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To enter the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, visitors pass an old US Army helicopter. In fact, the whole courtyard is given over to menacing but ultimately futile hardware from the American arsenal of the mid-20th century. The implied message — “This was not enough to beat us” — is unsubtle.
One day, Kyiv might have a museum full of the Russian materiel that failed to subdue Ukraine. The Taliban could certainly show off the gear that was left behind after two decades of botched foreign occupation in Afghanistan. As for Iraq, imagine all the “remnants” from the US misadventure there.
When did a major state last unambiguously win a land war on a significant scale? Desert Storm in 1991, perhaps, but it was settled to a great extent from the air. The Iran-Iraq war was inconclusive. The Soviets lost in Afghanistan before the west did. France gave up on Operation Barkhane, its counterinsurgent mission in the Sahel, in 2022. You are left to cite Russia’s invasion of Georgia (population 4.4mn at the time), the still-evolving situation in Gaza and the Falklands war, which happened nearer to the second world war than to the present.
The world seems to be living through a trend that, if it holds, could scarcely be more profound: the increasing ineffectiveness of war. There is a pattern of military failure, or at least frustration, which covers democratic aggressors and autocratic ones, wars close to home and wars on distant continents, wars against other sovereign states and wars against irregular forces. Vietnam used to be the reference point for the military humbling of a major power. It was such a unique shock as to inform a generation of rather good movies and even a “syndrome”. Now it seems unexceptional.
It is hard to make this argument without seeming to throw one’s hands in the air at the pointlessness of everything. So, to stipulate, air-to-surface strikes without land armies have been fruitful. Think of the ousting of Slobodan Milošević (after a lag) and the beating back of Isis. But reckon too with the limitations. After toppling Muammer Gaddafi without ground forces in Libya, the west lost control of the aftermath. It became mired in Iraq partly because the air attacks of the 1990s had done only so much damage to Saddam Hussein. Both precedents should haunt Donald Trump as he contemplates a new round of strikes against Iran.
If we are witnessing the impotence of the world’s leading armed forces, what explains it?
For one thing, the means of violence have spread more widely. It does not take a major state, or a state at all, to use drones or guerrilla forces. Autonomous weapons systems can offset a lack of personnel. A “porcupine strategy” has been suggested for Taiwan, but even smaller and weaker entities have their quills. A generation has passed since the British general Rupert Smith, in The Utility of Force, wrote that unending “wars amongst the people” had succeeded the chivalrous old world of discrete battles with clear outcomes. That was before the Afghanistan war really soured and before Russia got stuck in Ukraine. This prescient book now just needs an “f” before the second word of its title.
At the same time, fear of nuclear escalation is quite the inhibitor. Countries will not do whatever it takes to win a war. Even if the state under attack is nuke-less, the aggressor has to keep in mind third parties that have the bomb. In the old world, Russia might have struck the US or Britain to deter their support for Ukraine. That is now (we trust) unthinkable. How odd that Korea is the “forgotten war”, given that it prefigured our world of indecisive conflict. The stalemate on the peninsula came about in part because the US and China wanted to avoid a nuclear exchange more than they wanted their proxies to win.
Anyway, it is easier to guess the causes of war’s mixed recent record than to predict the consequences. On the face of it, war should become less common, as states decide that it entails too much cost for too little gain. There is a lot of journalistic certainty around now that a “might is right” world is coming. This should be hedged a bit. Powerful states might feel legally and morally unshackled to use force in “their” historical spheres of influence. That does not mean it will work. If they grow reticent, having seen the Russian experience in Ukraine, that is the next best thing to a world in which such wars are seen as wrong in principle.
But life wouldn’t be life if things were as neat as that. There is a scenario in which constant military disappointment is worse for free societies. Dictatorships can build armed forces by fiat. Democracies need popular consent. In the cold war, they sustained huge defence budgets and conscription because the public still associated these things with the second world war: the good war, with its clear-cut morality and even clearer winner. If that gives way to cynicism about the usefulness of force, free societies could go under-defended. Appeals to patriotism are nice, but winning goes further.
In that rare thing, a notable farewell address by a US president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against military penetration of civilian life. The contemporary problem is something nearer the opposite: civilian estrangement from the military, born of decades of poor outcomes. “There are no winners in war” was a moralising slogan in the last century. In this one, it has the ring of a descriptive sentence.
