How War became Obsolete

How War became Obsolete

1995 9-10 September-October 18-22 How War became Obsolete (1238) As the industrialised world celebrates 50 years of peace against the backdrop of global security and co-operation in an area extending from Vancouver to Vladivostock, the end of the Clausewitzian era seems to have been largely ignored. The German strategist, Karl von Clausewitz, a contemporary of Napoleon, formulated the political axiom which governed the world for more than a century and half that war was a continuation of politics by other means. Nation states had customarily employed war as a decisive instrument in international politics. When von Clausewitz formulated his aphorism, war was conducted by armies of nations in a battlefield generally outside inhabited areas and there were few non-combatant casualties and little collateral damage to property. With innovations in destructive technologies, all these changed. Improvements in communication and transportation facilities made it possible to field hundreds of thousands of soldiers in combat resulting in continuous fighting across the entire territory of the country under attack. Civilian non-combatant casualties started increasing and collateral property damage became unavoidable. In World War I civilian casualties almost equalled those among combatants. These increased with the advent of aircraft with the capability of penetrating deep into enemy territory and dropping bombs. It was argued that since industry supported the war effort, workers produced war materials, roads and railways transported them and power stations supplied energy, all these were legitimate targets for destruction by aerial bombing. In reality, it amounted to the systematic killing of non-combatant civilians and the destruction of both industrial and residential property. In the World War II, the non-combatant casualties far exceeded the combatant ones with two thirds of those killed and wounded in the war being civilians. This legitimisation of such bombings logically culminated in the use of nuclear weapons. One bomb achieved what a thousand bombing raids on cities could.

ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE

In the post World War II period, the lethality of weapons increased and so did their ranges. The ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties rose to a staggering 20-to-one in the Vietnam war. There was also deliberate ecological damage caused by the use of chemical defoliants. In spite of all the claims about the accuracy of the bombing in the Gulf war there appears little doubt that civilian casualties exceeded combatant losses many times over.

Today high-intensity conventional war in the industrial world will not only result in enormous civilian casualties and collateral damage to property, but will also lead to an ecological catastrophe. Oil installations, chemical plants and even buildings incorporating a lot of synthetic materials when hit will produce enormous quantities of pyridoxines. A limited demonstration of this was provided by the Iraqis who set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields. Water sources are also likely to be contaminated.

Up to World War II, an occupying power was able to extract economic benefits for itself from the occupied country and make the population of the invaded nation work for its benefit. The exceptions were the Soviet Union, parts of Yugoslavia and Poland. Today Vietnam, Afghanistan, the West Bank and anti-colonial wars prove that keeping under occupation a hostile population is far more expensive than invading a country. It is under these circumstances that during the visit of former Soviet President Mr. Michael Gorbachov to West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and he made a joint declaration that war was no longer a viable instrument of policy. It is significant that the statement was made in Germany from where von Clausewitz came. Earlier President Ronald Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev had declared that a nuclear war could not be won and, therefore, must not be initiated.

PITH AND SUBSTANCE

War was a continuation of politics, an instrument of policy and was meant to be resorted to in the expectation of gain, or to limit the damage otherwise possible by raising the cost to the aggressor. That was the pith and substance of the Clausewitzian theory. War does not make sense as an instrument of policy, if there is no worthwhile gain or the costs of it will not be commensurate to the results expected or achieved. In the 19th century and till the mid-20th century, when the age of colonialism ended, the riches and status of nations in the international hierarchy were popularly deemed to be linked with the area under their control: the mineral wealth, the territories, the number of subjects in the empires and the industrialization of metropolitan countries. Today Japan and Germany have proved that the ranking in the hierarchy of nations largely depends upon the skills of populations, their work ethic and the extent of value addition the work force can make to the goods and services they produce.

Colonialism has come to an end and it is no longer possible for imperial powers to deny the raw materials which their colonial domains had to their rivals - a reason why Germany and Japan wanted to acquire empires on the model of Britain and France. Almost all the raw materials are available in the market. Today industrialised nations carefully calculate the costs and benefits of intervention. Legislatures ask whether their young men and women should be exposed to risk to establish peace in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere. The philosophy of the white man’s burden is dead. Unfortunately these considerations which are valid for established and industrialised nation states do not extend to the developing world where the nation state formation is still underway.

MANY CASES

In the developing world, civil strife occurs on account of ethno-nationalist factors. Unfortunately, unlike in the industrialised world where the advances in weapon technology and rise in political consciousness had some correlation, in the developing world today sophisticated high technology weapons are available to populations and organised groups who are still to evolve in terms of political values. Tribes steeped in clannish culture and values have Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and explosives. So do fanatical sectarian organisations and terrorist groups. Most such equipment originates from industrialised nations and relatively advanced developing nations. There are a number of cases where large populations with separate ethno-nationalist identities are fighting for their legitimate demands for greater autonomy and democratic rights.

In numerous other instances, extremist values have inspired large-scale violence. Such conflicts are not always wars in the sense in which Clausewitz defined them. They are often insurgencies and large-scale terrorism where at least on one side the normal calculations of costs and benefits of war as part of political intercourse do not apply. Very often it is not possible to identify a single aggressor who is in a position to negotiate and terminate the hostilities.

Today in the industrialised world where the Clausewitzian maxim originated, the era of war as a continuation of politics has come to an end though it is still possible that many national leaderships have not recognised this reality. There is always a time-lag between reality and its cognition by politico-military establishments. That was the reason why bloody anti-colonial wars occurred in Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Most military leaders have declared that nuclear weapons are unusable in wars, yet the leaderships of five nuclear weapon powers still insist on having them. Though it may take time for politico-military establishments to realise this and come to terms with it, the era of Clausewitz has come to an end at least in the industrialised world, and even in respect of relatively advanced developing nations.

(By K. Subrahmanyam, The Times of India, May 9, 1995)