Strategy And Defense Policy For Small States: Problems And Prospects by Bernard F W Loo;

Author:Bernard F W Loo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811244308
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Maintaining the Relevance of the Military Organization

Finally, it is important to ask if the modernized military organization is necessarily relevant to the strategic challenges that the state faces. By the end of the 20th Century, a debate emerged as to the nature of the security agenda in the 21st Century for states and military organizations.36 One side argues for a new security agenda, pointing to phenomena such as “new” wars, fourth generation (possibly even fifth) warfare and cyber warfare on the one hand. The other side holds to a “business as usual” argument: that the grammar of war (its specific manifestations) may change, but the logic of war (its essence) will remain unchanged. However, if we assume that the new security agenda thesis to be true, this then begs the question of the extent to which military organizations will be prepared for such scenarios. Some discussion of this proposition is warranted.

This new security agenda thesis portrays the changes to international politics as a paradigm shift, a radical reorientation of how we perceive and think of the world around us. One particular aspect of this reorientation of international politics, germane to the analysis in this chapter, is the expansion in the number and power/influence of malign non-state actors, in particular: transnational criminal organizations; and rebel groups and terrorist organizations and networks. Transnational criminal organizations have been waging what Moises Naim, the former editor of Foreign Policy, called the five “wars” of globalization—the proliferation of narcotics, human trafficking, intellectual property theft, money laundering, and arms smuggling and black market trade.37 In the case of rebel groups, their strategic significance is reflected in statistics that demonstrate that major inter-state wars (however “major” is defined) has been on the wane since World War II, whereas so-called “small” inter-state and intra-state wars have been on the rise.38 Finally, while some studies suggest that mainstream media has overhyped the threat of terrorism to state and human security, other studies suggest that between 2002 and 2014, terrorist attacks increased significantly.39 Then actors are considerably more agile than the cumbersome, slow state bureaucracies they face. Today’s terrorists and insurgents are as, if not more, computer-savvy as their state adversaries. Information technology is a double-edged sword. This is an era in which the bulk of military capabilities are increasingly civilian developed, relatively cheap, commercially available and globally distributed. Terrorists and insurgents are also able to access technology that is commercially available to carry out operations against states that have strong military forces.40 An increasing number of individuals and non-state actors as well as states can get access to overhead imagery, night vision devices, biological weaponry, thermal image defeating materials, robotic vehicles (land, sea and air), system integration software, micro-satellites, sophisticated communications and conventional weaponry of all kinds. The means to wage war are no longer the exclusive domain of states.

Given this backdrop, it is fair to question the continuing relevance of military organizations, especially those that are configured principally for conventional military operations. Military organizations have traditionally been configured

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