Just Finished Reading: Another Bloody Century – Future Warfare by Colin S Gray (FP: 2005)

There appears to be a growing current of thought that the global levels of violence, especially violence organised into warfare, has been steadily decreasing. Others are convinced that wars between nation states are a thing of the past and that all future warfare will be asymmetric – between states and non-state actors such as terrorist groups or internal would-be revolutionaries. Not so, says the author of this detailed argument to the contrary. The 21st Century will, he maintains, be no different from the 20th, the 19th or all previous centuries that have seen war piled on top of war. Organised conflict, he argues, is part of what makes us human. We argue and we fight. It’s basically what we do. I certainly can’t fault his argument there. I doubt very much if war is going to fade away anytime soon and find it difficult to credit the idea with any kind of rationality.

Of course, as the author points out before demolishing the idea, there has been no war in Western Europe since 1945 and no realistic prospect of any serious conflict between EU members in the long term future but, just as the US is not the world neither is the EU. For the present at least Europe is a post-conflict culture until that is they are threatened in such a way that only a military response will do. With history as we know it to be that is far from an unrealistic possibility. That, of course, is the authors point. War is cultural in many ways: the way we fight, the way we win and the way we treat both the victors and the vanquished. Culture changes and the cultural aspects of war are no different from other aspects in this sense but the underlying essence of war, the author maintains, never changes, never has and never will. War is, to not put too fine a point on it, war – end of story. The melody might change, never instruments might be added but the sound and the fury remain the same. Resurrect Alexander the Great and put him in charge of a modern army and he would quickly adapt from swords and chariots to guns and tanks. The fundamentals are the same. Even with the addition of air-power, nuclear weapons and cyber warfare things are substantially unchanged. The object of war is the imposition of will upon the enemy by the application of force – killing people and breaking stuff.

At least that’s how the argument goes and despite the fact that the author does labour his point somewhat it’s a good argument. With the rise of China and India and the relative decline of the US it’s pretty much a given that someone somewhere will attack their neighbour thinking that advantage can be taken. There are obvious flashpoints – the South China Sea most recently and still on the radar today, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Israel/US and Iran and so on plus the historical inevitability of something nasty coming out of the blue as it has a well-known tendency of doing. That’s the thing though (and yet another area where I strongly agree with the author), our best guide to future conflicts are past conflicts. These show us where the likely blow-ups will be and how those conflicts will be fought. History can’t tell us everything though because things just aren’t that deterministic. But knowing the world’s history is the best guide we have. The future is predictable up to a point but it can never really be known with certainty. That’s the rub with any kind of crystal gazing. There is much we know about the future but there are also significant aspects we can never know.

Despite the author repeating himself rather more than I thought necessary I did think this speculative journey was very good indeed. I did take his point that new technology doesn’t really provide true game changers but I was rather surprised by the practically total omission of the mention of robotics or AI in future warfare. I couldn’t help wonder if that was an oversight or done deliberately to underline the point that nothing foreseeable is likely to change the underlying nature of war. One other thing which irritated me a bit but at the same time got me thinking. The author is obviously a great fan of Carl Von Clausewitz who authored the seminal military work On War. This, the present author believes, is pretty much the last and unassailable word on the subject of war. It seems that this is a book I must read……. Another Bloody Century is a definite must read for anyone interested in the planets future and especially the future of global conflict. It also has a truly excellent bibliography!