Author Rupert Smith's lengthy career in the British military has provided him with a set of unique insights with which to judge modern war. As a conventional commander, he led Great Britain's 1st Armored Division during the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. As a less conventional commander, he led British forces in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998. In between these two starkly different British commands, he as also served as the commanding general of UN forces in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) during 1995. From this varied experience at the top of both British and international military organizations, General Smith has arrived at what might, at first glance, be viewed as a shocking conclusion:
War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict, and combat undoubtedly exist all around the world...[n]onetheless, war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as a battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in international affairs: such war no longer exists(pg 3).
While he leads with what might, at first glance, appear to be a nonsensical statement, it is the caveats he follows with that shape his debate. He more specifically states that "industrial war no longer exists" (pg 4) before getting to the heart of his argument: war between states has largely been replaced by war amongst the people. As Gen Smith describes it, "[w]ar amongst the people is both a graphic description of modern warlike situations, and also a conceptual framework: it reflects the hard fact that there is no secluded battlefield upon which armies engage, nor are there necessarily armies, definitely not on all sides” (pg 5). Smith’s experiences in both Northern Ireland and Bosnia strengthen his understanding of this shift in the nature of war. In both theaters, he found himself struggling to adapt military formations to an enemy that often demonstrated few of the traits we associate with armed forces – all while striving to protect large bodies of civilians who moved freely across his battlefield.
Before delving more deeply into the history of modern European warfare – his chosen means of leading us to his own conclusions, Smith provides us with further clarification on war amongst the people. In essence, it “is characterized by six major trends… [t]he ends for which we fight are changing…[w]e fight amongst the people…[o]ur conflicts tend to be timeless…[w]e fight so as not to lose the force…[o]n each occasion new uses are found for old weapons…” and finally, “[t]he sides are mostly non-state” (pg 19).
After clearly laying out his thesis, Smith divides his book into three distinct sections as he walks us through the evolution from industrial war between states into war amongst the people. These three sections, “Interstate Industrial War,” “Cold War Confrontation,” and “War Amongst the People” start with the rise of Napoleon and his use of the state’s assets to force decisive battle, describe the Cold War’s effects on senior military leaders’ understanding (or lack thereof) of conflict and confrontation in a nuclear-armed world, and end with a hard look at the modern military struggle to deal with a style of warfare that fits uncomfortably outside the tenets of conventional Western military thought. Being a Western military leader, Smith cannot leave the book as merely an explanation of modern warfare. He finishes by describing what this new change in warfare means for the West - and how Western leaders must adapt to this new reality in order to re-establish what he repeatedly calls the utility of force.
In outlining the origins of interstate industrial war, Smith begins with Napoleon and his ability to both wield the tools of the state and to achieve strategic objectives through the use of concentrated military force (the decisive battle). For Smith, Napoleon’s genius rested in his ability to both harness the resources of the State and to deliver the product of those resources to the critical point on the battlefield in such a way as to force decisive battles. Napoleon, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, understood what he hoped to achieve through his use of force:
His strategic political aim was precisely to change rulers and states, largely in order to make them part of his empire. His genius lay in marrying the military means he created and the method he devised of using them to achieve the end: decisive defeat of the enemy force (pg 41).
From here, he takes us forward through the Prussian innovations that formalized Napoleon’s genius and created a more systematic framework for harnessing the tools of the state. As he guides us through Prussian innovations, he leans heavily on Clausewitz’s trinity and his own belief that military force must be applied to achieve political ends. The results of both the Austro-Prussian conflict and the Franco-Prussian conflict are held up to this light and, from Smith’s perspective, we see shrewd political maneuvering tied to the use of force – until the end of the Franco-Prussian War. As he sees it, Prussian posturing and unnecessary political humiliation inflicted upon France sets the groundwork for future conflict rather than successful integration of captured terrain. An example, as Smith puts it, of force moving beyond its utility (pp 105-106). Unstated in this assessment of the Franco-Prussian conflict is the fact that Prussia’s “decisive battles” with the French only set the conditions for World War One rather than permanently settling the conditions for Prussian/German security.
Smith’s approach to the evolution of European warfare from the 17th to 20th centuries is nothing earth-shattering. It is not intended to be so. Instead, he attempts to clarify conventional historical wisdom on the evolution of Western military thought as he proceeds toward the later sections of the book – those in which he will depart from convention and seek to impress his own ideas upon the reader. From the Prussian victories of mid-19th century, he brings us to the two perfect storms of industrial interstate war: World Wars One and Two. World War One presents two disturbing trends for Smith: the completion of Clausewitz’s trinity as the people became as fully engaged as government (under the Napoleonic model) and the military (under the Prussian model); and the horrible realization that this incorporation of government, military, and people did NOT lead to quick, decisive victory but, instead, to horrific casualties and bloody stalemate on all sides. Once again, in Smith’s eyes, the utility of force (in this case massive force) vanished (pp 116,119). Unfortunately, the German military refused to accept this harsh truth and thus invented the notion that a lack of popular support led to defeat, undercutting the military in the process. This refusal to accept the failure of military action to achieve political aims laid the groundwork for World War Two even as the first Great War came to a conclusion.
Smith does not dwell long upon World War Two – other than to make note of two key points: the deliberate targeting of civilians by all sides served only to strengthen the trinity of people, army, and state – thus achieving an effect opposite of that desired. Secondly, as the best example of both forms of military mass – massing of state resources and massing of destructive power on the battlefield – the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War Two changed the face of warfare irrevocably.
Despite the losses generated by total interstate industrial war, the two biggest winners of World War Two (America and the Soviet Union) deliberately designed their militaries in the post-war years to once again engage in decisive conventional battle. At the same time, they moved to develop the nuclear weapons systems and doctrines that would prevent these conventional forces from ever meeting in such an engagement. Nuclear weapons became the trump card that drained the utility of conventional force between nuclear-armed rivals while opening the door to smaller wars (or conflicts, in Smith's parlance) – those amongst the people (pg 154). The two large power blocs both sought to exploit this form of warfare for their own gain while attempting to avoid allowing these conflicts to spread and create larger confrontations. On those occasions when Soviet or American conventional forces – designed solely to face each other on the battlefields of Western Europe – were committed to these new conflicts, they often found little utility for the force they could bring to bear. Whether it was Afghanistan, Algeria, or Vietnam, conventional armies from the most powerful nations in the world routinely found it difficult to apply their military power in a manner that created the conditions for victory. To explain the growing Western inability to apply military force directly to small wars (a marked contrast from the previous two centuries’ examples of European colonialism and imperialism), Smith commits an entire chapter to describing the growing sophistication of guerrilla campaigns while focusing on a simple truth that explains the general difference between colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries:
The colonial expeditions of the 19th century succeeded because for the most part the polities they faced could neither conceive of acts that had an effect on the popular political will in some distant country nor were likely to empower the people by telling them to fight independently of the ruling authority” (pg 162).
With the major conventional powers unable to bring massive force to bear – either because of the possibility of provoking nuclear war or because their people no longer showed a willingness to join the
Clausewitzian trinity (effectively making “decisive” warfare nearly impossible within democratic societies), those who wished to practice war amongst the people were free to hone their craft. In fact, many of these combatants received substantial assistance from one (or both) of the two superpowers even as they worked toward perfecting a style of warfare that undermined their sponsors’ own military efforts. Smith describes the two primary “lines of operation” typically employed by partisans, guerrillas, or terrorists to neutralize larger conventional forces as “the propaganda of the deed” and “the strategy of provocation” (pg 169). Also key to this description of revolutionary war is the notion that revolutionaries tend to apply force only at the tactical level; the objectives at operational and strategic level revolve around shaping the will and intention of the population. This distinction changes the objective of applying force:
In industrial war the object is to destroy the opponent’s army and to prevent his government from making war and protecting the people, thus breaking the triangular linkage [of Clausewitz’s trinity]. In the antithesis the object is to constantly and expensively undermine the stronger army and to thereby break the will of the government and the people to make war (pg 177).
Key to Smith’s reinterpretation of warfare in the nuclear age is the notion that “war” has largely been replaced by - often long-running - confrontations that periodically escalate into conflicts. His central examples for this paradigm are the Cold “War” itself - to Smith, it is clearly a long-running confrontation rather than a war - and the American confrontation with Iraq – that essentially ran from 1990 into the present. Because the US chose to interpret Desert Storm as an older-style war in which force was applied to achieve immediate and permanent resolution, the confrontation dragged on and force applied by the US was often counterproductive since it was applied within the context of providing immediate resolution of a specific conflict rather than advancing toward a resolution of the longer-running confrontation.
Shifting to the post-Cold War era, Smith presents a strong case that the removal of this strategic-level conflict has fundamentally forced the paradigm of “War amongst the people” from an underlying current to the forefront; powerful nations no longer view the sponsoring of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries strictly from the perspective of weakening their major opponent – or as a minor sideshow in the larger strategic struggle to vanquish the other side through whatever means were deemed necessary.
In contrast to these hard strategic ends, we tend now to conduct operations for…sub-strategic objectives…we intervene in, or even decide to escalate to, a conflict in order to establish a condition in which the political condition can be achieved by other means and in other ways. We seek to create conceptual space for diplomacy, economic initiatives, political pressure and other measures to create a desired political outcome of stability, and if possible democracy (pg 272).
This fundamental shift in responsibilities has not been accompanied by a fundamental shift in the organization of modern
militaries. Instead, military leaders and planners have sought to identify the next conventional opponent they will face while leaving commanders in the field, saddled with the responsibility to succeed in these wars amongst the people, to make do with forces and equipment that are often wholly inappropriate.
