The Direction of War by Hew Strachan

Author:Hew Strachan [Strachan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

9 Technology and strategy

The strategic contours of war in the early twenty-first century have not been as decisively shaped by technology as our own belief in the remorselessness and acceleration of innovation suggests. This is not to say that the machine has not had a public and highly charged impact on warfare. In the British case, claims that the British army in Iraq was forced to soldier with inadequate body armour, ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers rather than properly armoured vehicles and insufficient helicopters made equipment the stuff of headline comment and cross-party accusation.1 These were issues because in Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the major cause of deaths and serious wounds among coalition forces. What were initially quite crude devices became more sophisticated as coalition forces responded by improving their own measures for force protection, not least by increasing the armour on their vehicles and by travelling by helicopter rather than by road, and as counter-IED devices and detection improved. It can be argued that IEDs had a strategic effect.2 The horrific wounds that they inflicted, particularly but not only to the lower limbs, fed the public image of the soldier as the victim of an unthinking and uncaring government, and so stoked the appetite for withdrawal regardless of whether the intended outcome of the war had been reached. But, in that case, the IED itself remained only a means, and the ways to its effectiveness were its propaganda effect. The transformation in media technologies (through the internet and mobile telephones), and the consequent democratisation of ‘strategic communications’, meant that the dissemination of news and opinion no longer occurred exclusively (or even principally) through the press and the politicians, but now belonged to the people.3

Although it can therefore be argued that both IEDs and mobile telephones are new technologies with strategic effects, it is less clear that those technologies have themselves changed strategy and strategic thought. Indeed, what is possibly more striking than their (visible) impact on the wars of the early twenty-first century is the less visible decision not to use much more destructive technologies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most advanced military powers in the world have been waging war without using the full range of their technological capabilities, and that self-imposed restriction has not been confined only to nuclear or chemical weapons. Neither heavy artillery nor, once the initial battles of 2003–5 were over, main battle tanks played a major role in land warfare. The conditioning influences in shaping strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan have been less technological and more social, political and historical. Those responsible for the application of strategy have needed to understand the tribal structures of both countries, their religious affiliations and the long course of their troubled histories, more than the employment of revolutionary military technologies. On the ground armed forces have experienced a displacement effect, acquiring cultural awareness while no longer needing the expertise to plan and execute an artillery fire plan for a corps-level operation.

This observation, however trite, looks either remarkable or mundane, depending on one’s perspective.

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