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, India, Israel, South Africa, Western Sahara, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, Burma Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Lebanon

1986

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, China-Vietnam, Chad (government versus rebels/Libya), Ethiopia-Somalia, South Africa–Namibia Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran (government versus Kurds), Iraq (government versus Kurds), Lebanon, Syria (government versus Sunni rebels), India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia (East Timor), Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Uganda, Western Sahara (Morocco), Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru

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Appendix

Other: Cambodia (government of Vietnam versus Khmer Rouge), Laos (government of Vietnam versus National Liberation Front [NLF]), Afghanistan (government of Soviet Union versus rebels), Lebanon 1987

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, India-Pakistan, China-Vietnam, Laos (government of Vietnam versus NLF/Thailand), Angola/Cuba versus National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)/South Africa, Chad/France versus opposition/Libya, Ethiopia-Somalia, South Africa–Namibia, Vietnam-Thailand Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel– Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Syria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, Ethiopia, South Africa (versus African National Congress), Sudan, Uganda, Western Sahara, Zimbabwe, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru Other: Cambodia, Malaysia (government of Thailand versus Communist Party of Malaysia), Lebanon, Mozambique (government of Zimbabwe, Tanzania versus National Resistance Movements), Afghanistan

1988

Interstate conflict: Iran-Iraq, India-Pakistan, China-Vietnam, Laos/Vietnam versus Thailand, Angola, Chad/France versus Libya, Ethiopia-Somalia, South Africa–Namibia Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel-PLO, Burma, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Western Sahara, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mozambique

1989

Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan, Namibia–South Africa, Panama–United States Intrastate conflict: Romania, Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel-PLO, Turkey (government versus Kurdistan Workers’ Party), Bangladesh, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Chad, Ethiopia, Western Sahara, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru Other: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola (government of Cuba versus UNITA), Mozambique, Lebanon

Appendix

161

1990

Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel-PLO, Turkey, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Chad, Ethiopia, Liberia, Western Sahara, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru Other: Mozambique, Lebanon

1991

Interstate conflict: Yugoslavia-Slovenia, Yugoslavia-Croatia, Iraq–Kuwait/UN, Liberia (including Burkina Faso) Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel-PLO, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Western Sahara, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru Other: Mozambique

1992

Interstate conflict: Azerbaijan-Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (government of Yugoslavia versus Croatia), India-Pakistan Intrastate conflict: Croatia, Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel-PLO, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Angola, Chad, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru Other: Mozambique

1993

Interstate conflict: Azerbaijan-Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (government of Yugoslavia versus Croatia), Georgia-Abkhazia Intrastate conflict: Croatia, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru Other: Tajikistan/Russia/Uzbekistan versus Popular Democratic Army(PDA)

1994

Interstate conflict: Azerbaijan-Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (government of Yugoslavia versus Croatia), Georgia-Abkhazia, Yemen–Democratic Republic of Yemen

162

Appendix

Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, IsraelPLO, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru Other: Tajikistan/Russia/Uzbekistan versus PDA 1995

Intrastate conflict: Croatia, Russia (Chechnya), Iran, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru Other: Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina/ Croatia versus Bosnian Serbs), Tajikistan

1996

Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan Intrastate conflict: Russia (Chechnya), Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Angola, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru Other: Tajikistan

1997

Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan, Congo (Brazzaville) versus rebels/Angola, Zaire-Rwanda Intrastate conflict: Northern Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Burundi, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, Peru

1998

Interstate conflict: Ethiopia-Eritrea Intrastate conflict: Guinea Bissau, Yugoslavia (Kosovo), Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Turkey Other: Democratic Republic of Congo

1999

Interstate conflict: Ethiopia-Eritrea, NATO-Yugoslavia Intrastate conflict: Guinea Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Angola, Colombia, Yugoslavia (Kosovo) Other: Democratic Republic of Congo

ACRONYMS

ABM ATACMS AWACS BBC BMD C4I CoW DBK EC ETs EU FAC FOFA GPS HCDC IFOR IISS ISR IT JDAM J-STARS KLA MOD NAO NATO NLF NMD

antiballistic missile Army Tactical Missile System Airborne Warning and Control System British Broadcasting Corporation ballistic missile defense command, control, communications, computer applications, and intelligence Correlates of War dominant battlespace knowledge European Community emerging technologies European Union Foreign Affairs Committee (House of Commons) Follow-on Forces Attack global positioning system House of Commons Defence Committee Implementation Force (Bosnia) International Institute for Strategic Studies intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information technology Joint Direct Attack Munition Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Kosovo Liberation Army Ministry of Defence (UK) National Audit Office (UK) North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Liberation Front National Missile Defense 163

164

OOTW OTA PC PDA PGM PLO RAF RMA SAM SAS SDI SFOR SIPRI SLAM UNITA UNOSOM UNPROFOR USAF

Acronyms

operations other than war Office of Technology Assessment (U.S.) personal computer Popular Democratic Army precision-guided munition Palestine Liberation Organization Royal Air Force Revolution in Military Affairs surface-to-air missile Special Air Service Strategic Defense Initiative Stabilization Force (Bosnia) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Stand-off Land Attack Missile National Union for the Total Independence of Angola United Nations Operation in Somalia UN Protection Force United States Air Force

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INDEX

Afghanistan, 27, 34, 53, 61, 64, 66, 68, 77, 112, 124. See also September 11, 2001; Taliban Aideed, Mohamed Farah, 56, 63–64, 96. See also Somalia Airpower, 2, 51, 58, 77, 79–82, 83, 87–113, 123, 143–144; strategic, 10, 14, 18, 20, 24, 25, 32, 52, 80, 81, 106, 108–111, 112, 133 American Civil War, 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 23, 24 American Revolution, 8–9, 12, 13, 31 Army XXI, 127 Asymmetric warfare, 28, 29, 55, 62, 77, 99–100, 129, 139 Atomic weapons. See Nuclear weapons Ballistic missile defense, 62, 100, 116, 134 Blair, Tony, 56, 64, 66 Blitzkrieg, 115, 117 Body bag problem. See Casualty tolerance Bosnia, 4n1, 29, 53, 56, 58, 70–71, 72–73, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 101, 105, 106–107, 124, 125. See also Operation Deliberate Force

Britain, 1, 33, 39, 69, 113n2 British Army, 6, 55, 69, 70, 77n2, 92 Brute force, 82, 100, 101–102, 103–104, 107, 112–113 Bush, George, Sr., 91 Bush, George W., 64 Casualties of war, 3, 4, 17–18, 38, 42, 50n3, 56, 72–73, 77n2, 84–85, 102, 119–120, 134–135, 139, 155–156 Casualty tolerance, 70–73, 76, 84, 92–93 Chechnya, 57, 96 Chemical weapons, 16, 17 Clark, General Wesley, 61, 132 Clausewitz, Carl von, 12, 13, 14, 29, 30–31, 51, 52, 56–57, 69 Clinton, William J., 36, 64, 65 Coercion, 82, 95–96, 100–105, 106, 107–108, 112–113, 144 Cold War, 6, 28, 35, 36, 41, 54, 61, 62, 70 Collateral damage, 56, 65–67, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90, 91, 94, 103, 112, 116, 137–138, 143, 144, 145. See also Kosovo; Noncombatant immunity; Operation Allied Force

183

184

Index

Command and control, 121, 126–127, 129 Conscription, 7, 19, 31, 69 Cook, Robin, 64, 66 Correlates of War project, 3, 50n3, 58, 153–155 Costs of war, 28, 29–36, 47, 49–50, 135, 136, 143, 144, 145. See also Casualties of war Creveld, Martin van, 56–58 Cyberwar. See Revolution in Military Affairs Defense industry, 47 Democratic peace, 36–44, 49–50, 53 Deterrence, 5, 10, 15, 30, 35, 136, 137. See also Nuclear weapons Digital battlefield, 123, 124, 126–129 Dominant battlespace knowledge (DBK), 121, 122, 123, 125, 135, 145 Doyle, Michael, 36–37, 40, 43 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 14 Escalation, 4, 12–19, 25, 27, 31, 51–52, 55, 56, 62, 145 European Union, 28–29, 44, 45, 48. See also Integration Expeditionary capabilities, 75, 76, 144, 145 Falklands War, 3, 54–55, 77n3, 83, 87, 88, 97, 119 Fragmentation of states, 57, 61 France, 28, 34, 39, 41, 69, 88. See also French Revolution French Revolution, 8–9, 12, 13, 31 Frunze, Mikhail, 4 Fuller, Major General J. F. C., 5, 28 Giddens, Anthony, 47

Globalization, 39, 44–50, 57, 85 Gray, Colin, 80–81, 83, 88, 124–125, 136 Guibert, Jacques-Antoine de, 12–13 Gulf War (1990–1991), 29, 34, 53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 77n1, 77n2, 79–80, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 103, 104, 105, 110, 115, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 129, 137, 150 Haiti, 61, 68, 70, 71 Howard, (Sir) Michael, 8, 13 Ignatieff, Michael, 55 Intrastate war: rise of, 54, 56–58 Intervention, 37, 42, 47, 54, 56, 61, 75 Industrialization, 6–7, 9, 13, 19, 23, 30, 31, 32–34, 71, 79 Information technology. See Revolution in Military Affairs Integration, 44–50 Intelligence, 95–96, 99, 106, 112, 121, 122, 127, 128, 137 Iraq, 27, 34, 53, 58, 64, 65, 68, 70, 74, 79, 89, 101, 112. See also Gulf War; Operation Desert Fox; Operation Northern Watch Jews: Nazi extermination of, 6, 10, 18, 24, 32 Kaldor, Mary, 53 Keegan, (Sir) John, 70, 106 Korean War, 5–6, 27 Kosovo, 21, 27, 29, 34, 53, 55, 56, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 74, 80–84, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94–98, 106, 107, 108, 110–101, 113n2, 124, 132, 137, 139, 147, 149. See also North Atlantic Treaty

Index

Organization; Operation Allied Force Land power, 82–85, 95, 97, 103, 105–106, 107 Libicki, Martin, 125, 126, 127–128, 136 Liddell Hart, Captain Sir Basil, 5, 35 Limited war, 5–6, 10, 13, 24–25, 27, 29, 35, 54 Localization of war, 29, 56, 58–62, 75, 143 Ludendorff, Erich von, 14, 23, 39 Mann, Michael, 29, 54–55 Marwick, Arthur, 19, 20, 21 Media, 67–68, 145–148. See also Propaganda Milosevic, Slobodan, 44, 56, 64, 66, 74, 94, 96, 99, 106, 147 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard (later Viscount Montgomery of Alamein), 7, 16, 63 Mueller, John, 34–35, 49 Napoleon Bonaparte, 8, 9, 13, 19, 31, 74 National missile defence (NMD). See Ballistic missile defense Nationalism, 52, 57, 71 Naval power. See Sea power Noncombatant immunity, 7, 8, 10, 11, 20, 32, 74, 75, 102. See also Collateral damage North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 1, 41, 42, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 81, 87, 90, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 106, 108, 111, 117, 118, 124, 139. See also Operation Allied Force

185

Nuclear weapons, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35–36, 134. See also Deterrence Operation Allied Force, 1, 2, 27, 66, 67, 73, 80, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 105, 107, 112, 113n3. See also Kosovo Operation Deliberate Force, 4n1, 73, 74, 78n4, 79–80, 90, 106, 107, 112. See also Bosnia Operation Desert Fox, 1, 27, 53, 58, 64, 65, 70, 91–92, 98. See also Iraq Operation Desert Storm, 92, 110, 112, 115. See also Gulf War; Iraq Operation Northern Watch, 98 Operation Overlord, 14 Owens, Admiral William A, 120–122, 135, 136 Pape, Robert A., 82, 108–111, 113n3 Participation of society in war, 1–2, 4, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 19–24, 25, 29, 32, 52–53, 55, 68–69, 145 Passchendaele, battle of, 16, 24 Pearl Harbor, battle of, 14, 52 Poison gas. See Chemical weapons Precision-guided munition (PGM), 117, 121, 123, 124, 137. See also Airpower; Targeting Prisoners, 16–17 Propaganda, 10, 16, 17, 23, 62–63, 96 Regime targeting. See Targeting Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 2, 51, 79, 115–141, 144–145 Robertson, George (later Lord Robertson of Port Ellen), 62, 67 Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin, 6

186

Index

Royal Air Force (RAF), 66, 67, 92, 97. See also Airpower Russia, 19, 21, 61, 96, 107. See also Soviet Union Ryan, General Michael (USAF), 90, 94, 108

Terrorism, 28, 29, 61, 62, 64, 77, 99–100, 130, 131, 139, 151–152 Thirty Years’ War, 11, 32 Total war, 2, 4, 5–12, 20, 22, 24–25, 28, 37, 51, 53–54, 55, 56, 62, 71–72, 85, 86, 143

Saddam Hussein, 44, 56, 64, 66, 77n1, 93, 96, 99, 110, 147 Schwarzkopf, General H. Norman, 64, 73, 89–90, 150 Sea power, 80–82, 84, 85–87, 105–106 September 11, 2001, 3, 28, 29, 61, 64, 76–77, 139, 151–152. See also Afghanistan; Terrorism Shaw, Martin, 55, 69 Short, Lieutenant General Michael (USAF), 108, 149 Somalia, 53, 61, 63–64, 70–71, 93, 96, 119, 152n2 Somme, battle of the, 24, 31–32 Soviet Union, 14, 18, 23, 32, 41, 52, 57, 63, 85, 118–119. See also Russia; Frunze, Mikhail Spectator-sport warfare, 2, 4, 13, 29, 51, 54–55, 62, 63, 85, 87, 90, 92, 106, 116, 135, 138, 143–152 Sport and war, 3, 148–152 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 3, 50n3, 155–156 Strategic bombing. See Airpower, strategic Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). See Ballistic missile defense

United Kingdom. See Britain United Nations, 97 United States, 17, 18, 23, 27, 28, 32, 36, 39, 53, 63–64, 69, 76, 81, 95, 96, 102, 104, 112, 120, 135–136. See also American Civil War; American Revolution U.S. Air Force, 65, 88, 89, 92, 108, 112. See also Airpower

Taliban, 27, 53, 64, 66, 77. See also Afghanistan Targeting, 56, 64–65, 67, 68, 75, 76, 81, 90–91, 94, 95, 98, 106, 113n3, 122, 134, 137, 143, 144, 145 Terraine, John, 25

Verdun, battle of, 14, 24 Vietnam War, 77n1, 84, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 118, 125, 147, 152n2 Wars of choice, 69, 72, 81, 143 Warden, John, 64, 110 Waterloo, battle of, 31 Women in war, 7, 11, 12, 21, 22–23, 53 World Trade Center attacks (2001), 3, 55, 76, 99, 139, 151–152. See also September 11, 2001; Terrorism World War I, 5, 7, 9, 13–14, 16, 17, 20, 21–25, 30, 31–32, 35, 79 World War II, 1–2, 5, 7, 10–11, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 21–25, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 50n3, 52, 63, 80, 81, 86, 91, 92, 96, 104, 105, 108, 115, 125, 133, 134 Wounded, 16–17 Yugoslavia, 57, 69, 79, 85, 87, 88, 97, 119 Zones of peace and conflict, 37, 40, 41, 43

ABOUT THE BOOK

ollowing a century dominated by global conflict—and despite the unchanging nature of the human suffering it causes—the nature of war itself, argues Colin McInnes, has been transformed for the West. Spectator-Sport War considers the key developments that have led to this metamorphosis, ranging from new geopolitical relationships to new technological advances. McInnes shows that, even in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States and the military action in Afghanistan, war has direct meaning for only a small minority in the West. It is no longer participatory for Western society as a whole; it is something removed, watched from afar. The far-reaching implications of this phenomenon, for both the military and the broader community, are explored in the final chapter of the book.

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Colin McInnes is professor of international politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His many publications on security and strategy include NATO’s Changing Security Agenda and Hot War, Cold War: The British Army’s Way of Warfare. In 1999, he was appointed special adviser to the British House of Commons Defence Committee.

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