If War Comes Tomorrow?

The Contours of Future Armed Conflict

General Makhmut Akhmetovich Gareev, Jacob W. Kipp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135223090
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Military affairs have been affected by major changes in recent years. The bipolar world of two superpowers has gone. The Cold War and the global military confrontation that accompanied it have ended. A new military and political order has emerged in the world, but the world has not become more stable; indeed, wars and armed conflict have become much more common. Forecasting the contours of future armed conflict is no easy task at such times, but this is the primary objective of If War Comes Tomorrow? Focusing on the impact of new technologies, General Gareev considers whether war is still a continuation of politics by other means' or whether the political, ideological, and technical transformation have broken that connection. He explores the linkage between threats to Russian national interests and war as an instrument of policy in great detail and concludes that there is very little prospect either of nuclear war or widespread conventional war. However, he does see local armed conflicts and local wars increasing, with greater emphasis on subversion. He argues that coming decades will see a shift towards a reliance upon indirect means to accomplish limited political ends, and analyses both information warfare and the revolution in military affairs from this perspective.

CHAPTER 1

POLITICAL AND MILITARY-TECHNICAL FACTORS AND ARMED STRUGGLE

Future Wars: Sources and Causes

There are growing tendencies in the world to suppress war and make the unlimited use of armed force impossible. Their reaches are ramifying; causing a need to find new military-political and strategic conceptions.

1 WAR AND POLITICS

Historically, wars had economic roots and underlying political motives. However, their actual objectives and causes, as a rule, were disguised as religious, ideological, and other motives. Therefore, it was not until the nineteenth century that the connection between war and politics became apparent, when, in addition to armies, great masses of the population were drawn into war.

Since Clausewitz it has been acknowledged that war was a continuation of politics by other and violent means. But since the advent of nuclear weapons another standpoint has prevailed that war no longer is a continuation of politics. There are two separate issues involved here: one is the question of expediency and admissibility of war in the modern world; the other is the question of whether new technologies can alter the socio-political essence of war.

The answer to the first question can and must be formulated in no uncertain terms: all wars must be banned from the life of the human race. Particularly inadmissible is nuclear war, fraught with catastrophic consequences for the participants and for other countries. Yet despite the obvious correctness of this postulate, and contrary to the best intentions, it is not always possible to resolve contradictions by political means and thus various forms of military violence continue to persist, even though we live in the nuclear age.

To this day, no foolproof guarantee exists that numerous local wars and conflicts will not evolve into large-scale warfare.

It is easy to follow trendy conceptions, avoiding the essence of the issue, but actual phenomena exist regardless of our ignorance or criticism. One needs to understand their essence in order to respond to them correctly. What do all these incessant wars and conflicts mean, and what is their origin if politics are believed to have already excluded armed methods from their agenda?

Academician G. Arbatov writes that, ‘even in local conflicts it [military force] cannot be regarded as an instrument to achieve rational political goals – at least in conflicts larger in scale than Grenada, Panama and the Falklands’.¹ Yes, it is true that at present it is not reasonable to connect rational policy with military force. But rational policy is often accompanied by irrational policy, which produces phenomena typical of it. Additionally, judgment of whether a policy is rational and reasonable, or not, is of a partial, circumstantial and debatable nature.

Some states really want peace. In others, ruling circles declare that there are issues more important than peace, or that there are worse things than war. All of them are confident of the rationality of their policies. And what should be done if war is imposed on a country, or its national sovereignty is endangered? Life poses such questions and they cannot be left unanswered. In Arbatov’s opinion, the Falklands War can still be viewed to some extent as the means of a rational policy, but what about the Iran-Iraq War; the Gulf War of 1991; or the current hostilities in the Caucasus and many other numerous armed conflicts? Yet the same Falklands War could have evolved into a much larger conflict, and that would not have altered its true nature defined by certain political goals of the warring sides. If this is not so, an explanation must be given of why and to what end wars like those continue to break out. So far, there has not been any evidence that any of them had other than political causes.

The essence of war (once it has been unleashed) cannot be changed by the use of nuclear weapons as well. M. Gorbachev once said that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki war ceased to be a continuation of politics. But following the nuclear attacks on those cities in August 1945, the USSR entered the war with Japan, this being the continuation of politics aimed at the termination of World War II. There was, after all, no military or strategic necessity to drop those bombs on the Japanese cities; the bombardment was caused by far-reaching political aims on the eve of the Cold War.

M.I. Charles Jr in his Potsdam Meeting, wrote that the then US Secretary of State declared that the main advantage of the bomb was not its impact on Japan. Rather, he claimed, the bomb would make the Russians more agreeable in Europe.² That was the true political aim of the first nuclear bombings in history.

And if, God forbid, with further proliferation of nuclear weapons they were used again, such a war, regardless of consequences, would be the continuation of a certain extremely irrational murderous policy. Any conscious use of nuclear weapons, whatever the outcome (with the exception of an unauthorized launch) would inevitably be caused by certain political decisions.

Thus, to answer the second of the raised questions, war without politics is not possible.

Therefore, it would be more correct to say that in today’s world, war – whether nuclear or conventional – must not be the means and continuation of politics.

But if war has broken out, it means that contrary to this imperative, politics have staked all on the military or were forced to resort to it in self-defense. There is a principal difference between the way we wish to see a certain phenomenon or the way it must not be, and its real identity. Nobody objects to the idea of eliminating stealing, and once something is stolen from us, theft in its essence remains theft whatever name we call it.

It is sometimes said that Clausewitz’s cliché (that war is a continuation of politics) should be repealed on the grounds that this formula is in itself almost a source of war. But this is tantamount to accusing Newton for the existence of gravitation laws. It is not formulas that produce war, but those objectively existing causes and phenomena that Clausewitz revealed, and these are unavoidable.

To ignore current wars and hostilities and to consider that they have nothing to do with politics and shoot up by themselves, means to lose touch with reality and deprive oneself of the chance to assess events objectively.

It is true that qualitative changes in politics and war assets make the interconnection of policy and war more complicated. On the one hand, they increase the role and responsibility of politics, but on the other hand, nuclear weapons significantly affect politics by drastically altering the very nature of war. Some political analysts rightly emphasize that new armaments are becoming more and more involved in politics and ultimately almost substitute for it. So to prevent war, especially nuclear war, all states need to change their policies, updating them to fit modern reality. Otherwise, Clausewitz’s 160-year-old prophecy that sooner or later war would get out of political control and turn into a means of collective suicide, may become a reality. Groundless statements that at present politics and war have nothing in common, mislead people with regard to the main causes of war, deprive them of the chance of influencing ruling circles, and hamper anti-war activities.

2 OLD AND NEW SOURCES OF MILITARY THREATS

In the past, there were always plenty of calls for peace, and denouncements of war. Some of the best minds of humanity fought for peace – take, for instance, Kant’s calls for the peaceloving unity of democracies, Russell’s and Einstein’s manifestos, to name only a few. ‘Eternal peace’ has been proclaimed by warring states countless times. Nevertheless, out of four-and-a-half thousand years of history, only about 300 were absolutely peaceful. The rest of the time there have always been armed clashes in various areas of the world.

We have verifiable information about 14,000 wars. Hotbeds of tension exist in many regions of the world in our time as well. And even with the end of the Cold War the world has not become safer – it has become even less safe.

What have been the main causes of all those wars? If we put aside the outer verbal wrapping, the generalized causes of war would be mainly the following: the struggle for territorial gains, natural resources, wealth and manpower (slaves); attempts by conquerors to subdue other nations or even establish world domination; the seizure of colonies, and their expansion, raw materials and spheres of economic and political influence. Nations subjected to aggressive attacks had to fight for their existence, sovereignty and independence.

Deep ideological confrontations have also contributed to war. Religious wars too, have been numerous. During this century, after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and during the Cold War, the main global confrontation has been produced by the struggle to impose socialism in all countries, and by the determination of the west ‘to crush communism’ and establish the total dominance of capitalism all over the world. This is how ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ wars have been unleashed up till now.

In generalizing the experiences of the past, some historians have come to the conclusion that no age-long conflict has ever been resolved by military means. And it is true that some armed confrontations produced new ones, leaving the source of the conflict unresolved. But it does not signify that all wars have been senseless, vain and useless in achieving political goals. For many nations, selfless struggle helped retain their independence – Russia was under centuries-long attacks aimed at her division and enslavement. Another example is the formation of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is also well known that Germany was formed of small counties unified ‘by blood and iron’. It would be no exaggeration to state that humanity would have been thrown decades back, if the anti-Hitler-coalition countries had rejected the use of force with the belief that war was a bad thing, and had not crushed the Fascism of World War II.

In the light of historical experience, it is hard to agree with the statement that ‘age-old conflicts are undoubtedly rated as excessive costs of mankind’s development – excessive, because they have never been historically unavoidable’.³ When talking about wars or military conflicts, one presumes that they can be avoided, but we must not forget that in a war one party is the aggressor, the conqueror with the other party on the defence and history still does not provide a clear-cut answer as to what extent war was unavoidable for either side.

W. Thompson, a researcher at the US National Defense University, has worked out some new security principles. He maintains that as the destructive consequences of a conflict using weapons of mass destruction cannot be limited by the frontiers of the sovereign states involved, this type of war cannot be considered as an acceptable sovereign right of a particular state. Arms control has become an international political prerogative. As a consequence of this, the number one principle for security policy in the twenty-first century is no longer based on deterrence, but on guaranteed security for other states; one-sided military buildup should be rejected in favor of mutual safety, with the guaranteed punishment of an aggressor by an international armed force. The security of nations will depend on the extent of their rejection of unilateral military buildup, and on their transition to a policy of cooperation in matters of mutual security in accordance with international treaties. Protection of justice in the world by joint multinational armed forces is the final goal of mutual security, and the gist of national security patterns for the twenty-first century, concludes Thompson.⁴

This approach deserves consideration. Nevertheless, in the past similar slogans and wishes were voiced and so far no state has found it feasible to completely rule out the use of its national military power.

Varying over time, the issue of the application of military power, and especially its limitless application, acquires a completely new dimension which might affect the future of all humankind. That is why the use of armed force should be reconsidered in keeping with new realities. One may assume that with the end of the Cold War global confrontation there is a real chance, for the first time in history, to prevent all wars. ‘New political thinking’ even proclaims the priority of universal human values above national ones. Emerging contradictions between states should be resolved by political means only. An increasing role for the United Nations (UN) was envisaged with its actual influence on international developments predicted. It was considered that the security of each separate state, and world-wide strategic stability in general, would be ensured not only and not so much by the framework of national security, as through the system of total global security. With this in mind, the Warsaw Treaty was disbanded. Simultaneously, the military security system of former Soviet republics collapsed along with the Soviet Union.

At the same time, actual international events are not developing in this direction.

With the end of the Cold War, the majority of leading states took certain steps to overcome global confrontation, such as the reduction of arms, and maintenance of partnership terms with former socialist countries. Yet as regards international affairs, they are mainly after their own national interests, staking on strengthening their own military security.

For example, in the 1994 ‘Strategy of the US National Security’ report to Congress, there is no word about universal human values. Instead, it clearly states that ‘our strategy of national security is based on American values and interests’ and even American participation in peacekeeping efforts is considered ‘as one of the means to ensure national security, and not as independent operations’.⁵

Under these conditions, the republics which previously made up the Soviet Union have to strengthen their security. Some self-presumptuous political leaders, who lately maintained that they can easily resolve all global contradictions in the world by political means, are now unable to sort out a single problem without violence within a small independent republic. It turns out that the international community is far from being ready for the practical policy of so-called ‘new thinking’. What is needed is a sober a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: the contours of future armed conflict and their interpreter: implications for national and international security policy
• 1 Political and military-technical factors and armed struggle - future wars: sources and causes
• 2 Military-technical progress and its influence on the nature of armed struggle
• 3 Distinctive features of future armed struggle
• 4 Prospects for military construction
• 5 Basic directions for perfection of training of the armed forces
• Conclusion
• Index