The End of Power (23 page)

Drones are hyper-sophisticated compared with the most devastating weapon in military conflicts of the past few years—the improvised explosive device. IEDs come in multiple types with many combinations of munitions and detonating systems; they do not follow a particular standard and often can be assembled with readily available ingredients: agricultural supplies, or chemicals from a factory, drugstore, or hospital. They may lie at the opposite end of sophistication and technical requirements from the equipment in big-army arsenals, but IEDs are especially well-suited to today's decentralized wars. They require no complicated supply chain or time-consuming deployment. Instructions for manufacturing the devices are fairly simple and circulate over the Internet. The proliferation of loose munitions from places like Iraq, the former Soviet Union, and Libya further reduces the cost and complexity of manufacture. They are small and easy to camouflage and do not require the fighter to expose himself; their raw impact, killing or maiming the enemy, is stark and scary. In fact, the sheer contrast between the homemade quality of these weapons and the technological superiority of the forces that they undermine can feed a David-versus-Goliath narrative, scoring a public relations win for insurgents.

The amount of money that Goliath has thrown at the problem while the casualties mount only adds to that effect. The United States has spent more than $20 billion since 2003 to combat IEDs. A variety of groups and agencies within the US defense establishment have been tasked with this challenge, leading to such classic bureaucratic problems as working at
cross-purposes, rivalries, poor coordination and, of course, waste. Even the acronym of the lead agency involved, the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), suggests its unwieldy character.
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Innovations like special armored vehicles, mine-clearing robots, and special protective garments have saved the lives of countless soldiers and civilians. But trying to stem the IED tide remains difficult. In 2011, for example, the number of improvised explosive devices that were cleared or detonated in Afghanistan alone rose to 16,554 from 15,225, an increase of 9 percent. The number of Afghans killed or wounded by IEDs jumped 10 percent in 2011, compared with 2010; the IEDs alone accounted for 60 percent of all civilian casualties.
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Even more insidious and adapted to stealth warfare than IEDs is the ultimate weapon of today's guerrilla and terrorist campaigns: the motivated individual prepared to give up his or her life in order to execute the mission. By one tally, suicide bombers were responsible for twenty-two of the thirty most lethal terrorist attacks around the world between 1990 and 2006. Martyrdom is an ancient motivation, and suicide warriors always appear in times of war. But since the 1980s, suicide attacks have increased dramatically, and their frequency and deliberate strategic use have no recent precedent. The combination of premodern motives and postmodern possibilities has proven devastating. Again, the three revolutions amplify the impact of suicide bombers. They take advantage of today's unparalleled ease of travel, while the culture of martyrdom validates the perpetrator, brings in new recruits, and sharpens the effect of fear not only in the target population but also, thanks to the amplification of the media, far beyond. Moreover, the culture of martyrdom is ruthlessly effective, as it is almost impossible to completely defend against a suicide bomber whose only purpose is to approach the target, and has no interest in getting away.

Dispersed and stealth warfare uses resolutely modern tools as well, of course. The Internet has become just as essential as IEDs or suicide attacks in the new decentralized landscape of war. At the frontier of cyberwar are hacker attacks on civilian and military infrastructure, as well as distributed denial of service (DDOS) and other disruptions of websites and platforms relied upon by the target government or population. But even simpler to access is the constellation of online militant voices that amplify hostile messages, spread propaganda materials and threats, and attract new recruits to their cause. Whereas in the United States and Europe some of the strident public voices in the war on terror have been mocked for their lack of military experience, the suicide bomber who carried out a successful attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan in December 2009 was a former
“jihadi pundit” who took up arms. The Internet is not just an amplifying tool for these causes; it can also be a device for radicalization.
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What all of these tools and techniques have in common is their sheer ease of access. As the head of Israeli military intelligence, General Amos Yadlin, pointed out in a late 2009 speech, Israel's enemies were still well behind Israel in military capability, yet they were catching up “by means of precision missiles, computerization, anti-aircraft weapons, GPS and pilotless aircraft” He added that off-the-shelf computer products available commercially now gave Israel's enemies significant abilities to encrypt their own communications and hack Israeli resources. “Cyberpower gives the little guys the kind of ability that used to be confined to superpowers,” he said. “Like unmanned aircraft, it's a use of force that can strike without regard for distance or duration, and without endangering fighters' lives.”
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General Yadlin's observation encapsulates the dilemma that now faces armies—and the governments who deploy them, and the citizens they are supposed to protect. The centrifugal force that has scattered power in politics, business, or religion has not stopped short of the military domain, as if it were untouchable. The decay of power has changed the terms and the possibilities of conflict, increasing the influence of small, nonstate and non-traditional players as the tools have generalized and the costs have tumbled. Media and communications disseminate the lessons of what works and help the effect feed on itself.

As these new, small military powers succeed, others waiting in the wings, or yet to be born, discover how to emulate them. This scenario does not mean that endless small-scale conflict is inevitable—but it does carry deep implications for anyone concerned with peace as a moral or practical priority.

It also has enormous implications for the way power is obtained, retained, and lost in our time.

“Never again” is the universal motto of war's survivors. Yet a day does not go by without a reminder that violence, terror, and coercion remain potent forces shaping human lives and communities. The Cold War's “peace dividend” quickly fizzled in the face of the Gulf War, the first World Trade Center attack, the conflict in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, civil wars in West Africa, and more. Author Robert Kaplan warned of the “coming anarchy” as states propped up by the Cold War disintegrated and ethnic and religious
tensions surged.
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The shock of 9/11, the rise of Al Qaeda and its clones, and the prosecution of a “global war on terror” under one name or another since then have compounded the sense of a world besieged by new forms of low-level but high-impact violence. Although coming from different perspectives, analysts such as Kaplan and Amy Chua, author of
World on Fire
, have argued that the rapid pace of globalization and the weakening of states have made violent conflict more likely, and that attempts to create Western-style democracies where they do not currently exist are likely to backfire into violence.
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Meanwhile terrorism, cyberwar, and narco-trafficking take place on amorphous, shifting, borderless fronts, liable to take their toll anywhere in the world on any given day.

Call it low-intensity conflict, small war, irregular war, or, as scholars Marc Hecker and Thomas Rid put it, “‘War 2.0'—by any name, violent conflict today is drastically different from the forms that shaped the 19th and 20th centuries and that live on in History Channel documentaries . . . and in the defense spending patterns of most countries.”
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What is less clear is how to address this new landscape. Arguments for radical cutbacks and reform of the world's major militaries founder on vested interests, the impression that they convey weakness, and the bigger worry of eroding the strength of conventional deterrents. Traditional interstate threats have not gone away, be they unresolved border disputes from the Caucasus to South America, military buildups by countries like Iran and North Korea, or the sharp and mutual suspicion between the United States and China. Meanwhile, prescriptions for how to address the spread of violence by nonstate actors depend on competing opinions about its root causes, which analysts pin variously on economic inequality, cultural disruption, the spread of corporate-driven imperialism, fundamentalist Islam, instigation by state sponsors, and a host of other factors.

Looking at war today through the lens of the decay of power will not resolve such debates. But it can produce some needed clarity about what forms of conflict are here to stay, and what new realities any military strategy—whether that of a Western democracy, an aspiring superpower, a developing country, or a militant or insurgent group—must account for if it is to succeed.

Easily available weapons; a blurring of the lines between soldier and civilian and military and consumer technology; and a rise in the number of
conflicts whose stakes are less about territory than about money, commodities, and ideas set the stage for hyper-competition in the arena of war and security. Like major political parties or the behemoths of industry and banking, the great military institutions are encountering new competitors no longer held back by traditional barriers to entry. A major defense ministry like the Pentagon no longer has a lock on the tools and resources needed to prosecute a conflict. Skills that are valuable in conflict can now be gleaned not just in basic training, officer academies, and defense universities but in an insurgent camp in northwest Pakistan, a madrassa in Leicester, England, or a computer school in Guangzhou, China.

In this scattered landscape, the traditional military apparatus remains important and impressive. It possesses the advantages of public resources and the ability to make itself the top priority in government budgets; national sovereignty gives it the moral heft that attracts recruits and justifies investment and spending, and the political legitimacy to enter into alliances. It has tradition on its side. What it has lost is exclusivity. Two crucial monopolies—one philosophical, one practical—have vanished and exposed its vulnerabilities. First is the state's philosophical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The second is a practical monopoly bestowed on the military by the geopolitical competition among sovereign states and the need for ever-more complex technology to win it. The rise of powerful nonstate actors and the breakneck diffusion of technology beyond the realms of specialists have destroyed that nuts-and-bolts advantage.

Today, national armies are attempting to adjust—with different speeds and results—to “full spectrum” warfare in which weapons are digital as much as physical, methods are psychological as much as coercive, and combatants are civilian and scattered as much as uniformed and coordinated. Hyper-competitive conflict does not necessarily mean more or worse conflict than before, whether measured in lives lost or economic benefits forsaken. Nor does it signal, by any means, the end of national armies. But it puts in a new perspective what a national army can be expected to achieve.

The transition from conventional interstate war to decentralized small-scale conflict has largely ended the specialization advantage of a large military. Therefore, any national security strategy that relies on military might or superior firepower is suspect. Realizing this, the major armies have been
trying to adjust. As noted above, a US military directive in late 2008 announced that irregular war was to be considered “as strategically important as traditional warfare”—a major statement of doctrine with implications for the whole scope of military planning, from personnel to equipment to training.
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For the United States, a focus on irregular warfare means giving more importance to special operations, intelligence gathering, counter-insurgency, and what the military calls “low visibility operations,” as well as more attention to operations in partnership with allies and local forces. According to plans announced in 2012, the US Special Operations Command, which has forces deployed in roughly seventy-five countries, will grow by about 6 percent from sixty-six thousand personnel in 2012 to seventy thousand in 2017.
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With this growth comes the discovery that today's counterinsurgency, for instance, may be different from the kinds that were featured in special-operations manuals. As a recent National Defense University study pointed out, insurgencies today are less likely to follow an ideology and established leadership (à la the Vietcong) and more likely to be “coalitions of the angry” that can spring up almost spontaneously (à la the Palestinian intifada).
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Other militaries are going through their own parallel adaptations. China's People's Liberation Army has shrunk in size in the last two decades, trading surplus personnel for more modern technology. It has significantly increased its participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions, which was nugatory before 2000, and its navy is making more and more port calls. Moreover, kidnappings and killings of Chinese workers in places like Sudan have provoked new thinking about how China can enhance its ability to protect its increasingly numerous citizens and interests overseas. Military analysts scour the experiences of leading forces like those of the United States, China, India, Britain, France, and Israel in search of “best practices” to prepare for today's most likely military assignments: counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, humanitarian intervention, and peacekeeping.
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