The death of deterrence

Cross post with editorials.

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Technology is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences - not to mention traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and US experts believe that the Iranians compelled the group to keep in reserve the far more powerful and longer-range cruise missiles it already possesses. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these missiles, and US experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying aircraft-carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable. <1>

Even more ominous, the US Army has just released a report that light-water reactors - which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia, already have and are covered by no existing arms-control treaties - can be used to obtain near-weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply. <2> Within a few years, many more countries than the present 10 or so - the army study thinks Saudi Arabia and even Egypt most likely - will have nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and missiles.

Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated guerrilla tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which deprives the heavily equipped and armed nations of the advantages of their overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The battle between a few thousand Hezbollah fighters and a massive, ultra-modern Israeli army backed and financed by the US proves this. Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future. The outcome suggests that either the Israelis cease their policy of destruction and intimidation and accept the political prerequisites of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be devastated by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear weapons in the hands of at least two Arab nations and Iran.

What is now occurring in the Middle East reveals lessons just as relevant in the future to festering problems in East Asia, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Access to nuclear weapons, cheap missiles of greater portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits of all anti-missile systems will set the context for whatever crises arise in North Korea, Iran, Taiwan or Venezuela. Trends that increase the limits of technology in warfare are not only applicable to relations between nations but also to groups within them - ranging from small conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to large guerrilla movements. The events in the Middle East have proved that warfare has changed dramatically everywhere, and US hegemony can now be successfully challenged throughout the globe.

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Asia Times

I differ with some of its generalizations. First of all, rockets don't really represent an improvement in technology and as a practical matter are tactically ineffective because of lack of sophisticated guidance. Not once did I hear of one rocket from Lebanon hitting a tactically significant target in Israel.

The Merkava tank design is defective in my opinion which makes it more vulnerable to anti-tank weapons.

There never was a unipolar world from the military point of view. The perceived inequality in the relative military power of China and the US in the Korean conflict was a matter of hubris and racism. To this day Americans maintain that Soviets flew Mig 15s in the Korean conflict rather than acknowledge that a Chinese pilot could shoot down an American. Mig 15s had superior flight envelopes compared to contemporary US aircraft. The Chinese had battle hardened ground forces. The US occupation forces in S. Korea and Japan were soft and ill equipped.

As far as Vietnam is concerned, US technology never measured up to defense contractor claims. Missile equipped interceptors with poor flight envelopes had to be reconfigured with guns because the air to air missiles were virtually totally ineffective against Mig 17s and Mig 21s. The Soviet made SA-2 missile surface to air missile combined with AAA tactics shot down over 500 US aircraft. Who was technologically superior? Again, contactor false promises and cultural chauvinism resulted in military defeat.

The nature of warfare favors the defense. When one is invading someone else's territory, serious problems are inevitable, such as a hostile population. Overcoming this is not really a technological problem but a logistics, intelligence, and political problem. When an area can be isolated from its sources of material support, "victory" at some cost may be possible. This is one critical function of a navy and air force. When the area and population in contention have borders and lines of material support and communications that cannot be secured and the enemy has organization, leadership, determination and material resources, you are in for a long slog, also known as a quagmire. Could a worse field of conflict be chosen than Afghanistan? Again hubris permits the US and NATO to believe they can succeed where Russia failed.

We have enemies in Asia because we don't belong there. The two great Asian powers Russia and China will support Iran as key buffer state opposed to our further military expansion in Asia. The combination of their material support, military training, and Iranian capital reserves and manpower can successfully challenge Israeli and American power. The Israelis know that they don't have the resources to take on Iran short of a nuclear attack. Such an attack would result in a reprisal sooner or later. This is why Israel tries to get the US to take on the problem. Because of our bad experience in Iraq where "shock and awe" and "full spectrum dominance" were supposed to make short work of any resistance, Americans now realize that seventy million plus Iranians shouldn't be taken lightly. This is why the corporate world needs to portray the Iraqi effort as successful and constantly complains that the media doesn't report the "good news" in Iraq.

There is no good news in Iraq, only propaganda. This is why the administration constantly has to return to the 911 "terror" paradigm. Because our election to attack Afghanistan and Iraq wasn't based on "nationalism" it is based upon imperialism. It isn't meant to advance US interests, it is meant to advance plutocratic corporate interests. The European forces in Afghanistan couldn't have made a bigger mistake than to aid the US delusions of imposing its will on southwestern and central Asia.

I do however agree that the dispersal of high tech weapons, particularly from sources other than the US, make a military challenge even more difficult to face. Egypt, for example, is totally dependent on the US, and therefore capable of being "cut off." As such, they have sacrificed their sovereignty on foreign policy matters.

I would quibble about rockets. They are a not particularly accurate form of artillery, with the advantage that they are cheap and you don't have to lug a giant tube around. You are right that they are not all that effective in a military sense, they are a political weapon, a terror weapon; although they can be of some tactical use if you saturate an area with them. The use by Hiz'bullah in the recent unpleasantness was purely political, as may easily be seem by the "measured" way they used them. The message was "see? we can annoy you with our rockets forever", not "we will kill you all with our rockets if you do not submit".

I generally consider in all this blather about 4th generation war, or whatever one chooses to call it, that primarily one is talking about cheap automatic weapons, RPGs and the like, IEDs and car-bombs, and such innovations as using a jet airliner as a bomb. So in a sense, the tactical considerations of conventional conflict of the 2nd or 3rd generation do not apply, it is not war of attrition in the Lanchestrian sense. All the stuff about "we never lost a battle in VietNam" is based on that sort of measure, that we were tactically more effective in that we killed more of them than they killed of us. But the question of who was marginally the best killer was not what the war was about. The war was about who was going to rule S. Viet Nam, and we lost because we did not get our way.

All the horseshit about how we were sabotaged on the home front is also dishonest butt-covering, if we could not create a peaceful colony in 10 years, there was no reason to think 20 would do the job, especially with the same old meatheads running the show.

The fundamental problem is that the theoretically subject peoples are not really inferior, they are able to compete on fairly even terms, which makes the once profitable colonial enterprise a loser. The rulers, the colonial overlords, the grand poohbahs of what ever sort have always demanded a modest degree of security for themselves, when you can threaten that you can drive them away. J. Paul Bremer didn't stay around long, did he? Neither did Negroponte. There is nothing left but stooges and cannon fodder now.

You are right that the situation does threaten imperial and state power, it favors local autonomy in political affairs. That could have it's good points, in my opinion.