Gwynne Dyer on conventional war

Jennifer Leonard: Is it true that the introduction of precision weapons has reduced the number of soldier deaths in war?
Gwynne Dyer: It’s true that the number of American soldier deaths has radically gone down. The number of soldiers on the other side has not. The whole thrust of American technological development in weaponry – conventional ground and air force weaponry – for at least fifty years, undisputedly, has been to spend virtually any amount of money to reduce American casualties. Americans actually now believe you can have wars with no casualties on their side – but, remember, this only works against technologically inferior opponents. America hasn’t fought any technologically equal opponents since 1945. The U.S. has had a long, easy run of it. The implications of all this technology would be very different if both sides were on a level playing field.

JL: Tell me about these so-called intelligent machines.
GD: The machines we’re talking about – these precision-guided weapons – are not intelligent in any kind of meaningful sense. They’re guided or self-guided. The jargon is "one-shot kill" capability. That is to say, in the First World War, you fired at least ten thousand bullets for every casualty. In the Second World War, you fired fifty to a hundred artillery rounds for every casualty you inflicted. Now, you fire one weapon and inflict a casualty – the casualty may well be a tank or an airplane, not just a person. The goal of all this stuff is to reduce the amount of weaponry you have to expend and kill the opponents. Of course, the weapons are so expensive that you’d better kill somebody with every one you fire; each round can cost anywhere from ten thousand to half a million dollars.

JL: What comes to mind when you hear the term "future warrior"?
GD: First of all, I’m not really keen on future warriors. I don’t think we need them. There is this fantasy that now that we’ve solved the military problem and, with these wonderful weapons, we can win a war without casualties. Yeah, sure you can, if you’re fighting three-generations-old technology or people who haven’t got weapons at all. But even then, you’d win the first battle and, afterwards, if you actually want to stay around and occupy the territory, you’re back in the old grim world where a roadside bomb is just as good as an Apache helicopter. High technology is great for defeating conventional military technology that is two or three generations out of date, but it doesn’t solve the political problem you came to solve. When and if the opposition drops down to guerrilla warfare or resists with terrorism, for example, high-tech weapons become useless.

JL: Why are we still spending so much money on weapons of mass destruction?
GD: You’re familiar with the concept of cultural lag? I think it’s pretty relevant here! I’ve been hanging around the military all my life and they’re smart people, but they are definitely wedded to their profession and the kind of wars that their profession has always fought. Conventional warfare between nuclear-armed countries has become redundant and ridiculous, however.

JL: What ever happened to Lester B. Pearson’s notion of peacekeeping?
GD: Peacekeeping in the full-blooded, very institutionalized Pearson sense of the word – he got the Nobel Prize for inventing it – was actually designed as a buffer zone during the Cold War. The idea was that, if you have conflicts you want to put on ice and you don’t want to have a Soviet-Western confrontation, then you freeze it with peacekeeping troops. This was what was done in Egypt in 1956, when the British and the French conspired with Israel to invade Egypt, and it got way out of control. They wondered, "How do we get out of this mess?" The answer was to put peacekeeping troops in there. And Canadians went. That really was Pearson’s contribution. After the Cold War, this concept was expanded into a more interventionist, humanitarian kind of operation. So nothing has happened to Pearson’s notion of peacekeeping. It continues to serve humanitarian functions today, as well as geo-political functions. A lot of it has now been sub-contracted to NATO.

JL: Is the European Union (EU) a good model for a peaceful future?
GD: I think it’s an excellent model for a peaceful future. But the thing that makes the Europeans so reasonable now is that they were so astoundingly unreasonable for a hundred years, and nearly exterminated themselves. Every city, basically, was bombed flat in Europe by 1945. A lesson has been learned, which has not been, mercifully, administered to the United States. So the Americans have a very different and, you might say, more naive view of what is achievable by way of war.

JL: Are you referring to President George W. Bush’s Pax Americana?
GD: Oh, yes. George W. Bush and the folks around him, the neo-cons, do have a very ambitious project. Pax Americana, based on the two-thousand-year-old Pax Romana, is essentially arrogant, but well meant. If you go in and look at the details, there is the intention to make a profit on this too, but the notion that we do what Rome did and extend our authority over the planet because we have the power – and, look, you can bring peace to the world by this – is at least partly well meant.

JL: What is the fate of the UN after the most recent events in Iraq?
GD: Pax Americana requires the destruction of the UN. That is the long and the short of it because the principles are opposed. The UN’s founding principle is that war is now illegal. You cannot attack another country. The Pax Americana project’s core rule is that the United States will decide what countries are dangerous and will take them down, unilaterally, without consultation, and without help, if necessary. It will be judge, jury, and executioner. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. The invasion of Iraq was illegal by UN rules. It was compulsory under Pax Americana.
But Pax Americana is going to fail. It’s as certain to fail as the Islamist project is going to fail. These projects both come very much from the margins of their respective societies. Pax Americana is not a mass movement. Invading Iraq was the launch vehicle for Pax Americana, in a sense. That’s what Iraq was really about, behind the facade about weapons of mass destruction or links with terrorists or all that other nonsense, which has now been blown away.

JL: What are the alternatives to war?
GD: The institution of war is older than civilization but, in a recognizable sense, it’s probably six thousand years old. It made a certain amount of sense when the only real source of wealth was land – of which there is a limited supply. But land is not really a source of any nation’s wealth anymore. The whole economy has moved beyond that. Wealth now derives mostly from industry and innovation and intellectual property, which can only be destroyed by war.
There will always be disputes, as long as there are human beings, but there are very few disputes that you would rationally choose to solve by war anymore. Over time, new institutions and relationships will evolve that undercut the whole nation-state model, which is the framework within which war occurs. We need the UN right now because we are still in the nation-state model, and it’s an attempt to keep us from blowing ourselves to kingdom come before evolution carries us further on. I cannot tell you what in 2073 the prevailing model is going to be, but there will certainly be large traces of the present model, in conjunction with new elements and relationships, as the old, exclusive ideas of national identity slowly erode and we become ever more interconnected on a global scale.

Gwynne Dyer is a London–based journalist and military historian.