The War of the Future Refections on ISMOR 16

bY Gwyn Prins

Visiting Senior Fell0 w DERA

'Natural philosophers declare that the atmosphere reveals at times the presence of a certain so-called cosmic dust. It influences the change of colours in the sky. It colours the sunlight with a bloody line . . . In the public and private life of modern Europe something of the same kind reveals itself.'

ISMOR 16 was announced as having no specific theme: but, in fact, three have emerged out of the cosmic dust that tints the horizons not only of Europe (as the quotation states), but world-wide.

A practical theme, a conceptual theme and a professional theme (by which I mean an axiomatic issue about the purpose and direction of OA as a research activity) have been addressed. I shall offer some reflections on each, intended to stimulate their further, active, consideration.

My cosmic dust comes from the preface to a book published 101 years ago. Its title is borrowed for this lecture, because, although the answers that we are finding and will find are different, the question posed is exactly the same: what will be the nature of war in the future?

Jan Bloch, the author, was a Polish railway engineer and tycoon who devoted his fortune and efforts from 1980-98 to a monumental study of the changing potentials of warfare. The full title of his work is The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations. Note the qualifications: exactly the extension from the engineering origins of OA to so-called 'soft' areas to which Tony Quigley referred in his opening talk.

Mr Quigley reminded us of famous achievements in Second World War OA - the Hurricane silhouette; the V1 targeting shift; the decoy carrier lifts; one might add the Sunderland mission pattern and depth bomb fusing solution too. All were brilliant in their elegance of conception,

simplicity and reliability of conduct and decisiveness of effect: manifestly fit for purpose. Clearly an ideal; but dependent upon the requirement being as simply and as clearly stated: repeatedly, we have been told of cloudy or non-existent requirements.

But engineering OA insights go beyond themsehes. In many ways, Bloch deserves the title of grandfather to OA: he analysed consequences of higher velocity and reduced calibre in automatic and semi-automatic infantry weapons, and the introduction of smokeless powder in both small-arms and artillery. He observed firing experiments on corpses and denied the prevalent contemporary view that smaller wounds would mean less loss of blood and therefore be more 'humane'. He investigated tumbling bullets and bone shrapnel damage from .high velocity penetration. He (a railway builder) studied the logistics of supplying quick-firing artillery. He concluded, with perfectly detailed and chilling accuracy, that the future war would be exactly as it became: long, immobile, locked into trench systems, with massive attrition, and, further, that the war would not be concluded on the battlefield but by social and economic breakdown and revolution. He also predicted that his predictions would not be heeded 'until mankind has made experience of the deadliness of its weapons: there will be terrible bloodshed' - and there was. Bloch predicted slaughter on a scale that corpses would form parapets to shield the living: just so with the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont Hamel on 1 July 19 16.

Bloch used engineer's insights to extrapolate beyond the technical domain to make political and psychological judgments about the impact of war on society. So should we. At St Petersburg last February, commemorating the centenary of Bloch's work, and The Hague Peace Conference of 1899, which was a direct consequence of it, students of war of all persuasions agreed on one point. At century's end, for whatever reason, war is now extruded from Europe; it is, as John Keegan put it, an activity exclusively of 'have-not' versus 'have-not', in which we - the wealthy and powerful and peaceful - increasingly choose to intervene: what Lawrence Freedman has called 'wars of choice'.

The principal global consequence of the end of the Cold War is now plain to see. It collapsed the 'second world' into the 'third', tipping most of the former Soviet space into poverty, with associated reduction in life expectancy, increased epidemic disease, rampant criminalisation of authority. We two.

collapse of civil society and have split the world firmly in

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This f;n de siGcZe reality of remarkable zones of deep peace abutting heaving zones of insecurity and uncivil war is reflected in the way that ISMOR 16 has addressed its three themes.

The practical theme is the return of logistics to the centre of attention. And not before time. In his fine book SuppZy War: Logistics @om Wallenstein to Patton, Martin van Creveld tells the gripping and repeated stories of how major campaigns were decided more by logistics than by tactics let alone strategy, especially in the industrial age: BARBAROSSA was fatally late reaching Moscow in 1941 because of four oversights: that high-octane German engines could not burn low-octane Russian fuel from overrun supplies; that trucks required anti-freeze to work in the cold; that the gauge-change needed more specialised railway troops and that German steam engines (unlike the Soviet ones destroyed by the Panzers) were not winterized. Conversely, in 1944, Patton broke out of Normandy and was ready, fuelled, provisioned and with full magazines, to disobey Bradley's orders and storm to Berlin because of the 'Red Ball Express' - his private logistics system with M p escort that barged all allied traffic, including combat units, aside, to keep his tanks rolling. It contributed to his removal from command.

Logistics is going to be increasingly central to political signalling with armed force in the 21'' century world of conflict. Kosovo has just demonstrated this: the initial decision to conduct an air campaign was a reflex reaction, little driven by circumstances on the ground. The role of the air campaign, we now may see, was to provide a 'casualty-free' (but expensive) activity on which all NATO members could agree - what Luttwak calls 'war-lite'. And that is all bar one thing: the air campaign gave a possibility to prepare the invasion. It appears that it was when the Russian intelligence services monitored the (principally British) logistics activities and, we may surmise, noticed the war-fighting generals in the field, that Chernomyrdin became persuaded that we would invade - after all, we had bet the shop on it - and he brutally contradicted the Russian General Staffs promises to go and help the Milosevic regime. Much of this is now pretty clear. So, Professor Schrady's point about the need to bridge the disconnect between logistics and 'OOTL' (operations other than logistics) is well taken. 'Death to stovepiping' is the new battle-cry for practical OA. 'Give us clear priorities' is another.

The second theme is conceptual, and logically entailed: many papers have described something called 'OOTW. This is helpful because it recognises the wider range of valuable political effects that can derive

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fi-om military activities than merely threat. But it is unhelphl because it begs the question of what 'w' is.

What is 'd now? Partly it is uncivil war in the poor world into which, fortified by the emerging doctrine of enforceable human rights, the rich and powerful intervene. But, in the 'classical' redm of threats to us, it has changed too. The kinetic segment of the spectrum - the thing that Bloch studied in the 1890s and which dominated warfare during the European Civil Wars 1914-1941 and the World War 1941-1945 - is now of diminishing importance (diminishing, not diminished, note): it shares space with the electronic, informational and psychological means of making war; with asymmetric threats made by non-state of sub-state actors. Joke less about the 2"d Bttn, the Loamshire Hackers, than people were once wont to do!

Therefore, the development within CDA of a suite of studies and models reported here (ADC, Clarion I & 11, Hiloca, DIAMOND), is, in my view, of great value. DIAMOND I find especially interesting, because it is founded upon a more realistic way of describing the 'OOTW domain - it deals with diplomatic/military operations PMOS), aware that the old UN PKO distinction of use and non-use of force - inserted into the 'OOTW acronym - is not viable for present and likely future contexts.

EXPERT (formal)

7 REFERANT (charirmatic)

FORCE REWARD

Source: G.Rins, Sfratem, Force-Planning and Diplomafic/Milifary Operations, RIIA.1998

The third theme detected was pervasive - part of the cosmic dust - but especially in the discussions about Command and Control. Jim Moffat set that ground when explaining that a non rule-based approach to

modelling C2 was required: one which was agent-based because it must better represent and interrogate human behaviour under stress in war. This apparently mild prescription actually contains a radical stimulant; for it engages directly the diplomatic/military requirement of a commander called upon to exercise judgment which turns force into power in circumstances where the full spectrum of power beyond force (Fig.l), sustained by expert knowledge, must be deployed to help position the fulcrum (Fig.2).

Source: G.PMs, Strafes, Farce-Planning andDiplomatic/Milita~ Operations, IUL4,1998

TR K E X E P C l S l O F C O M M A N D

POLITICAL OBJECTIVE

FORCE

Enabling Activities

This is a much more demanding task than hitherto because of the wider senses of 'w'. How might we expect people to react? Bloch told us that 'they will try, thinking they are fighting under the old conditions'; and Lorraine Dodd reminded us beautifully how, as individuals and groups faced with cognitive dissonance, we try either to embrace the difference

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out of existence (let a include p even if it cannot) or we will plod down the left axis of the catastrophe model, towards potential for global loss, in denial, taking not self-protective or remedial action.

The remedy, Dodd noted (with Carl von Clausewitz @3k I Ch 71 invisibly at her side), is to exercise and train in order to deflect the inertia resultant from friction: to switch on the unique human characteristic of vision and foresight in order to see this potential: human imagination created the end of century hiatus and human imagination, liberated to remake the world, will end it.

I do not underestimate the excitement or the fundamental nature of the challenge that this extension of the professional range of OA implies. We are far from the Hurricane silhouette in task, but close in our great need of the clarity and simplicity of thought it embodied.

Jan Bloch's The War of the Future prompted the last Tsar to call for The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907; but Bloch's prediction that all the world's statesmen could not prevent the coming war proved correct. We learned his lessons in blood because we lacked the moral courage to be galvanised into action by applied imagination.

Last night Professor Rivett told us how lucky we are to have the responsibility of such work at such a time. I fully agree. And we need all the help we can get.

So we might do well to pay attention to Bloch's vision of the war of the future which we will mainly experience in, and as a consequence of, our deeply riven world community, rather than the major war between industrial states that he foresaw. The prescription is the same even if the context will be different:

'The elements contending in a future war will be all the moral and intellectual resources of nations, all the forces of modern civilisation, all technical improvements, feelings, characters, minds and wills - the combined h i t of the culture of the civilised world.'

Jan Bloch's work is evaluated in (eh) G. Bins & H. Tromp, 'The Future of War', Kluwer, Amsterdam, 1999 Cforthcoming)

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