Sir Lawrence Freedman Future of War Book Review
THE FUTURE OF WAR, by Lawrence Freedman, Public Affairs, 2017, 376 pages, $eighteen.99
Our regular assumption was that the odds of success might be shifted decisively as a result of some new technology. Gunpowder to musket, steam turbines to aircraft, missiles to digital networks, all changed the character of warfare, opening up new possibilities while closing off others. Simply the technology was rarely monopolized or else, if 1 side enjoyed superiority, adversaries institute ways to limit their furnishings. Even for modern Western forces, technology encouraged a fantasy of a war that was fast, easy, and decisive: nonetheless still they found themselves facing 'slow, bitter, indecisive war.'
State of war has a future. It volition remain a main staple for states big and modest, for non-land actors fighting for an ideology, and for ethnic groups fighting over territory believed to be theirs.
Future wars take been guided by the experiences of past wars. No sooner than a war ends, a future war is lurking around the corner. As we accept seen from Margaret MacMillan in State of war (reviewed hither), this has been so since humans began organizing into groups, societies, and nations. As civilizations avant-garde technologically, so have the means of waging state of war. Looking back to see what worked and what did not – besides as our works of imagination from "academic papers, war machine appreciations or fictional thrillers" – informs on how futurity wars are likely to exist waged. According to Lawrence Freedman:
These tendencies so axiomatic in the history of the future of war are therefore likely to persist in the time to come. As in the past in that location will exist a stream of speculative scenarios and anxious warnings, forth with sudden demands for new thinking in the face of an unexpected development.
Freedman's THE FUTURE OF State of war is non about how the side by side wars will be fought. Anyone who has been following the news can predict that in future warfare, artificial intelligence (AI) volition play a major role as will cyber-attacks on financial institutions to utility grids and military installations, to weapons-systems reliant on the internet, with conventional weapons remaining in apply. Rather, THE FUTURE OF War is almost the history of the future of wars. Freedman looks at by wars and conflicts, in context, showing how future wars were imagined and planned, near e'er with the misguided expectation that innovative thinking and new weapons-systems unavailable to the opposing side would atomic number 82 to a swift and decisive victory, with the victor dictating the terms and the vanquished suffering as they must.
THE Time to come OF WAR has it all. Much like MacMillan in War, Freedman serves a bout d'horizon by looking at how wars of the past sparked the imagination for wars of the hereafter. Information technology is a fascinating and rewarding read, replete with references from historians, chroniclers, war machine theorists, novelists, picture show makers, and others – all of whom, informed past the past and guided by imagination, predicted, conceptualized, and shaped how time to come wars will or should be fought, sparking innovative thinking and technologies to boss the military theater offensively and defensively.
THE Hereafter OF WAR is divided into iii parts. Office One covers the heart of the 19th century to the finish of the Cold War in the early 1990s, where we run across an impressive evolution of technology and warfare during the ii Globe Wars and the possibility of "an even more than cataclysmic 3rd," with the development of nuclear weapons. Hither Freedman treats us to the and so prevailing "idealized model of warfare geared towards decisive battles that could be used to regulate relations among the great powers." Over time, this model vicious short of the expected goal, every bit it became evident that wars were difficult to proceed brusk – even with a massive initial and oftentimes unsuspected attack (Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor is a fine example).
This is a fascinating part of the book, laying the groundwork for what is to come. Nosotros acquire, for case, that the decisive battle model of warfare thinking was based on an influential theorist who served in Napoleon's army, Baron Antoine de Jomini, a gimmicky of Carl von Clausewitz, who'south seminal work The Fine art of War was more historic than Clausewitz's On War . Sir Edward Creasy thought somewhat otherwise in his 1851 published work, The Xv Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo. The tipping point, if yous will, was to exist establish in "the undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and the love of laurels, which makes combatants confront agony and devastation" – qualities "to be found in the basest also every bit in the noblest of flesh." Ane passage quoted by Freedman from Creasy is as incisive equally it is seemingly obvious and timeless. In battles what mattered was whether:
the concatenation of causes and effects, by which they have helped to make us what nosotros are: and also while we speculate on what we probably should take been, if any i of those battles had come to a unlike termination.
We adjacent meet Smoothen broker Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, who in 1898 published a six-volume report: The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations . He theorized that the next wars would exist won or lost defensively, that is, by entrenching and waging a war of attrition, wearing down combatants, draining economic resources, and contributing to social collapse.
Just perhaps the first to conceptualize the contribution that science would bring to future wars was novelist and historian, besides as social commentator/essayist, H.G. Wells. Much of what he imagined has turned out thus far. And every bit we have come up to feel, new technological and scientific advances made to meet future wars will, in turn, germinate more innovative ideas or lessons from those future forms of warfare.
Freedman shows that with innovation comes new thinking on how hereafter wars will be fought and what might information technology take to avoid such wars which, since the invention of nuclear arms would have such devastating effects, gave rise to the Mutual Assured Devastation (MAD) theory during the pinnacle of the Cold State of war. According to Freedman, MAD "was non and so much a deliberate policy selection as recognition of a condition which confirmed the risk in an endeavor to achieve a decisive victory through a knockout accident." While conventional warfare would even so be waged, technological advances (particularly with the use of internet and AI development) would accelerate the demand for more and more innovative ways of warfare. Even before the future becomes the nowadays, the next future is beingness conceptualized and theorized.
Part Two covers the menstruation afterward 1990 with the astonishingly rapid collapse of the Soviet Marriage and the Warsaw Pact alliance. Hither Freedman focuses on the civil wars that ensued, not and then much because of the perceived absence of threat of future state of war between the ii super/nuclear powers, but because civil wars began to draw in Western Powers. No war theory to speak of emerged, other than possibly that at that place is no discernable pattern of time to come wars, and that the causes of these civil wars were complex and hard to fully grasp.
The 9/11 al-Qaeda attack on the US ignited an imperative for the US and its allies to intervene in Afghanistan and and so Iraq. In both instances, an endeavor at nation-edifice followed the war, in office to avoid hereafter wars. What seemed uncomplicated and was naively welcoming, has proved disastrous. Hubris to presume that as occupiers, the United states of america and its allied forces on the ground could garner the support of local population, find determined and incorruptible indigenous political leaders, aid create a modern and disciplined armed forces to protect confronting fanatical and ideologically driven insurgents, and build a sustainable liberal democracy with a vibrant ceremonious society. Afterward 20 years of nation-building and fighting in Afghanistan (few tin can readily remember why the US and allies went at that place in the first place), it took a week or so for the American-backed Afghan armed services and authorities to collapse.
Freedman engages the states with a sobering reality drawn from the annals of history on war-making:
The quarter century after the end of the Common cold War thus combined an improving academic appreciation of the sources of conflict in non-Western conflicts, deeper and more realistic than anything available in 1990, with an arc of Western date. The arc began tentatively, fueled past greater commitment and appetite, until disillusion fix in, confirming the early inclination to stay clear of these conflicts. In that location had been a search for a new type of futurity for state of war, just information technology had not been found.
Part 3 gives usa a minor glimpse of what is in store for humanity in hereafter wars dominated by technological advances, cyber-systems, and information warfare. The dystopian imaginations played out in novels such as Ghost Fleet past P. W. Vocaliser and August Cole (2015) and 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James G. Stavridis (2021) are not and so farfetched equally nosotros might have idea. In fact, aside from the small and protracted conventional wars, the confront of future wars – at least amidst the big players – is likely to be dominated past surprise cyber-attacks without much use of conventional armed forces. Freedman warns:
[A]ny thinking about hereafter war geared to prevention should look to innovation in diplomacy and international communications as much every bit to military strategy. Problems could sally non out of the blue with some all-or-nothing attack just instead out of an exclamation of rights in contested territory, a principled stand that embraced a rival, probing action to explore weaknesses that came up against force, military maneuvers to 'send a bulletin', or displays of resolve that turned into actual clashes and escalated speedily.
Freedman displays a remarkable mastery of facts, analysis, and source material in THE Futurity OF WAR. As we expect around the globe and reflect on the ongoing conflicts and future potential conflicts, such as the command over the Due south Cathay Body of water, not to mention relatively recent events such equally Russia'due south annexation of Crimea or the hacking into Information technology companies with clients such as political parties and major businesses (interfering with a state's electoral process or causing financial disruption), or the virtual possibilities of some states crippling another state's grids from public utilities to military hardware, Freedman offers us an opportunity to learn from the past every bit we reflect on the futurity.
So, if you are interested in looking dorsum to view the future of warfare, if you are a history buff, if y'all are looking to enhance your library with books on war that range from military theory to literature to dystopian fictional and sci-fi thrillers, or if you are a serious student of war, then look no further. In any outcome, let'southward promise political leaders, specially the super and sub-superpowers heed Freedman's sage advice to pay as much attending to innovation in diplomacy and international communications, as they exercise to searching for innovative military strategies.
Read the introduction to this Book Review Series.
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