Just Finished Reading: The Utility of Force – The Art of War in the Modern World by Rupert Smith

This was a bit of a ‘blast from the past’ for me. Years ago I used to devour any book to do with military hardware or history. I guess I grew up and moved onto other things.

Anyway – As the title suggests the author (a retired General with 40 years military experience) sets out his ideas regarding the art of war on today’s battlefields. The main thrust of his idea is that the shape of war has changed. No longer do massed armies face each other on the field of battle. No, today’s conflicts are based around the concept of war amongst the people. In this type of warfare the strengths of Western forces are diminished. Their technical superiority is neutralised. Their training and structure has been rendered ineffective. They have, to a large degree, lost their utility.

This is, of course, a problem if we are going to be called to fight more conflicts (the author shies away from the word wars) such as those on-going in Iraq and Afghanistan, these being far more likely than the pitched battles envisioned during the Cold War era. Throughout the book Smith gives examples of where flexibility and changes of tactics to suit this relatively new type of warfare has produced results. He proposes that less attention and money is directed to techniques and weapons designed to defeat the (now ex) Soviet Union and instead directed to those processes that can defeat modern insurgents.

To me much of this was common sense. Still over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall military forces in the West (and elsewhere I imagine) are building weapons that will never be used but are being built at enormous cost. They have little or no deterrent value against our most likely enemies and have almost no utility. Future conflicts will most likely be fought in the sprawling cities of the Third World where the application of our advanced weapons will be useless or counterproductive. We need to recognise that the set-piece battles of World War Two are unlikely ever to happen again and design our Armed Forces accordingly. Without such redesign the apparently endless fighting between high-tech soldiers from the West and poorly armed guerrillas from the rest of the world will continue – indefinitely.

This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand why we can’t seem to win our wars any more.