ABSTRACT
A recurrent theme in much contemporary writing on strategy is that war in its classical form, involving set-piece battles between regular armies, does not have much of a future.1 This issue is particularly important for the United States. Its international role relies on an ability to take on all comers in all circumstances. It has superior capabilities for nuclear exchanges and conventional battle, but capabilities at the level upon which most contemporary conflict takes place have been found wanting when recently put to the test. After Vietnam, the US armed forces demonstrated a marked aversion to counter-insurgency operations and dismissed peacekeeping as an inappropriate use of capabilities geared to high-intensity combat. They acknowledged a lack of comparative advantage in low-intensity operations, as they prepared for bigger things, but they also took comfort in the apparent lack of any strategic imperative that would oblige them to engage in distant civil wars. On occasion, as in Somalia, the US government chose to engage, but the military leadership left little doubt that as far as it was concerned this was a bad choice, and, at least in this case, experience seemed to prove it right. Afghanistan and Iraq, however, have created new strategic imperatives and so engagement has become unavoidable, continuous and vexatious. The US would not be the first apparently unbeatable military power to find itself undone by an inability to take seriously or even to comprehend enemies that rely on their ability to emerge out of the shadows of civil society, preferring minor skirmish to major battle, accepting no possibility for decisive victory but instead aiming to unsettle, harass, demoralise, humiliate and eventually to wear down their opponents. This was, after all, the basis of many successful ‘wars of national liberation’ against colonial powers. Meanwhile, the strategic imperatives that would justify the large-scale investments in nuclear and conventional capabilities that dominate the Pentagon’s budget are no longer self-evident.
