The United
States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before
other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s
deterrence theory worked – nations knew that if they used the
awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite
such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous
threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and
large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear
war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons
of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity
of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity
of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant
and the equations of military power that existed in the period after
World War Two no longer hold.
This process
began in Korea after 1950, where the war ended in a stand off despite
the nominal vast superiority of America’s military power, and
the Pentagon discovered that great space combined with guerrilla
warfare was more than a match for it in Vietnam, where the U.S.
was defeated. Both wars caused the American military and establishment
strategists to reflect on the limits of high tech warfare, and for
a time it seemed as if appropriate lessons would be learned and
costly errors not repeated.
The conclusion
drawn from these major wars should have been that there were decisive
limits to American military and political power, and that the U.
S. should drastically tailor its foreign policy and cease intervening
anywhere it chose to. In short, it was necessary to accept the fact
that it could not guide the world as it wished to. But such a conclusion,
justified by experience, was far too radical for either party to
fully embrace, and defense contractors never ceased promising the
ultimate new weapon. America’s leaders and military establishment
in the wake of 9/11 argued that technology would rescue it from
more political failures. But such illusions – fed by the technological
fetishism which is the hallmark of their civilization – led
to the Iraq debacle.
There has now
been a qualitative leap in technology that makes all inherited conventional
wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy, utterly irrelevant,
not just to the U.S. but to any other nation that embarks upon it.
Technology
is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources
or will to control its inevitable consequences – not to mention
traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more
lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and American experts
believe that the Iranians compelled them to keep in reserve the
far more powerful and longer range cruise missiles they already
possess. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these missiles
and American experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying
aircraft carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses
against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive
failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after
decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable.1
Even more ominous,
the U. S. Army has just released a report that light water reactors
– which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia as well as Spain,
already have and are covered by no existing arms control treaties
– can be used to obtain near weapons-grade plutonium easily
and cheaply.2 Within a few years,
many more countries than the present ten or so – the Army study
thinks Saudi Arabia and even Egypt most likely – will have
nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and
missiles. Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated
guerilla tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which deprives
the heavily equipped and armed nations of the advantages of their
overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The battle between a few thousand Hezbullah fighters and a massive,
ultra-modern Israeli army backed and financed by the U.S. proves
this. Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future.
The outcome suggests that either the Israelis cease their policy
of destruction and intimidation, and accept the political prerequisites
of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be devastated
by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear weapons in the
hands of at least two Arab nations and Iran.
What is now
occurring in the Middle East reveals lessons just as relevant in
the future to festering problems in East Asia, Latin America, Africa
and elsewhere. Access to nuclear weapons, cheap missiles of greater
portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits of all antimissile
systems, will set the context for whatever crises arise in North
Korea, Iran, Taiwan…or Venezuela. Trends which increase the
limits of technology in warfare are not only applicable to relations
between nations but also to groups within them – ranging from
small conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to large guerilla
movements. The events in the Middle East have proven that warfare
has changed dramatically everywhere, and American hegemony can now
be successfully challenged throughout the globe.
Iranian Missile
Exercise
American power
has been dependent to a large extent on its highly mobile navy.
But ships are increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and while they
are a long way from finished they are more-and-more circumscribed
tactically and, ultimately, strategically. There is a greater balance-of-power
militarily, the reemergence of a kind of deterrence that means all
future wars will be increasingly protracted, expensive – and
very costly politically to politicians who blunder into wars with
illusions they will be short and decisive. Olmert and Peretz are
very likely to lose power in Israel, and destroying Lebanon will
not save their political futures. This too is a message not likely
to be lost on politicians.
To this extent,
what is emerging is a new era of more equal rivals. Enforceable
universal disarmament of every kind of weapon would be far preferable.
But short of this presently unattainable goal, this emergence of
a new equivalency is a vital factor leading less to peace in the
real meaning of that term than perhaps to greater prudence. Such
restraint could be an important factor leading to less war.
We live with
21st century technology and also with primitive political attitudes,
nationalisms of assorted sorts, and cults of heroism and irrationality
existing across the political spectrum and the power spectrum. The
world will destroy itself unless it realistically confronts the
new technological equations. Israel must now accept this reality,
and if it does not develop the political skills required to make
serious compromises, this new equation warrants that it will be
liquidated even as it rains destruction on its enemies.
Israeli
missiles target Beirut
This is the
message of the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon –
to use only the examples in today’s papers. Walls are no longer
protection for the Israelis – one shoots over them. Their much-vaunted
Merkava tanks have proven highly vulnerable to new weapons that
are becoming more and more common and are soon likely to be in Palestinian
hands as well. At least 20 of the tanks were seriously damaged or
destroyed.
The U.S. war
in Iraq is a political disaster against the guerrillas – a
half trillion dollars spent there and in Afghanistan have left America
on the verge of defeat in both places. The “shock and awe”
military strategy has utterly failed save to produce contracts for
weapons makers – indeed, it has also contributed heavily to
de facto U.S. economic bankruptcy.
The
Bush Administration has deeply alienated more of America’s
nominal allies than any government in modern times. The Iraq war
and subsequent conflict in Lebanon have left its Middle East policy
in shambles and made Iranian strategic predominance even more likely,
all of which was predicted before the Iraq invasion. Its coalitions,
as Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but utterly convincing and critical
book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, are finished.
Its sublime confidence and reliance on the power of its awesome
weaponry is a crucial cause of its failure, although we cannot minimize
its preemptory hubris and nationalist myopia. The United States,
whose costliest political and military adventures since 1950 have
ended in failure, now must face the fact that the technology for
confronting its power is rapidly becoming widespread and cheap.
It is within the reach of not merely states but of relatively small
groups of people. Destructive power is now virtually “democratized.”
If
the challenges of producing a realistic concept of the world that
confronts the mounting dangers and limits of military technology
seriously are not resolved soon, recognizing that a decisive equality
of military power is today in the process of being re-imposed, there
is nothing more than wars and mankind’s eventual destruction
to look forward to.
- Mark Williams,
“The Missiles of August: The Lebanon War and the democratization
of missile technology,” Technology Review (MIT), August
16, 2006. - Henry Sokolski,
ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons Threats,
U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2006, pp. 33ff., 86.
September
1, 2006
Gabriel
Kolko [send him mail]
is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book is The
Age of War.
