The End of Power (21 page)

Even though World War II is almost seven decades behind us, and the arms race of the Cold War two decades gone, military planners are still betting on the doctrine of superior firepower. They continue to assume that a large and technologically advanced military is essential for security and might.

Exhibit A is the United States. In 2012, its defense budget was over $700 billion,
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accounting for almost half the world's military spending. Related
expenses from other US agencies increased the total to about $1 trillion. America's largest military rivals, China and Russia, accounted for only 8 percent and 5 percent of world military spending, respectively—even though their spending (especially that of China) is growing very rapidly. Relative to GDP, only about twenty-five countries, most of them in the Middle East, spent more on their military. Even with the cuts in defense spending that the United States is planning to make in the next decade, the expenditures will be enormous. By 2017, when the planned cuts take fuller effect, the US defense budget will still be six times what China now spends and more than the next ten countries combined.
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Under this slightly reduced budget, for example, the United States will still field eleven aircraft carriers and maintain all three legs of its nuclear triad (long-range bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and missile-carrying submarines).
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Whenever the United States has engaged in conventional war in the last two decades, its forces have easily triumphed. But these conventional wars have been few: just the first Gulf War, in 1991, and arguably the second, although the Iraqi military barely fought back. In 2008, US defense secretary Robert Gates observed that of all the many deployments of US forces over more than four decades, only one—the first Gulf War—was “a more or less traditional conventional conflict.” The others, from Grenada and Lebanon to Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, involved counter-insurgency, anti-terrorism, or political or humanitarian intervention rather than a sustained duel of command-and-control armies. That trend applies to the world at large. During the 1950s an average of six international conflicts were fought each year, compared to an average of less than one per year in the first decade of this millennium.
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And over the last 60 years, there has not been a single war between the major powers.
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This doesn't mean that wars are not being fought. Although the number of state-based armed conflicts around the world dropped by 40 percent between 1992 and 2003 (this includes not just wars between states but wars waged by states against nonstate groups), it has since increased.
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And following a decline since 2003, nonstate armed conflicts—defined by the Human Security Report Project as “the use of armed force between two organized groups, neither of which is the government of a state”—ticked sharply upward in 2008.

Warfare today has assumed different forms, which large conventional military establishments are struggling to deal with. Consider these snapshots from the last decade:

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Juz Ghoray, Afghanistan, October 2011:
A US Marine on patrol finds an improvised explosive device buried near a ridge called Ugly Hill. While working to defuse it, he spots another, in the process moving and stepping on a third, which shatters his right leg—causing him to become one of the 240 US service members to lose a limb in 2011.
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He was lucky: 250 coalition troops lost their lives to improvised explosive devices that same year.

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Mumbai, India, November 26–29, 2008:
After hijacking an Indian fishing trawler, ten Pakistani gunmen arrive via sea and proceed to stage terror attacks across the city, killing 168 people and wounding more than 300 before they are themselves killed or apprehended.

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Monterrey, Mexico, August 25, 2011:
Gunmen from Los Zetas, Mexico's most violent drug cartel, attack a casino, shooting patrons and then setting it afire. More than 50 people die in the carnage.

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Northeast of Socotra Island, Yemen, February 7, 2012:
Somali pirates attack and take over a Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier, and sail it back to the Somali coast—one of thirty-seven attacks, and the eleventh vessel to be taken hostage with its crew, since the beginning of the year.
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Washington, DC, May 2010:
The US Chamber of Commerce discovers that Chinese hackers have had access to its computer network throughout the previous year, during which they pilfered member information and some of its employees' e-mail logs and even controlled its building thermostats.
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This is just one of hundreds of such attacks on US government, military, and corporate targets launched by hackers from China and elsewhere, many of them with government connections.

As these examples illustrate, the challenge for traditional military powers such as the United States is not just a new set of enemies but the transformation of warfare itself, driven in no small part by the darker side of the
More, Mobility
, and
Mentality
revolutions. The IEDs that have become the weapon of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and myriad other sites of conflict rely not on plutonium or complex alloys but, rather, on household or agricultural ingredients and consumer goods manipulated and assembled into bombs designed by those who have benefited from the spread of education—both fruits of the More revolution. Like the pirates who use fiberglass skiffs, cheap AK-47s, and rocket-propelled grenades to hijack huge multimillion-dollar ships, the terrorists who attacked Mumbai drew on the ready availability of weapons and communication technologies—
by-products of the More and Mobility revolutions that include the GPS that helped them navigate through Indian waters as well as the satellite phones, cellphones, and BlackBerries they relied on throughout the attacks to coordinate with one another, monitor the police, and transmit messages of their heinous deeds to the outside world. Thanks to the ease of travel and communication, even a lone terrorist can mount the kind of high-impact strike on a faraway target that once required bomber jets or missiles—think of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and “underwear bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab, both of whom almost succeeded in bringing down aircraft. By raising aspirations and expectations that are often cruelly unmet or easily distorted, the Mentality revolution has helped to recruit a pool of disaffected zealots, criminals, and would-be revolutionaries. And perhaps just as importantly, the lesson that a lone attacker or a small band of committed fighters can inflict severe damage on a major power has entered into the minds of millions of people and won't be unlearned.

These new capabilities do not demand the hierarchy and coordination that are the pride of the world's great militaries. As barriers to involvement in conflict have fallen, the advantages that once constituted the might of big armies and secured their ability to deter attack have lost some of their relevance. After the initial display of “shock and awe,” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been the kinds of conflicts waged with massive artillery barrages, tank assaults, and supersonic dogfights, much less with the cold logic and calculated escalations of nuclear doctrine. Meanwhile, NATO forces have also had to learn how to fight in a different media environment—one in which their adversaries have been able to spread their message with greater ease through social media, and in which reporters, bloggers, and activists catalogue every allied casualty and ugly episode of collateral damage for presentation to a plugged-in and restless public.

The transformation of conflict has spurred intense rethinking in defense ministries and war colleges, and driven attempts to adapt organization and doctrine. Both the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the principal guiding document of US military approach and budgeting, and the Defense Strategic Guidance released in January 2012 stress the growing importance of small and asymmetric conflicts with an eclectic range of antagonists;
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the latter document puts “Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare” at the top of the list of primary missions of the US Armed Forces.

American military planners are also worried that advanced precision weapons that can shoot down planes, sink ships, or target a single moving car on a highway are becoming increasingly available not just to rivals
such as China and adversaries such as North Korea but also to nonstate actors. Thomas Mahnken, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning and a professor at the Naval War College, has warned that “adversaries are acquiring precision-guided munitions, as well as the vital supporting capabilities needed to wage precision warfare with a minimum investment.”
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Drone technology, the pilotless vehicles that have revolutionized surveillance and the conduct of US operations against insurgents and terrorists, is being widely adopted and disseminated, raising the possibility of inexpensive mayhem for anyone willing to make a relatively small investment of a few thousand dollars.

“A prince wishes to make war, and believing that God is on the side of big battalions, he doubles the number of his troops,” wrote Voltaire in the eighteenth century. But just as constant throughout history are examples of small armed forces that have successfully harassed, halted, and sometimes even defeated these large military machines.

The battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. is an earlier case in point. Taking advantage of high ground and rugged terrain, a vastly outmanned Greek force held the Persian army at bay for three days, inflicting disproportionate losses on its enemies before eventually perishing in a heroic last stand. The Greeks lost the battle of Thermopylae, but they did weaken the Persian force and ultimately repel the invasion. From David in the Bible to the Vietcong in the Vietnam War, history is replete with smaller and less-equipped antagonists holding their ground and thwarting, if not militarily defeating, larger opponents.

Among the modern pioneers in this method of warfare are Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh as well as Mao Zedong, whose guerrilla tactics in the Chinese civil war helped deliver China into communist rule. Differentiating guerrilla war from conventional war, Mao found the two to have opposite requirements with respect to size and coordination. “In guerrilla warfare,” Mao wrote, “small units acting independently play the principal role and there must be no excessive interference with their activities.” In traditional war, by contrast, “command is centralized. . . . All units and all supporting arms in all districts must coordinate to the highest degree.” In guerrilla war, that sort of command and control was “not only undesirable but impossible.”
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In current military language, guerrilla wars are “irregular” and “asymmetric.” They are irregular because they are launched by an antagonist that, while armed, is not a traditional military force. And they are asymmetric because the opponents are mismatched in brute military power, as measured by personnel and materiel. Today, irregular and asymmetric conflicts have become the norm. In Afghanistan, for example, more than 430,000 Afghan and coalition troops have been unable to subdue a Taliban force barely one-twelfth as big. In Iraq, at the peak of the surge in October 2007, more than 180,000 coalition forces and nearly 100,000 Iraqi security forces were pitted against as many as 20,000 insurgents.

Russia had a similar experience in Chechnya: in 1999–2000, in what is called the Second Chechen War, more than 80,000 well-armed Russian troops were stalled for five months by an estimated 22,000 insurgents fighting for independence. Eventually the Russian army prevailed and restored Russian federal control over the territory, but not before launching a brutal campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian casualties and the deaths of more than 5,000 Russian soldiers.
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Across Africa and Southeast Asia, one can find dozens of new and long-running insurgencies—from the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. And military conflicts that are not tied to defending a particular territory, but instead are motivated by potentially borderless ideological, criminal, religious, or economic goals, are clearly on the rise. Of the military conflicts that erupted in the 1950s, only a minority were between states and nonstate armed groups. In contrast, during the 1990s conflicts with armed groups were in the majority. In 2011, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn explained that conflict is evolving from “intense but short periods” to “longer and more drawn-out engagements.”
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Smaller forces are proving successful with increasing regularity, at least in terms of advancing their political goals while surviving militarily. The Harvard scholar Ivan Arreguín-Toft analyzed 197 asymmetric wars that took place around the world in the period 1800–1998. They were asymmetric in the sense that a wide gap existed at the outset between the antagonists as measured in traditional terms—that is, by the size of their military and the size of their population. Arreguín-Toft found that the supposedly “weak” actor actually won the conflict in almost 30 percent of these cases. That fact was remarkable in itself, but even more striking was the trend over time. In the course of the last two centuries, there has been a steady
increase in victories by the supposedly “weak” antagonist. The weak actor won only 11.8 percent of its conflicts between 1800 and 1849, as compared to 55 percent of its conflicts between 1950 and 1998. What this means is that a core axiom of war has been stood on its head. Once upon a time, superior firepower ultimately prevailed. Now that is no longer true.
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