Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

MILLENNIUM : January 23, 2000

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Of war and destruction

Air Commander Jasjit Singh

The author is Director, Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, New Delhi

As the curtain is drawn on the second millennium we cannot but help reflect on the passing of what has been the most violent and destructive century in human history. What made it so destructive? Who were the victims? And what may we expect in the new millennium, or at least the opening decades, of it?

Many of the wars in this century resulted from the residual colonial expansion of the metropolitan powers and others as a consequence of this over-stretch. The colonial wars intensified with the continental powers, like Russia, trying to expand into what by now was limited space and which could not be occupied without coming into conflict with other essentially maritime imperial powers. The "Great Game" touched new heights, the tension of which was being repeated at the close of the century. Russia's defeat by Japan at the beginning of the century set the parameters for the industrialised wars for territory and space. The century of peace that Europe had enjoyed after the Napoleanic Wars was buried in the death and horror of trench warfare when the "Great War" bogged down in the killing fields of Europe. Both the sole super-power, Britain, and the challenger, Germany, exhausted themselves in violence where poison gas was seen as the redeemer from the machine guns mowing down youth by the tens of thousands every day. Never again would they let the demon in them get out, vowed the leadership of the metropolitan powers that believed that they had to colonise the rest of the world on a civilising mission. A League of Nations was set up to collectively defend against any aggressor. But the moving force, the United Nations, did not join; and narrow national interests ensured that no action would be taken against a powerful aggressor. Wars did not stop in the "inter-war" years.

Less than two decades later, the great powers themselves were back on the battlefield, once again with the hope and assumption that each possessed the key competitive advantage in destroying the others. It once again became a "World" War because the colonies were dragged into that war although it was not their war; they remained the objects as they had been for three centuries. Germany would rely on the Holocaust to pursue its goals; and the most liberal democracy was to use the atomic bomb to decimate two thriving cities before it would accept the surrender of the challenger of status quo in the East. The fire-bombing of Coventry, Dresden and Tokyo paled in the face of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where a million innocents would pay the price of being alive on that day in that city, and where the survivors would envy the dead. There was little military logic, and lesser political responsibility in visiting this destruction on the innocents. But war, as Clausewitz theorised a century and a half earlier, was an extension of politics by other means. These means by the middle of the 20th century had come to rest heavily on the weapons of mass destruction. New terms like "mutual assured destruction" entered the lexicon of civil society.

Sandeep Biswas

The devastation of the old power structure produced new super powers while the erstwhile ones fought futile wars in the Suez and other places to resist change while flexing their atrophying economic muscles in a military over-stretch. Wars were fought to keep the peace. War departments went on the offensive in the name of defence. But wars for territory and resources are a phenomenon of the past except for those that may yet be fought for hydrocarbon resources. It is not surprising therefore that the United States which cut back its military budgets from 6 per cent of its GDP during the Cold War to the 3.5 per cent level of today, closed down over 150 foreign bases and retrenched plans from the visions of 600-ship Navy, but created a force in the shape of the Fifth Fleet and deployed it in West Asia where the world's largest resource base of hydrocarbons exists. Pakistan created a force of Taliban to control Afghanistan and the access to the much-anticipated riches of Central Asian oil and gas when the Mujahideen they had supported against the Soviet Union were not willing to be the rubber stamp for Islamabad. The wars in the Caucuses are being fought for access to oil from the Caspian Sea. But some of the sheen from the dreams of the would-be oil-rich states of Central Asia is fading away, even if the Taliban remain entrenched without legitimacy.

This century also witnessed an exponential growth in technology; and this growth was the most dramatic in military technology. Compared to one revolutionary development perhaps once in many centuries, the 20th century witnessed at least four (that of the machine-gun, main battle tank and armoured fighting vehicles, the aircraft, and the nuclear weapon) with the world on the threshold of another. The impending revolution in military affairs (RMA for short) is expected to transform war in the next century. War had expanded to the third dimension at the beginning of the 20th century when air power changed the way we fight wars. Nuclear weapons added a cataclysmic dimension to that war when the atom bomb was first dropped from an aircraft on an unsuspecting city which had been preserved from conventional bombing to enhance the impact of the new weapon. Electronic warfare added the fourth dimension to war by the middle of the century. He who controlled the electromagnetic spectrum now would dominate the battlefield. War would now be even less visible.

The advent of air power, and its extension to aerospace power was seen as the saviour from the slogging trench warfare. As so often in the past, doctrine was way ahead of technology and hence the reality. Prophets forecast populations being attacked from the "Central blue" and ground wars becoming redundant. But it would take an exponential growth of technology and numerous wars as proving ground to achieve what the prophets promised. And then great faith started to be placed in the nuclear weapons to make war redundant. But other ways of killing and fighting were evolved. After all war was always a matter of generating asymmetry. And human innovation to do so has never stayed tied to available means. Thus when technology of distant killing was used in Vietnam, the adversary responded by a manpower-based war. The Americans would replicate the lessons in Afghanistan at great cost to the Soviets.

Francoise Demulder/ Gamma
Lebanon, January 1976. Palestinian woman pleading with a soldier amidst a village in flames, in an encounter between guerrilas, civilians and the opposing army.

We now stand on the threshold of war extending to a fifth dimension - that of time itself. Even more and faster information would have to be managed in shorter time, and information-decision-action cycle would have to be managed faster and more efficiently than what the adversary can do.

Technological expansion of war has made killing more impersonal and clinical where the lexicon of warfighting now includes terms like "surgical strike." Air power has come to dominate wars and their outcome since the key to success lies in the ability of nations to control engagement and disengagement rather than occupation of space and territory. But the prospect of electronic battlefields engaged in information warfare has made the human being in war more and not less important. The increasing consciousness of casualties and the dream of remote push button warfare has not made war less tragic or more acceptable. Courage and valour of the individual have, if anything, become more critical. In the wars of the 21st century - and one hopes there will be less of them than in the closing century - so much more will depend on so few.

Civil society, especially the innocents, was always affected by war. But (civil) society came to be specifically targeted in the 20th century. Expansion of warfare into the third dimension (of air, and later space) released warfare of its earlier limitation of having to destroy the enemy's military or conquer his territory first before it could target the adversary nation's society (and its "will"). Nadir Shah's massacre of Delhi could take place only after he conquered Delhi. But the massacres of Coventry, Berlin and Hiroshima would take place well before the attacker troops even set foot in the territory of the adversary. The concept of targeting civil society was legitimised by the doctrine of strategic bombing; and this was taken to horrendous levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The military to civil casualty's ratio of 20-to-one in World War I had completely reversed by the time of the Vietnam War. In the Second World War, 30 per cent of the bombs dropped were aimed at civilians. In Korea this became 70 per cent; and in Vietnam nine out of every ten bombs dropped were aimed at civilians. Over 16,000 ballistic missiles have been fired in wars since 1943, including the 600-odd during the War of Cities a decade ago, all of them against innocents of civil society although with only conventional high-explosive warheads. Well before the nuclear age war had become totalitarian because it was directed against the nation as a whole.

Akhil Bakshi/Fotomedia

As territory and resources regressed from their prime position of being the motivators of wars, ideology occupied the front stage as the reasons for fighting wars. During the century ending with the Napoleonic Wars, ideology was responsible for one-sixth of the wars. During the 100 years before the First World War, 23 per cent of the wars were ascribed to ideological motivation. But the proportion jumped to 42 per cent in the half-century since the end of the Second World War in 1945.

India's peaceful struggle for independence had stood in stark contrast and deepened the tragedy of the violent wars of independence that many enslaved nations had to wage especially in Southeast Asia and Africa. The Cold War was perhaps the most virulent ideological war, but one in which the primary contestants did not engage in a direct armed contest. But ideology motivated them to undertake proxy wars mostly in the territories of the developing world. More than 300 would be fought before the Berlin Wall came down. They included the longest and the bloodiest of this century. And few of these wars were actually those of the nations in whose territories they were being fought.

The combination of ideology, easy access to lethal portable weapons and legitimisation of targeting civil society finally led to expansion of violence inside society. The State has started to lose its traditional monopoly over the instruments of violence; and consequently armed violence is spreading like wildfire. From the cauldron of extremist ethno-religious ideology, narcotics trafficking and phenomenal proliferation of sophisticated military-type weapons in the hands of non-state actors often placed there by states was born the modern transnational terrorist waging a new form of war. Even this post-modern war has undergone changes in the past decade where the warrior has transited from the Mujahideen of "jehadi" and on to the "fidayan" - the last category to be increasingly seen in the cyanide carrying LTTE Tigers, the human bombers of the Middle-east and South Asia, and the desperadoes of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and its ilk.

The 20th century had made (civil) society inclusive to war; but the last quarter of this century has, in addition, made war inclusive to society. The human race will need to reflect at the end of this millennium if it wants to remember its humanity or excel the death and destruction of the last century.