Warfare today and tomorrow

Our century so far has not been an age of big wars. Early twenty first century warfare has caused terrible suffering but has been militarily small. 

No massive armies, navies and air forces have clashed across, continents, oceans and skies as they did in the 20th century. The casualty rate, both combatant and civilian, has also been comparatively low.

Most wars between 2000 and 2020 involved an asymmetric struggle between relatively small government forces, armed groups and their Great Power supporters who have not fought each other directly but sometimes used State and non-state military partners in proxy wars. 

Most battles have been relatively small too, with nothing on the scale of Solferino or large 20th century battles. The exceptions have been initial attacks in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and some medium sized urban battles like Fallujah in Iraq, as well as Aleppo and Mosul in Syria. The Battle of Mosul lasted for seven months and involved an Iraqi force of 94,000 taking on an Islamic State Group (ISg) force of 12,000.

With the exceptions of Syria, Yemen, Iraq and sometimes Gaza, Afghanistan and South Sudan, most wars have also been confined to particular parts of a country and have not spread across whole countries (see ACLED, 2022).

Most warfare since 2010 has taken the form of internationalised civil wars with a large number of state and non-state armed groups and private military companies (PMC) fighting in coalitions on each side. 

These alliances make early 21st century warfare an intensely crowded form of war with many different warring parties. This puts particular responsibility on State parties to ensure that the rules of war are being respected across their coalitions (see ICRC, 2021).

In 2020, the ICRC had contact with 465 armed groups around the world and large areas in contemporary warfare which are controlled by armed groups. This means that millions of people live “beyond the state” in wars today.

Long war, or protracted conflict as it is sometimes described, is a clear characteristic of warfare in the last twenty years.

Wars throughout history have often been long as well as short. Many wars are in fact new episodes of violence in long conflicts that flare up and down over hundreds of years, like the two world wars between Germany and its European neighbours or the series of wars in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict.

Wars today are also long because they mutate. A war, like Afghanistan, for example, started around tensions on the borders of the Soviet empire in the 1970s then led to invasions and occupation, mutated over time into national resistance, Soviet withdrawal, factional civil war, Islamist terrorism, US invasion, occupation and resistance.

Asymmetric wars, which are the majority today, are also notoriously difficult to win. When they involve so-called “radical disagreements” in ideology, they are equally difficult to end with a peace deal.

The changing technological character of war in the 21st century is the most original feature of war today because it brings real novelty to warfare. None of the other characteristics are unprecedented. Computerized technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), puts warfare on a new trajectory that challenges human autonomy and takes war and strategy into the new domains of outer space and cyberspace.

Most military fighting machines today are not complicated mechanical platforms like planes, tanks and artillery. Instead, they are highly complex “systems of systems” that are automated with extraordinary precision and speed well beyond the understanding of their individual human operator. 

AI-based surveillance systems can gather extraordinary amounts of detailed information and function as “recommender systems” offering tactical advice to commanders in real-time. Drones are being used in attack, defence, surveillance and supply. They can operate alone or in swarms, and close-up alongside human combatants in “hybrid operations”. 

AI-based weapons are achieving high levels of functional autonomy and may even be achieving “functional moral autonomy” as they make ethically-based decisions on their own.

There are more laws of war today than ever before. 

The First Geneva Convention in 1864, which was signed into international law as a result of Dunant’s advocacy, set in motion an almost constant process of law making and humanitarian advocacy for new laws that has continued through the 20th and 21st century.  

Professor Craig Jones has rightly observed that the modern era is striking for a remarkable “juridifcation” of war in which battle spaces are “saturated” by international law about the lawful conduct of hostilities and the protection of civilians, the wounded and refugees. His work shows how hundreds of ‘war lawyers’  play an ambivalent role in limiting war today. 

Some of this law involves simple requirements and prohibitions around actions that warring parties should always do or never do – like protecting the wounded or not deliberately targeting civilians. But much of the law relies on warring parties making judgements and interpretations of general principles like the “proportionality” of force and reasons of “military necessity”, which remain vague in law and highly contextual in conflict operations.

Despite the great elaboration of the laws of war, they remain problematic in practice for three reasons: 

• The law is often complicated and dense, and only really understood by a professional class of highly specialized lawyers. Some of it can be boiled down into simple maxims but some of it cannot.
• There is a general weakness in the enforcement of the laws of war and usually no irresistible judicial or political incentive for warring parties to comply.
• The law can sometimes be bent to the advantage or disadvantage of one side in a strategy known as “lawfare” (see Martin, 2019). 

These three flaws in the laws of war mean that people in war, or those watching war through the media, experience a sort of cognitive dissonance as they see endless wartime atrocities while simultaneously being told that there are laws for war.