War: Capacity, Challenges and Change

Nilsson

The capacity to wage war has always been the ultimate guarantee for state security. The size of the army does not only serve as a deterrent however. The fact that many wars have been started with security related arguments testifies to the possibility that warfare can indeed be one of the many rational tools of defensive statecraft. But history teaches us that the longer the wars have lasted in modern times, the greater the chance that the defender will win. The length of the war can thus have serious consequences for state security.

In earlier times, wars were often very long because of the low level of technological development. This resulted in a lower intensity of warfare. Yet during the 19^th century, the technological developments increased the mobility and firepower of armies and made wars shorter.

In the 20^th century, however, the technological advances did not further decrease the duration of military contestations, even when omitting World War I and II from the statistics. One of the reasons is that technology did not develop far enough for the attacker to always quickly incapacitate the defender. The size of the armies and the ability to wear down the weaker side was still often the decisive factor for the outcome. Moreover, the old problems of finding a mutually acceptable bargaining solution also remained, not only as nationalism but also as ideology often guided the combatants’ actions at the negotiation table.

With the recently, much heralded revolution in military affairs, however, there have been hopes that precision guided munitions would finally make wars quicker due to the possibility of surgical strikes against enemy contingents without negotiations. Indeed, the military campaign against Iraq in 1991 seemed to heal the trauma caused by the long and costly Vietnam War and made warfare again seem like a realistic policy option.

Yet the ongoing warfare against irregular enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan and especially the emergence of hybrid threats such as Hezbollah, and maybe even Iran, seem to have neutralized these developments. Hybrid threats are capable of both regular and irregular warfare. Israel painfully learned during its latest incursion into Lebanon that a hybrid enemy can be large and well armed to take on modern tanks and cause unexpected casualties. It can also resort to irregular tactics that limit the efficiency of even the latest precision guided munitions.

The nature of the irregular or hybrid enemy makes warfare a double edged sword for state security.  Military force can be used to weaken the enemy’s potentially threatening capabilities, but each day of warfare increases the risk of intensifying the enemy’s motivation to continue the fight and even expand the war. These actors are often not ideologically but rather religiously motivated, which makes it extremely difficult to agree on mutually acceptable terms of peace. While winning is the ultimate goal, a religiously motivated combatant may not view a prolonged war merely as a cost but a benefit, a chance to continue killing the enemy and to more easily recruit new fighters.

All this should make warfare a less appealing policy option that often decreases rather than increases state security. When military action and negotiations are to no avail, the most efficient way of increasing state security is depriving the enemy of the resources it needs: money, recruits and legitimacy. This calls for tighter international cooperation beyond the military sphere rather than relying on new technological advances. Doing nothing militarily may be perceived as a sign of weakness, but all out warfare may easily become even more devastating.

Marco Nilsson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. His Doctoral dissertation was titled, ”War and Unreason: Bounded Learning Theory and War Duration.” He can be reached at: marco.nilsson@pol.gu.se