Christopher Coker

The future of war

Conventional weapons and armies are being replaced by hacking, drones and computer-game technology

Imagine Peace. These were the words that appeared on an otherwise blank page in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 2013. They were paid for by Yoko Ono and they are of course an echo of John Lennon’s most famous song. A few days later, the Guardian conducted an opinion poll in which it asked its readers whether they thought the advert would produce world peace. Surprisingly, a third of the respondents thought that it would, though there was little evidence around the world to confirm them in that hope. By then, the civil war in Syria had already claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 people. It’s now about 400,000.

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if war were just an idea, a very bad one, and that universal peace could be achieved by just imagining it? Jeremy Corbyn is certainly in the Yoko Ono camp. He doesn’t believe that it is worth fighting a war for anything. It is not quite clear where Diane Abbott stands, though she insisted last week that the only war that could be justified would be one like the second world war — the good war, as Americans like to call it. But that is precisely the war we are not going to get. The next world war will not involve great ideological principles any more than it will see mass attacks on multiple fronts and heroic set-piece battles like Stalingrad. But that won’t stop it from breaking out. War is evolving all the time, thanks in part to technology. A crude Darwinian principle appears to be at work which suggests that it will end only when it finally exhausts its evolutionary possibilities.

It is those possibilities that the Great Powers insist on both exploring and exploiting. We can see this in Syria now with Russia and America using proxy forces to confront each other.

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