Wars to Come

[Guest guest]

Here is the article I mentioned the other day. Not sure how much of it I will type up this go round though.

From: The Armchair General, March 2006

The Shape of Wars to Come: Roots and Range of 21st-Century Conflict

What can America expect on future battlefronts?

By Ralph s

The 21st century will see an unprecedented expansion in the varieties of organized violence. The argument over whether the future will bring back wars or extend the current pattern of asymmetrical conflicts misses the point. The United States military will continue to wage "small wars", but must be prepared for the possibility of greater conflicts. There is no choice involved. And the fiercest challenges may come from neither the conventional nor irregular forces as we know them, but from governments and organizations willing to wage war in spheres now forbidden or still unimagined. The nature of warfare never changes, but its surface manifestations will mutate savagely in the coming decades.

Beyond the question of how men, gangs, tribes, nations and faiths will fight, what they will fight about appears grimmer still. This will be a century of contradictions: the age of super-technology is also the new age of superstition, of great religions reduces to cults that worship bloodthirsty bogeymen. Seek to deny it though we may, we faces decades of religious wars - between faiths, but also within faiths. The defining struggle of our time - the source of conflicts great and small - will be between those who believe in a merciful god and those who worship a divine disciplinarian. The philosophical divide will kill many millions.

Desperate, failing civilizations will confront triumphant ones. While racial hatreds tragically persists wars within racial groups will kill more human beings that conflicts between races. Humans may hate a distant neighbor in theory, but prefer to kill their neighbors in practice. Tribes - a term forbidden 20 years ago - are back, even in Europe, where godlessness is simply another faith, if one devoid of comfort. Men will fight about all of the traditional sources of conflict, from global economics to access to wells and parcels of grazing land, but the most frequent wars and lesser conflicts will be between those who disagree over the interpretation of a single faith, as well as between different tribes within the same racial group. Often, both differences will manifest themselves in the same conflict - with atrocity the result of compounded hatreds.

The genocidal impulse isn't and anomaly. Humans are hardwired for it. Only civilizations and the rule of law occasionally allow cultures to control the enduring longing to exterminate those perceived as enemies.

Here in the West, we have our own superstitions that complicate warmaking. The insistence on the part of the leftist and unthinking academics that all humans want peace; that all conflicts can be negotiated to a gentle ending; that all cultures and civilizations are morally equal; and that all foreign barbarities are somehow our fault is reminiscent of the papacy's insistence that the evidence had to be rejected, that Copernicus and Galileo were wrong. Our internal "culture wars" are wages between those who have created a petty, but utterly unfounded fantasy of a peaceful nature for humankind and the new Newtonians who recognize that the data this planet generates every day suggests otherwise. The new inquisitors insist that we can pretend war away. In consequence, the greatest impediment to effective warfighting by the U.S. military is the double-barreled nonsense that war is never necessary and that, when we do find ourselves at war, we must fight with exaggerated restraint.

Even after 9/11 and the blood-cult terrorism encountered in Iraq, the American intellectual class refuses to think honestly about the war.

Of course, it's natural for Americans or Westerners in general to look at conflict through the lens of own recent experiences, but our wars and interventions are merely the best publicized - and far from the grimmest. For most of humanity, the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, with their broad adherence to restrictive rules, would be an incomprehensible experience. More instructive examples of what the future holds would be the 1980s war between then-Sunni-dominated Iraq and Shi'a Persia, in which over a million soldiers and civilians died, with millions more wounded; the twin civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in which children served as shock troops and societies collapsed into anarchy; the drug-lord insurgency in northern Mexico that subverts state authority; or the decade of interrelated wars in Rwanda, Congo (formerly Zaire) which took at least 2 million lives - mostly civilians - most killed at close quarters and many butchered with knives.

We Americans - liberal or conservative - share a deluding belief that all problems have answers, if only that can be found, and that all conflicts can be brought to a resolution, is only we hit on the right formula. But this is an age of insoluble conflicts - of confrontations that can only be "solved" by ethnic cleansing and other barbarities, of conflicts likely to ebb and flow throughout our lifetimes. After a few hundred years of pretending that warfare might be limited by laws, savagery is back in fashion.

Except in North America and northwestern Europe, the great religious was of the last two millennia never really ended - they were only taking naps, due to the exhaustion of one party or the other. The Sunni-Shi'a contest is 13 centuries old - as old as, but deeper than, Islam's struggle with the West. The struggle between Islam and Hinduism threatens to go into nuclear overdrive. And the racial and religious jihad of Arabs against black Africans may be on the verge of exciting a startling reaction. All of these are endless wars, punctuated by stretches of phony peace and falsely divided by historians into separate struggles.

The world wars of the last century, then the Cold War - the last great struggle within the West - clouded our understanding of the longer, greater tides in history. Now, with bewildering speed, history has made a comeback, insisting on its durability and casting the last 100 years as an aberration. We have re-entered the long river of struggles over elemental issues: god and blood. We have to reset our calendars and recalibrate our mentalities.

In this century, the battle of Manzikert is more relevant than the Battle of Midway, and the overarching struggle will be about interpreting God's will.