Clive Fairweather: Warfare changes, but war remains

As we remember past conflicts, it would be wise to consider how well equipped the UK is to face challenges of the future

WITH the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year in a new century upon us today, many will be remembering previous generations, including those who were lost from 1914 onwards in the “war to end all wars”. Others will be wondering what the future could hold in a world which is by no stretch of the imagination still at complete peace.

Have we fully absorbed the lessons of Armistice Day and more recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have shown just how exhausting such interventions are for all concerned? Even more worryingly could we be facing a potential holocaust if the current Iranian governments plans to assemble a credible nuclear weapons system are not cut to size – before the Israelis send their attack dogs in, or worse? Surely we must have learned from the past and cannot ever endure again what happened in the last blood-soaked century?

Yet Angela Merkel startled us with her recent pronouncement that the spectre of war might return to haunt Europe if the current economic crisis was not sorted. Herself the product of two world wars and a divided Germany, we must hope this normally bland bureaucrat has got her eurozones in a fankle. But she may not be entirely wrong either, because resources, or rather the competition for them, are often central when conflict erupts. With a burgeoning world population struggling to match resources some of which, like oil and water, are becoming scarcer, we are surely living in every bit as dangerous a world as our great-grandparents did.

The start point then was in Sarajevo and in southern Europe, with the gunshot echoes from the archduke’s assassination rippling on to an even greater and truly world engulfing conflict which only ended shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The new global order created in 1945 still has resonance today, especially in the newly freed Balkan region and further east. The Europe that the Scottish National Party would have us join as a sovereign nation may have developed, greatly, but some of the old fault lines are still as apparent as they were all those years ago, further complicated by subsequent population migrations.

Somewhat grudgingly, the SNP is being forced to admit that in the event of independence (rather than “devo max”), its first priority would have to be defence and the proper protection of our offshore oil assets. Recently these have been discovered to have far more sustainability than originally forecast. So though the more immediate threat to our livelihoods and precious environment off Lerwick and Aberdeen might come from terrorism and suicide bombers, this underscores the point that in an apparently more peaceful world, our lives are liable to dislocation both from near and far.

Current developments in the eastern Mediterranean (not far from Greece) are another illustration, where newly-discovered offshore gas fields between Cyprus and Lebanon/Syria could threaten relations between neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Israel. Of course many oil-rich Arab countries are already in turmoil, (not to forget the southern and mainly Muslim fringes of what was the USSR), this time due to revolution brought about by the power of the internet and social networking. No-one can predict how all this will end, but it might cascade on well beyond the immmediate Mediterranean littoral, such as Libya and Tunisia and towards Asia, where at its outer limits, a growing Chinese population will need ever more consumables.

More centrally, in Iran, president Ahmaninejad’s not so subtle threat of nuclear attack towards Israel (itself a creation of the two world wars ) has been delayed, though probably not for long. This was mainly achieved by Stuxnet, a virus introduced into computers to confuse Iran’s fissile producing centrifuges. This indicates that whilst recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded quantities of “boots on the ground” to enforce subsequent stabilisation, modern warfare may no longer be about the massed armies which fought themselves to a corpse-laden standstill in the poppy fields of Flanders. High-accuracy weapons such as miniature drones and cyberwarfare are rapidly replacing the divisions of artillery, tanks and men of yesteryear. Drones and the like can be directed from an increasingly domestically-engrossed America, via computer screens on to their mainly human targets on the fringes of nuclear armed Pakistan and the Indian Ocean, many thousands of miles away.

Here in UK, the economic recession means more reliance will be placed, just as it was before 1914, on reservists and technology, because we can no longer afford a standing army. Indeed, thanks to the recent scrappings of orders by our cash-strapped government, there is not much left of the Royal Navy either and we are, for the first time in living memory, without an aircraft carrier to project power, and very little to defend our immediate shores, let alone possibly defend oil assets adjacent to the Falkand Islands. Arguably, banking excesses and greed have finally forced Britain to elect for the size of armed forces we might have opted for long ago when it became obvious our days of Empire had evaporated following the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942.

Thanks to the ever increasing power of the camera and now in the hands of every mobile owner, the horrors of mans’ inhumanity to man on the battlefield is no longer a distant issue. Whereas in the first few minutes of battles such as Passchendaele we lost more men than in ten years of strife in modern day Afghanistan, the British public will no longer tolerate such excessive losses in its military. So we will no longer be harvesting thousands of youngsters from our towns and villages to defend our national interests, many of them never to return.

Any future actions involving our armed forces are more likely to be undertaken in conjunction with allies and limited to a matter of months rather than years. The relevance of nuclear systems such as Trident, previously a contributor to peace via the policy of “mutually assured destruction”, is also probably diminishing – thanks to the undignified and unexpected fall of the Soviet empire.

So as that sombre eleventh hour again returns, eyeing us all balefully, there is much change to be thankful for, mainly due to so much previous “supreme sacrifice”. Even those that survive being maimed in Helmand now get far superior treatment on their long journey to hospitals such as Selly Oak, whilst those suffering from the “hidden scars of war” are no longer sent to asylums like Craiglockhart or to the firing squad.

But in an era of climate change, flooding and desertification plus dwindling resources, it should not be forgotten that according to Malthus, populations may be reduced by “nature” through war or pestilence. Increasingly everyone could be at risk of being the “casualties” of interdependent economies, with warfare no longer just about our tiny force of men and women in khaki and blue, but about there being enough vaccines and high ground to go round us all.

As the bugles sound from sad shires this weekend, it is a time for sober reflection. Our military forces may be better technologically equipped than ever before, but they are the puniest in size in recent history. Certainly they may better match the country’s deeply drained budget. But whether they will be able to cope with the as yet unknown threats just around the corner is another matter. Not so long ago, the might of our armed forces acted as a deterrent to conflict and helped maintain the peace. Now, successively reduced bulk and numbers take us into uncharted territory, where potential opponents at home and abroad may be tempted to cross a very thin red line.

• Clive Fairweather is a former SAS deputy commander