INTERNATIONAL VIEW

On Ukraine’s front lines, high-tech weapons are clashing with Soviet-era artillery. There and elsewhere, the theory and the practice of war are being transformed. As old certainties collapse, innovative ideas – and effective deterrence – are needed more than ever.

Eric GujerFebruary 12, 2024  7 min

«War is father of all.» A few years ago, anyone who quoted this sentence attributed to Heraclitus would have been called a warmonger. Wars were so distant from everyday experience that the mere thought of them seemed obscene. Yet since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel, anyone citing the Greek philosopher might be considered a realist. The fighting in Ukraine in particular is fundamentally changing the way Western societies think about war.

Some time ago, the term «disruption» became popular as applied to digitalization. Yet the greatest possible disruption is modern war, because the upheaval it produces reaches far beyond the nations involved. In Germany, which likes to defend the freedom of expression by forbidding certain thoughts, anyone who even mentioned an army fit for actual fighting would not long ago have been excommunicated from polite society. Today, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius speaks freely about the country having to be «ready for war.»

Wars have become probable again – even in Europe, which has long been exceptionally peaceful. In fact, the opposite is true today: Europe and the crescent of instability from the Caucasus to North Africa are particularly insecure.

Authoritarian regimes don’t care about collateral damage

Europe still feels like an island of prosperity and stability, far removed from the major conflicts of our time. However, if we include factors other than purely military ones, such as irregular migration, Europe must be considered one of the world’s hot spots. Moreover, the two wars that are attracting the most attention worldwide are taking place right on its doorstep.

The war of aggression in Ukraine was the world’s deadliest conflict in 2023

Number of fatalities in violent conflicts since January 2023UkraineIsrael-PalestineMyanmarSudanNigeriaBurkina FasoSomaliaMexicoBrasilSyriaMaliD.R. CongoEthiopiaYemenPakistanColumbiaHaitiIraqSouth SudanNiger31 40725 26316 20713 3658 7148 5768 5667 2647 1376 4384 4184 0783 8973 2582 1901 9861 7551 4061 2781 242

Source: ACLED. Data as of Jan. 12, 2024.

NZZ

However, perception is not keeping pace with the pace of change. Defense spending is rising only slowly. Some countries are still blind to the reality of the epochal change. In Switzerland, the government is neglecting defense so criminally that its armed forces are barely functional. Instead of taking remedial action, the state is blaming the army’s leadership for the disaster. The defense minister, Viola Amherd, has played a deplorable role in this situation. If there were such a thing as political responsibility in Switzerland, she would have been forced to resign. If Switzerland were part of NATO, she would pose a risk to the military alliance. But the government’s motto has been: We are neutral, so it doesn’t matter.

The nature of war has changed since the authoritarian quartet of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea began to see it as a means of asserting their interests. For a long time, the U.S. and its allies believed that they could pick and choose their conflicts. The West dominated and intervened where it pleased.

The battlefield held few surprises for Western armies. They set the pace and chose the location. At the same time, they tried to limit casualties among civilians and their own troops. In so doing, they cultivated the illusion of bloodless war.

For Moscow and Hamas, on the other hand, dead civilians are not collateral damage, but a means of conducting war. Residential buildings are among the preferred targets for Russian missiles. Hamas goes even further. It provokes the deaths of countless civilians by using them as human shields.

Authoritarian regimes are wasteful with the lives of their soldiers, too. In individual battles, Putin unapologetically sacrifices as many as 1,000 men per day, whether killed or wounded. Wars don’t get any bloodier than this.

Today, the West is being surprised on many fronts. Even after the annexation of Crimea, Germany let its dependence on Moscow expand further. No one could have imagined that Crimea would be only a prelude. In Israel’s case, few countries are actually better prepared for war. Nevertheless, the Jewish state was taken by surprise on Oct. 7 because the enemy used a new tactic. Instead of firing rockets as usual, Hamas attacked with infantry. Israel was not equipped for close combat because it relied blindly on its missile defense system.

Innovation and destruction

Because Israel had been lulled into a false sense of security, it clung to the status quo. Yet threats are always dynamic. Innovation is therefore a key factor in war, as everywhere else. Had Heraclitus been aware of digitalization and the internet, he probably would have been more cautious with his statement about who is the father of all.

Nothing drives its development like civilian invention. Small drones, commercial satellites and software from Silicon Valley make the battlefield transparent. In Ukraine, the time between the detection of a target and its destruction has shrunk to less than five minutes.

This has strategic consequences. In the eternal race between offense and defense, the defender has an advantage. As in World War I, positional combat dominates. A party to combat that wants to win has to rethink war, just as the interaction of tanks and air power revolutionized ground war in 1939.

The large-scale mechanized offensive, which served as the recipe for success in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, might quickly lead to disaster today. The lessons learned from Ukraine are also presenting Western military planners with tricky tasks.

The tank was the game changer of past wars. But it and other large weapon systems such as ships and aircraft are today being attacked by precision missiles and drones. As a result, the Russian Black Sea Fleet has already lost a fifth of its ships. Tank battles like those that once took place between the Germans and Soviets in Ukraine are no longer practical. Tanks are once again being used to support the infantry – just like a hundred years ago.

This example shows that conventional weapon systems are not becoming obsolete. In the first weeks of the war, two artillery brigades saved Kyiv with their Soviet-era guns. They fired more ammunition in three days than the British currently have in their stockpiles. Tube artillery is as traditional as land mines, which the Russians used to stop the Ukrainian summer offensive. None of this was foreseen in the Western doctrine.

Sometimes this requires concentrated fire, and sometimes precise strikes from a distance. Thanks to modern missiles, supply depots and command posts well behind the front lines are vulnerable. High-tech and old-fashioned strategies complement each other. A mixture is used to make the enemy feel unsafe everywhere.

The lessons to be drawn from this are unsettling. In recent years, the public has comforted itself with visions of cyber warfare conducted on the cheap. But this remains a fiction, because old and new systems only achieve their optimum effect when combined. In the face of risk-taking actors such as Russia, armed forces must be prepared for many other scenarios. A military that can fight the Taliban in the Hindu Kush but cannot defend its homeland is useless.

Neutral armies in particular need a broad range of capabilities, because they do not benefit from alliances. Neutrality is expensive, or it is worth nothing in an emergency. In general, security cannot coexist with lean management. Insufficient supplies can be fatal. The German Bundeswehr, for example, currently has a shortfall of ammunition and spare parts worth €40 billion.

Heraclitus was not the only philosopher to think about conflict. «Only the dead have seen the end of war,» runs a maxim attributed to Plato. Democratic states must never make it their aim to wage war. They must prevent this, because every human life counts.

But this requires effective deterrence. The EU and NATO counted Ukraine as part of their sphere of influence, but did not invest in its security. For Putin, that was an invitation. Israel was also unable to deter Hamas because it did not credibly threaten painful retaliation (and not just a short air war).

Deterrence is a dialectical art. It involves thinking through the impossible, precisely so this doesn’t happen. Any state that categorically rules out the use of tactical nuclear weapons is weakening its own deterrent capability. Without nuclear weapons and at least the theoretical willingness to use them, there can be no security – as long as the other side possesses them.

This is not a new realization. But it is perhaps is the biggest change in the way we look at war. The nuclear taboo that existed since the fall of the Soviet Union has been lifted. Hardly anyone is talking about what this means for a dispute between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, for example. Once again, nuclear war is no longer an unrealistic hypothesis.

source https://www.nzz.ch/english/as-war-reemerges-even-nuclear-weapons-are-losing-their-taboo-ld.1778817