Wars and Predictions

Militaries must prepare for the unpredictable

Think about war in the world of 2014.

NATO forces had been playing whack-a-mole with insurgents in Afghanistan since 2001. American forces had mostly been extracted from the quagmire that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but now the fanatics and psychopaths of ISIS, armed with little more than machine guns, grenades, and burning righteousness, were fanning out across the deserts of Iraq and beyond. All this was in line with the 1990s, which saw tensions between major nations with sophisticated militaries replaced by lightly armed neighbours turning on neighbours, as in the former Yugoslavia, where the weapon of choice was the AK-47, and Rwanda, where it was the machete.

In 2014, the spectre of major powers fighting major wars with sophisticated tanks, jets, laser-guided artillery, and computer-controlled missiles had largely been left in the past with the Cold War.

In September of that year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd interviewed the eminent Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan. Historians are typically wary of predicting the future, but MacMillan, most famous for her magisterial history of the Versailles Treaty negotiations, did not hesitate.

“The 21st century will be a series of low grade, very nasty wars that will go on and on without clear outcomes, doing dreadful things to any civilians in their paths,” MacMillan told Dowd.

As a description of recent history, that statement was perfect. As a forecast for the remainder of the century, it flopped a mere eight years later — when Russia’s most advanced tanks sped over Russia’s border, Javelins and NLAWs struck those tanks, and fourth- and fifth-generation fighter jets battled for supremacy above the fields of Ukraine.

MacMillan’s mistake is a classic. Thanks in part to some basic psychological mechanisms, which I discussed in Future Babble, we tend to expect current trends to continue. So we draw a straight line far into the future.

I don’t bring this up to throw shade at Margaret MacMillan. I’m a great admirer. And I couldn’t have predicted the future of 21st century warfare any better.

But then, I wouldn’t have tried.

And that’s why I’m bringing this up today.

The NATO summit in Washington DC this week got a lot of people talking about preparing for war, and for good reason. Between Russian aggression, tensions over Taiwan, interlinked horrors in the Middle East, and continued zaniness in North Korea, the probability of major wars — the sort of wars that draw on the most advanced human intelligence and industry to kill people in enormous numbers — is surely higher now than it has been since the end of the Cold War. Suddenly, even unserious governments such as Canada’s, which have allowed their militaries to atrophy for decades, are at least talking about the need to beef up.

And if you had said this was coming in 2014, it would have sounded like science fiction. Major wars involving developed countries? Alarmist nonsense. Downright nutty.

Granted, earlier in that year, Russia had pulled its “little green men” stunt, in which Russian soldiers without insignia popped up in Crimean shortly before Russia declared it was annexing Ukraine’s pro-Russian southernmost province. But that low-grade (to borrow MacMillan’s term) aggression hardly changed the apparent state of the world, as the modest reactions of the Western powers showed.

In 2014, if you had said that in eight years Russian tanks would storm into Ukraine like the Wehrmacht plunging into Poland, you would have been treated as a kook.

Yet that’s what happened.

Incidentally, if you had said, eight years before the Second World War erupted that there would be a Second World War, that it would start in 1939, and it would begin with the Wehrmacht plunging into Poland, you would also have been treated as a kook. Because that year was 1931. In 1931, the government of Germany was not at all militaristic and aggressive. The Nazis were. But the Nazis wouldn’t come to power for another two years, and only after a series of unfortunate and unpredictable events.

Here’s the fundamental problem: It takes many years or even decades to take weapons programs from conception to deployment.

It takes many years or even decades to build ships, jets, and tanks, to generate stockpiles and reserves, and to develop expertise and training programs and other forms of organizational capacity.

It takes many years or even decades to build effective, inter-operable alliances.

But the world can change dramatically and dangerously — unpredictably — in only a few years.

See the problem?

This mismatch means we absolutely must not develop and maintain military capacity based only on what we foresee.

Our ability to forecast accurately is so limited that by the time we see a threat it is probably too late to get ready. Worse, much of what we think we foresee — much that seems perfectly sensible, indisputable — will turn out to be wrong. Not even an eminent Oxford historian with a vast knowledge of the past can escape this basic fact of human existence. What will the wars of the 21st century look like? I don’t know. Neither does Margaret MacMillan. Nobody does.

Militaries must be prepared for a wide spectrum of threats, very much including threats that may seem, in this moment, implausible or even outlandish. That doesn’t mean permanently maintaining enormous militaries capable of meeting any challenge. It means ensuring militaries always have the latest and best weaponry and other capabilities needed for a very wide range of dangers, if only in modest numbers — while maintaining the organizational and industrial capacity to quickly scale up in the event of emergency.

Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He was right. But Eisenhower also built many guns, warships, and rockets.

Because Eisenhower understood that weakness invites war. Because he understood strength prevents war. And because he understood that the only thing worse than spending money on weapons is being unprepared for war.