The future of war and peace

In 1978 the IRA blew him up. He commanded the UK Armoured Division in the 1990-91 Gulf War. In 1995, he commanded the UN forces in Bosnia. In 1998, he was appointed Deputy Commander of Nato and strategic commander of the nascent EU force. And, yet, he says that war no longer exists.

The sight and sound of a Spitfire and Hurricane flying over Malta tonight will remind many of World War II and its end. But for General Sir Rupert Smith it was the last war in the sense the term has been understood for the last 150 years. That is, "war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs..."

Or the kind of war whose foundations were laid by Napoleon, who involved state and society massively in his military campaigns. It was theorised by Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz (1779-1830). And it was first fought in the American Civil War, when the North realised its industrial base could out-produce the South and, therefore, conducted its war accordingly, by sending General Sherman into a deep penetration of enemy territory to attack not the enemy's army but its industrial capacity.

"In the paradigm of industrial war the premise is of the sequence peace-crisis-war-resolution, which will result in peace again, with war, the military action, being the deciding factor."

In his new book The Utility of Force: The Art Of War In The Modern World (Allen Lane), General Smith reckons that the bombing of Hiroshima made further industrial war unthinkable. Furthermore, World War II saw the emergence, thanks to the French resistance fighters, of a different model of combat: guerilla warfare, which was increasingly adopted in the post-war years; for example, by Zionist guerillas against, first, the British and then the Arabs in Palestine, the Algerian "liberation army" and the Vietnamese resistance.

It is this second model of warfare that predominates nowadays - leading to a new paradigm he calls "war amongst the people".

"In the new paradigm there is no predefined sequence but rather a continuous criss-crossing between confrontation and conflict, whilst peace is not necessarily either the starting or the end-point; and whereas conflicts are ultimately resolved, this is not necessarily the case with confrontations. The Cold War [a term he finds misleading] is an example of a confrontation that was resolved - but only after 45 years..."

The most conspicuous characteristic is that combat no longer takes place on a battlefield but among the people, usually in an urban environment, against guerillas who are trying to weaken the will of the stronger conventional force to continue its operations.

There are three others worth highlighting here. First, the objectives of combat are changing - from using military force to decide the political outcome (destruction of the enemy) to using force to change the setting in which the outcome may be negotiated or decided.

Second, conflicts tend to be timeless. Consider some conflicts touching the Mediterranean. The Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is still not resolved after 57 years. The UN mission in Cyprus, established in 1964 following inter-ethnic violence, has entered its fifth decade. Despite the 1999 heavy Nato bombing of Serbia because of its military actions in Kosovo, no strategic solution to the problem has yet been found: Nato continues to occupy the province and the UN to administer it. Last year, the US appeared to give up trying to mediate between Morocco and Algeria over the decades-long dispute over the Western Sahara.

Third, the sides are today mostly non-state, usually "comprising some form of multinational grouping against non-state party or parties" (eg terrorist groups, popular movements).

General Smith makes his 400-page argument because he believes that modern governments continue to work within an outdated concept of force, combat and conflict - "...this conceptual gap... is influencing the production of new equipment, which is often not suitable for the current forms of military operations".

Late last year, the US forces in Iraq, supplied with vehicles made for transport behind the front of an all-out "industrial war", had to scavenge for metal in rubbish heaps to provide additional protection. "The bulk of the equipment we have today was acquired to defeat the Soviet threat in industrial war - but the enemies we face today are of a completely different nature, usually armed with much lighter weapons."

But his arguments about the new nature of war have an obverse side: they are an argument about the new nature of peace. It has more grey areas now than under the old paradigm. General Smith urges that the new form of military power requires sharper understanding of other organs of power - economic, diplomatic, political and humanitarian.

Conversely, however, we might say that Malta's commitment to peace, particularly in our region with its timeless conflicts, involving non-state actors, requires similar engagement with the issues that General Smith raises so lucidly.

ranierfsadni@europe.com