The United States had a monopoly of
nuclear weaponry only a few years before other
nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly
the 1990s, deterrence theory worked - nations knew
that if they used the awesome bomb, they were
likely to be devastated in the riposte.
Despite such examples of brinkmanship as
the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of
nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers,
by and large the few nations that possessed the
bomb concluded that
nuclear war was not worth its horrendous
risks. Today, by contrast,
weapons of mass destruction or precision and power
are within the capacity of dozens of nations
either to produce or purchase. With the
multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence
theory is increasingly irrelevant, and the
equations of military power that existed in the
period after World War II no longer hold.
This process began in Korea after 1950,
where the war ended in a standoff despite the
nominal vast superiority of the United States'
military power, and the Pentagon discovered that
great space combined with guerrilla warfare was
more than a match for it in Vietnam, where the US
was defeated. Both wars caused the US military and
establishment strategists to reflect on the limits
of high-tech warfare, and for a time it seemed as
if appropriate lessons would be learned and costly
errors not repeated.
The conclusion drawn
from these major wars should have been that there
were decisive limits to US military and political
power, and that the United States should
drastically tailor its foreign policy and cease
intervening anywhere it chose to. In short, it was
necessary to accept the fact that it could not
guide the world as it wished to. But such a
conclusion, justified by experience, was far too
radical for either of the United States' two main
political parties to embrace fully, and military
contractors never ceased promising the ultimate
new weapon. America's leaders and military
establishment in the wake of September 11, 2001,
argued that technology would rescue the country
from more political failures. But such illusions -
fed by the technological fetishism that is the
hallmark of their civilization - led to the Iraq
debacle.
There has now been a qualitative
leap in technology that makes all inherited
conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of
political policy, utterly irrelevant, not just to
the US but to any other nation that embarks upon
it.
Technology is now moving much faster
than the diplomatic and political resources or
will to control its inevitable consequences - not
to mention traditional strategic theories.
Hezbollah has far better and more lethal rockets
than it had a few years ago, and US experts
believe that the Iranians compelled the group to
keep in reserve the far more powerful and
longer-range cruise missiles it already possesses.
Iran itself possesses large quantities of these
missiles, and US experts believe they may very
well be capable of destroying aircraft-carrier
battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses
against these rockets, even the most primitive,
have been expensive failures, and anti-missile
technology everywhere has remained, after decades
of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable. [1]
Even more ominous, the US Army has just
released a report that light-water reactors -
which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia,
already have and are covered by no existing
arms-control treaties - can be used to obtain
near-weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply.
[2] Within a few years, many more countries than
the present 10 or so - the army study thinks Saudi
Arabia and even Egypt most likely - will have
nuclear bombs and far more destructive and
accurate rockets and missiles.
Weapons-poor fighters will have far more
sophisticated guerrilla tactics as well as far
more lethal equipment, which deprives the heavily
equipped and armed nations of the advantages of
their overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The battle between a few
thousand Hezbollah fighters and a massive,
ultra-modern Israeli army backed and financed by
the US proves this. Among many things, the war in
Lebanon is a window of the future. The outcome
suggests that either the Israelis cease their
policy of destruction and intimidation and accept
the political prerequisites of peace with the Arab
world, or they too will eventually be devastated
by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear
weapons in the hands of at least two Arab nations
and Iran.
What is now occurring in the
Middle East reveals lessons just as relevant in
the future to festering problems in East Asia,
Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Access to
nuclear weapons, cheap missiles of greater
portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits
of all anti-missile systems will set the context
for whatever crises arise in North Korea, Iran,
Taiwan or Venezuela. Trends that increase the
limits of technology in warfare are not only
applicable to relations between nations but also
to groups within them - ranging from small
conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to
large guerrilla movements. The events in the
Middle East have proved that warfare has changed
dramatically everywhere, and US hegemony can now
be successfully challenged throughout the globe.
Iranian missile exercise US
power has been dependent to a large extent on the
country's highly mobile navy. But ships are
increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and while
they are a long way from finished they are more
and more circumscribed tactically and, ultimately,
strategically. There is a greater balance-of-power
militarily, the re-emergence of a kind of
deterrence that means all future wars will be
increasingly protracted and expensive - and very
costly politically to politicians who blunder into
wars with illusions they will be short and
decisive. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his
defense minister, Amir Peretz, are very likely to
lose power in Israel, and destroying Lebanon will
not save their political futures. This too is a
message not likely to be lost on politicians.
To this extent, what is emerging is a new
era of more equal rivals. Enforceable universal
disarmament of every kind of weapon would be far
preferable. But short of this currently
unattainable goal, this emergence of a new
equivalency is a vital factor leading less to
peace in the real meaning of that term than
perhaps to greater prudence. Such restraint could
be an important factor leading to less war.
We live with 21st-century technology and
also with primitive political attitudes, assorted
nationalisms, and cults of heroism and
irrationality existing across the political
spectrum and the power spectrum. The world will
destroy itself unless it realistically confronts
the new technological equations. Israel now must
accept this reality, and if it does not develop
the political skills required to make serious
compromises, this new equation warrants that it
will be liquidated even as it rains destruction on
its enemies.
This is the message of the
conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon - to
use only the examples in today's papers. Walls are
no longer protection for the Israelis - one shoots
over them. Their much-vaunted Merkava tanks have
proved highly vulnerable to new weapons that are
becoming more and more common and are soon likely
to be in Palestinian hands as well. At least 20 of
the tanks were seriously damaged or destroyed in
the recent conflict with Hezbollah.
Israeli missiles target Beirut The US war in Iraq is a political disaster
against the guerrillas - a half-trillion US
dollars spent there and in Afghanistan have left
the United States on the verge of defeat in both
places. The "shock and awe" military strategy has
utterly failed save to produce contracts for
weapons makers - indeed, it has also contributed
heavily to de facto US economic bankruptcy.
The administration of President George W
Bush has deeply alienated more of America's
nominal allies than has any US government in
modern times. The Iraq war and subsequent conflict
in Lebanon have left its Middle East policy in
shambles and made Iranian strategic predominance
even more likely, all of which was predicted
before the Iraq invasion. Its coalitions, as
Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but utterly
convincing and critical book Fiasco: The
American Military Adventure in Iraq, are
finished. Its sublime confidence in and reliance
on the power of its awesome weaponry are a crucial
cause of its failure, although we cannot minimize
its peremptory hubris and nationalist myopia.
The United States, whose costliest
political and military adventures since 1950 have
ended in failure, now must face the fact that the
technology for confronting its power is rapidly
becoming widespread and cheap. It is within the
reach of not merely states but of relatively small
groups of people. Destructive power is now
virtually "democratized".
If the
challenges of producing a realistic concept of the
world that confronts the mounting dangers and
limits of military technology seriously are not
resolved soon, recognizing that a decisive
equality of military power is today in the process
of being reimposed, there is nothing more than
wars and mankind's eventual destruction to look
forward to.
Notes 1.
Mark Williams, "The Missiles of August: The
Lebanon War and the Democratization of Missile
Technology", Technology Review (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology), August 16, 2006.
2. Henry Sokolski, ed, Taming the Next
Set of Strategic Weapons Threats, US Army
Strategic Studies Institute, June 2006, pp 33ff,
86.
Gabriel Kolko is the leading
historian of modern warfare. His latest book is
The Age of War. He wrote this article for
Japan Focus.
