The Conduct of War in the 21st Century

Kinetic, Connected and Synthetic

Rob Johnson, Martijn Kitzen, Tim Sweijs, Rob Johnson, Martijn Kitzen, Tim Sweijs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000347067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated.

Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high intensity or low intensity. The volume examines changes in warfare by investigating the key features of the conduct of war during the first decades of the 21st century. Conceptually centred around the terms 'kinetic', 'connected' and 'synthetic', the analysis delves into a wide range of topics. The contributions discuss hybrid warfare, cyber and influence activities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the use of armed drones and air power, the implications of the counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, as well as the consequences for law(fare) and decision making.

This work will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies and International Relations.

Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Introduction
The conduct of war in the 21st century

1 Introduction

Rob Johnson, Tim Sweijs and Martijn Kitzen

The Conduct of War in the 21st Century offers significant changes to the framework of thinking about armed conflict in three respects. First, it updates current thinking on warfighting, weaving together different strands of thought that have emerged in the wake of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria which occurred between 2001 and 2020. Second, it expands upon the conduct of the 21st-century style of war that includes both kinetic and non-kinetic approaches, which is waged both in traditional and in new domains, and which occurs in developed as well as developing polities. Third, it offers new insights into the impact new technologies are having on the conduct of war, including cyber and information, artificial intelligence (AI), unmanned and semi-autonomous systems, satellites, and a new generation of missiles.

This volume is not about the future of war but provides a clear assessment of the lessons that can be derived from the conduct of war in various theatres around the world. The different parts touch on key manifestations of strategy, technology, air power, war from the ground up, law, and decision-making. These salient themes in the execution of contemporary warfare are further explored in chapters that place the relevant developments over the last two decades within the context of the intellectual challenge of thinking about war. The volume thereby examines key dimensions in the conduct of war (the human, the technological, the strategic-operational-tactical, the procedural, and the legal), and shows that our thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated.

The three cross-cutting key terms around which the volume coheres are Kinetic, Connected, and Synthetic. We examine war as a kinetic activity, applying the original Greek meaning of kinesis as pressure, flow, and force, since electronic warfare, just like its physical equivalent, depends on each of these qualities. We investigate the impact of the connected element of war – between peoples, between ideas, through systems, communications, networks, and even across time. Finally, we examine the extent to which war is synthetic, that is seemingly dominated by artificial and manufactured elements, but with an enduring role of the human.

This volume therefore marks a new departure in the study of contemporary war, in that it concentrates on the solutions that have been advanced in theory and practice to deal with the challenges wars have posed in the first decades of the 21st century. It charts the new agenda that has emerged. It is specifically an inter-disciplinary work, brought together by the common and urgent demands created by armed conflict. It is neither a specialised survey of all technologies, nor a staff college guide to current warfighting, since these professional studies already exist. It does not seek to provide an exhaustive overview of all aspects relevant to the conduct of contemporary war. It is, instead, a problematised selection which offers a framework of thinking in combination with critical analyses of the dominant elements that characterise the conduct of war of the first quarter of the 21st century.

Military professionals and scholars share an interest in how to identify and assess change in armed conflict, and, at war colleges across the Western world, they study with great intensity its ways, that is, the actual conduct of war. They are concerned with legal and ethical considerations, the relative utility of force compared with other instruments of power, and new technologies and their impact on how fighting forces and irregular actors make use of them. In 2010, the Oxford Changing Character of War scholars published a volume with Oxford University Press to examine the character of war in past and present conditions, and what emerged was that, despite some changes in the types of actors and their practices (such as the employment of cyber systems), there were striking continuities.¹ In that year, with significant insurgencies against the Western powers and their allies underway, there was perhaps a stronger focus on the violent non-state actor. In the years that followed there were further technological innovations and considerable political and economic changes. These have driven an evolution in the character, if not the nature, of war. At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, we are eager to assess what has changed in the conduct of war, and get a better understanding of its emerging characteristics.

A centennial of thinking about the conduct of war

The inspiration for this volume is the work of the inter-war years theorists, between 1919 and 1939, who had begun their deliberations in the aftermath of a significant global war a century ago. They were compelled to reflect on what had occurred but also to consider what lay ahead. Was there a future where international institutions could regulate and even prevent war, or was there the prospect of new and barbaric forms of conflict? They speculated about the impact of new technologies, such as armour, aviation, and wireless communications, and how to harness them. There was widespread concern about the use of poison gas, the prospect of heavy casualties in mechanised land battles, and the widespread destruction of cities by air bombardment. Crucially, these analysts offered a framework of thinking about the conduct of war during a time of considerable political and technological change.

The starting point for this volume, therefore, is J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller, who was, like some of our authors, a military officer, historian of war, strategic thinker, and advocate of new technological solutions. In 1926, he tried to codify the conduct of war based on an analysis of the global armed conflict that had such a significant impact on his generation, and, two years later, he considered the longer term future of warfare.² In most of his 45 books, written across his career, he believed that the purpose of new technologies and original techniques was to create a psychological effect. Herein lies our first connection with the present, for what we see, especially in terms of new technologies, at first seems to herald some breakthrough or a ‘revolution in military affairs’. Instead, what is striking is that the use of those technologies is still targeted at, and dependent upon, the endurance, skills, and psychological resilience of the human.

Writing in the Interbellum, Fuller was eager to clarify what could be learned, and applied, from the conduct of war in his own time, and his principles, with some modification, remain in use with modern Western armies. He summed up these principles in three groups: Control (the direction of operations and mobility), Pressure (concentration of force, surprise, and offensive action), and Resistance (distributed forces, endurance, and security). Our approach, building on Fuller, therefore advocates the idea that the character of the current conduct in war is kinetic, connected, and synthetic, with humans still at its core. Fuller’s control, pressure, and resistance are applicable to all three of our trinitarian elements. ‘Control’, in the form of direction, leadership, communications, allocation of resources, or an economy of effort, can be found in each of our elements – in the kinetic aspect of operations, in the connected nature of it, and in the synthetic. Ethical and legal norms considered are all elements of control, and feature in debates on the use of automated systems. Equally, for ‘Pressure’, we find characteristics in all three of our elements, including the concentration of force in precision kinetic air strikes, in connected cyber disruption operations, and in coercive policies in the so-called grey zone. ‘Resistance’ appears in all three elements too, in physical kinetic resistance, in connectivity, and in the use of synthetic systems. In other words, we imagine two trinities, one superimposed upon the other, each applicable to the other. We have therefore created a set of three observable characteristics to add to Fuller’s original conception, arguing that, in the context of the early 21st century, the grammar of war is kinetic, connected, and synthetic.

Conceptual clarification of the military-human implications of technological change is a connection with this volume, since the advent of new technologies and systems today has created a degree of confusion and uncertainty. This is reflected not only in debates concerning the rules and regulations guiding legitimate conduct in war in new domains. State actors’ exploitation of an unwillingness to cross the threshold of war, while using violence, disruptive deception, and the speed accorded by information operations, constitutes a serious challenge to the strategic balance. Considerable strategic experimentation of the past decade, both by state and non-state actors, heralded new forms of contestation, including legal and information contexts, that involve state instruments of influence deployed on and off the battlefield. The accelerated battle rhythm of the second decade of the 20th century also spurred the emergence and the adoption of new forms of command and control that seamlessly exploit high tech tools combined with low tech social forms of organisational adaptation.

The other link between Fuller and our work is manifest as a warning. In Fuller’s day, the full potential of the new technologies and the techniques that would optimise them were not embraced by the Western democratic powers but were utilised by their enemies. In Fuller’s case, it was the German armed forces that adopted his ideas.³ It seems clear that a failure to grasp the implications of new technology and the systems that accompany them could profit those who seek to disrupt and defeat the West, and the values the West seeks to uphold, and thus destroy all that was so hard won in the 20th century.

Despite our obsession with the latest technologies and their potential, war is still driven by humans. It is the human dimension that will surely assert itself in war in the near future just as it does in the present. There are plenty of critics of this view. Some technologists and philosophers warn that we may be approaching the end of a period when humans could make the critical decisions, since AI-enabled robotics may have the capacity to replace us. But another way to see this is to remember that humans are a form of technology, that is bio-technology, and it is conceivable that we will see a merging of hardware, software, and human tech, in the same way that humans embraced aviation or mechanisation, creating an almost seamless military instrument in the process. Much of this remains speculation but academic research, as in this volume, can help us navigate these issues based on analyses of how the interaction between human and machines is already reshaping the conduct of war.

Kinetic actors an...