Isegoria

Is warfare becoming more performative?

In the span of three weeks this June, the world witnessed three extraordinary military operations: Ukraine’s decimation of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Israel’s sweeping overnight key leader and air defense neutralization in Iran, and America’s ultra long-range bunker busting at Fordo and other Iranian nuclear sites. Each operation shared commonality in audacity, scale, and something surprising: detailed and immediate operational disclosure. These weren’t the limited scope press briefings or carefully circumscribed military reports seen in other high profile missions, like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden or the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani. Instead, presidential statements were quickly augmented by comprehensive overviews from that nation’s senior defense officials, complete with easily distributed media: drone footage, confirmational imagery, and mission graphics.

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Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.

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While precedents like Desert Storm showed conflict in real time, they did not bring the viewer into the metaphorical planning room. The June operations showed both conflict and the means and methods used to wage it. Details disclosed were not guessed at by talking heads or pundits, but were officially relayed by the highest levels of national authority. Rather than achieving tactical objectives through one channel and strategic communication through established signaling formats, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States integrated tactical execution with strategic messaging into single operational frameworks.

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Ukraine, Israel, and the United States all sacrificed valuable military information — details that might limit similar methods, capabilities, and flexibility in future missions — in exchange for immediate strategic communication gains.

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In many ways, the evolution of performative warfare is predictable within modern information operations. Even highly successful influence campaigns face the challenge of retaining attention in today’s saturated information environments, and the natural method of recapturing audience focus is through increasingly dramatic and credible demonstrations.

The word arctic comes from the Greek arktikos, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), which means “near the bear,” Ursa Major, whose last two stars point toward the North Star:

The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the United States.

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The Arctic region includes land in parts of Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). It is a land of extremes: for brief periods in the summer the temperature can reach 26 degrees Celsius in some places, but for long periods in winter it plunges to below minus 45. There are expanses of rock scoured by the freezing winds, spectacular fjords, polar deserts, and even rivers.

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The first recorded expedition was by a Greek mariner named Pytheas of Massalia in 330 BCE who found a strange land called Thule. Back home in the Mediterranean, few believed his startling tales of pure white landscapes, frozen seas, and strange creatures, including great white bears; but Pytheas was just the first of many people over the centuries to record the wonder of the Arctic and to succumb to the emotions it evokes.

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As for the first person to reach the North Pole, well, that’s a tricky one, given that even though there is a fixed point on the globe denoting its position, below it, the ice you are standing on is moving, and without GPS equipment it is hard to tell exactly where you are. Sir William Edward Parry, minus a GPS, tried in 1827, but the ice was moving south faster than he could move north and he ended up going backward; but he did at least survive.

Captain Sir John Franklin had less luck when he attempted to cross the last non-navigated section of the Northwest Passage in 1848. His two ships became stuck in the ice near King William Island in the Canadian archipelago. All 129 members of the expedition perished, some on board the ships, others after they abandoned the vessels and began walking south. Several expeditions were sent to search for survivors, but they found only a handful of skeletons and heard stories from Inuit hunters about dozens of white men who had died walking through the frozen landscape. The ships had vanished completely, but in 2014, technology caught up with geography and a Canadian search team using sonar located one of the vessels, HMS Erebus, on the seabed of the Northwest Passage and brought up the ship’s bell.

The fate of Franklin’s expedition did not deter many more adventurers from trying to find their way through the archipelago, but it wasn’t until 1905 that the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen charted his way across in a smaller ship with just five other crew. He passed King William Island, went through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific. He knew he’d made it when he spotted a whaling ship from San Francisco coming from the other direction. In his diary he confessed his emotions got the better of him, an occurrence perhaps almost as rare as his great achievement: “The Northwest Passage was done. My boyhood dream—at that moment it was accomplished. A strange feeling welled up in my throat; I was somewhat overstrained and worn—it was weakness in me—but I felt tears in my eyes.”

Twenty years later, he decided he wanted to be the first man to fly over the North Pole, which, although easier than walking across it, is no mean feat. Along with his Italian pilot, Umberto Nobile, and fourteen crew, he flew a semirigid airship over the ice and dropped Norwegian, Italian, and American flags from a height of three hundred feet. A heroic effort this may have been, but in the twenty-first century it was not seen as one giving much legal basis to any claims of ownership of the region by those three countries.

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The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China. The first cargo ship not to be escorted by an icebreaker went through in 2014. The Nunavik carried twenty-three thousand tons of nickel ore from Canada to China. The polar route was 40 percent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal. This allowed the ship to carry more cargo, save tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs, and reduced the ship’s greenhouse emissions by 1,300 metric tons.

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The northeast route, or Northern Sea Route as the Russians call it, which hugs the Siberian coastline, is also now open for several months a year and is becoming an increasingly popular sea highway.

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In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, and 90 billion barrels of oil are in the Arctic, with the vast majority of it offshore. As more territory becomes accessible, extra reserves of the gold, zinc, nickel, and iron already found in part of the Arctic may be discovered.

ExxonMobil, Shell, and Rosneft are among the energy giants that are applying for licenses and beginning exploratory drilling. Countries and companies prepared to make the effort to get at the riches will have to brave a climate where for much of the year the days are endless night, where for the majority of the year the sea freezes to a depth of more than six feet, and where, in open water, the waves can reach forty feet high.

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The claims to sovereignty are not based on the flags of the early explorers but on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This affirms that a signatory to the convention has exclusive economic rights from its shore to a limit of two hundred nautical miles (unless this conflicts with another country’s limits), and can declare it an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The oil and gas in the zone are therefore considered to belong to the state. In certain circumstances, and subject to scientific evidence concerning a country’s continental shelf, that country can apply to extend the EEZ to 350 nautical miles from its coast.

The melting of the Arctic ice is bringing with it a hardening of attitude from the eight members of the Arctic Council, the forum where geopolitics becomes geopolarctics. The “Arctic Five,” those states with borders on the Arctic, are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, which are also full members. There are twelve other nations with Permanent Observer status, having recognized the “Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” in the region, among other criteria. For example, at the 2013 Arctic Council, Japan and India, which have sponsored Arctic scientific expeditions, and China, which has a science base on a Norwegian island as well as a modern icebreaker, were granted Observer status.

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Moscow has already put a marker down—a long way down. In 2007, it sent two manned submersibles 13,980 feet below the waves to the seabed of the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag as a statement of ambition. As far as is known, it still “flies” down there today. A Russian think tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought, they came up with an alternative: “the Russian Ocean.”

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Russia and Norway have particular difficulty in the Barents Sea. Norway claims the Gakkel Ridge in the Barents as an extension of its Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), but the Russians dispute this, and they have a particular dispute over the Svalbard Islands, the northernmost point on earth with a settled population. Most countries and international organizations recognize the islands as being under (limited) Norwegian sovereignty, but the biggest island, Svalbard, formerly known as Spitsbergen, has a growing population of Russian migrants who have assembled around the coal-mining industry there. The mines are not profitable, but the Russian community serves as a useful tool in furthering Moscow’s claims on all of the Svalbard Islands.

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Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority. Its air force regularly intercepts Russian fighter jets approaching its borders; the heightened tensions have caused it to move its center of military operations from the south of the country to the north, and it is building an Arctic battalion.

Canada is reinforcing its cold-weather military capabilities, which includes five new navy warships with moderate ice-breaking capability to be delivered between 2018 and 2022. Announcing the increase in the spring of 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it.”

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Russia meanwhile is building an Arctic army. Six new military bases are being constructed and several mothballed Cold War installations—such as those on the Novosibirsk Islands—are reopening, and airstrips are being renovated. A force of at least six thousand combat soldiers is being readied for the Murmansk region and will include two mechanized infantry brigades equipped with snowmobiles and hovercraft.

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The Murmansk brigades will be Moscow’s minimum permanent Arctic force, but Russia demonstrated its full cold-weather fighting ability in 2014 with an exercise that involved 155,000 men and thousands of tanks, jets, and ships. The Russian Defense Ministry said it was bigger than exercises it had carried out during the Cold War.

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As Melissa Bert, a US Coast Guard captain, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC: “They have cities in the Arctic, we only have villages.”

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The Russians know that NATO can bottle up their Baltic Fleet by blockading the Skagerrak Strait. This potential blockade is complicated by the fact that up in the Arctic their Northern Fleet has only 180 miles of open water from the Kola coastline until it hits the Arctic ice pack. From this narrow corridor it must also come down through the Norwegian Sea and then run the potential gauntlet of the GIUK gap to reach the Atlantic Ocean. During the Cold War, the area was known by NATO as the Kill Zone, as this was where NATO’s planes, ships, and submarines expected to catch the Soviet fleet.

Fast-forward to the new cold war and the strategies remain the same, even if now the Americans have withdrawn their forces from their NATO ally Iceland. Iceland has no armed forces of its own and the American withdrawal was described by the Icelandic government as “short-sighted.” In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: “A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.”

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It takes up to $ 1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.

By contrast, the United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another. In 2012, it had to rely on a Russian ship to resupply its research base in Antarctica, which was a triumph for great-power cooperation, but simultaneously a demonstration of how far behind the United States has fallen.

A Chinese blockade could cripple Taiwan’s electricity, recent war games suggest:

“Energy is the weakest element in Taiwan’s resilience against coercion,” warned the report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The overwhelming preponderance of energy must be imported and is thus vulnerable to a blockade.”

China could supplement a blockade with attacks on Taiwan’s electrical grid, as Russia has done with some success in Ukraine.

“Total electricity production might be reduced to 20 percent of pre-blockade electricity levels,” CSIS said. At that level, all manufacturing ceases – including computer chips vital to the U.S. and the global economy.

These conclusions came from a series of 26 war games run by CSIS to test a blockade of Taiwan, an attractive option for Beijing that offers the prospect of Taiwan agreeing to “reunify” with China, without the need for a bloody and risky Chinese amphibious invasion.

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Taiwan can also reduce its dependence on imported energy. This could include boosting its reserves of oil, natural gas and coal, and even reopening its last nuclear plant, which shut down in May. Meanwhile, the island’s electrical grid could be hardened, including stockpiles of spare parts such as transformers and turbines.

For its part, the U.S. could increase its air transport capacity for a Berlin 1948-style airlift. While insufficient to meet all of Taiwan’s needs, “in some circumstances, an airlift could have a powerful moral effect and provide some breathing room,” CSIS said. In addition, the U.S. Navy will need to improve its capability for convoy escort.

They shut down their last nuclear reactor in May?

The main driver of the rise of empires, Peter Turchin argues, is interstate competition:

The intensity of this competition, in turn, is dialed up by advances in military technologies. Each military revolution, thus, generates a set of mega-empires. Today we live in the historical shadow of two most consequential military revolutions.

The iron-cavalry revolution dates to about 1000 BCE.

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To cut the long story short, the iron-cavalry revolution transformed the Great Eurasian Steppe into an engine of imperiogenesis. This continental heartland was the home of nomadic pastoralists, whose main military force consisted of horse archers.

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The other consequential revolution was, of course, the one that originated in Western Europe around 1400 CE. Its two components were gunpowder weapons and ocean-going ships. So I refer to it as the “Gunship Revolution.” The parallels between the two revolutions are quite striking. Inner Asians rode horses and shot arrows, while Europeans rode ships and shot cannon balls. The world ocean played the same role as the “sea of grass.” Historians noted these similarities. For example, the historian of Southeast Asia, Victor Lieberman, referred to Europeans as “White Inner Asians.”

Readers, who are familiar with geopolitical theories of Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, and others (if not, check out this Wikipedia article), will immediately recognize the similarities between what I am talking about here and various geographical concepts central to these theories (the Heartland, the Rimland, the Islands…).

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Thus, the Great Steppe (which is treated as a pivotal region by several geopolitical theories) today is of little significance, except for its historical effect. By 1900 it was completely taken over by Russia and China. Today it’s home to a bunch of weak and geopolitically insignificant states, such as Mongolia and the “Stans.” The successors of old mega-empires, which arose on the Steppe frontiers, is where Eurasian power now resides.

The second pole of power is “Oceania,” which originated on the western shores of Eurasia during the sixteenth century (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the British Isles), then spread across the Atlantic, and now is a global empire, ruled from Washington and Brussels as a secondary capital (although there are cracks between these two seats of power due to Donald Trump’s policies). A good way to visualize this geopolitical entity is a map of American military bases.

Oceania’s geopolitical logic — encirclement of Eurasian empires — is obvious.

The Japanese are an island race, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with the majority of their 127 million people living on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands:

At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

In the 1300s, the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria, and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korea Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a “Divine Wind,” which they called a kamikaze.

So the threat from the west and northwest was limited, and to the southeast and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name Nippon, or “sun origin”: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun.

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The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to one another along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills. Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join one another.

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By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was an industrial power with the third-largest navy in the world, and in 1905 it defeated the Russians in a war fought on land and at sea. However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialized nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber, and a shortage of many metals.

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It was the thirst for these products, notably iron and oil, that caused Japan to rampage across the far-less developed Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early ’40s. It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As each domino fell, the expanding empire and the growing Japanese population required more oil, more coal, more metal, more rubber, and more food.

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This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the United States, but grabbing the very resources, rubber, for example, that the United States required for its own industry.

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If the terrain had been easier the Americans’ choice may have been different—they might have fought their way to Tokyo—but they chose the nuclear option, unleashing upon Japan, and the collective conscience of the world, the terror of a new age.

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The postwar agreement imposed by the United States limited Japan’s defense spending to 1 percent of the GDP and left tens of thousands of American forces on Japanese territory, thirty-two thousand of whom are still there.

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The 2015 defense budget was its biggest to date, with the yen mostly going to naval and air equipment, including six US-made F-35A stealth fighters. In the spring of 2015, Tokyo also unveiled what it called a “helicopter-carrying destroyer.” It didn’t take a military expert to notice that the vessel was as big as the Japanese aircraft carriers of the Second World War, which are forbidden by the surrender terms of 1945. The ship can be adapted for fixed-wing aircraft, but the defense minister issued a statement saying that he was “not thinking of using it as an aircraft carrier.”

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The military infrastructure at Okinawa, which guards the approaches to the main islands, will be upgraded. This will also allow Japan greater flexibility to patrol its Air Defense Zone, part of which overlaps with China’s equivalent zone after an expansion was announced by Beijing in 2013. Both zones cover the islands called the Senkaku or Diaoyu (in Japanese and Chinese, respectively), which Japan controls but that are claimed by China, too. They also form part of the Ryukyu island chain, which is particularly sensitive as any hostile power must pass the islands on the way to the Japanese heartlands; they give Japan a lot of territorial sea space, and they might contain exploitable underwater gas and oil fields.

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China’s expanded Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or “face defensive measures,” Japan, South Korea, and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so.

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Japan also claims sovereignty over the Kuril Islands in its far north, off Hokkaido, which it lost to the Soviet Union in the Second World War and that are still under Russian control. Russia prefers not to discuss the matter, but the debate is not in the same league as Japan’s disputes with China. There are only approximately nineteen thousand inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, and although the islands sit in fertile fishing grounds, the territory is not one of particular strategic importance.

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Japanese statisticians fear that the population will shrink to under 100 million by the middle of the century. If the current birth rate continues, it is even possible that by 2110 the population will have fallen below the 50 million it was in 1910.

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Even if they do go on to solve a problem like Korea, the issue of China will still be there, and this means the US 7th Fleet will remain in Tokyo Bay and US Marines will remain in Okinawa, guarding the paths in and out of the Pacific and the China seas.

North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River:

The United States, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost thirty thousand troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.

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North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect. Its foreign policy consists, essentially, of being suspicious of everyone except the Chinese, and even Beijing is not to be fully trusted despite supplying 84.12 percent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 percent of its exports, according to 2014 figures by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

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To its captive population it says it is a strong, munificent, magnificent state standing up against all the odds and against the evil foreigners, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It has a unique political philosophy of Juche, which blends fierce nationalism with Communism and national self-reliance. In reality, it is the least democratic state in the world: it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also checks off every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century. Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and “reeducation” camps.

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If you come from the north, then once you are over the Yalu River there are few major natural defensive lines all the way down to the sea, and if you can land from the sea, the reverse is true. The Mongols came and went, as did the Chinese Ming dynasty, the Manchurians, and the Japanese several times.

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In the twentieth century the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory.

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The defeat of Japan in 1945 left Korea divided along the 38th parallel. North of it was a Communist regime overseen first by the Soviets and later by Communist China, south of the line was a pro-American dictatorship called the Republic of Korea (ROK).

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The Soviets pulled their troops out of the north in 1948 and the Americans followed suit in the south in 1949. In June 1950, an emboldened North Korean military fatally underestimated America’s Cold War geopolitical strategy and crossed the 38th parallel, intent on reuniting the peninsula under one Communist government.

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The North Korean leadership, and its Chinese backers, had correctly worked out that, in a strictly military sense, Korea was not vital to the United States; but what they failed to understand was that the Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for their South Korean ally, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them.

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In September 1950, the United States, leading a United Nations force, surged into Korea, pushing the Northern troops back across the 38th parallel and then up almost to the Yalu River and the border with China.

Now it was Beijing’s turn to make a decision. It was one thing to have US forces on the peninsula, quite another when they were north of the parallel—indeed north of the mountains above Hamhung—and within striking distance of China itself. Chinese troops poured across the Yalu, and thirty-six months of fierce fighting ensued with massive casualties on all sides before they ground to a halt along the current border and agreed to a truce, but not a treaty.

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The geography of the peninsula is fairly uncomplicated and a reminder of how artificial the division is between North and South. The real (broad-brush) split is west to east. The west of the peninsula is much flatter than the east and is where the majority of people live. The east has the Hamgyong mountain range in the north and lower ranges in the south.

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South Korea’s capital, the megacity of Seoul, lies just thirty-five miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centers, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery.

In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ, the North Korean military has an estimated ten thousand artillery pieces. They are well dug in, some in fortified bunkers and caves. Not all of them could reach the center of Seoul, but some could, and all are able to reach the greater Seoul region. There’s little doubt that within two or three days the combined might of the South Korean and US air forces would have destroyed many of them, but by that time Seoul would be in flames. Imagine the effect of just one salvo of shells from ten thousand artillery weapons landing in urban and semi-urban areas, then multiply it dozens of times.

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The ROK’s economy is eighty times stronger than the North’s, its population is twice the size, and the combined South Korean and US armed forces would almost certainly overwhelm North Korea eventually, assuming China did not decide to join in again.

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Developing the north of Korea would be building from ground zero, and the costs would hold back the economy of a united peninsula for a decade. After that, the benefits of the rich natural resources of the north, such as coal, zinc, copper, and iron, and the modernization program would be expected to kick in, but there are mixed feelings about risking the prosperity of one of the world’s most advanced nations in the meantime.

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South Korea is now a vibrant, integrated member of the nations of the world, with a foreign policy to match. With open water to its west, east, and south, and with few natural resources, it has taken care to build a modern navy in the past three decades, one that is capable of getting into the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea to safeguard the ROK’s interests. Like Japan, it is dependent on foreign sources for its energy needs, and so keeps a close eye on the sea-lanes of the whole region.

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In early 2015, when the Americans, South Koreans, and Japanese got down to the details of an agreement to share military intelligence they had each gathered on North Korea, Seoul said it would pass along only a limited amount of secret information to Tokyo via Washington. It will not deal directly with the Japanese. The two countries still have a territorial dispute over what South Korea calls the Dokdo (solitary) Islands and the Japanese know as the Takeshima (bamboo) islands.

When Failure Thrives was the inaugural publication by the Army Press, back in 2015:

Regardless of how revolutionary they are at the time of their introduction, all military innovations gradually lose their utility as they are overtaken by further technical and societal developments. For example, while the Prussian drill regulations and tactical ordre oblique introduced by Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia in the mid-18 Century were revolutionary for his time, they became a liability a mere generation after Frederick’s death when battlefield developments during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars led to the diffusion of new models of military organization. However, Prussia proved too slow in responding to these new developments until, after an existential defeat in 1806, policymakers finally discarded the institutions and practices they had inherited from Frederick. This case and others like it demonstrate the validity of Joseph Schumpeter’s axiom that innovation is a process of “creative destruction.”

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For this reason, military innovators oftentimes advocate abolishing organizations considered impediments to reform. For example, Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, an early advocate of a Military Technical Revolution, passionately (yet unsuccessfully) lobbied for his government to shift resources from armored forces to digital command-and-control networks and long-range precision-guided munitions.

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Airborne forces are an ideal case for exploring the survival and evolution of a military capability of decreasing utility because of both the nearly universal creation of such forces by the great powers between 1928 and 1941, and their subsequent development along disparate lines in different states.

In this context, although the spread of integrated air defenses, armored vehicles and surface-to-air missiles gradually reduced the utility of airborne forces, states adapted to these developments in different ways.

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As both scholars and military professionals have long understood, military innovations occur when armed forces establish autonomous or semi-autonomous organizational structures (either a separate service, branch or unit) to explore new technologies and doctrines. However, the same qualities of organizational autonomy and institutional power that promote innovation in new organizations foster organizational inertia as an institutions’ favored tactics and technologies become obsolete.

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In effect, airborne forces suffered cutbacks in countries, such as the United Kingdom, where they did not enjoy a high level of institutional strength or autonomy to begin with. Contrarily, they proved largely immune to cutbacks in the Soviet Union, where they were originally endowed with a great deal of organizational clout and independence before the war. Finally, airborne forces remained large, but were obliged to engage in frequent and sustained efforts to reinvent themselves in the United States, where the airborne community’s institutional strength was substantial, yet not so great as to enable airborne forces to entirely neglect the implications of technical and tactical developments.

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The invention of tanks in 1916 and subsequent improvements to their performance created opportunities for land warfare to be waged in radically new ways.

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In many great powers, including Britain, France and the United States, the responsibility for employing tanks was assigned to two traditional service branches — the infantry and the cavalry. Contrary to certain misconceptions, both of these branches viewed tanks as potentially very useful. Nevertheless, they narrowly defined the tank’s role and technical requirements in terms of supporting preexisting infantry and cavalry missions. This meant that the infantry demanded tanks and armored units that were heavily armored, slow moving and optimized for supporting infantry assaults. Meanwhile, the cavalry developed tanks and armored units designed to substitute for the traditional horse cavalry missions of scouting and reconnaissance. In the American case, the cavalry even insisted on combining tanks and horses in hybrid units.

Unfortunately, entrusting the infantry and cavalry branches with tank development squandered their revolutionary potential. This became apparent when Germany launched its blitzkrieg campaigns in 1939-41. Rather than subordinating tanks to existing branches, the Germans created a dedicated armored branch, the Panzerwaffe, to exploit the new technology. In sharp contrast to the approach taken by existing branches, these special-purpose organizations exploited the full potential of armored vehicles for deep maneuvers and causing chaos in opponents’ rear areas. Consequently, although Germany’s armored forces were actually numerically inferior to those of their opponents in 1940 and 1941, they nevertheless dominated the battlefield and won remarkable victories.

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The rapid development of military aircraft in the early 20thth Century sparked just such a development of independent air services, beginning with the British Royal Air Force’s creation in 1918. However, because the creation of new armed services is costly owing to their many support and administrative services, policymakers frequently prefer to create new branches within existing services.

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How too little institutionalization can impede innovation is illustrated by the case of United States special operations forces prior to the creation of the Special Operations Command. Before 1986 special operations forces existed as discrete units within each of the services. Because they neither possessed large staffs nor could offer appealing career prospects, special operations forces failed to attract officers of the needed quality, were neglected in national-level debates, and were unable to develop specialized equipment for their missions.15 As a result, American special operations forces did not provide the strategic value that had been anticipated at the time of their creation—a fact illustrated in the dramatic failure of the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue operation, Desert One. It was in light of these shortcomings that policymakers eventually created an institutionally robust Special Operations Command.

While the case of special operations forces illustrates the perils of under-institutionalizing a capability, the example of Soviet/Russian National Air Defense Forces (the PVO-Strany) illustrates the inverse error of over-institutionalizing a capability. Impressed by the technological promise of integrated air defense networks—combining radars, aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles—Soviet leaders established the National Air Defense Forces in 1948 as an independent armed service on a par with the nation’s ground, air and naval forces.17 This entailed endowing the National Air Defense Forces with a sizeable bureaucracy, educational institutions (a military academy and staff colleges), and training facilities that replicated many of the functions already performed by the other armed services.18 To make matters worse, the National Air Defense Forces procured costly aircraft and surface-to-air missiles that were similar to, yet different from those procured by the air force and army. Over time, this unnecessary duplication of effort came to be seen as an excessive drain on the state’s scarce resources, leading to the National Air Defense Forces’ abolition as an independent service in 1998.

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Because warfare is a matter of life and death for individual combatants — and national survival for states — it is mistakenly assumed that military professionals are ruthless and unsentimental when it comes to discarding old technologies and tactics. However, one tends to find more examples of clearly obsolescent tactics and technologies in military organizations than in many other fields of human behavior. In one extraordinary case, horse cavalry survived in even the world’s most industrialized states until the 1950s, a half-century after they ought to have been abolished. There are, however, many more examples of this kind of obsolescence. The Swiss military maintained carrier pigeons into the early 1990s, long after the advent of electronic communications. The United States Army has retained a sizeable Chemical Corps since the First World War despite the declining importance of chemical warfare. Military forces in states such as France (the Spahis), Spain (the Regulares) and the United Kingdom (the Gurkhas) all retain regiments whose traditions and recruitment reflect the exigencies of long-vanished colonial empires.

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One reason for greater inertia in military organizations lies in the incomplete and intermittent nature of how military organizations are tested.

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It is, therefore, almost always possible for military organizations to ignore unpleasant truths by arguing that the circumstances of future wars will be more favorable to their preferred tactics and technologies. For example, in one particularly brash example of a military professional drawing biased conclusions from contemporary conflicts, British General John French summarily dismissed the need for reevaluating the cavalry’s role after their poor performance in the Boer War. To this end, French wrote, “It passes comprehension that some critics in England should gravely assure us that the war in South Africa should be our chief source of inspiration and guidance…we should be very foolish if we did not recognise at this late hour that very few of the conditions of South Africa are likely to recur.”

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Driven by necessity, military organizations emphasize tradition, continuity and the value of received tactics as a means of instilling the confidence needed to perform difficult tasks amidst the chaos of battle. Put another way, Edward Katzenbach argued in a classic study that, “Romanticism, while perhaps stultifying realistic thought, gives a man that belief in the value of the system he is operating that is so necessary to his willingness to use it in battle….But faith [in a weapons system or tactic] breeds distrust of change.” Thus, a degree of bias and resistance to change is a natural by-product of military organizations’ efforts to develop élan and esprit de corps.

In addition to these unconscious biases, military professionals also develop conscious biases as a result of career incentives. Because officers are promoted within well-defined military organizations, they have a natural interest in seeing those organizations prosper.

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In recent times, no better example of this phenomenon can be found than the US Marine Corps’ steadfast defense of the V-22 Osprey program. Because Marine leaders considered the V-22 Osprey essential to the service’s amphibious assault mission, Marines (and former Marines) successfully lobbied to save the program in the face of grave technical problems, sustained cost overruns, and politicians’ repeated efforts to cancel the program.

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One strategy, the preferred one of military organizations under pressure, is to invest in technological innovations that promise to restore the validity of the organizations’ core missions.

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Having obtained its status as a separate service in 1947 by arguing that air power could independently win wars, the Air Force has repeatedly faced criticism when it either failed to destroy targets considered essential or failed to achieve the anticipated strategic objectives. However, such shortcomings have never prompted the Air Force to fundamentally question the dogma of strategic air power.

Rather, the Air Force has consistently sought to develop new tactics and technologies capable of reinvigorating its preferred strategic mission. Such was the case, for example, when the Air Force encountered grave difficulties during the Vietnam War as a result of both North Vietnam’s sophisticated Soviet-provided air defense system and the Air Force’s own difficulties destroying precision targets. However, rather than renounce the strategic air campaign against North Vietnam, the Air Force instead concentrated its efforts at developing new technologies and tactics. Within this context, the Air Force developed a host of electronic warfare equipment, precision-guided munitions, drones, and airborne early warning systems. Tactically, the Air Force also implemented revolutionary new training and exercise methods (eventually culminating in the “Red Flag” exercises) shortly after the war. These costly efforts at resolving the Air Force’s tactical and technical problems bore fruit later in the Vietnam War and in subsequent conflicts. Nevertheless, the service’s goal of achieving victory through airpower alone has proven elusive.

Besides seeking innovative remedies for the technical and tactical challenges ailing them, another strategy military organizations under pressure can adopt is to seek new roles and missions. In effect, even if developments render a military organization’s original mission impossible or irrelevant, the organization can nevertheless survive if it identifies and fulfills another mission vital to national security. A good example of this phenomenon can be found in the United States Marine Corps’ conversion from imperial policing to amphibious warfare in the 1930s. Because the Marine Corps had hitherto justified its size and autonomy by spearheading the United States’ frequent interventions in Latin America, many openly questioned whether there was any reason to preserve the service once President Franklin Roosevelt promulgated the “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1933, which curtailed the interventions (the “Banana Wars”) that previously constituted the Corps’ raison d’être.

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Assistant Commandant John Russell, therefore, urgently initiated reforms to transform the Marines from an imperial policing organization to an amphibious assault force as soon as the “Good Neighbor Policy” was announced. In short order, the Marines constituted the embryo of an amphibious force — the Fleet Marine Force — in late 1933 and suspended teaching at the Corps’ schools in 1933-34 to allow the schools’ personnel to devote their undivided attention to crafting amphibious doctrine.

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In addition to innovating to preserve an existing role or adapting to accomplish a new mission, military organizations can also protect themselves by arguing that past contributions to national defense constitute an argument for future survival.

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Within this context, the Green Jackets were founded in 1800 as a unit of skirmishers and long-range marksmen and the Bersaglieri were formed in 1836 to execute the gymnastic and high-mobility infantry tactics that were favored by certain tacticians at that time.

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Moreover, the units were able to perpetuate their elite status because their reputations drew their countries’ best officer cadets and most qualified recruits to join them, enhancing these units’ effectiveness relative to functionally identical “ordinary” infantry formations.