This is something I’ve wondered over the last few years, and recent developments with ISIS and western nations (and other participants) have got me thinking about it more. Do you think that in the near future (eg 20 or 30 years) historians will look back and say that we have been involved in a world war and that it started on Sep 11, 2001?
With the technology that has existed over the last few decades, removing the need for thousand-bomber raid scenarios; and the rise of asymmetric warfare over a similar time; a world war could take place but look nothing like a conventional impression of one (back in my day we thought of WW III being a big, spectacular confrontation between the Soviet Union and the west).
Mods, feel free to move this to a more appropriate forum.
Not a bad theory, although the “War on Terror” has not led to the kind of full-scale national mobilizations and total warfare that characterized the first and second. The fact that it is largely being waged against non-state actors also might keep it out of contention for the title “WWIII.”
I think you captured something that I wasn’t quite able to elucidate, E.H… I guess I would add “notwithstanding a lack of full scale national mobilizations” and assuming a number of somewhat unknown actions involving special operations forces, private security contractors perhaps, as well as more conventional battles and airstrikes etc. So I’m assuming that if this was considered a world war, it would be a very unusual (compared to our numerous two previous ones) one.
I do wonder about a non-nuclear WWIII that doesn’t happen in Europe. Something involving China, the U.S, India, something like that. Would it be called WWIII, or something more specific to the region? I can see the plebs calling it WWIII, but the news media and governments downplaying it and coming up with some other term for it.
I’d imagine that from now on, most wars probably will involve non-state actors on at least one side. Armed clashes between two nations are just so 20th century.
WWI killed 16 million, and WWII between 50 and 85 million. Unless the fatalities got up into the tens of millions, with widespread devastation of cities and drastic effects on the economies of major world powers, there would be no comparison.
What’s been going on since 9/11 is more like the Cold War, with a series of widely scattered and relatively small-scale conflicts going on in many different areas. The difference is that there aren’t two monolithic blocs battling it out with proxies. Instead the war is between western powers and a very diffuse and relatively uncoordinated non-state actors.
We’ve been fighting the Petroleum Wars for almost half a century. Eventually the oil will run out and the strategic importance of the Middle East will decline and the proxy wars and jockeying for power in that part of the world will fade away.
No, historians will have a perspective on this issue that the majority of people living today lack, that everything bad happening in the world today is the tiniest of brush fires compared to the real struggle and adversity that constituted the world wars.
9/11, the day that changed everything, the most horrible thing ever to happen to anyone ever!!! would’ve been the most pleasant day, by a mile, on either the entirety of the Western Front in WW1 or the Eastern Front in WW2, if that’s the worst that happened to them that day. There were many times where all of the countries involved in those wars lost the same amount of people as in 9/11 over and over again in minutes, sometimes perhaps even seconds.
The entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns would amount to some colonial skirmishes on the scale of WW1 or WW2 - so minor that we wouldn’t even cover them in something like a history channel documentary.
It’s only living in the safest, most peaceful, most prosperous times in history that has distorted the perspective of modern westerners that they compare their minor problems to those in the past who faced existential threats and required sacrifices that were orders of magnitude greater. With some academic and historical detachment to the events, they will not register as a blip on the historical radar compared to real conflicts and adversities like the world wars.
Except it’s not just a matter of casualties. It was a realization that the military was completely unprepared to deal with conflicts of such tiny scales and diverse locations. The woeld has become so fast moving and porous that “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here” has become largely irrelevant.
And IMO we still haven’t taken that lesson fully to heart.
In some ways this reminds me of WWI, when suddenly zeppelins began floating across the English Channel and dropping bombs on London. There was very little damage, and none at all that affected Britain’s military capabilities, except for the fact the the public and Parliament went nuts and the RAF was forced to divert a great deal of air power to protect against it.
I’d think to really get the moniker “World War III” it would have to involve most, if not all of the industrialized nations in a serious fashion, not just via cash and limited material support. I don’t really include African or S. American nations because their industrial, warfighting and/or logistical support capabilities are relatively negligible, outside of naval bases.
Where the actual fighting happens is secondary.
And yeah; had something like 9/11 happened during WWII, people would have been upset for a bit, cleaned it up, and gone on about the business of kicking Axis ass. Had it happened anywhere else besides the US, it might not have even been notable that 3000 people were killed in a single bombing- the Germans and Japanese routinely lost more civilians than that in single day/night bombing raids, and the British lost 40,000 civilians during the Blitz- 5000 per month, although spread across the entire nation.
It’s a matter of perspective- people bitch and whine about the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan… as if 6700 dead in the course of 2 relatively intense insurgency-type wars over a 13 year span is anything other than a mind-bogglingly astoundingly tiny number of killed. By way of comparison, the Russians lost 13,500 in their time in Afghanistan, and the US lost 58,000 in Vietnam. In WWII battle terms, that’s 1/3 the total number of US killed during the 1.5 month Battle of the Bulge, twice the number killed on Omaha Beach in a single morning, and a little less than the total number killed on Iwo Jima in about 2 months.
I do not think the vast majority of sheeple in the west realize how good we got it now, compared to the carnage of WW 1 and 2. I am speaking in a sense of loss due to war.
However with that said we are in a long, long fight with the extremists that will be multiple generations long. I see no end to this with the current political situation in the west. Will this rise to be consider WW3 remains a good question.
I would say that the current war on terror and Mideast instability is either not WW anything or else it is WW IV. If your definition is liberal enough to include terrorist acts, internal rebellion and target bombings as a World War, then I would argue that it should be liberal enough to include the proxie wars, arms race and saber rattling of the cold war as WW III.
There is a similar argument that the Napoleonic Wars could be considered the first ‘World War’, so that would make the current military actions World War V, or perhaps only World War IV if you accept the premise that World Wars I and II were really just one big war with a 20 year breather and build-up in between.
Al Q attacked the Homeland on 9-11, and we pretty much dealt with that in the first couple weeks fighting in Afghanistan. The rest of the time, all these years, nobody we’ve been fighting is actually at war with us. A few ignorant 3rd world savages have tried and failed to blow up an airplane. The underwear bomber boiling his cock and balls was pretty comical, the chemical reaction he started in his crotch to precipitate explosive crystals generates a lot of heat. A thinking man would have dumped it all in the bathroom sink and blown the tail off the jet. It can’t be WW3 because we don’t actually have an opponent. The Muslims are fighting each other. The ISIL boys are worse than the Saudis but not by much, just more public about it, and control of the Holy Sites has got to be their true goal if they are the Caliphate. Let em all duke it out, I’d like to see if Saudis can run as fast as Iraqis. What a sorry lot of fools over there.
Not precisely addressing the question that was asked, but I’ve been wondering recently what the odds are that between now and the end of time, a full-sized aircraft carrier will be sunk in combat. They’re something that only very rich first world countries own, and, for the most part, only a fairly advanced country could destroy. Plus, at some point in the future they’ll presumably be rendered obsolete and fade out of use so there’s not an infinite window in which this could happen…
While it is certainly possible for historians of the future to suggest such a thing, isn’t it just as likely it could be swept under the rug and downplayed? I think it depends on how other wars in the future are fought. Will it be more of the same or will it be wars the likes of which we’ve never seen before?