New tactics are needed for the wars of the future

The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies and minds to fight unwinnable wars. The lessons to be learnt from Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed from Libya, Syria and the Sahel, are many; but the original sin was hubris, born of post-Cold War military preponderance and successes in Sierra Leone, Ulster and Kosovo.

The consequence of our arrogance, when 9/11 demanded action, was that we failed properly to interrogate, and so to grasp, either the character of the specific conflicts into which we jumped, or the fundamental nature of war itself. Lack of understanding of the particular dynamics of Iraqi and Afghan society was exacerbated by a tendency to conceive of war in general as the rational ‘continuation of politics by other means’. We treated it as a puzzle to be picked apart and solved bit by bit, rather than as a complex domain of radical uncertainty which calls for a more instinctive, intuitive approach and the ability to see the picture as a whole.

If we want to make better decisions about when, why and how we might use lethal force in the future, we need to start by re-thinking the concept of war itself. We will only be able to do that successfully if we are able to distinguish between those aspects of war which have genuinely changed and those which in fact constitute continuities. And that means we will have to explore the history of war once more.

Jeremy Black’s latest book tries to contribute to that exploration, offering ‘an analysis of the past, a perspective on the present, and a prospectus for the future’. Much of it consists of a whistlestop tour through the history of war, from caveman to the end of the Cold War.