“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

OPENING NOTEWilliam Butler Yeats’ chilling 1920 poem had a backdrop: World War I, the flu pandemic, the Russian Revolution and a sense of impending doom, an inflection point. The gyre is widening and turning again.

As wars rage in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and West Asia, it is important to understand what’s happening and why. Questions abound. The answers are not easy to come by, given the unknowns. Here I intend to analyse how we have got here and what lies ahead. In the final section I also discuss how we theorise about war and why.

Wars bring death and destruction. Technology helps. In our era, the pace of technological innovation (the Ukraine frontline is an example) has put Moore’s law on steroids. As the ongoing wars show, sequestering digital tech (like states did with nuclear weapons) and denying it to the adversaries is becoming increasingly difficult. Physical interconnectedness means the effects of war will spread beyond the spaces in which it is being fought; digital is non-spatial. Result: conflicts are creating ever more complex second- and third-order effects. War has become compounded.

Commanders no longer stand on a knoll and cast Napoleon’s coup d’œil, the glance to judge the raging battle, and dispatch runners with new instructions. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its cascading effects is a case in point, as are strikes by Ukraine on Russia’s oil refineries that, in conjunction with the war against Iran, have created an oil refineries crisis, forcing US President Donald Trump to ask Kyiv to go easy on those targets.

Attacking Russia’s oil refineries is great targeting for Ukraine. Not so much for the rest of the world and energy markets. The war has also impacted US domestic politics and prices, not just the fuel price but also the bond market and its impact on mortgage payments.

From the wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and West Asia and the changing balance between the United States, China and Russia, contemporary conflicts are becoming longer, more interconnected and harder to resolve. Theories that once helped us understand war struggle to keep up. Attrition, technological disruption, economic warfare and geopolitical rivalry are producing conflicts with no obvious finish line and an international system increasingly incapable of containing them

From the wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and West Asia and the changing balance between the United States, China and Russia, contemporary conflicts are becoming longer, more interconnected and harder to resolve. Theories that once helped us understand war struggle to keep up. Attrition, technological disruption, economic warfare and geopolitical rivalry are producing conflicts with no obvious finish line and an international system increasingly incapable of containing them

Yet another problem is the finish line. X starts a war. Y fights back. Where in time and space does it end? Armies want decisive victories. Wars, increasingly, remain indecisive. Victory becomes contested. Iran against the US and Zionists; Ansar Allah against Saudi Arabia; Ukraine against Russia; the Taliban against Pakistan. This is not entirely new. Since World War II there have been many cases of tactical successes failing to achieve a war’s political objectives. That has now become a near-consistent menace for the stronger parties.

Allied with it is what I call the ‘arena problem’, a direct outcome of compounding. The clash percolates into ether (information war, influence operations, cyber-attacks), financial and commodities markets, shipping and insurance (resulting in energy volatility, food insecurity, shortages of raw materials in petrochemical industries, the list is long). The kinetic embracing the non-kinetic in a new dialectic.

The element of compounding and the absence of finish lines throw up another problem. War with its many battles is morphing into protracted conflicts that contain within them iterative wars and their battles, interspersed with pauses of uneasy, tenuous peace. As Nadia Schadlow, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy, has argued in a recent article for Foreign Affairs (‘America’s Attrition Trap’), belligerents increasingly have non-negotiable objectives. That leaves little room for compromise and makes conflicts intractable and wars within those conflicts attritional.

Gone are the days of short, decisive wars when “relatively small numbers of sophisticated and expensive weapons systems” could devastate the enemy. Conflicts are now long and grinding. The world has learnt that the US does not have the industrial base that can rapidly replace many of the sophisticated munitions it has expended attacking Iran. Worse, it doesn’t have a strategy to create the political conditions required for victory.

If attrition comes, can sustainment be far behind? No. Sustainment requires industrial assembly lines. The US won WWII because of its industrial output and innovation. It is now constrained by the inability to produce at scale. This isn’t a problem higher GDP can solve. As Schadlow notes, you can’t fire GDP from artillery tubes. That creates a gap “between nominal power and usable military capability.”

When a war is happening, military theorists study it even as events are unfolding. While studying an ongoing war is crucial, it is important to remain wary of applying its lessons to every case. This is not to say that every war is absolutely different in its conduct. Just that one has to be careful in selecting what could apply to one’s own context. The Zionist war against Hamas and Hezbollah is not the same as a war against Iran or Ansar Allah.

When a war is happening, military theorists study it even as events are unfolding. While studying an ongoing war is crucial, it is important to remain wary of applying its lessons to every case. This is not to say that every war is absolutely different in its conduct. Just that one has to be careful in selecting what could apply to one’s own context. The Zionist war against Hamas and Hezbollah is not the same as a war against Iran or Ansar........

© Dawn (Magazines)