How does weaponry effect a war?
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=139499
I’ve written a fair amount over the last few years about the implications of the use of new military technologies in Ukraine and the Middle East, and I’ve noticed the problems a lot of pundits seem to have wrapping their neurones around current developments, and what they mean. The usual practice is gee-whiz stories written in science-fiction mode, and largely in the future tense, about how this or that technology will Change Everything. Such stories are often accompanied by firm assurances that certain types of equipment (especially manned aircraft, tanks and aircraft carriers) are now “obsolete.” Observably, very little systematic thinking goes into any of these stories, which are almost always deeply conceptually challenged as well. So let’s reach into my bag of systematic thinking principles, and see if we can apply some of them here.
One of the major obstacles to understanding the implications of these technologies is the popular obsession with the narrowly technical aspects of equipment and platforms. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this is a special problem in the West, but it is actually pervasive, and can produce long articles by weapons fetishists comparing in loving detail the technical characteristics of rival proposed jet fighters that don’t actually fly yet, as though that was all that mattered. And, rather as music or film enthusiasts want to rate the output of their favourite band or director out of ten, or in some ranked list, so weapons fetishists lovingly debate questions such as “was the Spitfire better than the Me 109?” Yet a moment’s thought shows that this is the wrong question. Numbers counted, tactics counted, radar made a huge contribution and most of all the endurance of the Spitfire (and Hurricane) was greater because it was operating over home territory, it had less far to fly, and a pilot who had baled out could normally be returned to fly again. And so on.
Which suggests that the real issue here is not what the three technologies and platforms listed above —and of course others—can do in detail, or how vulnerable they are, or how expensive they are. The real questions relate to the missions they were intended to carry out. Nobody ever said “wouldn’t it be a cool idea to have a tank?” The technology was developed in order to overcome specific problems on the battlefield and make offensive operations possible again. So the actual questions pundits should now be addressing fall into two types. First, What are the likely military tasks of the future and how can they be addressed, and second, are such technologies as tanks, manned aircraft, and iarcraft carriers now “obsolete,” either because the missions they were designed for are no longer necessary, or because they can no longer be performed by these platforms? (It’s worth adding that the death of these three technologies has been proclaimed at regular intervals over the last fifty years.)
Vulnerability, as such, is not much of an argument. Few weapons systems of the past have been invulnerable to attack, and in many cases the attacking system cost less than the defending one did. There’s even a reductio argument against the use of infantry on the battlefield: after all, a trained soldier with two years service and equipment can easily represent an investment of 100,000 dollars/pounds or whatever, but can be killed by a single round of ammunition costing practically nothing. On the other hand, nothing has (yet) replaced the Mk 1 soldier for certain missions, and anyway, a large part of military doctrine is concerned with the recognition of inevitable risk, and finding ways to minimise it.
So it’s helpful to think of these questions in terms of missions first, of the capabilities you need to carry them out second, and equipment only third. Let’s go back to the examples used above to show what I mean. The point of a tank (and armoured vehicles generally) is to give you the capability to project force across open ground against opposition, and to be able to control the ground once you get there. So long as the military might potentially be given such a mission they will need this capability. If it’s not a tank it will have to be something else. Aircraft represent a capability to deliver destruction, carry out reconnaissance and transport human beings and equipment across long distances, and to do so rapidly. Aircraft carriers represent the capability to project power over long distances, including air power, helicopters, deployable military units, command and control and intelligence gathering. If you want these capabilities, then they will have to be provided in some form, by carriers or otherwise. And in turn, this means that you have to try to answer that most difficult of questions: what tasks is it reasonably likely that the military will be asked to carry out over the next generation, and so what capabilities are you likely to need?
We can get some idea of what this entails from the most obvious worked example: the tank. By the end of 1914, mobile warfare on the Western Front had already come to an end (though it continued throughout the War further East.) Successive attempts at flanking manoeuvres had failed, and the two sides could only now conduct frontal warfare. The Germans, as the invaders and fighting on two fronts, were content to stay on the defensive and fortify their positions against attack. (Fortified lines and positions as such, of course, were not new in warfare.) The Allies had to attack to recover lost territory and ultimately to win the War. This meant recapturing all that territory, even if attrition of the enemy was a necessary precondition. It is often said that defence was superior to offence in that War, but this is only partly true. For example, artillery was responsible for about 70% of casualties in the fighting, and the Allies, with a larger industrial base and fighting on only one front, had the advantage here. The effect of artillery barrages by attacking troops could be destructive and terrifying: German losses on the Somme in 1916 were about two thirds of the attacking British and French troops, but they could afford them less.
The problem lay in following up this advantage. The British and French infantry had to advance over several hundred metres of open ground, as quickly as possible, burdened with perhaps half their body-weight of weapons and material, all while trying to cross barbed wire. The Germans soon realised that only a few troops were needed to hold the front line, well-protected in dug-outs ready to emerge with their machine-guns, and that they could then quickly launch counter-attacks from positions several kilometres back, from positions that had not been bombarded. For their part, the attackers could not communicate with their headquarters to tell them where they had broken through, and therefore where to send reinforcements, nor where resistance was stubborn and more artillery barrages were needed. They were almost always dislodged by the inevitable German counter-attacks. Although technology and tactics both improved markedly during the War, this basic problem was never really solved.
Enter the tank, or the “armoured machine-gun destroyer” as the British initially called it. It would be able to cross open ground faster than infantry, roll straight over barbed wire and engage enemy troops from behind protective armour. This worked, to an extent. There were no real countermeasures against tanks: their weaknesses, and so their limited effectiveness, came more from their slow speed and their mechanical unreliability. And as tanks became faster and more reliable as well as better protected, many military thinkers, notably in Germany and the Soviet Union, began to think of them as independent, war-winning weapons. Indeed, German success in France in 1940, though largely a product of luck, surprise and innovative tactics, owed something to the fact that outside tank-to-tank engagements, (where the French often won) there were few weapons capable of defeating the tanks of the day. It was not until the latter part of the war that such weapons began to be fielded.
In the generation after World War II many nations worked on anti-tank missiles, and there was no reason for pundits to be surprised (as they inevitably were) by the Egyptian use of them against Israel in the 1973 war. Almost at once the tank was declared dead, only for it to rise on the third day—or at last a few years later—with the announcement of compound armour developed by the British, and fitted to tanks to protect against such weapons. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was developing so-called “active” tank defences, and Russia has continued to do so. The Russian tanks deployed in Ukraine are for the most part massively protected against drone attack, the current incarnation of the tank’s nemesis.
If you’re interested, there are any number of technical histories retracing the long and complex story or the development of armour, of anti-armour weapons and protection against them. But that’s not what I am concerned with here, because such technical analysis misses out two very important things. The first is the need to consider the use of different weapons together, and using a proper doctrine, and the second is the need to understand how and why the weapons are being used in the first place. In 1973, the Egyptians had such success against the Israeli tanks, because the latter charged straight for the Egyptian lines without any preparation, assuming that they would sweep all before them. Not only did they lose a number of tanks, the shock effect of their appearance was massively reduced as they slowed and tried to find cover, of which there wasn’t very much. But few pundits noticed the lack of artillery preparation or the lack of accompanying infantry, and so the death of the tank was proclaimed, and not for the last time. (More recently, you may have noticed that the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 primarily with Battalion Tactical Groups, which were armour and equipment-heavy, and were intended to be complemented by infantry mobilised for a general war. But the latter didn’t happen, and so the BTGs found themselves unsuited to the kind of war they were actually asked to fight, and took casualties as a result.)
On the face of it, the numbers have always seemed persuasive: cheap missiles could defeat expensive tanks: job done. So obviously the future lay with lots of dismounted infantry, and there were even fantasies I remember from the 1980s of giving every German citizen an anti-tank weapon to keep at home. In fact, any such tactic would have been suicidal, because the attackers would simply have blown everything (and everyone) to pieces with artillery, and then just moved in. It’s what the military call Combined Arms tactics, and if you have the patience to watch and learn, you can see Russians using essentially these tactics in Ukraine now. In particular, whilst drones (yes, we’ll have more to say about them) have been effective against tanks, Russian tanks now have anti-drone systems capable of destroying perhaps 15-20 attacking drones each: at which point the calculus starts to look a little different. And of course a drone, in itself, is only part of a system, as a tank is. It requires operators, who themselves require protection and mobility, it requires an intelligence picture, it requires training and interaction with other arms, the drones have to be manufactured and fuelled, and deployed, and the vehicles require drivers, servicing, protection and fuel. There is some evidence that Russian attacks on petrol stations in the East of Ukraine have been at least partly aimed at reducing the availability of fuel for Ukrainian drones and their transport vehicles. Moreover, it’s one thing to have drones, it’s another thing that they should be of the right type and capability, and employed with other assets towards a coherent objective.
Again, the fixation with the detail of technical characteristics means that we overlook the purpose of the use of military capabilities in the first place. In Ukraine, the Russians strategic objective of a country that no longer poses a threat, as they see it, requires its military and its production facilities to be destroyed if the Ukrainians will not voluntarily follow Russian demands. But it is nonetheless necessary to take and hold a certain amount of ground, and in particular, for political reasons, to control the whole of the Donbas. That requires attacking, in an environment which favours the defender, and therefore the development of tactics—including drones used offensively—which accept casualties, but try to minimise them. Likewise, the Ukrainians have attempted to launch counter-attacks from time to time, largely for political reasons, and themselves are ready to accept heavy casualties. To talk about the relative strength of “attack” and “defence” therefore doesn’t mean that much unless a context is specified.
And casualties may have to be accepted as the price of achieving what you want. When you get down to it, the basic job of any military force—ground and naval certainly—is the control of a particular area. Anglo-Saxon popular culture, in particular, is so obsessed with combat and the destruction of equipment, that we forget that the most basic role of any military is to ensure that the political authority has the monopoly of the use of legitimate force in a given area. This does not have to mean combat, or even necessarily an aggressive stance: it may mean simply, for example, that through a combination of patrols and garrisons, a military force can secure an area without firing a shot. Potential enemies may decide life is too difficult there, and go somewhere else. (If you have spent any time in a country where the government cannot ensure the monopoly of legitimate force, you’ll know instinctively what I mean.) Beyond that, a nation with a sea-coast has to have a presence around it, for political reasons, as well as to combat smuggling and trafficking. And all states make a point of patrolling their air frontiers. When a state cannot do this sort of task (as in the recent difficulties of the Royal Navy) then it pays a considerable price politically.
In principle, some of these tasks could be carried out by “drones” in the widest sense of that term. You can use them, for example, for keeping watch over large areas, but a population menaced by extremist groups or traffickers probably wouldn’t find their presence very convincing. Drones cannot take and hold ground in the classic sense of the term, or ensure the security of disputed territory. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine naval drones carrying out fishery protection duties, or airborne drones patrolling airspace. Again, it all depends what you are trying to do, and what the principal tasks of your armed forces are.
The Iran War is a good example of these points, and indeed several others. As a master-class in how to get things wrong from the start, it takes some beating. Consider: the forces used for the operation were those actually available, not necessarily those most suited, so the operation had to be designed round them, and politically it had to be argued that they were, nonetheless, adequate to achieve the objective: otherwise, why bother? It had to be asserted from the start that stand-off bombing by aircraft and missiles launched from ships would be sufficient to cause the Iranian population to rise up and overthrow the regime, because there were no other military options open. This in spite of the very dubious record of such campaigns in the past, not to mention the high level of Iranian preparation. Thus, from the start the US military was obliged to try to achieve a political objective without the appropriate forces. As a result, the political objectives (or at least types of targets) changed all the time, as a function of what the US could actually do, rather than what needed to be done.
The corollary of this is that what is needed for expeditionary warfare of this kind, far from home, is far more than a series of weapons: it is an entire capability. It appears that from the beginning the US decided against air operations over Iranian territory, because it was too well defended. But this in turn required secure bases at a distance, a sizeable maintenance capability positioned forward, a constant supply of logistics and replacement personnel and consumables and sufficient stand-off weapons, as well as high quality intelligence about where such weapons, launched from hundreds of kilometres away, would actually land. In practice, much of the US air capability was on aircraft carriers, and these carriers had to be based outside the range of Iranian missiles, requiring the aircraft to be refuelled on the way, which required a whole set of other capabilities. So you can see, I think, that the “plan,” which involved long-range missiles (the tactical level) to somehow bring about Iranian surrender (the strategic aim, or one of them anyway), not only lacked any way of ensuring that one actually produced the other—what I call a Transmission Mechanism—but required a whole range of technical things to go well in addition..
And of course they didn’t. The most flagrant lack was the inability to protect and operate from secure forward air bases in Gulf Countries. Whether the likely Iranian response was underestimated, whether the defensive systems were too few or inadequate, whether the sheer number of Iranian drones and missiles was underestimated: these are things which may become clear as the books and studies are written. But it’s not necessary to suppose that the Iranians are playing seven-dimensional chess here, to accept that they had spotted the overall weakness in the US capability (not individual weapons systems) and looked for ways of exploiting it. The F-35 may be a wonderful aircraft, but it has a relatively short range and a relatively limited payload. If in practice, by one expedient or another you can keep it away from your territory, then you don’t need to resort to air defence weapons, or rather you can save them for later.
Now note that this is not necessarily an argument against the technical excellence of the F35, nor the operational capability of US carriers, as well as the various radars that have been destroyed. It is all a question of environment, mission and concept. By the familiar “scissors, stone, paper” logic of military capability, which I’ve mentioned many times, few individual weapons systems, in isolation, are themselves decisive or can carry all before them. In certain circumstances, they may be very vulnerable and indeed a net risk to the success of the mission. But much depends on the situation in which they are used. So for any years now, aircraft carriers have been declared obsolete by some, on the grounds that, just as with the tank, they can be destroyed by cheaper and relatively unsophisticated weapons. But once more it all depends n the context.
In the Cold War, carriers were intended both to project power to places where aircraft could not independently go, and to escort reinforcements across the Atlantic. The Falklands could not have been recaptured by the British without carrier-born aviation, but the British were well aware of the vulnerability of their carriers and so, as was normal for such deployments, they sent anti-air and anti-submarine defence forces as well. In the event they were lucky not to have a carrier lost or damaged, but there was no alternative way of getting aircraft into the area, with their support as well, and no other way of getting command and control and communication capabilities down there.
It’s not just that carriers have become more vulnerable, though they have, it’s also that public tolerance of casualties in wars that are wars of choice rather than survival is not very high. In the Cold War, both sides expected to lose a large part of their arsenals and armed forces in some apocalyptic battle, if it ever came to that. In 1982, public opinion in Britain was generally behind the government, and in any even that government was itself fighting for its very survival. Things are different now, where the US is in the process of losing an unpopular war and dare not risk substantial casualties. In any event, operating carriers near to an enemy with substantial airpower (or missile power today) has always been a bad idea. For that matter, carriers are only as good as their escorts and reconnaissance: in 1940, HMS Glorious was sunk off Norway by German battlecruisers which were not spotted in time, in spite of excellent visibility.
Yet strangely enough, carriers are becoming more popular, not less. More than a dozen countries have some type of vessel capable of embarking fixed-wing aircraft or large numbers of helicopters, and some, like China, are rapidly and enthusiastically developing their capability. Yet we are told that in a war between China and the US, carriers would be of no value. Why do they apparently think otherwise in Beijing? Well, here the Iran War is helpful, because it has shown the enormous logistic challenges of keeping a carrier group at sea for long periods of time, even when it is out of range of a direct threat, and therefore the challenges of distant power projection. But the Chinese would not have these same problems. So far as we can see, they have two main purposes for their carriers. One is symbolic power projection, through ship visits and exercises, making and underlining political points about them being a world power, because they are capable of deploying all over the world. The other is to operate in home waters, under the protection of aircraft, missiles and long-range radars. This of course, is quite different from the US conception of carrier operations near China, which is likely to be as suicidal as most experts think. It is clear that the Chinese are developing a capability to keep US naval forces a long way from their coastal waters, and to dominate the seaspace around them. Carriers are an important component of both these objectives.
There is nothing especially original in the above analysis, and a true military expert could probably have explained it better than me. Likewise, many serving military officers and defence experts would understand the above analysis, and agree with large parts of it. But of course there is a fundamental distinction between understanding something intellectually, and acting upon it. Still more difficult is the kind of major intellectual reorientation that this kind of simple analysis suggests. That said, I think a few tentative conclusions can be drawn.
The main one, and I apologise for insisting upon it yet once more, is the distinction between equipment and capability. The Iranians have demonstrated very well the importance of the latter, whereas the West has been obsessed—and still is—with the former. Effectively, the Iranians have developed a capability to keep hostile ships and aircraft at a distance from their shores, and thus prevent any invasion through their coastline. They have also developed a capability to politically dominate the region, to destroy hostile facilities and exercise political pressure on neighbouring states. All of this has been done without recourse to the expensive and complex equipments that the West has historically used, and with missiles and drones launched from their national territory. Their orientation could be described as defensive/offensive, in the sense that their strategic posture is defensive, creating security around their borders and beyond, and its implementation is partly offensive, by denying outside powers bases and facilities, and overawing their immediate neighbours. It also makes it easier for them to export their Shia revolution to other areas than was the case in the past: there is little anyone can do to stop them. These objectives are limited, and the means they have to attain them are appropriate.
But Iran is only one case, and it is dangerous to extrapolate too far from a single example. What can be said is that drones and missiles are proliferating, and they provide smaller and weaker countries with the potential capability to keep western powers, and for that matter China, away from their coastlines. I say “potential” because, once more, you need a whole range of capabilities to do this, and you have to be able to avoid or counter, for example, intelligence efforts to discover where your drones and missiles are and to destroy them preemptively. A drone is no use unless you know approximately where to point it, and if a ship is out of visual identification range, you need some method of distinguishing and targeting it. It’s not certain from open sources whether the Chinese and Russians have been providing targeting information to the Iranians, and if so how much, but the normal rules of politics suggest they probably have, since any weakening of US power can only be to their advantage. However, such aid may have conditionalities attached and can, of course, be withdrawn. Likewise, we should not suppose that sharing of targeting and reconnaissance information with nations and groups will become routine.
Drones are most likely to be of value in land combat, where the forces are close enough to each other that quite small and unsophisticated actors can use them to good effect. This seems to have been the case in the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Hezbollah has been seen using drones effectively against Israeli forces in South Lebanon. Beyond that, it’s not necessarily clear that drones will be a great equaliser, because drone technologies themselves vary greatly in range and sophistication, and it’s quite possible that, as with other forms of military technology, wealthier and more sophisticated countries will have the advantage. Already, China is deploying ships and aircraft capable of launching and commanding attack drones, and such a technology, backed by satellites and even sophisticated reconnaissance drones.
I think we can also conclude that military technology is going through a stage, as in the First World War, where the defence has an advantage over the offence. This does not mean attacking is impossible, just that it will be more difficult and costly, and losses will have to be accepted. For the West this will be difficult, because the idea of bloodless precision wars, although actually quite recent, is now deeply ingrained in the minds of the present generation of military and political leaders. The Russians attach enough importance to their objectives in Ukraine to be prepared to accept the casualties that an offensive military operation now entails. It is hard to imagine any situation where western powers would accept even a fraction of such casualties, and indeed it’s hard to imagine what possible political objective could ever justify them. Certainly, US forces are going to great lengths to avoid casualties in the current Iran conflict, and it’s obvious that they had no idea of the effectiveness of the resistance they were going to meet.
Finally, I have argued before that the age of traditional western expeditionary warfare is over. It’s become clear that operations at long distance are now simply too vulnerable to disruption and attrition, and that even as something as basic as logistics support could quickly become impossibly difficult. And that’s before we even get to actual fighting and casualties. By contrast, Russia and China, and other countries following their example, may well be able to use these technologies to project power, influence and intimidation over wide areas, should they choose to. My impression is that this fact has not yet percolated the western strategic mind, and there are structural reasons why it might be very slow to do so. There’s a disturbing belief that things will rapidly “return to normal” after the Iran War is over. I’d be very surprised if that turned out to be true.
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