OPINION:
Does war work?
This question lingers in the pages of Andrew Roberts’ study of the roles that strategic leadership, exemplary tactics, technological prowess and more played in determining the outcome of conflicts “that have contributed to the evolution of warfare” since 1945.
With three of 10 chapters written by retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, “Conflict” shows how militaries applied lessons from past wars to the next ones. An impetus for writing this book was Russia’s shambolic invasion of Ukraine. The authors aim to place it in a historical context by demonstrating where Moscow failed to learn the lessons of modern warfare and how it now finds itself in a World War I-style slog.
In keeping with this schema, Mr. Roberts, an accomplished military historian, and Mr. Petraeus, an architect of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq, are more interested in how wars were fought than why they were started. As gruesome images from the Middle East to Ukraine flood our social media feeds, it would seem that “Conflict” should have something to teach us about whether the use of military force can resolve any modern problems. The authors might say that it depends.
Mr. Roberts and Mr. Petraeus argue that leaders — whether political or military, democrats or dictators — must master four major tasks. First, they must get the big strategic ideas right. Then they must effectively communicate their ideas, rigorously implement them, and adapt their plans to changing conditions. Exceptional strategic leadership is, however, “as rare as the black swan,” they write.
The outcome of the Korean War is one of the first watersheds in Mr. Roberts’ account.
“One is rarely rewarded with the satisfaction of the suicide of the enemy dictator in his bunker in Berlin. … Wars end more messily in the modern world, and there are several acceptable substitutes for victory if it turns out … that outright victory is beyond reach.”
One cannot help but think of the stalemate in Ukraine. But neither Moscow nor Kyiv thinks it is losing — or each is simply unwilling to countenance a “messy” negotiated settlement.
The scale and carnage of the Korean War notwithstanding, warfare evolved almost immediately after 1945 from state-on-state conflict to smaller wars of national liberation. Conventional armies of imperial or colonizing powers fought lightly armed guerrilla forces where the “winning of hearts and minds” proved more important than body count.
Mr. Roberts introduces us to dozens of these conflicts in crisply written summaries of about five to 10 pages. His writing sparkles as he describes the overall strategic stakes and the action in the battle space — the movement of troops and aircraft, orders of commanders, and searing violence. Generals often miscalculate, but Mr. Roberts never gets lost in the fog of war.
Some of the conflicts chosen here might surprise casual students of military history. For instance, how did Britain’s war in the jungles of Borneo (1962-66) contribute to the evolution of warfare? The British government managed to keep it secret. Maj. Gen. Walter Walker beat the Indonesian troops at their own game of jungle combat and were “thoroughly versed in the importance of winning the hearts and minds of the local native population.”
The British had already honed these skills in the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60. Mr. Roberts observes, “Few other Western counter-insurgency campaigns have been as successful.” What the British did right in Malaya, the French, Soviet and U.S. militaries would do wrong in wars against nationalists, communists and Islamists.
This brings us to Mr. Petraeus, who writes in uninspiring prose three long chapters on the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike Mr. Roberts, who attempts the dispassionate analysis of a scholar, Mr. Petraeus has a personal stake in portraying the post-9/11 counterinsurgency campaigns as at least partly successful in temporarily restoring order to parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
To his credit, he concedes the U.S. did lose the war in Afghanistan. He also does not deny the probability that the U.S. presence in the Greater Middle East was the catalyst for insurgencies rather than a liberating force. But rather than seeing that invading such a forbidding country as Afghanistan could only end in disaster, Mr. Petraeus asserts that the U.S. needed to give war more of a chance.
“It might have been possible even at the end to achieve a commitment that was doable in terms of blood and treasure and sustained for as long as it took — however frustrating and unsatisfactory it might have been” to prevent the collapse of the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul. He asserts the American people “had not sacrificed a great deal during the twenty years of the Afghanistan war.”
Predictably invisible in this calculation are the people of Afghanistan, who might find the possibility of endless war less sustainable than the general. For instance, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the U.S. military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes, resulting in a dramatic increase in civilian casualties.
The war made worse the problems of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation and environmental destruction. The Brown University researchers counted about 243,000 deaths in the Afghanistan-Pakistan war zone since 2001, including 70,000 civilians. If U.S. occupiers could not protect civilians by defeating the Taliban after two decades, then when?
• Martin Di Caro is an award-winning broadcaster and host of the podcast “History as It Happens” at The Washington Times.
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Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Ukraine
By Gen. David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts
563 pages, HarperCollins, Oct. 17, 2023, $31.99
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