The New Rules of War

Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder

Sean McFate

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062843609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"Stunning. Sean McFate is a new Sun Tzu." -Admiral James Stavridis (retired), former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO

An Economist Book of the Year 2019

Some of the principles of warfare are ancient, others are new, but all described in The New Rules of War will permanently shape war now and in the future. By following them Sean McFate argues, we can prevail. But if we do not, terrorists, rogue states, and others who do not fight conventionally will succeed—and rule the world.

The New Rules of War is an urgent, fascinating exploration of war—past, present and future—and what we must do if we want to win today from an 82nd Airborne veteran, former private military contractor, and professor of war studies at the National Defense University.

War is timeless. Some things change—weapons, tactics, technology, leadership, objectives—but our desire to go into battle does not. We are living in the age of Durable Disorder—a period of unrest created by numerous factors: China's rise, Russia's resurgence, America's retreat, global terrorism, international criminal empires, climate change, dwindling natural resources, and bloody civil wars. Sean McFate has been on the front lines of deep state conflicts and has studied and taught the history and practice of war. He's seen firsthand the horrors of battle and understands the depth and complexity of the current global military situation.

This devastating turmoil has given rise to difficult questions. What is the future of war? How can we survive? If Americans are drawn into major armed conflict, can we win? McFate calls upon the legends of military study Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and others, as well as his own experience, and carefully constructs the new rules for the future of military engagement, the ways we can fight and win in an age of entropy: one where corporations, mercenaries, and rogue states have more power and 'nation states' have less. With examples from the Roman conquest, World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan and others, he tackles the differences between conventional and future war, the danger in believing that technology will save us, the genuine leverage of psychological and 'shadow' warfare, and much more. McFate's new rules distill the essence of war today, describing what it is in the real world, not what we believe or wish it to be.

Rule 1: Conventional War Is Dead

Imagine a war. Several sides are fighting, but it is not clear who is on what side. The combatants do not wear regular military uniforms, and many are foreigners. They fight in the name of religion but act like monsters. Worse, they fight for the same god, labeling their enemy “apostate” and reserving the cruelest punishments for disbelievers. Groups splinter and turn on one another. The conflict becomes a holy mess to outside observers, and some even conclude that the religion itself is evil.

Civilians are prey, and the laws of war are nonexistent. Whole communities are raped and looted. Fighters carve out independent states in god’s name and extort people of their wealth. They govern through terror, committing horrible human rights atrocities: children are slaughtered, women rounded up as sex slaves, men tortured, burned alive, beheaded, defenestrated, or worse.

In one city, a religious leader orders his fighters to put all inhabitants to the sword. And they do. One witness recounts: “Everyone—women, old and young, and sick, and children and pregnant women were cut to pieces at the point of a dagger.” Babies were “taken by the feet and dashed against walls.”1 Thousands more flee into the countryside, only to die slowly of thirst. The international community screams outrage but does little to stop the massacres.

People flee the war zone, creating a tidal wave of refugees that floods other countries, destabilizing them. The region sinks into chaos. Other powers intervene, exploiting the situation for their own interests and waging proxy wars against enemies, but they, too, become mired in the tar pit of war. Humanitarians decry all sides, penning invectives and condemning the bloodbath, but achieve nothing. Meanwhile, the disorder feeds on itself, resulting in perpetual conflict with no resolution in sight.

Is this the Middle East today? No.

The War of Eight Saints took place in Italy from 1375 to 1378, but the parallels between it and the Middle East today are stunning. The religion in question is not Islam but Christianity. Instead of Sunni fighting Shia over “true Islam,” papists fought anti-papists for the soul of the Catholic Church. Warriors did not wear standard uniforms, and many were foreigners. In the War of Eight Saints, most fighters were mercenaries hailing from every corner of Europe. They, too, professed to fight for or against the pope, but many were interested only in coin or adventure. The same could be said of jihadis today. Terrorists are masked and wear a collage of military fatigues. Sunni and Shia come from all over the Middle East and North Africa. Combatants in both wars were and are savage.

All fought for god but behaved like devils, damning the innocent to a living hell. In 2014, the terrorist group known most commonly in the West as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) took the city of Sinjar, Iraq. They rounded up the inhabitants and slaughtered them in the name of Allah: men, women, and children. Five thousand were killed. Even more fled up Mount Sinjar outside the city, dying of thirst. The War of Eight Saints had its own Sinjar: the massacre of Cesena, a small city in northern Italy. In 1378, Cardinal Robert, the pope’s envoy, ordered the mercenary captain John Hawkwood to kill all of the town’s civilians—five thousand of them—as God’s punishment. Hawkwood did. Tellingly, it did not hurt either man’s career. Hawkwood became one of the most celebrated and wealthy mercenaries of his day, and his visage still adorns Florence’s famed cathedral. Cardinal Robert later became a pope himself, known as antipope Clement VII during the papal schism. Some do well by war.

Both conflicts sucked entire regions into anarchy. Syria and Iraq remain the epicenter of an ancient feud between Sunni and Shia, one with no permanent resolution in sight. The War of Eight Saints was fought for three years, but that was only the beginning. It birthed the great papal schism that split the Catholic Church from 1378 to 1417, wreaking pandemonium across Europe. The fight between papists and anti-papists would continue through the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War two centuries later, and arguably beyond.

The War of Eight Saints could be mistaken for the Middle East today because both illustrate the timeless nature of war: organized violence that means to impose the will of one on another. It is brutal, bloody, and unfair, whether in 400 BCE, 1300 CE, or today.2 Some things change—weapons, tactics, technology, leadership, circumstances—but the nature of war does not. This is the difference between war and warfare. Warfare is how wars are fought, and it is always changing. But the nature of war never changes.

People today confuse war and warfare, and this leads to big problems. The War of Eight Saints shows us what war is, but what is warfare now? For the West, it’s called “conventional war.”3

The Western Way of War

There is no such thing as conventional versus unconventional war—there is just war. “Conventional war” is actually a type of warfare, and it’s how the West likes to fight. Sometimes western militaries call it “Big War.” Think of Napoleon or the world wars: Great powers duking it out with their militaries as gladiators, and the fate of the world dangling in the balance. Only states are legitimately allowed to do battle, making war an exclusively interstate affair, fought with industrial-strength armies. Firepower is king, and battlefield victory everything. Honor matters, as do the laws of war, and citizens are expected to serve their country in uniform with patriotic zeal. It’s why we say “Thank you for your service” to vets in the airport.

World War II is the West’s model for armed conflict. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge and called it the “good war.” Others say it was fought by the “greatest generation.” Nearly seventy years on, the demand for Second World War movies appears unstoppable, the supply inexhaustible. Like a handsome man in uniform, these films never really go out of style. There are over six hundred unique World War II movies, and four more were released in 2017.4 That conflict remains iconic because it represents the last time the West won decisively, unlike today. The frustrations that followed, from Korea to Afghanistan, are either forgotten or dismissed as “quagmires.”

World War II remains paradigmatic for experts, too, who view its style of warfare as timeless and universal. Generals describe it using normative language like “conventional war,” “symmetrical war,” and “regular war.” (I like the term “conventional war,” but they all mean the same thing.) So strong is this dogma that other forms of combat are labeled “unconventional,” “asymmetrical,” or “irregular.” These are snubs. Military campaigns waged by armed nonstate actors are not privileged as war, but belittled as something lesser.

Conventional war is state-on-state fighting in which the primary instrument of power is brute force and battle determines everything. It’s a military-centric vision of global politics, which is why militaries cling to it and remain smitten to its call. The high priest of conventional war theory is Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general from the Napoleonic era.5 A hagiography exists around the man, and his book On War is enshrined in Western militaries as a bible. When I teach this text to senior officers at the war college, the room grows silent with reverence. His ideas constitute the DNA of Western strategic thought, and a few of his concepts, such as the “fog of war,” have even made it into popular culture.

There is just one problem with conventional war: no one fights this way anymore. There is nothing conventional about it, because war has moved on. Despite this problem, conventional war remains our model, and this is why the West continues to lose against weaker enemies who do not fight according to our preferences. To win, we must ditch our traditional way of fighting, because it’s obsolete. It is neither timeless nor universal. On the contrary, conventional war has a beginning, middle, and end.

A Very Short History of Conventional War

The story of conventional war and the nation-state is one.6 While they have no precise birthday, one could argue it is May 23, 1618. That morning someone was thrown out of a window in Prague. Three others followed. Miraculously, all four survived, despite the seventy-foot drop onto cobblestones.

This set into motion a chain of improbable events that led to the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest in European history. Catholics and Protestants fought each other without mercy. The armies of Sweden, then a superpower, destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany alone. Disease and famine were rampant, and tens of thousands of people became refugees, wandering the plains of Europe and getting picked off by bands of roving mercenaries. Rape was routine. By the war’s end, eight million were dead and most of central Europe was wiped out. The continent took a century to recover.

Out of this inferno came the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which gave birth to a new international order, one uniquely ruled by states. Prior to that moment, Europe was a medieval free-for-all. Anyone with money could wage war, and everyone did. Kings, aristocratic families, cities, and even popes hired mercenary armies to do their bidding, no matter how petty. War was everywhere, all the time, and so was human suffering. It was the Wild West.

The “Westphalian Order” made states the sheriff, outlawing mercenaries and those who hired them. States invested in their own standing armies and began their ascendancy. The relationship among force, power, and world order is stark. Those who control the means of violence get to make the rules that others must obey—or die. Nonstate rivals became defenseless without mercenaries and were easily defeated. Old medieval powerhouses such as the church had no choice but to kowtow to state rulers. Soon, nation-states reigned above all others.

The Westphalian Order is the state-centric international system of today, the so-called rules-based order.7 It has many features, but the most important one is this: only states are sovereign, and everyone else is subordinate. States guarantee their sovereignty by clobbering anyone who might oppose them with their national militaries. Although gradual and imperfect, the Westphalian Order established modern diplomacy, international law, and the world we inhabit today.

The second-most-important feature of the Westphalian Order is armed conflict. Under it, only states were allowed to have militaries and wage war, enabling them to rule unchallenged. This made warfare an exclusively state-on-state affair, fought by national armed forces according to certain customs such as not killing prisoners or waving a white cloth to signal surrender. Later, these battlefield traditions were codified into the “laws of war,” using instruments like the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which address only interstate conflict. All other forms of war were outlawed and viewed as illegitimate.

The Westphalian way of war became “conventional” in the mind of the age, and we are its inheritors. It was the only kind of warfare Clausewitz knew, and it is what we teach today. Napoleon and the world wars remain paradigmatic conventional wars, as they were fought with national armies for flag rather than with mercenary armies for kings or popes. Battlefield victory determined winners and losers. These wars mirror the nation-state’s own rise to glory; they are a recent invention, with most of history governed by empires, kingdoms and city-states. Both states and their way of war spread across the globe through European colonization, and today we have internalized them as timele...