Funny way to start, but there’s method to my madness.
“Mommy, why is it raining?” Because God’s crying. “Why is God crying?” Because He’s sad. “Why is God sad?” It must be something you did. Well that, at any rate, is the Christian answer. But as any intelligent mother of an inquisitive child knows, every concatenation of why questions has to end in something, and preferably not original sin. Why is that for which there’s no further explanation? Because that’s the way what is is.
The study of the way what is is is called science. It starts with the atomic constituents of what is, then the molecular configurations of those constituents, a.k.a. objects, and then the regularities describing the way those objects interact. Metaphysics, by contrast, asks a two-fold different set of questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? And why is there this something rather than something else?
It doesn’t help to answer because that’s the way God wanted it. That just pushes the same two questions back onto God. So on this score neither theism nor atheism does any better than the other. Both reach terminus at what they can’t explain. They just have a different name for it. So let’s skip the metaphysics and go straight to the physics of military science.
A science is defined by the objects it takes as atomic. So it might be supposed that military science would start with the soldier. It does not. We need to back up. How far back? To this:
Once upon a time there were no animate objects. Then there were. To sustain itself an animate object needs to ingest. Most do so through a straw, so to speak. But those that need to break up their food develop teeth. And those that need to render their food stationary while they break it up develop claws. Hence Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”
Not all of what we sink our teeth or claws into is edible. Some predation is about eliminating competition for what’s edible. More particularly, humans kill each other for food, but food other than the humans they kill for it. That is, we do not, at least not as a rule, eat each other.
Humans also kill each other for reproductive access, though needless to say not access to the humans they kill. That would be self-defeating. So if you’re a Republican Congressman – as there was a few months back – demanding that a university president provide a definition of ‘woman’, as good an answer as any and better than most is: something men try not to kill if it’s what they want reproductive access to.
Ten seconds versus at least nine months explains why women have to be selective in their reproductivity, whereas men needn’t be so picky. It follows that if the parties were left to their own devices, rape would be more the rule than the exception. But they’re not left to their own devices. Long before we came down from the trees, wombs have been a commodity to be protected and managed, a commodity the ‘owner’ of which has seldom been the womb-bearer herself. So talk of consent isn’t something new. What’s new is whose consent we’re talking about. And even when, however implausibly, it’s her consent, the age of that consent keeps moving up. Critical Studies courses now teach Romeo and Juliet as a story about rape. But I digress.
Well, not entirely. Sex is about lust, not reproduction. Nature merely uses lust to get us to reproduce. But now that sex has been largely severed from what nature had in mind for it, much of the phenomenology of sex – think of bondage, for example – is vestigial. This is not an exercise in sexology, so why do I mention this? Because there’s a pattern to vestigiality. Nature hardwires us to behave in certain ways, ways that no longer make sense when the environment, including our own technology, changes. This is especially true when we move from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from stone-age tools to iron, or from oral transmission to writing, or … And, of course, the same can be said when we move from lines of fusileers trading volleys to trench warfare, to missile exchanges, to drone warfare, and to whatever comes next. So though its foundations never change, as we’ll see the science of war does.
As with virtually every other species, food is a function of territory. But territory, and/or the fruit thereof, is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “mine only for so long as I can keep it.” Long enough for tonight’s dinner, perhaps, but not breakfast tomorrow morning. That’s because twixt the two I have to sleep. And when I sleep I can’t protect my stash. Hence the need for “confederacy with others who are in like danger as himself.”
Whether for productivity or defence or territorial expansion, confederacy with others requires coordination, coordination requires second-order coordination, and second-order coordinations requires hierarchy. So hierarchy is an ineluctable feature of human survival and delectation. To think otherwise – even to aspire that it be otherwise – is to imagine a species other than the one we’re talking about here.
For example, some people think – the same people who think God’s crying because of something you did – that in the Kingdom of Heaven rapaciousness and the hierarchy that attends it will no longer be required. And so they ask of Him, unthinkingly, that “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” I say unthinkingly because what do they imagine such an existence would be? Whether on Earth or in Heaven, certainly not human existence. So isn’t “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” just the theological version of the Human Extinction Project?
In mocking this swords-into-ploughshares nonsense, am I revelling in “nature red in tooth and claw”? Not at all. As I told my students, “The object of this course is neither to celebrate war nor to lament it. It’s to understand it. To make of the words ‘this senseless war’ an oxymoron.”
Some people think that between AI and robotics we are on the way to becoming a different species. They may well be right. Google glasses are going to do away with introducing our particulars to each other in the bar. Women are going to lose much of their currency to artificial companions, both for sex and domestic services. That there were once actors, set designers, cinematographers, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, and so on, will be as quaint as that there were once cobblers and farriers.
Will there be anything left of what we once were? More to the point here, will our successors “have put an end to war”? Well, I suppose they’ll just have to cross or burn that bridge when they come to it. But we won’t, because given the species we are and will be for the foreseeable future, a world without war would be, as Vizzini would put it, “inconceivable”. So for now at least …
For all martial intents and purposes, the human body is made up of a power source housed in the upper torso, a command centre located in the skull, and the extremities the command centre commands, namely the legs for pursuit, flight, and repositioning, and the arms for doing unto others before they can do it unto you. The objective of combat needn’t be to kill the enemy but to disable him, and one does that by targeting whichever of these body parts is most vulnerable.
Humans don’t have claws, nor would our teeth frighten an apple. And typically penetrating the other’s anatomical defences requires force more concentrated than a fist. Hence the ongoing arms race between weapon and shield. One way to thwart a blow is to evade it. And one way to facilitate evasion is distance. So over time swords get replaced by projectiles, and shields by walls. Enter the three little piggies. A wall of straw offers very little protection. One of wood a tad more. And one of bricks or stone more still. So until recently the advantage went to the holders of the fortress.
But nothing protects absolutely. Few walls can withstand a cannonball. Much less a tank shell. And the cost of one-on-one interception has almost always been, by orders of magnitude, greater than that of the missile being intercepted. So the smart money goes more to exhausting the enemy’s interceptors than to honing our own munitions. That’s why Iran and the Houthis are winning their war against the US and its Gulf allies, and why Russia and Ukraine can continue to the last onion dome standing. You can put a retractable roof on a fifty-thousand-seat NFL stadium for the cost of a battery of Patriots, whereas drones can be manufactured in a garden shed. Does that mean drone technology has altered the nature of warfare? It has. But first …
It used to be that from our fort we had control of everything we could see from its tower. Until, that is, we lost that control to a siege. Then to reassert that control, or just avoid starvation, we had to exit the gate and meet the enemy in the open field. For over three thousand years the lion’s share of military science was about that. How to position one’s assets, and reposition them as required, to maximum effect. On this score Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is a collection of banalities. But von Clausewitz’ vom Kriege and Jomini’s Summary of the Art of War are classics for a reason.
An arrow could be met with a shield, because you can see it coming, and when it does it’s rock-over-scissors. Not so a bullet. It’s too fast to be visible and it comes with explosive-assisted force. So gunpowder was to warfare what the printing press was to literacy. Giving up on the shield changed everything. Now it came down to the timing of the volleys and who could muster the more expendable line of fusiliers. By the time of the Napoleonic wars, the fallen per battle had grown from dozens to tens of thousands.
And it would have remained that way had domestic politics not intervened, rendering that level of slaughter politically unacceptable. Hence back to at least a modicum of concern for the conscript, though now the shield had morphed into a trench. Trench warfare fared no better, because the front couldn’t move unless one side was ordered ‘over the top’. So trench warfare fell within the generation of the Interbellum to Blitzkrieg, the opening salvos of which were blitzy enough but then it too ground down to a war of attrition, won by the side that could outproduce the other in manpower and ordnance. Tank warfare was frozen in its tracks, in turn, by MAD, which did “put an end to war” between the superpowers, but not between the superpowers and the not-so-super powers, nor between their proxies.
Which leads one to ask, what exactly is meant by a superpower, and how came it to be so? It takes a village to raise a child. It also took a village to produce a single archer. And it took a large town, if not a small city, to equip the medieval equivalent of a modern tank. Hence from the conclave of huts to the city state, from the city state to the nation state, and from the nation state to the empire. The exigencies of war demand that it’s either absorb – call it colonialism, imperialism, or just outright conquest – or be absorbed. It’s as axiomatic as the Peter Principle, or that divorce causes weight loss.
After a while people forget they weren’t always a people. The Brits have. The Americans are trying. As are the South Africans. And then there are polities, like the Israelis, who are trying not to forget, or the Palestinians, who aren’t being allowed to forget. This is not the way to build a nation, though neither seems interested in doing so. But since the two-nation solution is no longer on the table, all that remains is either perpetual apartheid or genocide. Not the cheeriest of prognoses. But I digress.
Let’s continue with the difference drones make. Drones don’t respect fronts. Nor do they distinguish between recruitment offices and day care centres. So the immunity of non-combatants – in Ukraine, in Russia, in Iran, in Gaza – has been pretty much retired. Drone wars are wars of attrition, and the winner is not which army can hold out the longest, but which people can. And which people can is at least in part a function of what they lose if they don’t. That’s why it’s not necessarily the subaltern – the Vietcong, the Taliban – who has to accept the inevitable. Sometimes it’s the would-be occupier who shouldn’t have expected the occupied would have to cave.
An army marches on its stomach. That’s why the general’s first consult is with the quartermaster. If you can’t supply you have to forage. If you can’t do either you have to retreat. And if you can’t with some assurance anticipate you can do either, you can’t invade in the first place. Napoleon learned that the hard way. Sacrificing a tenth of your own people is a stiff price to pay to drive the invader from your land, but affordability is indexed to the perceived direness of the alternative. General Giap knew what he was doing. As the post-war meteoric rise of Vietnam shows, it was never about communism. It was about sovereignty. Even civil wars aren’t about the kind of government. They’re about who‘s the government.
A front line breaks the way a dam does. First one soldier looks at his chances if he holds and decides discretion is the better part of valour. That reduces the chances for the second soldier, his desertion reduces it for the third, until in short order desertions reach critical mass. But this dialectic is being played out at the same time on the opposing line. And so the two are locked into an intersection of Prisoners Dilemma and Chicken with each other.
Whether to hold or retreat, soldiers are trained to trust their superior to make the right call. But that training can’t be counted on, and an unlucky commander can lose that trust in a heartbeat. There’s a difference between what coulda-woulda-shoulda be the outcome of battle and the personal prediction thereof. This is why, even before the first volley, war is fought in the head. The Allies won because the Germans thought they couldn’t lose. The Argentinians lost the Malvinas because they thought the Brits wouldn’t bother with it. The Americans lost the Twin Towers because they didn’t think nineteen young men with their whole lives ahead of them would be willing to trade those lives in for something so far from their own shore.
People sign up to go to war on a whim because they think they won’t be sent to war on a whim. If they’re sent to war they need to be convinced it’s not on a whim. If they think they are being sent to war on a whim, they’ll either cower or defect. Those nineteen young men who went to war on 9/11 did neither. Nor did those who went to war on October 7th. That people don’t go to war on a whim – that they do so for something that’s vitally important to them – is something the rest of us would be well-advised to take seriously.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
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