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Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2016
Infinity Journal
Page 29
This essay is based upon my recent book
Carnage and
Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional
Military Power
published by Hurst in the United Kingdom and
by Oxford University Press in the United States.
The strategic studies literature has for a long time
apprehended an acutely problematic dimension to
increasingconnectedness—theaccelerationof transactional
flows of people, things, and ideas generally popularly known
as ‘globalisation’. It appears to disempower, to a greater or
lesser degree, state actors while empowering non-state ones.
This was the gist of Marine General Charles C.Krulak’s remarks
at a conference of the Royal United Services Institute in 1996.
Even earlier, of course, it was the core argument of Martin
Van Creveld’s
The Transformation of War
, which opened with
the line ‘A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and
defence departments all over the “developed” world—the
fear of military impotence, even irrelevance.’[i]
But back to Krulak’s speech, which at around twenty years
distance from us today provides a convenient benchmark. In
it, he said in one oft-repeated colourful passage, that future
wars will be not like the agreeably inept conventional one
fought by Saddam Hussein in 1991 but rather ‘the stepchild
of Chechnya and Somalia’, and in a lesser-quoted passage
that our enemies ‘will not be doctrinaire or predictable, but…
far more deadly.’[ii] This seems still very accurate. We are still
drawn to settle ‘other people’s wars’, though without much
sense of the policy that such interventions are supposed
to serve, let alone prospect of victory in them, howsoever
defined.
Recent debates over intervention in the Middle East generally,
and in the ex-Iraqi and Syrian heartlands of Islamic State
specifically, exemplify this interventionist rodomontade. Our
opponents obviously do not insist on playing by any fixed
rules except, contra Van Creveld, that war is comprised of
a wonderful trinity that includes passion, in addition to
reason and chance, which they harness very effectively to
the achievement of political purpose (while we do not).And
all of this now takes place under the unblinking eye of a
camera somewhere, inevitably beaming its imagery globally,
potentially everywhere ‘bringing the village to the world and
the world to the village.’[iii]
Where are you Son of Desert Storm?
It is fair to say that within the defence establishment at
the time, Krulak’s views were in the minority. The rest of the
American military, with the armed forces of many of its major
allies following eagerly, was haring after a different sort of
war—the one they thought they saw in the extraordinarily
lopsided outcome of the 1991 Gulf War. That event seemed
to herald the arrival of a fast, cheap, and decisive form of war
that was subsequently christened the ‘Revolution in Military
Affairs’. Quite obviously, that has failed to materialise.[iv]
Nonetheless, there’s a good question here.
According to the London-based International Institute for
Strategic Studies' annual
World Military Balance
defence
expenditure for 2014 by all countries amounted to $1.6 trillion.
The United States alone accounted for over a third of that
spending and China, the next biggest spender, accounted
for just under a tenth. Over half of the remaining top ten
countries are American allies. This is a colossal amount of
investment by any measure and it amounts in aggregate to
a gigantic amount of latent combat power in all domains—
land, sea, air, space and cyberspace—and it is able to touch
essentially anywhere on the face of the planet.
Estimating the power of non-state actors is intrinsically more
difficult, given their nature—but even the strongest and most
capable of them, for instance Hezbollah, are noteworthy
David Betz
King’s College London, Department of War Studies
David Betz is a Senior Lecturer in the War Studies
Department at King’s College London where he heads
the Insurgency Research Group. He is also a Senior Fellow
of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (Philadelphia). He
has written widely on information warfare, land forces,
and future war. He is currently working on a book on the
resurgence of fortification strategies in contemporary
security.
To cite this Article:
Betz, David,“The Strategic Bystander: On Mayhem in Century 21,”
Infinity Journal
,Volume 5, Issue 2, spring 2016,
pages 29-33.
The Strategic Bystander: On Mayhem in Century 21
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