‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,’ Albert Einstein had warned US president Harry Truman, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
It doesn’t do to quarrel with Einstein and he is no doubt right about a fourth World War, but implied in Einstein’s famous adage is an assumption that right until the moment we knock ourselves back into the Stone Age, the technologies of warfare will evolve in one direction only — they will become ever more advanced, complex, sophisticated and lethal.
Today, much rhetoric about future wars makes this assumption. We assume that military technological innovation is a one-way ratchet. High-tech measures taken by one side will be followed by high-tech countermeasures taken by the other, which will be met with still more advanced counter-countermeasures, and so on, ad infinitum — or at least until some Einsteinian nuclear catastrophe ends the cycle, crashing us back to the age of sticks and stones. But Einstein’s cautionary words overlook one detail: For all our technological sophistication, warfare has never truly moved past sticks and stones — and even today, their bone-breaking power remains surprisingly potent.
It is easy to forget the continued role of sticks and stones. When we think of the history of warfare, we think in terms of perpetually advancing technologies. Certainly, history offers plentiful examples of escalating technological “measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure” cycles: As swords and spears grew more lethal, armour became heavier. As armour became heavier, horses were needed to increase the speed and manoeuvrability and the invention of the stirrup further increased the lethal effectiveness of mounted cavalry. The development of the long-bow enabled distance warfare and the decimation of mounted troops armed with swords and spears, but then guns and artillery displaced longbows, automatic weapons displaced single-shot weapons and so on through the atom bomb — for which Einstein’s work so ambivalently paved the way. Or consider electronic warfare. During the Second World War, for instance, Allied forces developed active sonar to locate submerged German U-Boats, while ship-based high-frequency radio direction finders were produced to intercept radio transmissions sent by surfaced U-Boats. Germany then equipped U-Boats with radar detectors, which led the Allies to deploy newly-developed centimetric radar, which German radar detectors could not detect.
In the context of aerial warfare, the evolution of radar systems to detect incoming aircraft led to the use of chaff and the development of radar jammers, which in turn led to new counter-countermeasures intended for making jamming more difficult, such as frequency hopping and radiation homing. In each of these cases, technological innovation in warfare sparked new technological innovations by adversaries, and today, as in the Second World War, we are often inclined to assume the inevitability of such technological escalation. This is the assumption that underlies much current thinking about cyber-threats, as well as Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle paradigm.
In cyber, the development of Internet-based communications systems is countered by the development of new methods of detecting and disrupting internet communication; cyberattacks lead to new cyber-defences, which lead to new and more sophisticated cyberattacks. The Air-Sea Battle paradigm is similarly premised on the assumption that technology marches forward: US air and naval dominance incentivises near-peer competitors — aka frenemies, aka China — to develop anti-access and area denial technologies. And so, the logic goes, we need to invest in anti-anti-access technologies and technologies to deny area denial. This, of course, just happens to take money, and lots of it. It also just happens to involve significant investment in the Air Force and Navy — the two services pushed to the sidelines, relatively speaking, during a decade of slow, plodding land war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fearing displacement themselves, the Army and Marines are pushing their own high-tech visions of their future. As Lloyd Freeman argued last week, the Marine Corps needs to transform itself, for “in future conflicts, [ground troops] will only play a secondary role. Land forces will no longer win wars. Computers, missiles, planes and drones will”. In the future, argues Freeman, the old “every Marine a rifleman” slogan will need to be replaced with a new concept: “Every Marine a JTAC” (joint terminal air controller). “Marines will manage and become experts on dozens of different communications platforms,” asserts Freeman. “Live video feeds will stream continuously.” Maybe so, maybe not. Here’s what we seem eager to forget: Military technological evolution can go in both directions.
In biological evolution, there is no teleology: The simple does not inevitably become more complex and while life forms change and evolve in response both to random mutation and environmental conditions, they do not inevitably “advance”. In modern warfare, the same is true. High-tech measures are not inevitably countered by more high-tech measures.
Sometimes, the opposite is true: The most successful countermeasures are low-tech — and historically, this has been demonstrated just as often as has the opposite. We know this, of course. We just do not like it.
The US brought overwhelming technological superiority to the battlefield — and with it, America also brought new blind spots.
The Taliban, a low-budget, but by no means low-innovation adversary, quickly developed low-tech responses to America’s high-tech blind spots. Unable to prevail in direct combat with US troops, for instance, the Taliban turned to improvised explosive devices (IED) made of readily available materials and detonated by cell phone. America countered by developing costly vehicle-based cell-phone jammers, designed to prevent the long-distance detonation of IEDs as American vehicles drove by them. These often had the unintended consequence of disrupting America’s own communications and they also led the Taliban to shift to using IEDs with mechanical triggers. The US responded by equipping its forces with ground-penetrating radar, designed to detect the metallic signature of IED components. The Taliban countered by moving even further in the direction of sticks and stones, constructing pressure-plated IEDs out of foam rubber, plastic and wood. America has seen similar Taliban low-tech countermeasures in other areas. The US has invested heavily in both encryption technologies and surveillance technologies designed to thwart adversaries’ use of encryption, for instance, but since America took it for granted that potential adversaries would have made similar high-tech communications commitments, it allowed its ability to locate simple FM radios to degrade. Most of the time, Taliban forces do not bother with encryption; they communicate openly over simple handheld walkie-talkies, using multiple mobile FM repeaters to retransmit these weak signals over longer distances.
US forces initially lacked the equipment needed to intercept these transmissions and reportedly had to reply on purchasing cheap “commercially available radio scanners in the Kabul souq” to listen in. The equipment needed to intercept Taliban radio communications became standard, but it has proven far more difficult for America to locate the enemy themselves — the US can locate the repeater towers, but not a Taliban soldier on his handheld radio. Al Qaida, too, is a learning organisation. Threatened by US drones, Al Qaida is reportedly turning to low-tech countermeasures, encouraging militants to use mud and grass mats to disguise vehicles from overhead surveillance. This tactic will not be successful for long, but it is a good bet that Al Qaida will find new low-tech means to thwart US drones in the coming years. You get the picture.
Sometimes, high-tech measures lead to higher-tech countermeasures — but at other times, high-tech measures lead to lower-tech countermeasures. More ominously, a misplaced confidence in America’s technological superiority dangerously increases its vulnerability to low-tech countermeasures.
Though 65,000 US troops remain in Afghanistan, America has already begun to lose interest in that war and its lessons. The US should know better.
In the 1970s, America had convinced itself that there would be no more Vietnams and turned its back on whatever wisdom it had gained during that brutal, protracted conflict (wisdom about the nature of asymmetric and guerilla warfare, the strength of nationalism and the perils of occupation). Then, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it painfully relearned many of Vietnam’s grim lessons — just in time for the wars to wind down and the public to lose interest.
Now, many leaders in both the military and civilian world seem determined to repeat America’s post-Vietnam head-in-the-sand routine. The US will not have any more Iraqs or Afghanistans, it tells itself — America will not invade or occupy states or territories with vast ground forces and it will not be engaged in messy stability operations. So America does not need to remember its mistakes — it can just move on!
The lessons of Afghanistan will have no applicability to future wars since they will be high-tech conflicts with sophisticated state or state-backed adversaries. Maybe so, maybe not. But here is the thing: Even if the cyberwarriors and the Air-Sea Battle proponents are right — even if any future wars will be with sophisticated, high-tech states — it is a big mistake to imagine that sticks and stones will play no role in future conflicts. After all, it took the Taliban remarkably little time to realise that high-tech US capabilities could frequently be thwarted by lower-tech countermeasures. Why should America imagine that near-peer states such as China have not taken notice?
— Washington Post
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counsellor to the US undersecretary of defence for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a State Department senior adviser.
