The title says it all. Maybe this is a GQ type question but I suspect it ain’t.
Nowadays the most advanced Militaries on Earth have access to weapons that were science fantasy fever dreams 100 and more years ago. However their enemies too have access to more modern technologies. Have the various advances made modern wars easier to fight for the stronger party or harder?
They are absolutely decisive, and have made the side possessing them unbeatable on the conventional battlefield to even a superior numerical force with less technology (especially in C&C). I’d say that the technology a country like the US possess even makes them decisive in asymmetrical warfare. It comes down to political will, logistics and…money. These capabilities are hugely costly, so costly that most countries simply can’t afford to possess many of the things. Look at the numbers of top rated MBT that even western powers like the UK, France and Germany can field. Same with all the other weapons systems…they just cost to much to have more than a handful, unless you are the US. Which is why I always laugh when people think the Chinese will simply catch the US in a decade or so, militarily.
-XT
More effective weapons (accurate high rate firearms, artillery, precision bombing, et cetera) make it easier to fight with a smaller force, or more effective to fight with a large one, hence why effective weapon technologies and the techniques that use them are called “force multipliers”. However, in terms of making war “more winnable” it is unclear that superior technology prevails in general. War is ultimately a political game, and combative parties will often fight long past the point that there is any material or financial gain, up to the point that it becomes politically untenable. See WWII as an example; even in the case where advanced technology was directly employed to end the war (by devastating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs), the fact was that the Japanese had already lost the war in any practical sense, as they were at that point restricted in reach to the Home Islands and the very limited natural resources available there.
For the most part, the United States had vastly more resources and (aside from Soviet technology that was primarily fielded as a test of American system) and superior technology in the Vietnam conflict, and yet we still lost. Why? Because the Vietnamese had been invaded and colonized for the previous thousand years, and after tossing off the yoke of the French were essentially willing to fight down to the last man to remain free from conquest.
Stranger
In a classic war of force vs. force the tech advantage is huge. This is why to resist a major power you must go guerrilla and do it early. The US is so far ahead of most of the world that WWII style battles could only end one way now.
Thus terror will be the primary warfare vs. the 1st world nations.
Did we win in Iraq?
How about Afghanistan?
Why, or why not?
I don’t want to hijack the thread or re-fight the Vietnam war, but I’d say the ‘why’ is that the US had self imposed restraints that made decisive victory nearly impossible. We could not, for instance, invade North Vietnam and force a surrender…merely bomb the crap out of it. In general we attempted a gradual escalation of force which allowed the NV’s to shift their tactics and obtain more advanced weapons to cover the gaps. I’d say that technology was absolutely decisive in Vietnam for America…what was lacking was any sort of coherent strategy to actually win and the political will to do so.
I also think you are under rating the contribution the Soviets made to keeping the North Vietnamese in the game. They gave the NV’s literally billions in aid and advanced weapons systems and material aid and training. Without that I don’t think that all the supposed superior fighting spirit of the North Vietnamese, valiant as they might have been, would have made them prevail. For that matter, if the US was willing to suck it up and just stay there we’d STILL be there. Probably with a South Vietnam some sort of rickety dictatorship or something, but we chose to leave. Militarily, we weren’t driven from Vietnam…it was a political choice to do so.
-XT
Militarily or politically? The answer is different depending on which you mean.
-XT
Where it was force vs. force in Iraq we won easily.
What Tech has not yet swung in favor of yet (heavily at least) is insurrection, guerrilla tactics and the like.
What’s the difference? You can win 100 battles through superior military technology and still lose the war.
Winning a war means achieving your war aims.
If our war aim was just to dangle Saddam Hussein on the end of a rope, why are we still in Iraq?
If our war aim is to establish a permanent pro-American regime in Iraq, well, it remains to be seen whether we’ll accomplish that.
In Vietnam, we blasted the hell out of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. We won every battle. And then we decided we’d had enough, and went home, and now Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh City.
It’s a mistake to focus on military victories and contrast them to political losses, because war is the attempt to use military force to accomplish political ends. If you skillfully and decisively use your military force to accomplish everything you desire, yet the political outcome is not what you wanted, then you’ve lost the war.
The moral of the story is that no matter how decisive your weapons or superior your military you can lose the war…not on the battle ground but in the homes of your own citizens. So…don’t go to war just because you can win militarily unless you are prepared and have the political will to fight and win, because no matter how good your weapons are you will lose if the people lose the will to fight.
Because that is a strawman of our aims. Our aims were the defeat Saddam, displace the Ba’athist regime in Iraq and change their system to be one less threatening to the region and more disposed towards us, obtain strategic bases in a region critical to the US’s and the worlds strategic needs, protect and secure a region that has something like a fifth or an eighth of the worlds oil reserves and…well, a bunch more. Stringing up Saddam and putting in a puppet (or ‘stealing’ the Iraqi’s oil) were, at best, caricatures of our actual aims. We have at least partially succeeded in those aims. Certainly the MILITARY aims have all been successful, and our technology (as well as our logistics and material advantages) was key to that. If we ‘lose’ the war after it’s not because of the technology or capabilities of our military. No war can be won on strictly military grounds…there are always political considerations that weigh as heavily if not more so in order to assure victory.
Exactly.
-XT
I’d say the answer is no, outside of nuclear weapons. The casualty rate of soldiers has gone down throughout history. A large reason for this is improved medical care but ancient battles were fought up close and personal. Defeated armies were slaughtered and the outcome decisive.
Not necessarily - a limiting factor in premodern battles was the ability if the victors to pursue a defeated enemy. Cavalry was of course useful for this - but otherwise, the losers could often avoid death by the expedient of throwing away their (heavy) weapons & shields to the extent that they could and running away- the victors of course would not do so and so would find it difficult to catch them.
Hence the ancient statement “come back with your shield or on it” (shields were often used as strechers for the wounded or dead). Throwing away one’s shield was a disgraceful (but common) sign of flight.
Contrast with the modern battlefield, there is often nowhere to run - the zone of battle can stretch many miles.
Panicked retreats, though, often led to slaughter by turning one’s back to the enemy. This page discusses battlefield lethality. Here’s a chart that attempts to calculate casualty rates over the last 350 years which shows an overall downward trend.
One problem I’ve mentioned in previous posts is that our current high tech weapons are ill-suited to any sort of grinding attrition scenerio. Thanks to nuclear weapons we don’t plan to- and couldn’t- fight a World War Two-style total conventional war. To name just one example, I’ve read that some advanced optical system (used in our tanks?) depends on single-crystal sensors that require months of slow growing; they simply CAN’T be produced quickly. If aliens were to blanket the Earth with some quasi-magical field effect that made nuclear explosions impossible and we had to fight completely conventionally, it would be …interesting.
Basically, in a set piece battle waged with modern weapons you wouldn’t WANT to try to do a ‘grinding attrition scenario’, a la WWII. Take any of the battles in WWII. Say Kursk. From either side. Put in less capable weapons (say Soviet era armor, infantry, C&C and all the rest). Now drop in the US military with all our capabilities. What would happen? They (the less technologically capable force) would get wiped out in either the attack or defense role if they went up against a modern state of the art military. The weapons today are that deadly…if you can see it then it’s basically dead meat. Doesn’t matter how many crap tanks or unsupported old school infantry divisions you have, trying to fight straight up and head to head with someone like the US (or even the EU if you are fighting on their turf and in their logistically supported range) is a painful way to die really fast.
-XT
It is difficult to analyze the impact of the chart without further information. Undoubtedly, the largest single factor in decreased lethality overall is as you have already noted the impact of modern medicine - in premodern times, more soldiers died from disease than from weapons.
However, assuming that is accounted for, another major factor is the length and frequency of modern battles. In premodern times, it was unusual for a battle to last more than a day or two, and battles were relatively uncommon events. In WW1 and 2, battles could last for months, and be reasonably common. Thus, a much lower number of casualties “per day of active combat” may lead to much higher overall casualty rates, as there would be many more “days of active combat” per war.
To put it another way - modern battles more often resemble premodern seiges, only on a vast scale.
Iraq had the 3rd largest standing army in the world and it was sliced up in weeks. We defeated the government in power but the Iranians are dealing with a civil war due to the artificially drawn boundaries of the country.
Afghanistan suffers from a similar problem of ill-defined borders. Militarily, it was crushed early on.
So if we’ve won the wars there, why are we still fighting?
See, you can’t just define “we totally crushed their military” as “winning the war”. It doesn’t work that way. If we’re still fighting, we haven’t won the war yet. We’ll know whether we won the wars when we aren’t fighting anymore and Iraq and Afghanistan either devolve into chaos, or don’t.
We never really intended to “win” in Afghanistan; just to get it out of the way so we could attack Iraq. And our plan of “victory” in Iraq was doomed to failure because it was based on right wing delusions and not how people actually act. The Iraqis didn’t love us for laying waste to their nation, the magic of the Free Market didn’t turn it into a libertarian paradise, and we really didn’t have any plans on how to “win” beyond that. We wanted Imperialism on the cheap, and that doesn’t work.
Saddam’s regime was conquered and no longer threatens the region. His army is gone. What is left is a civil war. We are no longer fighting a war in Iraq. It is a peace-keeping function.
Afghanistan is similar in that the border does not define the people within. We are still actively hunting Al-qaida/Taliban in 2 countries.