What is War? – RGM
In his comments to my previous post, a good friend, Don Larson, got me thinking about the changing nature of war and about how the use of the word itself has been broadened. Wikipedia has much interesting material on war.
When I was young (and Rome was invading Carthage), war seemed a simple concept and when one heard the word its meaning was generally understood. Now it can mean so many things. Lets look at a few.
Conventional war. Like World War II, conventional war is fought by nation states. Each has a military. In recent centuries combatants wore uniforms and carried weapons produced by organized industry. The militaries would engage in battles with each other. If possible one nation might try to damage the industrial war making capacity of their opponent. When desperate, they might try to destroy each other’s population centers as happened to Dresden and Hiroshima. In the end, one nation would be damaged to the extent that they would surrender to another and hostilities would cease.
The Afghan War, by comparison, is not against a nation state but is an attempt to prevent the territory of a failed state from being used by private individuals to disrupt the daily lives of the populations of a number of other nation states. The population and infrastructure of Afghanistan were already in shambles from a previous war with the Soviets. The goal is to re-institute civil society and create a government that can defend and police its own territory. It began with popular support of the participating NATO countries and the Afghan people. Unfortunately, it did not receive the resources required to see it through to a speedy execution. Now the Afghans are becoming discouraged by the corruption of their own local government and the casualties they continue to take six years after the war began. Since there is no national government to surrender in this case, victory will be defined a cessation of hostilities by the Taliban insurgents. The Taliban have no industrial or population centers to destroy or central authority to surrender, so they must be give up the fight or be killed individually.
The War in Iraq is something different. Iraq had a brutally strong central government that was a threat only to its own people. The reasons given for invasion seem to have been fabricated. However, the reason for staying has become to prevent it from becoming another Afghan like failed state that provides a base of operations for the terrorists displaced from Afghanistan. This war was unnecessary and has turned a sad situation into a dangerous one. There is no plausible definition of victory. Whether the U.S. stays the course for another 10 years, makes a precipitous withdrawal, or does something in between, there is no good prognosis.
The War on Terror is far from a conventional war. About all they have in common is that innocent people die. There is not a single, centrally controlled enemy with physical assets to target or uniformed troops to fight. The classic military strategy of decapitating the command and control structure does not apply. There is a very real threat but, it is like trying to use a bayonet to defend against mustard gas. The opportunities to effectively use military force to fight terrorism will be few. Calling it a war is simply pandering to people’s fears. It is a serious struggle but it is going to require a much more imaginative approach than a conventional war. Unlike the good old days when you could burn and pillage, secure in the knowledge that you were hurting the enemy, any collateral damage you cause now, brings them more recruits.
The War on Drugs takes us to the ridiculous. This is not “the moral equivalent to war”. It is not even the moral equivalent to double parking. We have reached the point where the only way we have of trying to communicate that we imagine something is important is to call it a war. This has the unfortunate side effect of desensitizing people to the word so when it comes up in a more real context, they take less notice. I think I will declare war on my summer reading list.
The War on Poverty is over. The poor lost.