The changing nature of war
challenging complacent assumptions about "peace in our time"
Apr 26, 2007
In 1997, Tony Blair declared that ours could potentially be the first generation in history never to send our children to war. It was a pat on the back too soon, reflecting a more widespread complacency over war and armed conflict in the 21st century.
Misunderstandings
“The organised use of force in the pursuance of political, economic or ideological objectives” remains the most intuitively accessible definition of what war is all about. In his famous work, On War, Clausewitz defines the activity as being “The continuation of policy by other means”. The first of these definitions – war as the organised (and perhaps aberrational) use of force – leads to unrealistic assumptions about the nature of armed conflict. These miscalculations fall into three categories.
The nature of war
The first is the misconception of scope. When many people speak of ‘war’, they tend to remember the particularly cataclysmic conflicts of the last century such as the World Wars and the Vietnam War. However, war on such a scale is in fact aberrational, the exception, not the norm. Most conflicts in the last 100 years have been regional affairs. The United Nations defines “major conflicts” as those in which there are at least 1000 battlefield deaths annually. Currently there are about eight major conflicts under way, with perhaps a dozen smaller conflicts of varying intensity.
Not always a matter of choice
The second miscalculation results from underestimating the willingness of the ‘developed’ world to enter into large scale military commitments. Where war to Clausewitz is “The continuation of policy by other means”, war today is itself a policy waged by other means. Governments now employ armed forces in sharp, “purposive” wars, with brief, surgical use of force being used as a counterpoint to more traditional diplomacy, legitimized (itself a debatable notion) if possible, by international organisations like the UN, all in pursuance of long term regional objectives. US Policy in South America and the Gulf are cases in point.
But the moral hegemony claimed by institutions such as the UN and indeed by much of the western world has an inconvenient backstroke. Often the west gets drawn into distant and unpopular conflicts to retain the credibility that rests so much on their professed moral hegemony. The US interventions in Ethiopia in 1990 and in Bosnia in 1995, and that of the UK in Sierra Leone in 2000 demonstrate this well, not to mention Australia’s recent deployment in East Timor. In short, War in the West is no longer a product of the chauvinistic and imperial motivations. Instead, pressure to support certain ideals and to be seen to oppose others, is now the rudder of martial policy.
The war we didn’t see coming
Finally, there is the spectre of “the war that has now become our problem” scenario. To many, endemic war may well be a “third world problem” – it is unpalatable to say, but it is a prevalent attitude. For this reason the Kosovo crisis in Eastern Europe during the mid-1990s, caused shock almost to the point of paralysis. War was not dead after all, it had merely been sleeping. The rush to arms in this case was precipitated by the fact that the problem was so close to home that it could not realistically be ignored. The 1990 Gulf War was a glaring example of this. With some 35% of the world’s oil reserves at stake, and the world economies riding on them, a Middle Eastern conflict became an international problem. Nuclear weapons, and terrorism will provide the 21st centuries “unsought war that has now become our problem” scenarios.
