The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (12 page)

In the current age, many of the most powerful economies in the world are united under the loose rubric “the West,” which includes the former nations of much of the British Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.), the transatlantic NATO alliance (most of the European Union and the United States), and democratic nations of the Pacific (Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.), along with miscellaneous kindred allies that are capitalist and democratic such as India and Israel. At present there is virtually no likelihood that we will see decisive battles between any of these similarly minded states, even though a mere seventy years ago most of them squared off in various temporary alliances against one another in terrible battles at places like the Ardennes, Arnheim, the Falaise Gap, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa.

While consensual states such as ancient Athens, the mercantile Venetian Republic, and the contemporary United States proved to be both ferocious and relentless warmakers, these democratically inclined states rarely fought like kind. The Athenian attack on democratic Syracuse was an anomaly. The periodic Venetian rivalry against the Florentine Republic and the War of 1812 were the exceptions rather than the rule. There now are more democratic states in existence than at any time in civilization’s history, suggesting that while they may continue to attack nondemocratic rivals with some frequency, they are less likely to turn on one another.

The Future of Battle

I
N THE IMMEDIATE
present, we can imagine two scenarios for decisive, conventional battle. One is between rival nations that have formidable armored and infantry forces of roughly the same size and that are in rough proximity to one another—India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, Taiwan and the Peoples’ Republic of China. Such matchups, however, are rare in the scope of contemporary world rivalries. More important, those states most likely to engage in such conventional battles are precisely the same contestants that might be deterred by fears of an escalation of their fights into a nuclear confrontation.

The world at large—but especially the immediate neighbors of India and Pakistan—has an interest in ensuring that sudden flare-ups along the Kashmir borderlands do not evolve into monstrous conventional set battles that themselves evolve into a nuclear exchange. If North Korean armored divisions, under a protective volley of supporting missile and artillery fire, cross into South Korea, the vastly outnumbered American forces might consider the option of tactical nuclear weapons to save the prosperous and democratic south. All these nightmarish scenarios are known to interested regional parties, and may explain the recent absence of conventional battles between such bitter rivals.

A second scenario is perhaps more common, but still does not quite constitute reciprocal conventional battle as we have know it: the asymmetrical wars between large westernized militaries and poorer, less-organized terrorists, insurgents, and piratical forces. The list of such “half battle” theaters where conventional forces have battled unconventional guerrillas is almost endless—Afghanistan, Grozny, Iraq, Kashmir, Mogadishu, and the Somali coast, to name a few. Yet they all share one trait: No indigenous force dares to come out in the open, marshal its resources, and test head-on the firepower and discipline of a westernized force. History’s record on that account—from Tenochtitlán to Omdurman—is not encouraging for those who might try.

True, insurgent groups sometimes fight one another, such as the Shiite-Kurdish-Sunni sectarian violence in Iraq, or the Tutsi-Hutu killing spree in Rwanda. But in those instances—while the ongoing, relentless violence in the aggregate can be every bit as lethal as a the one-day toll of an Austerlitz or Gettysburg—neither side has the resource, logistics, or organization to commit to or sustain a set battle.

On very rare occasions a weak state has either foolishly challenged in conventional fashion the United States or its allies or has been the subject of a surprise invasion. And while there has often loomed the specter of an old-fashion collision of arms, the obvious imbalance in conventional resources ensured that the result was relatively brief, one-sided, and mostly a rout—as we saw in the “Mother of All Battles” in January 1991, the NATO air assault against Slobodan Milošević (1999), the bombing of Tripoli (1986), the earlier British-Argentine showdown at Goose Green, Falklands Islands (1982), and the American invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989).

Those who have successfully attacked the United States—in Lebanon (1983), at the Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia (1996), the American East African embassies (1999), the U.S.S.
Cole
(2000), and on September 11, 2001—did so as terrorists. And if nation-states other than Afghanistan sponsored such radical Islamist groups, they were careful to offer a deniability of culpability, preventing an all-out conventional war with the United States that they would inevitably lose.

Just as important as the nature of the combatants and the world political landscape in explaining the decline of conventional battles are other factors such as technology and the globalized communications of the twenty-first century. The conventional battlefield can now be seen and mapped to the smallest pebble. Aerial photography and second-by-second updated video-carrying drones ensure that surprise is rare. Potential combatants know far better the odds in advance. They can download minute information about their potential adversary from the Internet. Generals can see streaming videos of his pre-battle preparations and calculate to some degree the subsequent cost.

Uncertainty and the unknown were often essential to the course of decisive battle, since each opposing force usually felt it had some chance of operational success. If the British had satellite reconnaissance about the German lines in the days before and during the Somme, they might have curtailed their suicidal assaults. If the Americans had live streaming video of Japanese forces fortifying bunkers on Okinawa, they might not have chosen to assault frontally the Shuri Line. Pickett’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg was predicated on an erroneous assumption that there was an especially weak spot in the Union army’s line—a conjecture that would have been easily disproved if General Robert E. Lee had a Predator drone at his disposal. We live in an age of successful surveillance when the counterresponse—jamming video feeds, destroying satellites, or short-circuiting electronic devices on a massive scale—has not yet caught up.

Weaponry likewise is not static. It also resides within a constant challenge-and-response cycle between offense and defense, armor and arms, surveillance and the maintenance of secrecy—a tension in which one periodically but temporarily trumps the other. Body armor may soon advance to the point of offering, if for a brief period only, protection against the bullet, which centuries ago rendered chain and plate mail useless. The satellite may become nonoperational by the satellite killer. The aerial drone soon may be forced down by more sophisticated electronic jamming.

Yet for now the arts of information gathering about an enemy trump his ability to maintain secrecy—and that too lessens the chance that thousands of soldiers will be willing to ride out to horrific battle, especially if they know they are being watched continuously on video by their adversaries. The conditions to enter decisive battle involve risk, delusions of grandeur, megalomania even—it’s the irrational who thrive on ignorance and misinformation.

Just as important are the controversies concerning lethality and cost of the new munitions. To wage a single decisive battle between tens of thousands of combatants along the lines of a Gaugamela or a Verdun would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and is beyond the resources of most belligerents. A single B-2 bomber on patrol overhead represents nearly a one-billion-dollar investment. Abrams tanks cost more than four million dollars. Single cruise missiles are at least a million dollars. One GPS-guided artillery shell may cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; an artillery platform could expend over ten million dollars in ordnance in a few hours. Even a solder’s M-4 assault rifle runs well over a thousand dollars. The result is that very few states can afford to outfit an army of, say, one hundred thousand infantry, supported by high-tech air, naval, and artillery fire—much less to keep it well supplied for the duration of battle. There is less likelihood, then, that Colombia or Venezuela would have the capital to deploy for very long two hundred thousand infantry soldiers in a vast collision of sophisticated arms.

Even in the smaller decisive battles of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when armies were not huge and the weapons were cheap in comparison with today’s models, both Israel and Egypt had to have the Soviet Union and the United States send in massive amounts of new weaponry shortly after the commencement of fighting. Arab and Israeli arsenals were near depletion within hours. Neither side had the resources to buy and transport replacement munitions without wealthier patrons—who themselves soon complained of the cost and difficulty of such resupply.

We have not seen a repeat of the Sinai battles of 1973 for various reasons—growing common regional interests between Israel and Egypt, satellite surveillance, the absence of an Arab nuclear patron to provide backup should an Egyptian gambit fail. But prominent among them is the cost of any such engagement, and the difficulty of finding an industrial big brother willing and able to budget billions for such efforts. Take away Iranian money, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas might have no missiles at their disposal.

In some cases, one belligerent may have the resources to offer a challenge to decisive battle, but it’s unlikely that an enemy could be found with a similar hope to win through a head-on confrontation. Again, the frontline Arab states have for more than thirty years given up such a dream, as has Iran in its various aggressions against U.S. allies in Iraq and Lebanon.

The current ascendant anthropological notion in the West that war may well be unnatural, preventable, and the result of rational grievances—that can, with proper training and education, be eliminated or at least curtailed—perhaps has also made battle less tenable among the general public. To the millions of teachers, social workers, academics, medical professionals, and politicians in the West who are invested in such laudable notions, battle is seen as retrograde, a Neanderthal rejection of the entire promise of higher education itself. And so a sizable population of influential professionals in Europe and the United States actively opposes military action of any sort—and especially the prospect of a traditional slugfest in which repellently high casualties on one side would be inevitable. Such makers of public and often government opinion may likewise have played an indirect role in temporarily discouraging even the semblance of major conventional military confrontations.

The bombing of fleeing Iraqi bandit brigades from Kuwait on the so-called Highway of Death in the first Gulf War (1991) was halted by popular outrage because of the televised carnage. The argument that such enemies who had just committed pillage and rapine in Kuwait should be punished or preempted, given that they were likely to regroup back in Iraq to slaughter Kurdish and Shiite innocents, could hardly trump the Western abhorrence at the images of death on millions of television screens. Russia’s shelling and destruction of Grozny escaped world condemnation only because a news blackout ensured Westerners would see little of mass death—and nuclear, oil-rich, and unpredictable strongman Vladimir Putin would have cared little if they had.

To suggest that Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel, or Syria and Israel, when the next Middle East war breaks out, be allowed to fight each other until one side wins and the other loses, and thus the source of their conflict be adjudicated by the verdict of the battlefield, is now seen not only as passé but also as amoral altogether. Who would wish a no-holds-barred showdown? And would not the loser simply try to reconstitute his forces for a second round?

We should remember that both victory and clear-cut defeat often put an end to a power’s struggles in a way armistices and time-outs do not. Nazis, Fascists, and most Baathists have presently disappeared from the governments of the world. Military defeat ended not only their power but also discredited their ideologies to the extent that they have not resurfaced in any real strength in Germany, Italy, or Iraq.

A decisive end to war does not necessarily mean greater violence and human losses than what totalitarian governments are capable of in times of peace. Far more perished during Stalin’s collectivization, the Holocaust, and the murdering and starvation brought about by Mao’s various revolutions—mass genocides outside of formal military engagements—than in all the decisive battles of the twentieth century, which suggests that, at least in Hitler’s case, they should have been stopped through force before they were allowed to kill millions more.

Again, modern scientific pacifism that tries to “prove” that bloody war is unnatural and has no utility in solving conflicts also tends to discourage the reappearance of decisive battle by inculcating such ideas among influential elements of the population. We certainly have no more Homers who sing of the
aristeia
of battling heroes, or Tennysons eager to write of another gloriously foolhardy charge by the Light Brigade. To read of gargantuan clashes of arms, replete with nobility in pursuit of exalted aims, is today to read fantasy—Tolkien’s grand battle between orcs and men before the gates of Gondor.

Finally, globalization, through instant cell-phoning and text-messaging, use of the Internet, access to DVDs and satellite television, has created a world culture that depends on uninterrupted communications. It expects convenient airline flights, international banking, and easy access to imported consumer goods. The result is not quite a new worldwide pacifism or exalted humanity—one need only examine the membership of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to see that there is no such thing as an evolving transnational morality outside the West.