Can 21st Century Military Technology Win in Guerilla and Irregular Wars?

In October of 2001, less than a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, the attack on the Pentagon and the air crash in Pennsylvania, the United States led a coalition of countries in an invasion of Afghanistan. Yesterday at midnight, the American military completed its withdrawal from that country having accomplished almost nothing other than contributing to the deaths of more than 150,000 Afghanis, and almost 6,300 U.S. soldiers and military contractors. In the process, the U.S. has expended almost $2 trillion and can show nothing for it. Even the target of American vitriol, Al Qaeda, still thrives despite the death of Osama bin Laden.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has engaged in a conflict with nothing to show for it. Since World War Two, when America’s industrial might gave it unsurpassed capacity to fight wars, and since the dawning of the Atomic Age, the country has been denied a viable military victory other than the first Iraq war. I’m referencing Korea which ended in a cold war truce, Vietnam which ended in a rout, Iraq which ended up creating a failed and deeply divided state, and now Afghanistan. Is this because industrial might and technology cannot stand the tests these types of wars create?

In the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Alex Roland writes, “However much technology may change warfare, it never determines warfare—neither how it will be conducted nor how it will turn out. Technology presides in warfare, but it does not rule.” That says it all.

Military historians tell us that the technology, tactics and leadership of armies are always fighting the last war and not understanding the conflict at hand. In World War Two, the Allies prevailed because of both industrial and resource capacity as well as weaponry. The atom bomb proved to be the penultimate weapon even when the losers had technological prowess with guided missiles and jet aircraft. But in both Korea and Vietnam, what worked in World War Two didn’t produce the same outcome, a victory. In both cases, the results were far from it: inconclusive in the first and an outright failure in the second. Nor did the changes made by the military learned from those previous two conflicts prove to be enduring in fighting the next series of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So although one might think that the side that most technologically advanced always wins out in the end, it turns out not to be true, which puts America’s trust in its industrial might and technological superiority as a guarantor of its ultimate military supremacy. Although the military-industrial complex and institutions like DARPA have held sway, in the end, the technology hasn’t made America’s military or its politicians any more sensitive to the culture, history, and geography of the places where they ultimately deploy armies. What the systematic, institutionalized innovation has contributed to is what can only be described as a false sense of security, an illusion because war is more than about material advantage. Modern generals forget this when fighting an enemy whose language, culture, and history they don’t know or try to understand. And that’s why guerilla and irregular forces supplied even with the most basic weapons can succeed against a vastly superior technological rival. The spending of billions if not trillions of dollars does not level the playing field in these faraway places.

But if technology and science were to be deployed to understand the history, the culture and the reasons these societies ultimately resist and reject American values and solutions, then maybe it could provide a decisive advantage. But, that’s hard for even artificial intelligence to do let alone the human version. Then add distance, the cost in lives and material, and the long-term commitments in these wars, and you have all the ingredients to produce military failures such as we have witnessed in the past few decades.