SOME THOUGHTS on 21St CENTURY WARFARE

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GR74 - Some thoughts on 21st century warfare

Major-General A.C.P. Stone, CB, FRUSI.

(A shortened version of an article first published

by the RUSI in their June 1999 Journal)

Introduction

Today, with the 21st Century only a few months away, British forces are faced with very different circumstances from those which, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, they then expected to face for decades to come. Not only is the Former Soviet Union a spent force but the so called technological revolution is well advanced; we have fought a High Intensity Conflict (HIC) in the Middle East; revolutionary warfare, in a variety of guises, threatens us on a number of fronts; the ‘less dense’ battlefield surrounds us; asymmetric conflict is here to stay; NATO’s 50th Birthday celebrations have been severely muted by the Balkans debacle - all this, and yet the need to be able to conduct both a Cold War-type, High, and a Northern Ireland-type, Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) appears to remain an essential ingredient of our military capability. The imminence of the 21st Century suggests that we should examine how today’s forces measure up to the types of warfare that we are likely to face in the new millennium.

The Last Ten Years

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 spawned a new era, that of the so called ‘Peace Dividend’, which offered an opportunity to turn swords into ploughshares. NATO had achieved its aim in defeating the Warsaw Pact, democracy was spreading to Eastern Europe and governments everywhere began to relax in the hope of increased harmony; but it was short-lived. In less than a year Iraq had invaded Kuwait and a coalition force prepared itself for a serious conflict at the very top of the intensity scale with every prospect of being subjected to weapons of mass destruction. The actual conflict, six months later, was also short-lived and itself heralded a further new era, the beginnings of Precision Warfare.

However, governments throughout the West were not to be deflected from their goal of a peace dividend and all pressed on with major force reductions, each of which seriously reduced the capability of their forces to undertake simultaneous operations of any real magnitude. It was argued, and still is, that the threat had markedly reduced, that warning time had significantly increased and that coalition arrangements would enable forces to be structured to meet the full range of contingencies. Then came Bosnia and, more recently, the Balkans crisis in Kosovo, both of which look likely to remain commitments for some years yet. With Northern Ireland far from peaceful and with the prospects so uncertain, British forces appear to be facing endemic overstretch.

These same ten years have witnessed the introduction of the most capable range of military equipment that western armed forces have ever seen. The weapon systems were all, of course, developed and procured against operational requirements drafted in the days of the Cold War against a threat that no longer exists. Most of the platforms have their uses in some of today’s scenarios and, perhaps, tomorrow’s too. Increasingly, however, they are not quite what the armed services need because, particularly in the case of land systems, they lack both strategic mobility and tactical flexibility for many of the types of operation with which the UK is likely to be faced.

The UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) attempted to grasp this nettle by a foreign policy driven review and its conclusions, published in the White Paper, Command 3999, on 8th July 1998, were widely acclaimed as the best attempt in recent history to re-orient defence policy and plans with the UK’s active foreign policy. It contained a wide range of initiatives aimed at creating more modern and cost-effective armed forces which are flexible and robust in the face of the uncertainties of the future. The perspective taken by the government was said to be well into the next millennium with an implicit recognition that 21st century conflict was necessarily a reality to be faced.

Have we got it right?

The much more difficult challenge which SDR failed to address was to recognise and explore some fundamental developments in the threat which have taken place relatively quickly in the historical context and to plan counters to these developments while retaining the capability to engage existing threats which the new ones do not necessarily displace. The real challenge of 21st Century warfare is that we now face a range of emerging menaces largely incapable of being overcome without some radical thinking on the defence posture we will need to adopt. This thinking will have to go well beyond that embraced by SDR not least because, as Kosovo has demonstrated, we are already gravely undermining much of what SDR was about; for example, the Army’s Formation Readiness Cycle and, more seriously, our reliance on the USA as lead nation. In the context of 21st Century warfare, SDR has signally failed to deliver an overall security review or the capability to deal with what would almost certainly have emerged from it.

Asymmetric warfare is the most underestimated of the threats that we face. What exactly is meant by it and is it new? How should we react to it and what experience, if any, can we bring to bear? What are the key enablers which will provide a superior capability in such warfare - in short, are we ready to deal with it? Disproportionate, unbalanced, unequal and irregular all spring to mind as possible descriptors of asymmetric warfare but none of these even begins to describe the potentially huge differences which can exist between what we see today in the West’s conventional forces and what an opposing force (OPFOR) might consist of in the next century. It is, of course, not a new phenomenon. An obvious example closest to home is that of the IRA, numbered in a few hundreds at their peak, who have tied down some of the world’s most advanced soldiers numbered in many thousands for almost thirty years and there are many similar examples in other parts of the world.

This quantitative asymmetry is no less significant than the qualitative difference between such forces whereby on the one hand, for example, high-tech armies are often outflanked by third-world guerrillas having little access to technology of any description. On the other hand, in the context of intra-state violence in which today’s criminal activity reaches previously unparalleled heights, we see the latest technology in the hands of comparatively few and relatively unsophisticated users tying down the combined capabilities of regular forces equipped with the latest that technology has to offer. The fact is that disproportionality of every description is the hallmark of asymmetric warfare and that the construction, deployment and employment of armed forces in the traditional mode will always place them at a disadvantage in attempting to deal with such a threat. So what do we do?

Experience tells us that knowing one’s enemy is fundamental to success and this is no less true in the case of an asymmetric threat. A key enabler is therefore intelligence based upon the widest possible information base. However, an unfortunate, self-inflicted, influence is confounding this advantage by working against us. It is that the means to deal with an asymmetric OPFOR are significantly constrained by the somewhat idealistic rules of engagement (ROE) in which civilised societies wrap up their armed conflict activity. Public opinion, formed very often by media pressure, frequently drives politicians down particular avenues which effectively stifle the flexibility of the military to pursue certain activities which might otherwise foreshorten hostility. Modern examples which have shaped recent warfighting are the imperatives to minimise casualties (on both sides) and collateral damage. It was, in part, these imperatives which led to, and continue to shape, the era of precision warfare now very much with us. Robust ROE are, of course, essential disciplines in any civilised armed force but, if the OPFOR is decidedly uncivilised, what steps can be taken to minimise the advantage which our ROE have thereby given him?

The rule of law is a centuries-old concept which the coming millennium is likely to test to its limits. At an unnerving rate in the closing decades of this millennium we have seen the inexorable rise of non-state groups competing for social and cultural values which are outwith the experience of the bulk of western society. Fundamentalists of varying persuasions, terrorists from widely differing political backgrounds, criminal gangs, drug barons, even peace campaigners can be seen attempting to dominate vital psychological ground in the minds of the vulnerable. Refugees, the starving and the persecuted add to the human disunion and this has led, increasingly, to armies being deployed as policemen and police forces often behaving like armies; there is clearly a growing capability gap which neither can adequately fill. As western nations struggle within their self-imposed ROE to deal with the escalating anarchy which these groups foster, we are witnessing a fundamental change in politico-military affairs with which we are ill-equipped to cope. The closing months of the 20th Century starkly demonstrate the change from superpower domination to, predominantly, rogue state and ethnically-based conflict.

Technology - Help or Hindrance?

From 1950-90 the West, numerically inferior to its main adversary, sought to offset this imbalance with technology, principally that of nuclear weapons. Today, following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the tables are turned; in many cases it is the newly emerging range of potential adversaries, each of which is a much smaller force than the West, which is using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, albeit not (yet) nuclear, to offset with increasing success the numerical advantage the West now enjoys. This COTS technology is thus simultaneously helping the potential OPFOR and damaging the West through its ready availability and affordability, a trend likely to increase our discomfort over the coming decade or more.

The West’s deployment of conventionally organised armed forces, increasingly in the quasi-police role, has done little to correct this imbalance and, notwithstanding SDR and its equivalents elsewhere, the likelihood is that the current re-shaping of these conventional forces will not produce a force suitably matched to the emerging threats. But, the need to be able to continue to conduct HIC against forces similarly equipped to our own will remain well into the next millennium, not least because each of some twenty-eight countries still possesses over 1000 tanks.

Some further re-shaping is therefore necessary but there does appear to be one technological factor which is most likely to give the West an edge over all its potential adversaries; it is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) wherein lies the ability to maximise advantage not only in precision weaponry but, more particularly, in the handling of information. RMA promises, and is already beginning to deliver, formidable improvements in information communication services (ICS) and in intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) all of which will enable their practitioners, regularly and repeatedly, to gather, process and prioritise information at a speed which will permit decision-making and the communication thereof well within the OPFOR’s ability to react to events.

The key to the successful exploitation of RMA lies in digitisation, an expensive and expansive process already well underway in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. Assuming, however, that digitisation is pursued, achieved and introduced as planned, it alone will still not overcome the constraints imposed by ROE and a conventional force structure to provide the enabling capability in the West’s forces which will successfully counter the emerging asymmetric threats. Technology is therefore not the complete answer; while it is needed across the whole spectrum of conflict, if only to keep pace with readily available civil advances, ownership does not bestow any guaranteed superior capability, particularly at the lower end of that spectrum. What is also needed is radical thought on just how to take on the burgeoning asymmetric threats which confront the West and, in particular, a re-think on both ROE and filling the capability gap between conventional forces and police forces.

Radical Thought

Asymmetric threats embrace the full spectrum of disproportionate intimidation with which the West might be faced, from international civil disobedience and criminality right up to military LIC. They include within this range, computer warfare through to terrorist or rogue state nuclear blackmail and can involve weapons of mass destruction as much as national destabilisation arising from mass migration. The ability to counter such a wide range of threats, as well as retain an HIC war-fighting capability, is clearly not within the current capabilities of our armed forces as presently organised; a full security review, as was promised under SDR but not delivered, would readily have identified the shortcomings. Such a review is therefore urgently required and, most sensibly, given that these threats are international in character, it should now be conducted on an international basis, perhaps by NATO but certainly under the aegis of the UN. Importantly, it should also embrace the roles of the aid agencies given their ability to assist in certain types of problem but, above all, it should address the aims and objectives in facing up to the various types of threat and the likely effect of ROE on the required outcome. Furthermore, the review should examine the juxtaposition between conventional armed forces and paramilitary forces (such as, for example, the Italian Carabinieri and the French CRS) which may have an international role against threats more appropriately confronted by police than by soldiers.

The formation of an international force able to deal with the various threats would necessitate contributions from many nations according to their levels of resource and expertise but all must be subordinate to a recognised, legal, command and control structure able to regulate the organisation which would deploy to the area of operations. This presupposes UN authority though not necessarily UN-led operations. Flexibility would be an important element of the structure.

Conclusion

Today, barely months from the beginning of the 21st Century, with the Cold War won and a Peace Dividend still high on the Western agenda, we wallow in the post-conflict follow-up of an air war in Kosovo with no ability to predict its outcome or scale and little apparent political understanding of the capabilities or limitations of our conventional forces. We have yet to conduct a full-scale security review following the collapse, some ten years ago, of the monolithic communist threat which had been the focus for decades and in the resultant, deluding, atmosphere of an apparently long warning time, we face the potential danger of asymmetric conflict escalating into HIC which we were all led to believe was so remote.

The deceptively small scale of asymmetric threats has concealed their potency which, in turn, has misdirected our planning and thereby confounded our ability to respond adequately. Western nations are therefore now increasingly vulnerable to a wide range of relatively unsophisticated threats which are likely to proliferate and our means of both offence and defence are too heavily reliant on a war-fighting capability optimised for conventional engagements.
Furthermore, public opinion has been seduced by the apparent benefits of ‘sanitised warfare’ through the use of precision weapons and this has led to a compulsion on Western armed forces to follow a set of ROE which restricts their flexibility to end conflict professionally and quickly.

Finally, the pursuit of technology, while essential for guiding our capabilities, has become something of a dogma leading to the mistaken idea that it is all that matters. The RMA will certainly give us an edge through the benefits of digitisation, but it is not a panacea. We have naively convinced ourselves that retaining a war-fighting capability at the high intensity end of the spectrum will give us the ability successfully to prosecute all forms of warfare below that level. It is simply not so.

As we prepare to enter the 21st Century we are far from ready to face up to the asymmetric types of warfare that now seem to be more of a probability than a possibility. The fundamentalist, the revolutionary, the terrorist, and the rogue state - all can advance their cause in the face of the apparently overwhelming odds of Western governments who continue to deploy organised military forces in the mistaken belief that they are superior.

Copyright ACPS June 1999

Disclaimer

The views of the author are his own. The UK Defence Forum holds no corporate view on the opinions expressed herein. The Forum exists to enable politicians, industrialists, members of the armed forces, academics and others with an interest in defence and security issues to exchange information and views on the future needs of Britain's defence. It is operated by a non-partisan, not for profit company.