War amongst the People—Still
In the early twenty-first century, British General Rupert Smith attempted to introduce a new paradigm of armed conflict which he referred to as “War amongst the People.”22 This paradigm, which was intended to shift defense thinking and
19. Daniel R. Drezner, “Economic Sanctions in Theory and Practice: How Smart Are They?,” in Greenhill and Krause, eds., Coercion, 251–70; as the author explains, even post–Cold War and other data sets have not changed the contingent nature of the results.
20. Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022); and Juan C. Zarate, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
21. Elliot Smith, “Russia’s Economy Is Beginning to Crack as Economists Forecast Sharp Contractions,” CNBC (website), April 4, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/russias-economy-is-beginning-to-crack-as-economists-forecast-sharp-contractions.html.
22. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2005, 2007).
procurement in the West away from its preoccupation with force-on-force conflicts, or what Smith refers to as “interstate industrial wars,” to contemporary wars. These wars are characterized by six major trends. First, the ends for which wars were fought have changed from the “hard absolute objectives of interstate industrial war to more malleable objectives to do with the individual and societies that are not states.” Second, wars were now fought “amongst the people,” as exemplified by the “central role of the media,” which bring armed conflicts into “every living room,” even as they are being fought in streets and fields far abroad. Third, modern conflicts “tend to be timeless,” since they center on establishing conditions that must be maintained until treaties or peace agreements are reached, which can require years or decades. Fourth, fighting takes place in a manner designed “not to lose the force,” rather than employing the force and expending it as necessary in pursuit of the overall aim of the conflict. Fifth, “old weapons” designed for industrial war were of necessity being adapted to “new uses,” to accommodate “war amongst the people.” Sixth, the sides in contemporary conflicts consist mostly of nonstate actors, meaning multinational groupings, such as alliances or coalitions, were pitted against parties that were not states.
Smith can be faulted for attempting to use Thomas Kuhn’s framework of conceptual paradigms to describe different types of wars.23 Paradigms are better at describing the systems of thought or ways individuals and groups think about things than the things themselves. Wars are notorious for the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous,” a phrase once popular among French and German sociologists to describe generational overlap, that is, when individuals of two or more generations occupy the same space and time. An example is Western society in the 1960s, when a younger generation embracing anti-establishment values clashed with an older, more conservative one hewing to traditionalism.
In short, classifying phenomena according to periods can be problematic because things can be in an era without being of that era. So, it is with wars. Industrial-age, interstate conflicts such as World War I and World War II occurred temporally with many of America’s “Banana Wars,” for instance, in which the US military often had to deal with violent nonstate actors. Yet the two types clearly differed. (The two world wars, incidentally, were fought by alliances, which Smith and others classify as nonstate actors.) The United States has participated in at least 10 times more noninterstate, nonindustrial-age wars than it has interstate, industrial-age wars.24 Nothing about the twenty-first century thus far suggests this ratio will change in favor of interstate wars.
23. Smith, Utility of Force, 4–5; and Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962).
24. Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2022, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report R42878, updated March 8, 2022 (Washington, DC: CRS, March 8, 2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/details?prodcode=R42738.
While his attempt to classify wars is problematic, Smith should not be faulted for having tried to persuade defense establishments in the West to develop better tools for fighting nonindustrial, noninterstate wars. That dream is both a noble one and a worthwhile goal. Not surprisingly, it remains both. Western defense establishments continue to resist investing in the requirements needed to deal with such wars, perhaps because the larger profits come with producing the military hardware necessary for interstate wars. This is not to say the West should forgo preparing to fight interstate wars, which have always been high-risk but low incidence. Rather, the West can, and should, commit itself to prepare for and, when necessary, to conduct both types of wars.
Most of the trends Smith identified are correct, though one might quibble about his description of the absolute nature of political aims; the Korean War and the Vietnam War, for instance, were examples of negotiated settlements. The salient characteristic Smith rightly ascribes to new wars, such as counterinsurgencies and peacekeeping operations, is they occur amongst the people. But as the conflict in Ukraine shows, that characteristic also holds true for major wars today. As of April 5, 2022, for instance, the UN migration agency reported some 11 million people had been displaced within Ukraine and more than 4 million had fled Ukraine.25 Refugees would have impacted any conflict that might have broken out in Central Europe during the Cold War, though Smith’s point is military doctrine and training exercises at the time rarely took account of the refugee flow and how its presence might impede operational maneuver.
In the current conflict in Ukraine, noncombatant populations are not only refugees but defenseless targets. Video evidence and personal testimonies have implicated the Russian military in war crimes because it directly targeted civilians in flagrant disregard of international law and the law of armed conflict. To be sure, populations across the globe are watching this conflict play out on their television sets, iPads, and computer screens. The suffering they have witnessed has caused them to put pressure on their governments to do more to support the Ukrainian cause. NATO, the European Union, and others have responded by increasing sanctions, and transferring more arms, money, and other support to Ukraine.
In sum, noncombatants have become participants in this war just as much as Ukrainian and Russian military personnel, and despite the law of armed conflict. This war is, thus, a war amongst the people in every sense, even though it is interstate and multinational in character. Western military strategy and doctrine
25. Associated Press, “Live Updates: UN Says 11 Million Have Fled Homes in Ukraine, AOL (website), April 5, 2022, https://www.aol.com/news/live-updates-ukraine-reports-russian-063640006-122004857.html.
must account for this fact as this phenomenon is likely to manifest itself again in other theaters, regardless of the scale or political aims of the conflict.
Table of Contents
- The Waning of Major War
- Strategic Coercion—A Closer Look
- War amongst the People—Still
- War’s Changing Character and Dynamic Nature
- Conclusions and Recommendations