(NSI News Source Info) March 25, 2009: Forget future weapons systems; forget former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "lean-mean" military. The wars of the 21st century will be fought by thermonuclear weapons and armies of millions of men, maybe tens of millions of them.
UNAMID force commander Gen. Martin Agwai, center is seen through two peacekeepers as he arrives at the Kas military base near the southern Darfur town of Kas, Sudan, Tuesday, March 24, 2009. Gen. Agwai conducted a one day field trip that included two of his operating UNAMID military units in the Darfur remote towns of Kas and Nertiti.
The reason for this, as we have noted in previous parts of this series and our companion series, "Warming Wars," is very simple: The population of the world is still soaring. It is now more than 6.8 billion. That is more three times as many human beings as were on the earth 80 years ago. It is a larger population than any in the history of the human race.
At the same time, the mineral and energy resources demanded by complex industrial societies are more depleted than ever. There is still plenty of oil, natural gas and, above all, coal in the world. But the competition to control will get ever more desperate.
Worse yet, there is global climate change. It has already triggered mass migrations of tens of millions of people out of sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa. The combination of environmental crisis caused by global weather change coupled with expanding populations makes mass migrations inevitable. And that means nations and groups of nations will increasingly be forced to either strengthen their borders or go under.
There is only one way to control mass immigration from desperately poor countries into prosperous ones, and that is by maintaining strong border defenses.Electrified fences and high-tech sensors alone won't do the job. Human desperation and ingenuity can cut them, neutralize them, or tunnel under them every time. As nations from Israel to India to Saudi Arabia have found, the only way to maintain strong border defenses is to man them permanently with large numbers of border guards and troops.
Also, if an enemy army tries to attack you with overwhelming force, as the Iranians repeatedly tried to do to Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, it doesn't matter how elite and high-tech your army is; it has to be big enough and have enough guns and ammunition to hold defensive lines, to avoid getting outflanked and cut off and to shoot down waves and waves of attackers.
The Iraqis proved that with their great and still widely ignored defensive victories during the Iran-Iraq war. American and global military planners paid almost no attention to those battles. They looked like a nightmarish rerun of the bloody trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I from 1914 to 1918, and they were. There was even poison gas used on a massive scale by the Iraqis, as the British, Germans and French did in World War I.
But the Iran-Iraq war was not just about the past; it was also a foretaste of the future. It heralded a dark era when war would not become obsolete or morph only into guerrilla struggles, as was the case through much of the second half of the 20th century, but would return to its massive, primeval roots as an irrational, instinctual struggle for survival, not just between abstract political and economic systems, but between entire societies in a chaotic world red in tooth and claw.
In such a world, armies will need huge quantities of basically simple weapons like variants of the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic assault rifle, whose design remains virtually unchanged more than 60 years after it first appeared. For the nations that can build them and afford them, thousands of tanks, heavy artillery and combat aircraft will be desirable, but they will have to be cheap enough to be produced in huge numbers and easily replaced. Superexpensive but sensitive, fragile, thoroughbred high-tech weapons systems just won't cut it in the renewed age of mass war.
Pack away your doves. In the coming age, it's Ares-Mars and his fellow gods of war who will be smiling.
UNAMID force commander Gen. Martin Agwai, center is seen through two peacekeepers as he arrives at the Kas military base near the southern Darfur town of Kas, Sudan, Tuesday, March 24, 2009. Gen. Agwai conducted a one day field trip that included two of his operating UNAMID military units in the Darfur remote towns of Kas and Nertiti.
The reason for this, as we have noted in previous parts of this series and our companion series, "Warming Wars," is very simple: The population of the world is still soaring. It is now more than 6.8 billion. That is more three times as many human beings as were on the earth 80 years ago. It is a larger population than any in the history of the human race.
At the same time, the mineral and energy resources demanded by complex industrial societies are more depleted than ever. There is still plenty of oil, natural gas and, above all, coal in the world. But the competition to control will get ever more desperate.
Worse yet, there is global climate change. It has already triggered mass migrations of tens of millions of people out of sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa. The combination of environmental crisis caused by global weather change coupled with expanding populations makes mass migrations inevitable. And that means nations and groups of nations will increasingly be forced to either strengthen their borders or go under.
There is only one way to control mass immigration from desperately poor countries into prosperous ones, and that is by maintaining strong border defenses.Electrified fences and high-tech sensors alone won't do the job. Human desperation and ingenuity can cut them, neutralize them, or tunnel under them every time. As nations from Israel to India to Saudi Arabia have found, the only way to maintain strong border defenses is to man them permanently with large numbers of border guards and troops.
Also, if an enemy army tries to attack you with overwhelming force, as the Iranians repeatedly tried to do to Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, it doesn't matter how elite and high-tech your army is; it has to be big enough and have enough guns and ammunition to hold defensive lines, to avoid getting outflanked and cut off and to shoot down waves and waves of attackers.
The Iraqis proved that with their great and still widely ignored defensive victories during the Iran-Iraq war. American and global military planners paid almost no attention to those battles. They looked like a nightmarish rerun of the bloody trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I from 1914 to 1918, and they were. There was even poison gas used on a massive scale by the Iraqis, as the British, Germans and French did in World War I.
But the Iran-Iraq war was not just about the past; it was also a foretaste of the future. It heralded a dark era when war would not become obsolete or morph only into guerrilla struggles, as was the case through much of the second half of the 20th century, but would return to its massive, primeval roots as an irrational, instinctual struggle for survival, not just between abstract political and economic systems, but between entire societies in a chaotic world red in tooth and claw.
In such a world, armies will need huge quantities of basically simple weapons like variants of the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic assault rifle, whose design remains virtually unchanged more than 60 years after it first appeared. For the nations that can build them and afford them, thousands of tanks, heavy artillery and combat aircraft will be desirable, but they will have to be cheap enough to be produced in huge numbers and easily replaced. Superexpensive but sensitive, fragile, thoroughbred high-tech weapons systems just won't cut it in the renewed age of mass war.
Pack away your doves. In the coming age, it's Ares-Mars and his fellow gods of war who will be smiling.
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