William Grimes: Why the Strongest Armies May Lose the Newest Wars
Right now in Iraq the mightiest army on earth is being fought to a standstill by insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and improvised roadside bombs. This should not come as a surprise. In nearly every respect the war in Iraq fits a new paradigm of conflict that has been operative since the end of World War II, although military and political leaders have been slow to recognize it. Until they do, conventional armies, applying conventional wisdom, will continue to misapply their power and risk defeat at the hands of seemingly inferior enemies.
This, in brief, is the hypothesis put forward by Gen. Rupert Smith in “The Utility of Force,” a closely argued, searching textbook on strategy and the efficient use of military power in the post-Cold War era. General Smith, whose more than 40 years of service in the British Army has included command positions in Northern Ireland, Iraq and the Balkans, maintains that the world has entered a new era dominated by nebulous, open-ended conflicts that are as much political as military....
General Smith starts with Napoleon, creator of warfare’s first modern paradigm. For several hundred years European states had fought static, nonideological wars intended to rearrange the map without drastically altering the overall balance of power. Rulers and governments were expected to remain in place.
Napoleon changed all that. He invented the idea of war as an event marshalling all the resources of the nation, both material and spiritual, with the aim of destroying an opponent and installing a new political order. Carl von Clausewitz, in “On War,” gave theoretical coherence to this new kind of warfare, and Prussia, in a series of sweeping military reforms, built an army and a powerful state dedicated to winning what General Smith calls interstate industrial war, epitomized in the two world wars of the 20th century.
General Smith, as he does throughout, analyzes the changes in how force was applied to achieve specific goals. This is his all-embracing idea. He also stops to note, in his discussion of the Napoleonic Wars, the first stirrings of a new kind of conflict, in which spontaneously organized, irregular forces carried out campaigns of ambush and harassment. The Spanish Peninsular Campaign, as General Smith describes it, was nothing less than the first war amongst the people, a baffling, rule-breaking conflict in which hopelessly outnumbered and poorly equipped guerrillas fought, not to win, but to keep alive the idea of Spanish independence, and to redeem it once Britain and its allies prevailed.
The atom bomb made industrial war obsolete. But industrial-style military forces remained in place, along with industrial-war thinking. The old paradigm lingered, although it had no life. “Throughout the Cold War military and political leaders on all sides clung to it, building armies to its specifications, swearing by its redeeming capabilities in time of need,” General Smith writes. To an alarming extent they still do, which is why the French faced defeat in Indochina and Algeria, why the United States lost in Vietnam, why NATO fumbled in the Balkans and why General Smith decided to write “The Utility of Force.”
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This, in brief, is the hypothesis put forward by Gen. Rupert Smith in “The Utility of Force,” a closely argued, searching textbook on strategy and the efficient use of military power in the post-Cold War era. General Smith, whose more than 40 years of service in the British Army has included command positions in Northern Ireland, Iraq and the Balkans, maintains that the world has entered a new era dominated by nebulous, open-ended conflicts that are as much political as military....
General Smith starts with Napoleon, creator of warfare’s first modern paradigm. For several hundred years European states had fought static, nonideological wars intended to rearrange the map without drastically altering the overall balance of power. Rulers and governments were expected to remain in place.
Napoleon changed all that. He invented the idea of war as an event marshalling all the resources of the nation, both material and spiritual, with the aim of destroying an opponent and installing a new political order. Carl von Clausewitz, in “On War,” gave theoretical coherence to this new kind of warfare, and Prussia, in a series of sweeping military reforms, built an army and a powerful state dedicated to winning what General Smith calls interstate industrial war, epitomized in the two world wars of the 20th century.
General Smith, as he does throughout, analyzes the changes in how force was applied to achieve specific goals. This is his all-embracing idea. He also stops to note, in his discussion of the Napoleonic Wars, the first stirrings of a new kind of conflict, in which spontaneously organized, irregular forces carried out campaigns of ambush and harassment. The Spanish Peninsular Campaign, as General Smith describes it, was nothing less than the first war amongst the people, a baffling, rule-breaking conflict in which hopelessly outnumbered and poorly equipped guerrillas fought, not to win, but to keep alive the idea of Spanish independence, and to redeem it once Britain and its allies prevailed.
The atom bomb made industrial war obsolete. But industrial-style military forces remained in place, along with industrial-war thinking. The old paradigm lingered, although it had no life. “Throughout the Cold War military and political leaders on all sides clung to it, building armies to its specifications, swearing by its redeeming capabilities in time of need,” General Smith writes. To an alarming extent they still do, which is why the French faced defeat in Indochina and Algeria, why the United States lost in Vietnam, why NATO fumbled in the Balkans and why General Smith decided to write “The Utility of Force.”
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