DANGER: PREPARING FOR THE WRONG WAR

My deepest roots are in the history we all share. For many of you and those around me it’s rooted in conflict and the politics that create, support and end it. In reality its much wider than that, I’ve always believed in the totality of history, the need to know what drove individuals at every level, from the working man or woman to the leaders at the top of their national and international tree. The question is always, ‘Why?’

When you understand the why of it, you understand it all, suddenly the realities of a past come home and sit in your mind as though you were suddenly and irrevocably there. You can reach such a point only rarely. It requires vast study, millions of facts and realities that stretch back decades, maybe even centuries, that bring us to a certain point, socially, morally, politically, culturally, scientifically and economically. What is it that tips us one way or another? What combination of events allows or encourages us into a certain moment?

The Industrial Age of the second half of the 19th Century, where for the most part Britain was the predominant economic power, though that was starting to change at the end as the United States and Germany expanded their economies, was framed by three major conflicts.

The Crimean War between Britain, France, The Ottoman Empire & Russia, which Russia lost militarily but in the longer term won politically. It gave all the powers involved a renewed lesson in the seapower doctrine, and yet glorified the cavalry that was already outdated, leading to an over reliance on horse cavalry that remained embedded until well past 1914.

The American Civil War in the early 1860’s was the first truly industrial war. Seapower played its hand again, a lesson the United States would not forget. It also set the scene for much of what was to come in 1914-18, though nobody at the time fully understood it.

The most important war, because of the animosities it created and the political alignments it later forged, was the Franco-Prussian of 1870-71. This war contained a sizable number of firsts and lasts. It was the last time a ruling monarch personally took an army to war and directed it to defeat. Napoleon-III was defeated and captured at Sedan, throwing his country into the crisis of an entire change of government from Imperial Monarchy to the first true French Republic of the modern era, the siege of Paris and political bickering all part of this crushing conflict. At the same time it was the forge for the unification of Germany under Prussia and the declaration of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm-I, a man who wasn’t even keen on the idea and simply wanted to be King of Prussia.

These wars were all close together, having resolved themselves between October 1853 and May 1871. The last had seen France surrender to the German Empire.

What it created was a series of military policies, that drove France into a frenzy of military technological advancement every bit as equal to the German Empire’s but different. Despite huge amounts of loaned French money Russia barely dragged itself into the 20th Century fit for any conflict, quickly made manifest by its disastrous defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1904. A victory made manifest by sea power.

Seapower played a huge role in the world – Britain had as tight a grip on the world’s oceans as any power could possibly have imagined, but it too, knew those days were in fact numbered. Its alliance with Japan in 1902 was based entirely on the reality that it could no longer afford to patrol the vast Pacific and the rest of the world. The Pacific mattered least to it. Germany and France were a problem, the former seeming determined to challenge the battle fleet that Britain saw as the core of its power.

Britain was having none of it of course and was both determined and able to out-build even the German industrial machine. However it was not as it thought, the most technically advanced, in many ways the Germans had slight leads. But none of it mattered, because the vastly expensive, massive technical wonders of the Dreadnought era were, in the end a self neutralizing force. They singularly failed to achieve what they were built for, not once coming into conflict in a way that made the slightest difference to the war of 1914-18. Even Jutland proved disappointing.

The fact is that the over concentration on Dreadnoughts was a mistake, a left over from the age of Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805 that had convinced, and continued to convince until 1941, that the battleship was supreme.

By the time the First World War started, the real danger, as the Germans quickly demonstrated, was the submarine. If both sides had been spending their time developing those rather than the Dreadnought, they would have rendered the battleship impotent far sooner and the war at sea would have been very different. The potential was there but the mindset was not. Old thinking set in stone for a century past, had a vice like grip on the admiralties of the world. They would not let it go even when it was clearly demonstrated to be an outdated theory.

Yet as on land, some pioneers saw a way forward. The devastating losses of life, the cost in material and money, suggested mobility was the answer. The tank showed the way and helped win the Great War. Aircraft proved critical to both sides. Then Captain De Gaulle wrote his book on the future of the tank and maneuver warfare – which saw him almost pushed out of the French Army in the 1920’s. The book was read widely in Germany, officers like Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian picked it up and ran with it, developing it in a way De Gaulle had never imagined, moving from mobile to full combined arms operations. He preached mobility in France just as the French lesson from the Great War (it was known as that until after WW2), was to build the massive fortifications and static defences of the Maginot line to deter a German invasion. The Germans were not so convinced that they could do without and built the lesser Siegfried line, but it was more of a last resort than the core of their strategy. France chose to learn the wrong lessons. The cost would be another shattering defeat worse than that of 1871, and the country forced to surrender in the very same rail car on the very same spot Germany was made to sign the armistice of 1918 in. It could not have been more humiliating.

Japan and the United States (and indeed the British) had learned that aircraft and carriers made sense. Yet none gave up on the Dreadnought Battleship until well into the Second World War. When it became clear in 1941 the battleship was dead, all three slashed their programs to keep only what was already mostly built and too expensive to abandon.

Even when lessons were learned – the Germans learned the lesson of tactical aviation and how to use it to a high level for example, they didn’t think of the future or how they would get at their enemy, Britain. Their tactical-centric aviation was not capable of defeating the RAF, with its exquisite and highly advanced radars, its command and control system coupled to the best fighters in the world at the time. Germany never came close to bombing Britain at a strategic level that made any difference.

That was something the Americans recognized even before the war. They knew they would need long range aviation capable of hurting Japan and if necessary Germany, all the way from Canada and the mainland US if need be. They believed in it so much that the most expensive military program of WW2 was not the Manhattan project, but the development and production of the B-29, which reached over $3 billion in 1945 dollars. Each aircraft cost $930,000 – a huge sum in relative terms. (A typical Iowa class Super-Dreadnought cost $100 million, so you can quickly see that the capacity of 100 B-29’s was far more bang for the buck).

One reason the United States won WW2 was that before it had even begun, an analysis of what was needed, the plans to build it, the factories to build it in, were all authorized and ready. Once Japan and Germany declared war, the financial taps opened up and their doom was already upon them.

My message here is that wars are prepared for by different countries in different ways. The nature of the people and governments of those countries determines their approach to how they go about it.

Right now I am not convinced we in the Collective West are preparing for the right war. Lessons from Ukraine are being seen and yet they are not being learned by the people at the top. They too often tinker with the realities of what might be next but seem oddly skeptical. Ukraine and Russia have proven quite decisively that the drone is and will play a major role. Yet it will not be the same in the next war as it is now.

In this war there was no defence against drones that worked past a bit of EW jamming in the early days. Strategic warfare drones are quickly becoming at risk of interceptors that cost a tenth of what they do, and tactical and strategic drones will soon be at the mercy of ever advancing laser and microwave systems that knock out dozens in seconds and render attacks en-masse a thing of the past – until those drones are hardened and made differently and become immune to such weapons – because that’s the nature of warfare. “What works today doesn’t work tomorrow”, is a mantra all fast paced technological challenges should live by.

At the same time it’s no good sitting on the sidelines saying, ‘well we can’t really see how this is going to end, what we might buy today may not be any use tomorrow’. And that’s a fair point. The approach should be that you build the factories you need in such a way that they don’t need retooling every few days and you constantly build a few of a new type, field test it and improve it on an ongoing basis. When a time of tensions rises, you switch up to full production based on the ready and waiting resources you’ve stockpiled and you never ever really stop development.

That is the way forward. That is the method China is starting to use for its missiles and long range weapons, today’s are not the ones you might field tomorrow, and they will not be the ones you field the day after. We’re entering the age of constant rapid modular development, in drones, missiles, on land, in the air and at sea.

This is why I worry for big exotic programs like the SSBN force. They cannot adapt at speed, but the drones to hunt them can. What if one power takes the risk and turns over its military to a drone force as its primary land, air and sea military? Right now that’s not viable, but in ten years? Twenty? What if Ai has advance so far a drone war of such capability and destruction actually does overwhelm the systems we rely on for our defence? Somebody has to assume it’s possible.

And all this is without moving into the realms of integrated cyber warfare with drones, complex Ai and whatever else we’ve come up with in the next few years.

I am not convinced we are preparing what we need soon enough to fight a war that’s going to be far faster, far more mechanized and flexible than anything we have previously seen. What we have today is going to be heavily outclassed by the force of tomorrow – and far more quickly than we can imagine. Someone needs to take that leap to understand and to make it real, and it needs to be the democracies of the world who do it. Leave it to Russia or China and our futures will be very dark indeed.

Think ahead, don’t live in the past, but learn lessons, the right lessons, from it.

The Analyst

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