Last week’s discussion of American military vulnerabilities
touched on one of the major issues that ought to be giving Pentagon officials
sleepless nights—but only one of them The military downsides of America’s
obsession with high-tech gizmos, in a world where complexity just gives the
other guy more opportunities to mess with you, are no small matter, to be sure,
but those downsides are taking shape in a wider context that has its own bad
news to deliver to fans of US global dominance.
To make sense of that context, though, it’s going to be
necessary to return briefly to a point I’ve made here more than once before,
which is the pervasive misunderstanding of evolution you’ll find straight
across the cultural landscape of today’s America. Since Darwin first proposed
his eminently simple theory more than a century and a half ago—“How stupid not
to have thought of it before,” Thomas Henry Huxley is reported to have said—the
great majority of Americans, believers and critics alike, have insisted on
redefining evolution as progress: what is “more evolved” is better, more
advanced, more progressive than the competition.
Not so. Evolution is adaptation to changing circumstances,
and that’s all it is. In some cases, evolution moves organisms in the direction
of greater complexity, but in plenty of other cases it’s gone the other
direction. Over the two billion years or so since the first self-replicating
organisms first appeared on this planet, the no-holds-barred wrestling match between
genetic variation and a frighteningly unstable environment has turned out some
remarkably weird adaptations—pterodactyls, uintatheria, Khloe Kardashian—but
they aren’t the organisms that endure over the long term. The dragonflies who visit my backyard
regularly haven’t changed much since the Devonian, the box turtle we see at
intervals out front had relatives munching slugs in the Cretaceous, while the
adolescent bat who got lost and ended up in our bedroom one morning a few weeks
back would not have been out of place in the forests of the Eocene. They and organisms like them are survivors
because they found a good stable adaptation and stuck with it; while other
organisms adapted in ways that turned out to be dead ends.
It’s precisely because evolution is adaptation to
circumstances, no more and no less, that it’s possible—and indeed easy—to find
precise analogues to Darwinian evolution in fields far removed from biology.
War is one of these. Seen from a systems perspective, nations competing for survival,
prosperity, and power show plenty of equivalencies to species doing the same
thing for the same reasons, and war—now as always, the final arbiter of
national survival—follows patterns of adaptation that a Darwinian analysis
explains well.
The collapse of Bronze Age chariot warfare discussed a few
posts back offers a useful example. The
chariot armies of the late Bronze Age were superbly adapted for their military
environment, but like so many highly specialized life forms in evolutionary
history, their adaptations limited their ability to adapt to rapidly changing
circumstances. That limit proved to be
fatal to many societies along the eastern Mediterranean littoral, and might
well have done so even for Egypt if that ancient society had not been willing
and able to return to an older and more resilient set of military adaptations.
Our chances are fairly high of witnessing an even more
striking example of the same process in the not too distant future. As discussed a while back in this series of
posts, the current American way of war was originally pioneered by the German
and Japanese militaries in the years before the Second World War, as both
nations explored the extraordinary new possibilities that petroleum had opened
up in war. The destruction of the French
army in the spring of 1940 by a German invasion force that had fewer men,
cannons, and tanks than its Allied opponents put the world on notice that the
old ways of war no longer mattered; the Japanese conquest of the entire western
Pacific in a few weeks at the end of 1941 made that memo impossible to ignore,
and the United States—to the lasting regret of Germany and Japan—proved to be a
quick learner.
The new warfare depended on the mobility that planes, tanks,
and trucks made possible, but it had another dimension that is not always
recognized. The German conquest of
France in 1940, for example, did not succeed because the Germans met and
crushed the Allied armies in a head-on battle.
Rather, the panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht dodged the big battle the
Allies wanted to fight on the plains of Belgium, and cut across France south of
the Allied forces, breaking their communication and supply lines, while the
Luftwaffe carried out air strikes to disorganize Allied units and crippled their
ability to respond to a rapidly changing situation. Compare it to the US
invasions of Iraq in 1990 and 2003 and it’s hard to miss the precise parallels;
in both these cases, as in 1940 France, what handed a quick victory to the
invaders was a strategy that focused on shredding the enemy government’s and
military commanders’ ability to respond to the invasion.
The aftermath, though, is telling. In 1940 as in 2003, the invader’s victory was
followed promptly by a sustained insurgency against the occupying forces. (The only reason that didn’t happen in 1990
was that the elder Bush and his generals had the great common sense to declare
victory and get out.) The same thing has
happened far more often than not whenever gasoline warfare on the blitzkrieg
model has taken place in the real world.
There are good reasons for that. Military theorists have postulated any number
of conditions that define victory in war, but in practice these all come down
to one requirement, which is that the losing side has to be convinced that
giving up the fight is the best option it has left. That was the point of the old-fashioned
pitched battle, in which one army offered battle at a chosen location, the
other army accepted the invitation, both sides got into position, and then they
hammered away at each other for a day or two until one side or the other had
the stuffing pounded out of it. After a
few battles of that kind, everyone from the king to the lowliest foot soldier
knew exactly which side was going to keep on beating the other if the war went
on, and so a peace treaty was normally negotiated in short order.
Gasoline warfare rarely has the same result. For those on the losing side—I’m relying here
especially on accounts by French and British officers who were in the Battle of
France in 1940—the war is a roller-coaster ride through chaos; many, sometimes
most, ground units never have the chance to measure their strength against the
enemy in combat, because the other side has gone right past them and is deep
behind their lines; orders from their own commanders are confused,
contradictory, or never arrive at all; and then suddenly the war is over, the
government has surrendered, and the other side is parading through Paris or
Baghdad. So there you are; your
government’s will to resist may be broken, but yours isn’t, and pretty soon
you’re looking around for ways to carry on the fight. That way lies the French Resistance—or, for
that matter, the Iraqi one.
This is why resistance movements sprang up so promptly in
every nation conquered by Nazi Germany, and why insurgencies have done the same
so often in nations conquered by the United States. It’s the natural result of
a way of war that’s very good at bullying governments into fast collapse but
very poor at convincing the ordinary grunt in uniform, or for that matter the
ordinary person on the street, that the other side’s triumph ought to be
accepted without further fuss. (Attentive readers will note here that the logic
of the blitzkrieg is weirdly similar to that embraced more recently by
believers in the sudden collapse of industrial society; in both cases, the
words “what happens next” play an insufficiently large role in planning, and
the possibility that people affected by a sudden collapse might do something to
respond to it rarely seems to get a look in.)
It’s here that the Darwinian analysis of war mentioned
earlier is most relevant, because insurgency is not a fixed thing. It evolves over time, as different insurgent
groups try new tactics, strategies and weapons, and draw on the experience of
past insurgencies. The evolution of
insurgency, as it happens, dates from before the birth of gasoline warfare; it
emerged as opponents of European colonial regimes in the Third World began to
adapt the methods of European revolutionary warfare to the distinctive
conditions of their time. The new model
of insurgency saw its first trial runs in South Africa and the Philippines
right around 1900; both insurgencies were eventually defeated, but not without
serious cost to the two imperial powers in question, and the lessons learned in
those wars spread widely—it’s not accidental, for example, that the word
“commando” entered military parlance in the very early 20th century from
Afrikaans, where it was used for Boer insurgent groups fighting the British.
The evolutionary struggle between gasoline warfare and
insurgency has been much discussed in recent years in military journals,
although the label that’s been given to state of the art insurgency—“Fourth
Generation warfare,” or 4GW for short—confuses far more than it reveals. The
notion that military history can be divided into a set of neatly defined
generations, each one of which supersedes the one before it, simply restates
the contemporary myth of progress in another guise, and is just as arbitrary as
narratives of progress normally are; though the technologies differ, 4GW was
practiced by Elamite hill tribes against Babylonian armies more than three
thousand years ago, and will doubtless still be being practiced by peoples on
the periphery of empires as long as human societies are complex enough to
support urban imperial centers.
Despite the problems with the term, and with a good deal of
the thinking that’s gathered around it, the debates aroud 4GW have brought up a
crucial issue, which is that today’s insurgent groups have been at least as
quick to innovate and to adopt the latest technology as their well-funded
opponents in the Pentagon and its equivalents elsewhere. Darwinian selection
works just as effectively on insurgencies as on species, and the mechanism is
much the same—a constant pressure on ecological boundaries, which sooner or
later stumbles across every available option for greater success at the hard
work of survival. So far, the military
bureaucracies in the world’s great powers have been able to stay more or less
abreast of the resulting transformations, but their situation has a lot in
common with that of physicians today faced with antibiotic-resistant
bacteria: you can keep on inventing new
antibiotics for a while, but the law of diminishing returns is always working
against you, the germs are gaining ground, and you know that sooner or later
something lethal, communicable, and resistant to all known antibiotics is
pretty much certain to make an appearance.
Exactly what form the next military revolution will take is
an interesting question. Some days I
suspect that a first draft of it was field-tested by the Hezbollah militia in
southern Lebanon in 2006. To deal with an invasion by an Israeli Army as
thoroughly committed to gasoline warfare as any army on earth, Hezbollah
adopted a strategy that could probably be called preventive insurgency. Soldiers, weapons, ammunition and supplies
were carefully stashed in underground hideouts all over southern Lebanon in
advance of the Israeli invasion, where they could wait out the aerial
bombardment and the initial assault, and then popped up unexpectedly behind
Israeli lines with guns and antitank rocket launchers blazing. While both sides claimed victory in the
resulting struggle, the fight was nothing like as one-sided as Israel’s two
earlier invasions of Lebanon had been Could the same strategy be taken further,
and turned into a wickedly effective defense in depth against a conventional
invasion? I suspect so.
On other days, I remember the war between Libya and Chad in
1987, when Libya was a client state of the Soviet Union and had an extensive
army and air force equipped with secondhand Russian tanks and planes, and Chad
had an army equipped mostly with Toyota pickups packing 50-caliber machine
guns, rocket launchers, and half a dozen infantrymen in back. The Chadian forces won an overwhelming
victory, whipping around the Libyan forces via goat trails in the mountains and
leaving the plains of northern Chad littered with burning Libyan tanks. Those armed pickups are called “technicals”
in African jargon, and it’s a term you may want to remember; for decades now,
they’ve been standard military vehicles all over the continent, and my guess is
that it’s only a matter of time before they start being used elsewhere in the
world. Could an army equipped with
technicals, and with antiaircraft and antitank rocket launchers a little more
sophisticated than the ones in common use just now, copy the Chadian victory
against a major power? Again, I suspect
so.
Whether or not these speculations have any bearing on the
way things work out, though, the age of gasoline warfare that began with Stukas
screaming out of the sky in the spring of 1940 is guaranteed to come to an end
sooner or later. There are two reasons
that can be said with a fair degree of assurance. First, of course, is the
simple fact that every way of making war eventually runs into something it
can’t handle. If military history shows
anything, it’s that the invincible army of one era is the crow food of the
next, and far more likely than not the switchover has nothing to do with
technological progress; it simply takes a certain amount of time for potential
enemies to stumble on whatever trick or tactic will do the job.
Still, even this factor is less certain than the other,
which is that gasoline warfare is only possible in the presence of ample
supplies of gasoline. More generally, the contemporary American way of war can
only continue if huge amounts of relatively cheap energy can be provided, not
only to fuel planes and tanks and ships, but to support the immense
infrastructure that makes modern war possible. As that surplus of energy wanes,
so will gasoline warfare, and the successful military powers of the future will
be those that can figure out ways to project power and win battles with less of
an outlay of energy and raw materials than their rivals.
To be sure, some amount of gasoline or the equivalent will
be going into war for a very long time to come—the advantages provided by the
internal combustion engine are real enough that gasoline will probably still be
being used for military purposes long after the private automobile has
retreated into legend. My guess, though, is that the last gallons of gasoline
to used in warfare will be fueling technicals, not tanks—and long before that
happens, a way of war dependent on the extravagant consumption of energy and
raw materials will have gone whistling down the wind alongside a civilization
that tried to support itself on the same unsustainable basis.
*******************
It has been three years now since I took a break from these
weekly essays, and for a number of reasons, now’s a good time not to take that
any further. The fictional scenario that was going to be the last post in this
series of three has unexpectedly grown into an extended narrative five posts
long, one that needs to be filled out by a good deal of further research; I
also have a contract, finally, for the Green Wizardry book project, and a major
writing project on the other side of my career, both of which could use some
concentrated attention just now.
This will therefore be the last Archdruid
Report post until the beginning of October. I’ll be responding to
comments on this post for the next week or so, but after that, you’re on your
own for the month of September. Put the time you’d spend reading these essays
into digging in your gardens, building solar ovens, learning to brew beer, or
in some other way developing skills that will help you weather the opening
years of the deindustrial age, and you’ll be ahead of the game. See you again
on October 3!
****************
And for those who are worried about missing their weekly
dose of apocalyptic fantasy...
End of the World of the Week #37, #38, #39, #40, and #41
Until recently, at least, the usual way to come up with an
apocalyptic prediction was to figure out first how the world was going to end,
and then try to figure out the date when that would happen. The current 2012
hysteria has taken the opposite approach, first choosing a date and then trying
to find some cataclysm or other to justify it—but it’s not quite the first time
this latter method saw use.
No, that honor belongs to the redoubtable Charles Berlitz,
one of the leading authors in the rejected-knowledge field in the late 20th
century. Berlitz was the man who
invented the Bermuda Triangle and rescued the supposed Roswell flying saucer
crash from oblivion, so he unquestionably had the skills needed for his apocalyptic
magnum opus, Doomsday: 1999 A.D..
How would the world end that year? Berlitz was nothing if not open-minded. A convulsion at the earth’s core might cause
cataclysmic earthquakes, or an overload of ice at the South Pole might destabilize
the crust and send it skidding over the mantle, moving all the continents into
new positions and causing earthquakes and floods; a sudden ice age might sweep
the globe, plunging much of the northern hemisphere into a deep freeze; there
might be a nuclear war, or the earth might get swatted by an asteroid or a
really big comet. Hey, it could even be more than one!
Now of course there was no reason to think that any of these
things were more likely to arrive in 1999 than in any other year, and with
three of the five, there are very good reasons to think that they can’t happen
at all. Still, it made for a very successful book—until 1999 came and went
uneventfully, that is—and the same logic Berlitz offered is being used today to
argue that one or more of an even more diverse flurry of world-ending events
will infallibly arrive on December 21 of this year.
