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An abridged version of this article appeared in American Heritage, December 2001, Volume 52, Number 8 FIGHTING THE LAST WAR AND THE NEXT
Generals proverbially prepare to fight the last war, and their tendency to do so is somewhat mechanically pilloried by their civilian critics. Preparing to fight the last war, however, is not necessarily a foolish thing to do. If military technology is stable, or is changing only incrementally (as was the case, for example, in the long age of black powder warfare and fighting sail), the lessons of the last war probably retain unimpeachable authority. Even then, stable technology is not enough to make a conservative approach a sure-fire winner, because such eras sometimes sees a revolution in tactics, possibly combined with other radical change, which can make any attempt to fight the last war a catastrophic mistake. In a world in which firearms had barely changed for a century, Napoleon acquired his reputation by drubbing opponents who tried fighting the last war-or so the story is usually told. But Napoleons are rare, not least because true tactical revolutions are rare. So lessons drawn from the last war, which are often pretty straightforward, generally remain invaluable. Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Marlborough, the Marechal de Saxe, Eugene of Savoy and the Duke of Wellington are arguably famous for having very effectively fought the last war, and done it many times running. Preparing to fight the last war only became a proverbial blunder because for a century and a half we've lived in a period of unstable military technology, one accompanied by successive revolutions in tactics, and a number of very memorable tragedies resulted from the incapacity of generals to adjust to new circumstances with sufficient alacrity. The staggering losses of the American Civil War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War and, above all, the First World War, are part of the reason why fighting the last war has become shorthand for murderous folly. Hideous casualties are normally thought to have resulted from the rigidity of generals who did not understand that tactics devised for an age of smooth bore muskets and brass guns were effectively suicidal in an age of rifled muskets-i.e, at Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor--let alone in one which had devised machine guns, barbed wire and modern artillery. The blood price paid on the Somme, or at Verdun, are normally taken to be eloquent enough condemnation of military rigidity, but fighting the last war became an even more dreadful error when doing so let Adolph Hitler conquer Western Europe, and shatter larger (and in many respects better armed) armies at minimal cost. In the Second World War, German tactical innovation, made possible by a technology as subtle and superficially drab as the radio net, exacted a dreadful price: it took five horrific years to dislodge Hitler's armies from those first, and very cheap, conquests. In the decades after 1945, the tendency to fight the last war seemed to be the new hallmark of the profession of arms. In the conventional wisdom, the United States fought the Vietnam War with forces equipped for a rerun of the Second World War, and lost as a result. There is even something in this view: the American Army did much better on the battlefields of Vietnam than was generally acknowledged, either at the time or since, but a political model of war derived from the nineteen forties did the American Army great harm. How did one win a war when one was not allowed to occupy an enemy's home country, when his economic base was beyond reach, when his totalitarian masters were essentially indifferent to the human cost of engaging American power, when the borders of the country one was defending were many times longer than the waist of the Korean peninsula, and when the American public tended to imagine wars culminating with the clarity and finality that had been achieved in 1945? We never quite worked that out, and in this sense Vietnam did become a case of fighting the last war, and losing. The Israelis seemed prone to the same errors: in 1956 and 1957 they seemed to fight and win campaigns modeled on the North African campaigns of the Second World War, but reaped no comparable, or permanent, political gains thereby. In the first portion of the October War of 1973 the Israelis temporarily lost the knack for re-fighting the Second World War: precision-guided munitions deployed on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai Peninsula seemed to spell the end of the combination of mechanized forces and tactical airpower, a form of military power which had become the new Queen of the Battlefield. This judgment proved premature-the Israelis ended the October War with an old style triumph for her armored forces, although without a comparable political victory. And in 1982 the Israeli showed that the death of tactical airpower, allegedly at the hands of the air-defense missile, had been much exaggerated. But 1982 also saw new evidence that the Israeli could be unimaginative when re-fighting the Second World War: in Lebanon, mechanized forces, employed on terrain unsuitable for an armored offensive, performed less impressively than had been the case in the great desert campaigns. This could have been a lesson from the last war, but it was not an official lesson-mobile forces, armor and airpower, the tools of blitzkrieg, were actually rather specialized tools. So the evidence is strong that generals do indeed fall prey to the temptation to fight the last war, and that this can be a very dangerous tendency indeed. So if we are to wage war on terrorism, what do the generals-and the politicians-remember about the last war? And which wars should they be remembering? In 1991 the Second Gulf War saw an American victory of fantastic proportions: modern airpower and armored forces destroyed an Iraqi army numbering hundreds of thousands, for a loss of hundreds. The Second Gulf War was a brilliant military triumph, although it evolved into a political stalemate, and recently seemed to be evolving yet further, into a defeat. Yet the Second Gulf War is the last war. Is America preparing to re-fight it? And can this in fact be done? In the first days after the terrorist attacks, the Administration began speaking about assembling a broad coalition against our enemies, whomever they turned out to be. Here one can indeed get a sense of which war the Bush administration is re-fighting. One lesson that is often drawn from the Second Gulf War is the crucial role for diplomacy in assembling an overwhelming coalition against Saddam Hussein. But was the coalition built by George Bush and his diplomats really crucial to our success against Iraq? And can something like it be reassembled? Most of the military forces contributed by our allies were of doubtful military value. The British armored division was an exception to this rule, as were some other non-American units. Much of the non-US allied airpower was obsolescent, and sometimes obsolete. The Syrian unit which was Hafez al-Assad's contribution to the war effort, often touted as a sign of the coalition's remarkable political breadth, in fact failed to fire a shot in anger. So what were the Syrians good for? Well, they provided political cover for the Saudis, or so we were told. But if the Saudis, who were under direct and immediate threat, needed political cover in order to defend themselves from Iraqi conquest, what kind of an ally were they? This, alas, soon became clear: the Saudis were the sort of ally who in 1996 refused to allow effective FBI investigations of the terrorist murders of American servicemen. So the great work of assembling the coalition seems to have been an effort to secure Saudi permission for America to expend her blood and treasure to defend the Saudis. The Saudis, humbly petitioned, grudgingly agreed. If George W. Bush manages to assemble another such coalition, the price may be steeper. Defending the Saudis, after all, was part of the point of the Gulf War; achieving that end was a strategic victory, no matter how infuriating the Saudis proved to be. The price for assembling a new coalition, one modeled on the last, may be much greater than that-it may distort or destroy the point of the exercise. If we admit the Syrians to a coalition against terror, as the Bush administration is hinting, we will have enlisted in our war on terror a state described by our State Department as an ally of terrorists. If we secure Iran's membership, for which we are also rumored to be angling, we shall double this embarrassment. If the Palestinian National Authority comes on board, as Colin Powell hints may be the case, we shall triple it. If the Pakistanis join up-the Pakistanis are active sponsors of terrorism in Kashmir-we may succeed in turning the war on terror into a perfect farce. We may manage to punish the Taliban, but the war on terror will have become a war on the most visible sponsors of one terrorist act, waged in conjunction with the authors of many, many other such acts. We shall be waging war on Afghanistan, not on terrorism. The lessons of history do not suggest that the United States cannot wage wars in coalition. But the coalitions that have worked most impressively have not been fig leaves over de facto American unilateralism. They have rather been uneasy assemblages of states bound together by genuine and vital (if transient) common interests. The first phrases coming out of Washington are marked by clauses about persuading our new allies to understand that ending state support for terrorism is in everyone's interest. But this is plainly false: a number of our theoretical allies are states which have a strong vested interest in employing terrorists, because terrorists have proven a cheap, effective and apparently satisfying way of striking at enemies-and we have often been the enemy so struck. Moreover, a number of states, and in some cases significant numbers of the citizens of these states, view some acts of terrorism as more than acceptable: they view them as legitimate. So if we intend to fight the war on terror the way we fought the Gulf War, by appealing to some least common denominator of political agreement, we may be in trouble before we start. And we may be in trouble simply by terming a prospective military action a war on terror. To declare war on terrorism, to call acts of terrorism acts of war, also runs the risk of fighting a previous campaign. War, if anything more than a metaphor, is waged by and between states, and when we forget this we are liable to get into difficulties. A few years ago we declared war on drugs, but the results of that war are pretty discouraging, not least because we thereby framed the question in an idiom which suggests the satisfying outcome of a violent and total result, but also because the tools of war have not proved very useful in such a campaign. It is not so much that they are absolutely useless, only that we have found small use for the instruments of war which we possess in some abundance. States may harbor drug traffickers, may even tolerate them as acts of corrupt policy, but we have not thought it useful to invade Mexico, Columbia, Burma or Thailand. Aircraft may fly drugs into the United States, but we do not send F-16s to shoot down such aircraft; ships may land drugs on our coasts, but we use Coast Guard cutters to intercept them, not destroyers to sink them. War is something we are actually pretty good at; suppressing the drug trade is something we are not very good at. The price we pay for calling a narcotics problem a war, if we take the metaphor at all seriously, is to cast undeserved scorn on our military capacity. Is rhetoric about a war on terrorism the same sort of mistake? Maybe, but not necessarily. Terrorism is often although not always an instrument of states, a means by which war is waged by surrogates, although often surrogates with agendas of their own. A number of modern states have recently employed terrorists to wage low-intensity warfare when they lack the means or the stomach to make war openly and more massively. And one can indeed wage war on states. The advantages of waging war on states as an attempt to suppress terrorism are fairly obvious. Most successful terrorists make good use of the resources states can provide; without access to these resources, suppressing terror generally gets easier. States are also conspicuous targets-terrorists themselves are usually very hard to find, but states are impossible to hide. States possess lucrative targets for military reprisal, terrorists possess few or none. And while terrorists may scorn the risks they run, may even seek martyrdom, states rarely if ever seek martyrdom. States can be deterred by reprisal, or destroyed. So, with whom are we to go to war? Syria has used terrorists against both Israel and Turkey, Pakistan has used terrorists against India (in Kashmir), Iraq and Iran have used terrorists against one another, and against the United States, and both have probably used terrorists against some of the Gulf states. Libya backed terrorists against a variety of enemies. When South Yemen was an independent state, it provided shelter to terrorists, as did East Germany. Back in the 1930s, Croatian terrorists were backed by Mussolini, and Sudeten German terrorists by Hitler. The Soviet Union backed some terrorists while shunning others (for example, Sinn Fein). The Chinese and Cubans both backed some terrorist organizations. Our own governments supported guerrillas who on occasion used terrorist methods-to pick a relatively uncontroversial example, we backed Afghan mujaheddin who were less than scrupulous in their tactics. This list is very far from being exhaustive. So most terrorist organizations have enjoyed the active support or benevolent toleration of states. Even if they can wage sustained and effective campaigns without the assistance of states, terrorists need sanctuaries, or at least find life easier with access to such. This is not an invariant rule: although it once enjoyed some toleration by the French state-a legacy of lingering and perfectly understandable distaste for Franco-it is my impression that ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, has lately made do without the aid of a friendly government. But ETA is in this respect unusual; most terrorists are better liked by at least one government. And again, one can obviously wage wars against governments. This is indeed what the Administration initially seemed to have promised we would do, and this promise was echoed and re-echoed: there were to be no more safe harbors. We were going to "end" states which supported or give shelter to terrorists. War is a time-honored way of ending states, if by that verb the President meant the destruction of regimes through conquest. Ending a regime in this fashion requires military conquest, occupation, and the organization of a successor government. It is perfectly possible to do this. Three states which not only supported terrorism but actively practiced it were foolish enough to declare war on the United States in 1941. Germany, Japan and Italy no longer practice terror, or support it.
Again, remember that talk of including Syria in the coalition against terror, and the tremendous efforts being made to enlist Pakistan. Pakistan not only uses terror against India in Kashmir, its intelligence service (the ISI) has a long and in some respects affectionate relationship with bin Laden himself. Perhaps these states will be allowed to join up after the cease their obnoxious practices. Perhaps. Are we requiring Pakistan to abjure terror in Kashmir before they sign up with us? Will Syria be admitted to the coalition without being required to arrest those members of the PFLP and the DFLP staffing offices in Damascus? Will it be required to stop supporting Hizbollah attacks launched outside Lebanese territory? If the administration is engaging in salami tactics, one can only admire its cunning: if the plan is to use Syria and Pakistan against the Taliban, then turn on them, we should take off our hats in salute. But the more disturbing possibility is that the Administration is simply not serious about insisting that the rules have changed. But why did the rules ever evolve in a direction which allowed states to shelter terrorists, and use them fairly freely? One obvious answer is that some terrorists were employed by states so strong that we did not think it prudent to go to war with them. This was obviously true of terrorists sheltered by nuclear weapons states, or the obvious clients of such states. Invading East Germany to root out members of the Baader-Meinhof gang would have meant pushing through Soviet Guard tank armies to get at them. Invading Syria might have meant a war with the Soviet Union, which was Syria's patron. Guerrillas, who have a tendency to use terrorist methods, who by the older rules of war were definitionally terrorists, were used by both sides during the Cold War; they often seemed like the only prudent way of striking at the enemy. And guerrillas, including ones who dabbled in terror, were bathed in the reflected glory of the partisans and Resistance fighters of the Second World War. In the course of the post-war fights that hastened the end of the European empires, and subsequently killed off some settler states, guerrillas given to terrorist tactics played a conspicuous role, and all such guerrillas looked a bit like the European partisans, especially if seen from a suitable distance. So state support of terror was tolerated, sometimes because it had to be, sometimes because such support seemed morally acceptable, even morally commendable, in a context of Cold War and anti-imperialist wars. The end of the European empires and the disappearance of the Soviet Union did not immediately end this atmosphere of toleration, and in any case the effect of the Cold War on the toleration of state-supported terror was sometimes indirect. Revolutionary Iran was not a Soviet client, but did employ terror against the United States, and did so with no fear of invasion or massive bombardment. Perhaps this forbearance, too, was a result of Cold War politics: precisely because revolutionary Iran was not in the Soviet orbit, American governments seem to have been were chary of pushing her in. So acts of war and terror by Iran were tolerated by the United States. Moreover, American tolerance of states which supported terror outlasted the Cold War by more than a decade. Neither during nor after the Cold War were states which sponsored terror "ended", although they were on rare occasions bombed in a comparatively desultory manner. This tolerance spanned four administrations, each of which serially announced that it would not tolerate states which sheltered terrorists, but tolerated them nonetheless. Why has this been the case? One can only speculate. It is possible that the habit of putting up with casus belli, which grew up under the shelter of Cold War-enforced restraint, afterwards had simply taken root. Perhaps there was a guilty conscience, a hangover from the heyday of European imperialism, when military reprisals were very regularly taken by Occidental states against less well-armed Oriental and African ones. Overwhelming strength sometimes has perverse effects on the willingness to employ one's strength: our military power dwarfed that of the Third World states who were provoking us, and at some level we may have refused to take even gross insults very seriously. Contrariwise, in the wake of a misperception about the lessons of Vietnam, the terrorist-sheltering states may have seemed militarily formidable. Perhaps there was no confidence in the willingness of the American public to accept even the minimal casualties which seemed the probable cost of effective reprisals. Perhaps the United States assumed that if Western regimes had apparently outgrown the casual use of state violence, our militarily-contemptible tormentors had done the same, and bizarre lapses from the new pacific norms were merely freakish aberrations. Perhaps it is simply the case that oil, like rank, hath its privileges, and the oil states rather conspicuously sympathized with one brand of terror. But whatever the reasons, by the late nineteen eighties a weak state could wage proxy war against the United States via terror, and do so without punishment unless it was caught red-handed-and if it was caught red-handed, the punishment would prove endurable, if not by the dead, at least by their political masters. For after all, American presidents have more or less declared war or terrorism before. In the wake of the recent atrocities we may pressure states currently sponsoring or tolerating terrorists to instead take effective measures against such groups. If we do, and are even partially successful, we may be in for an unpleasant surprise, for this approach is arguably re-fighting some very old wars indeed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Western states periodically compelled non-Western states to crack down on homicidal and xenophobic elements within their own societies. Western states did this with both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, and the result was to erode the legitimacy of both regimes, which subsequently collapsed. There are some alarming parallels here to Pakistan, Egypt, and a number of states on the Arabian peninsula: all of these are fragile regimes which have made an uneasy peace with indigenous violent xenophobic movements. None of these regimes rule populations which are hostile to terrorist movements in every instance. We may significantly erode their legitimacy if we push them hard, and if we do not push them hard, they will probably remain fairly tolerant of at least some terrorists-certainly of ones who strike at the Israelis, or the Indians, or the Uzbeks. And Pakistan is now a nuclear weapons state; if the current government collapses, its fission bombs will fall into the hands of what may be an extremely hostile successor regime. Pressing for the nuclear disarmament of Pakistan may be both implausible and extremely risky, while failing to disarm Pakistan may in the long run be even riskier. In any case, one war which we must pray the Bush Administration will not re-fight is the fraudulent war against terrorist states, the one waged by its predecessors. A series of minimal responses to state-abetted terrorism has been cumulatively catastrophic; with each readily-endurable retaliation, we have taught such states that it is safe to conduct a policy of covert murder against our country's civilians. If the current attacks have been made by a group aided or abetted by a state (or states), and we make the now-traditional minimal reply, we will have taught such states that one can kill up to six thousand Americans with relative impunity. The next time, the ante will presumably increase. Another war we must hope the Administration does not re-fight is the recent war on terror conducted on the model of a criminal investigation and prosecution. Criminal investigations are intensely rule-bound, as they must be, since they occur within the borders of a state governed by laws. A state waging proxy war is by definition bound by no laws, and combating it on the contrary assumption is to risk entering a one-sided suicide pact. A conspicuously useless tactic of the earlier was on terror is the strategy of economic sanctions. These can go on for decades with no noticeably useful effect, and states as weak as Libya, Cuba and post-war Iraq rarely seem to have been significantly inhibited by economic sanctions. So which wars might we want to consider re-fighting? Does the more distant past hold any useful lessons? At first glance it seems as if it does: the Bush administration has implied, perhaps unintentionally, that it intends to revive an older model of the international state system. Current doctrine holds that sovereignty is absolute; all states are to be treated as formal equals, on the theory that all states observe certain minimal norms. But the existence of states practicing genocide at home, and/or terrorism abroad, suggests that all states are not observing what most Americans consider minimal norms. The norm just broken has cost more American lives than were lost on Omaha beach, or at Antietam. In the nineteenth century, norm-breaking states were not invariably treated as formal equals, and they risked the loss of their sovereignty. If we discover that a state has backed the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, will we in fact suspend the sovereignty of that state by force of arms-invasion, conquest, and the formation of a new regime? No press coverage from abroad suggests that foreigners think this either feasible or desirable, and much suggests the contrary. As I write this, the administration seems to be backing of from its earlier pledges to "end" states which support terror, and if it backs off far enough, nothing will change, at least not for the better. But it is worth remembering that a policy of the sort the Administration initially considered was effected as recently as 1945, and with considerable if mixed success. There is no obvious reason why it cannot in principle be done again. There will be many unpleasant consequences if we try and fail, and very probably some unpleasant consequences if we try and succeed; not all of these consequences can even be imagined before we start. But if we do not try at all, we will almost certainly encourage people who demonstrably hate us very much to continue to attempt to kill us in appalling numbers. They will try repeatedly to better their existing score, and some of them will eventually succeed. States are oft-times taught by example: innovative if atrocious measures which do not attract effective reprisals are generally repeated, and then emulated. This is not to imply that we have the power to make a political paradise of some pretty unpromising raw materials. We do not; we are not a political paradise ourselves. If, against the odds as they now appear, we set up a new regime in Iraq, it is not likely to be anywhere near as successful, or as long-lived, as the successor regimes of Germany, Japan and Italy have been. This will be a great misfortune for its citizens, but will not necessarily make the exercise worthless. The purpose of destroying a rogue regime is chiefly as a reprisal and a deterrent: pour encourager les autres. And this we may be able to do, for some reprisals succeed. When the Confederate States of America vowed to enslave any black American soldier taken prisoner, Abraham Lincoln famously ordered that if this occurred, captured Confederate soldiers would be set to work in chains. And in the wake of this public vow, our captured black soldiers were not systematically enslaved-although some were simply murdered. Similarly, Adolph Hitler, not a man easily restrained from atrocity, was deterred from using poison gas against armed enemies by fear of reprisals, although he very notoriously used it against unarmed enemies. No one should pretend that reprisals work reliably: sometimes they set off an escalating spiral of atrocity. But a failure to retaliate risks emboldening enemies who have already proved themselves quite remarkably cruel. If we destroy a state, we will not, of course, deter suicidal zealots. But we are not unlikely to deter some states which are considering sponsoring them, or men like them. If we do this, we will be called imperialists for our pains, but we are called imperialists now, by which our enemies presumably mean impotent and risible imperialists, whose citizens can be mass-murdered with impunity. But can we do this? We have the military power to do it, and for at least a day or two, some of our possible targets seem to have thought that we might have the will. At the time of writing, however, they seem to be recovering their nerve. The existing rules of the international say that we cannot, or at any rate must not, do this; the numbers of our dead suggest that we may, just may, be willing to change the rules. The rules of the state system sometimes change after decisive wars. Perhaps that is the sort of war we should be thinking about re-fighting. Another sort of war we might consider re-fighting is the sort which breaks the morale of the enemy. Not all military defeats make durable martyrs: some crushing defeats make the defeated party lose, for a very considerable period, all taste for a fight. And we might consider as additional models wars which did not produce decisive victories in any near term period, but which in the long run changed international norms in ways which have so far proved permanent. The US Navy's campaign against the Barbary pirates lasted fifteen years, and the Royal Navy's campaign against the slave trade lasted rather longer. But piracy, and slavery, are nowadays pretty marginal evils, in both cases because although weaker states clung to them pretty tenaciously, and profited from them, these practices were put down by force of arms. It may not be likely, but it is scarcely impossible, that the same may become true of state-sponsored terrorism. |