The New Character of Warfare

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These Indochinese, seen trudging over a rickety bridge at dawn, carried no arms in their fight against the French. Their concealed weapon was an indomitable will and, with it, they forged a human chain that hobbled and then humbled the French and, later, the Americans. Our military might was paralyzed—and seems to remain so today—by indecision and lack of heart for any kind of a fight.

We can never know the full story of mankind be­cause we have not yet found the opening chapters of his history. However, at the point where written records begin (circa 3600 B.c.) we find that man was already busily engaged in warfare. Then, if we backtrack the obscure paths of fragmented information that predate the written records, we can rationally conclude that some form of physical conflict was common and had been since man first rose onto his two hind feet and began to mold the planet to meet his many and diverse needs.

The initial impetus for fighting seems to have been the achievement of an immediately discernible gain that would fill the needs of an individual: i.e., food, land, water, wealth, wives, or slaves. These conflicts were physical in nature and the decision as to who was the winner or loser quickly evident, the winner being alive and the loser dead.

As civilization progressed, we see that along with the development of agriculture, religion, writing, govern­ment, and commerce, man also raised the levels of his skills in the art of warfare. The aim of combat was gradually shifted from a means of satisfying an individ­ual need to one of fulfilling the collective goals of a tribe, nation, or empire. The desired results for both the ruler and his subjects, however, remained essentially the same as those of primitive man: land, food, water, wealth, wives, and slaves.

Since the end goals of combat still remained desira­ble within the warring groups—the battles were fought hand to hand, and they involved almost every able­bodied man who owed allegiance to a national or ethnic grouping—it is doubtful that the people of those days were really cognizant of the subtle changes that were taking place in their wars. However, changes there were, and superior leaders were already making innovations in military tactics and strategy that would enable a resourceful and imaginative commander to overcome the sheer force of larger numbers by use of cleverness, deception, improved troop dispositions, closer command and control, and new weaponry.

Deception was used with great effect in one of the earliest battles about which we have sufficient informa­tion to reconstruct. This was the Battle of Kadesh, fought in 1288 B.c. between the Hittites and the Egyp­tians. In the fourth century B.c,, Philip of Macedonia created an army with an infantry phalanx that enabled four ranks at once to take the enemy at spearpoint. On the left and right of this solid holding force, he put striking wings of flanking cavalry. Alexander the Great, his son, used this basic formation in virtuoso fashion to defeat armies that outnumbered his by as many as 20 to one.

A seemingly insignificant idea like the placement of stirrups on a saddle changed the role of a cavalryman into that of a highly maneuverable shock trooper capa­ble of handling heavier weapons with greater effect against foot soldiers. Endless examples of such actions could be listed, but there is little requirement for a lengthy dissertation of tactical and strategical innova­tions in the history of warfare to support the fact that the victors in most ensuing wars were those who had the foresight and perspicacity to take advantage of either new equipment, new ideas, or both.

As civilization became more sophisticated, man added principles, religion, and political ideals to his list of reasons for fighting. Some cynical historians believe that the end goals of even this type of war were still the same as the old ones: land, water, food, wealth, wives, and slaves. Whatever the real truth, the thread of war­fare continued to weave its way through the history of civilization. It has always been with us, constantly changing, and usually the final arbiter of which peoples, nations, and civilizations lived and which died. New social concepts, new political systems, new govern­ments, new religions, and new lands all came and went with terrible frequency. But, right up to the present, warfare remains common to all times, all lands, and all people. Knowing this, it does not seem prudent to believe that any nation can long alter or escape the deadly pattern of national and international conflict that is revealed by 5,000 years of known history. Whether we like it or not, war has existed in the past, exists now, and will exist in the foreseeable future. And, only those peoples who have been well prepared to cope with their potential opponents forcefully and intelligently have been able to avoid war. Those who trusted to faith, goodwill, and token armed forces have perished.

The difficulty in getting this seemingly obvious message across to people today lies in the complexity of our national and international society. Threats are vague, weapons are given legendary capabilities, and our citizens cling to hopeful memories of past capabili­ties. Even warfare itself is no longer definable in terms of open hostility. This fact has been recognized within our society by use of terms such as "hot war,” "cold war,” "detente,” and "peaceful coexistence.” This at­tempt to define for the general public how different leaders and administrations view the status of our diffi­culties with the Soviet Union compounds the problem in that the terms are vague and often mean different things to different peoples and governments. Most important, they confuse the issues and obscure for the public the fact that the situations and events they are being used to describe are really continuing actions in a long-term battle between conflicting ideologies. It is a battle that must end with a winner and a loser at some point in the future. To conceive of the situation other­wise is to ignore every lesson that was paid for so dearly in the past.

According to the official Soviet position, the Soviet Union has practiced the policy of "peaceful coexist­ence” since the U.S.S.R. came into being. The January 1975 issue of the Soviet Journal The Working Class and the Contemporary World stated it this way: ". . . peaceful coexistence is a specific and highly effective form of the class antagonism and historic rivalry between world socialism and world capitalism. This policy is an im­portant integral part of the world revolutionary proc­ess.”

Or again, to quote Mazurov, a member of the Polit­buro and First Deputy Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Coun­cil of Ministers, who said on 4 June 1975:

"The policy of peaceful coexistence and the relax­ation of tension is creating favorable conditions for social progress throughout the world. It is under these conditions that the national liberation move­ment has achieved fresh successes in Southeast Asia and Africa. It was in a detente situation that the collapse of the fascist regime in Greece took place and the democratic forces in Portugal won their outstanding victory.”

From these examples—and obviously more are avail­able—it appears that the Soviets and their Communist allies have grasped the new nature of international struggle more clearly than has the Free World.

That one side in a conflict—even a confusing one—is able to make such a mental breakthrough is not un­precedented. It is doubtful that all participants in what we now call the Punic Wars recognized that the series of battles and peaces that took place over a period of 118 years were really only parts of the same long-term, continuing struggle for control of the Mediterranean Sea and its littoral land areas. The same long-term pattern for control of various parts of the world holds true for the Hundred Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and, in our own time, the World Wars.

This lack of vision apparently results from human nature itself. Most individuals are interested only in those events that affect them personally. They tend to view them in isolation, each with its own cause and effect, and each having a finite beginning and end. World War I to them is World War I. It is distinct from World War II. Korea, Vietnam, the Mideast, and revolutionary actions throughout the world all fit in separate slots. Only those with an understanding of history or great ambition to impose a religious, eco­nomic, or political idea on others seem to grasp the interrelationship of warfare. To them, each battle, each "war” is only a part of a greater whole leading eventu­ally to one victor. That it may take 100 years to reach an eventual solution to the main cause of the conflicts is of no consequence. The end result is the only thing of importance and this type of individual or group of individuals, is willing to wait patiently, fighting where it can or must, until the tide of events swings in its favor. Then, if the group’s opponents do not recognize and check its advantage, the members of the group use it to attain their goals.

It is always difficult to determine precisely any single event that brings about such a shift of strength and military advantage in a long series of continuing con­flicts between major powers. For it is usually not just one event. Rather, it is a consolidation of the lessons learned as a result of several actions. Sir Gavin deBeer in his book Hannibal: Challenging Rome’s Supremacy (New York: The Viking Press, 1969) writes of the turning point in the Punic Wars:

"The treaty that ended the First Punic War differed in its effects on the two contenders. On Rome it impressed the necessity of possessing and maintain­ing sea-power, which increased in importance as Rome ceased to be concerned solely with military operations in Italy, and was drawn more and more frequently into wars in distant lands. Without it, the Roman Empire, which came into existence long before the Empire [hegemony over a major part of the known world], would never have been possible.”

Making such evaluations from the safe distance of time and greater knowledge is relatively easy. However, we must recognize that this factor was so obscure to the

With the two-edged sword of sea power, ancient Carthage carved for itself most of what is today Spain's southeastern coast. But it was his enemy’s sea power that forced Hannibal, the Carthaginian military genius, to scale the Alps and ford the Rhone, left, rather than challenge Roman control of the Mediterranean.

participants that recognizing the value of sea power in what had been ostensibly a land war was a major breakthrough in Rome’s final victory over Carthage.

In our own situation, it is very likely that future historians may mark the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as a major turning point in our own series of World Wars. In that confrontation, we achieved the victory, but the Soviets apparently learned the lessons. In the aftermath of their forced withdrawal of missiles from Cuba, the Soviet leaders were obviously impressed with the ex­treme dangers of a head-to-head conflict between the superpowers. Also, they became well aware of their inability to use the awesome power of their large land forces in distant confrontations unless they had a navy that could control the seas. This made them intensely aware of the need for superior sea power and the re­quirement for new approaches in spreading the doctrine of Communism to distant nations.

Correction of the problem of naval inferiority was relatively simple. It was basically one of time and resources, both of which were available. The Soviets committed them to the direction of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov. He was so successful in his part of the plan that 15 years later, the Soviet fleet outnumbers ours three and four to one in various categories of fighting ships. The Soviets are clearly ahead in naval missiles, both strategic and tactical, surface and subsurface launched. The editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, Captain John Moore, author of the book The Soviet Navy Today (New York: Stein and Day, 1976) has stated that the Soviet Navy has the "greatest firepower” of any fleet that ever existed and could menace all the world’s sea-lanes, especially if it gained bases in Angola. The second part of the equation—new techniques of con­flict—was more difficult to resolve, but it appears the Soviets have been equally successful in that area.

A review of the known history of warfare reveals certain discernible patterns that provide us rational guidelines on which to develop new stratagems. By this I do not mean total adherence to actions that produced security or victory in the past, but rather a broad review of the changes that were made by different leaders to take advantage of different conditions. In doing this, one of the major points that becomes immediately evident is that a nation which plans or fights a future war by slavishly using the tactics and concepts of prior wars will most likely lose to an opponent who has properly evaluated the political and sociological changes that have occurred in the intervening years.

Karl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian general and strategist, made a tremendous impact on the strategic nature of warfare by his simple statement that war is not merely a political act, but also a political instru­ment, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means. Alfred Thayer Mahan created new concepts of national military requirements through his recognition that sea power forms the solid base on which all military campaigns must be planned. The development of atomic weapons during World War II, however, confused our understanding of these, as well as other, basic rules for the conduct of warfare.

The startling breakthrough in military weaponry created by nuclear weapons dominated most military and political thinking in the succeeding years. The awesome power potential overshadowed the evidence provided by the Korean and Vietnam Wars that it is a weapon no more potent as a realistic alternative than poison gas or bacteriological warfare, which had been available—but not used—for many years. We have found evidence in ancient writings that there were agreements far in the past between the warring nations that prohibited the poisoning of wells. Consequently, even though a single weapon system may be tremen­dously destructive, it may also be in reality too powerful to be used in the types of disputes between nations that have been historically settled by armed conflict.

In fact, military trends since World War II indicate strongly that nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons are in reality "stalemate” weapons. Where two opposing superpowers possess such weapons, neither can employ them routinely without fear of retaliation. This neu­tralizing effect results from the fact that the purpose of warfare since the beginning of time has been primarily for either individual or collective profit. Since national suicide is not a profitable result for any people to contemplate, these types of weapons are really main­tained and required only for blunting or deterrence purposes: in effect, mutual blackmail. In actual combat today, they are not militarily usable weapons. Conse­quently, a nation or society that pictures a distinct military advantage being derived from the possesion of such weapons is basing its plans on a false premise within the context of wars that are acceptable in our era.

Many argue that today no conflict is acceptable. However, this is an unreal viewpoint, for armed con­flicts at various levels of intensity continue to take place throughout the world. We may not see these small wars as detrimental or threatening to our society or demo­cratic form of government. But that in itself is part of the innovative warfare that has been introduced by our opponents.

To indicate the Soviet viewpoint on warfare today, Premier Aleksei Kosygin has stated that:

"The policy of peaceful coexistence . . . proceeds from the inadmissibility of the application of force in solving disputed questions among states. But this in no case means the rejection of the right of peo­ples, arms in hand, to oppose aggression or to strive for liberation from foreign oppression. This right is Holy and inalienable and the Soviet Union unfail­ingly assists peoples which have risen in strug­gle. . .

Events of the past few years in many diverse areas of the world certainly prove the sincerity of those remarks. Further, we should recognize from them that there must be some long-range advantage involved for the Soviets to pursue such a policy. To determine what this gain might be, a good place to begin is with the writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Viet­namese strategist charged with militarily implementing the political theories of Ho Chi Minh. General Giap developed a revolutionary strategy for victory that eventually proved itself effective against even a super­power.

Very early in the war for control of Vietnam, no outside military observer would have given North Vietnam any chance of military victory over France and the United States. The imbalance of military power was just too great. General Giap, however, had recognized a