Stardate 20031113.1002

(On Screen): Steve Green writes:

War is a serious business. Total war, such as the WWI & II, is more serious still.

Total war means rationing. It means car factories switched over to tank and aircraft production, and everybody making do with the cars they bought before the war. It means cutting spending down to the bone, to pay for the war.

The term total war doesn't mean what Steve thinks it does. It doesn't refer to a maximal effort.

I've written in the past about how the industrial revolution totally changed war, and even changed what we think armies and navies look like. The American Civil War was the first industrial-age war, and in many ways it presaged the two world wars. It was fought about fifty years after the Napoleonic wars and about fifty years before the Great War, but overall it was much more like the latter than the former. The trenches of Petersburg were far more similar to the ones in WWI France than the ones used in the siege of Yorktown at the end of the American Revolution.

In preindustrial warfare, which reached its peak with Napoleon, maneuver and battlefield tactics were the predominant factors. But in industrial era warfare, logistics is the key to victory, and that's why interdiction is the most important tactic in industrial-era warfare, and the reason why the Battle of the Atlantic was the most important battle of WWII.

You can't fight with what you don't have, and you can't fight with what you do have if it's in the wrong place. Industrial-era warfare is large scale and high intensity, with huge field forces that consume mountains of supply and sustain immense casualties. Thus it is attrition warfare, and the key to victory in an all-out industrial war is to manage the attrition exchange rate so that your enemy runs out before you do. Runs out of men, or money, or oil, or steel, or ammunition, or anything else which is critical. And civilians are also critical.

In the industrial age, a field army is only as strong as the national industrial economy which stands behind it, and the transportation link which can move supplies from that national industry to where the soldiers are fighting. An industrial age military force which is out of supply is as helpless as a turtle on its back. If it has no ammunition then its guns are no more useful than clubs. If it has no fuel, it cannot move its trucks and tanks. If it has no food its soldiers will starve, for an industrial era military is far too large to support through "foraging" (looting).

So interdiction, which is to say attacks on enemy supply lines, is a critical tactic in industrial war because enemy supplies which don't reach the front don't do the enemy any good at all. If those supplies don't reach the enemy's military force, then you don't have to match them with your own supplies in attrition exchange. Destroying them is best, but if you can reduce enemy transportation that's nearly as good, because the supplies will pile up at home instead of reaching the front. That means that the enemy's railroads and sea freighters are valuable targets.

If you follow this concept to its logical conclusion, you realize that it means that the enemy's industrial base is a military asset and is no different from his tanks or ships. The ultimate interdiction is to destroy the enemy's means of producing supplies for his field army.

The enemy's industrial workers are combatants in the war, and are ultimately no different than soldiers and sailors. An enemy industrial worker who helps produce artillery shells is as much of a threat to you militarily as the artillerist who fires them at your troops.

And all of the enemy's civilians are military assets. They're the ones who pay the taxes which finance the enemy's field army.

Total war refers to the kinds of strategies used in the era of industrial war, which recognizes the reality that industrial war is not deadly conflict between field armies, but rather deadly conflict between the industrial and economic might of nations. Nothing is ever certain in war, but God tends to fight on the side with the biggest guns – or rather, with the biggest mountain of shells at the front waiting to be fired out of those guns. Field armies are the means by which the industrial might of nations contest, and part of the test is which army is larger and better supplied.

After the terrible devastation wrought in Europe during the 30 Years War, in which some areas were totally depopulated, the Europeans wrestled with the idea of making a distinction between enemy combatants and non-combatants. Combatants were, of course, fair game; but there was a rising acceptance of the idea that enemy non-combatants should not be targeted with deadly military force. You could conquer territory owned by the enemy, but you weren't supposed to slaughter the civilians living there, since they weren't really involved.

That distinction breaks down in industrial warfare, and total war is war in which everyone in the enemy's nation is treated as a combatant, whether they wear a uniform or not. Many armies in the industrial era use weapons and ammunition purchased from others; few nations are militarily self-sufficient. But when there's full-scale war (to the finish) between two nations each of which produces most of the supply required by its field army, then in the long run victory by one side will require destruction of the other side's industrial base. Industrial war made that kind of attack possible, and it also made it necessary.

It's theoretically possible to defeat an industrial nation without attacking its industrial capacity, but it's much more risky. The war will be longer, and your field army will pay a much higher price, and your chance of winning will be much lower. A prudent strategist will try to harm the enemy's industry as much as possible, because it makes every other aspect of fighting and winning that war easier.

Of course, it's nearly impossible to destroy the enemy's industrial might without killing civilians in huge numbers. It's impossible to starve the enemy's industry of critical supplies without also causing privation and misery in the enemy's civilian population. It's impossible to reduce the enemy's ability to move war matériel around without also reducing the enemy's ability to move food and medicine. When you fight a total war, you'll cause a lot of civilian deaths.

WWII is generally thought of as being the first total war and one way to gauge that is that far more civilians died than soldiers and sailors.

The Civil War included the first clear-cut examples of a deliberate strategic operations directly intended to eliminate major sources of supply to the other side. The best example of that was when Grant ordered Sheridan to assume command of a field force in the Shenandoah Valley. There was a Confederate force there, and certainly it was recognized that its destruction would be useful, but that wasn't Sheridan's primary mission.

The Shenandoah valley was tremendously fertile, and produced generous surpluses of food and horses which had helped keep the Confederates fighting. Sheridan was ordered to sweep the valley from one end to the other and to seize or destroy everything which could be used to produce such supplies. That didn't mean to slaughter all the farmers; they were to be spared unless they resisted. But it did mean killing or seizing draft animals, destroying farming implements and in general laying waste. And Sheridan did so, and it was one piece to the final puzzle of defeating the Confederacy and ending the rebellion.

Another piece was Union control of the entire length of the Mississippi River, interdicting supplies from Confederate regions west of there reaching the primary Confederate field forces. And Sherman's notorious "March to the Sea" was another example of the same kind of thing. Afterwards, a large part of Georgia was no longer able to contribute supply to the war.

Because of these Union victories, the Confederate field forces began to starve, and I mean that literally. When Lee met Grant at Appomattox Court House, one of the things he mentioned was that his men were hungry and had no food. Grant offered Lee a hundred thousand rations, which Lee accepted. It's dually noteworthy that Lee needed that food and that Grant could easily spare it; it shows that the Union had totally defeated the Confederacy logistically.

But in the Civil War, and even in the Great War, civilians were not targeted because they were thought to be military assets. Civilians have always been targets during sieges, as catapults tossed rocks or burning barrels of tar into besieged cities, not to mention carcasses of animals or corpses of men who had died of plague. In the American Civil War, Grant shelled Vicksburg during the siege.

And in the Great War after the stalemate, the Germans hoped to develop big guns which could shell Paris, and both sides used early multi-engine biplanes as strategic bombers against enemy cities. Germany even experimented with zeppelins. But in every case the goal was to induce demoralization; they were terror attacks intended to convince the enemy to give up. The military technology of the era didn't permit them to inflict more than token destruction in rear areas beyond the range of conventional artillery.

WWII didn't start out as total war. Industrial and technological progress had made it possible to build heavy bombers, but initially no one used them to try to deliberately destroy enemy cities. When there was bombing of civilian targets, it was still for purposes of demoralization. The doctrine of total war grew slowly, to some extent as a result of give-and-take by all combatants, with each going a bit further than the other had. During the Blitz, one German bomber got lost and released a load of bombs over London in direct violation of orders. The RAF then sent a single multi-plane bombing mission to Berlin, after which the Germans switched to sustained bombing of London and other major British cities (which decision lost them the Battle of Britain). But they were still thinking in terms of demoralization.

But as the number of planes available grew, with greater range and larger bomb loads, and the nature of the strategic problem in the war became more and more clear, mass bombing raids against enemy cities became less and less about affecting enemy morale and more and more about affecting enemy production and logistics. A city would be bombed not to cause the enemy to give up, but because a major factory was there.

By the end of the war, this had built in gradual stages to the point where it was considered not only acceptable but desirable to cause total destruction of huge areas with mass casualties, as demonstrated by such things as the firebombing of Dresden, even more destructive firebombing attacks on Tokyo, and the use of two nukes.

The firebombing attacks on Tokyo remain the most destructive military attacks in history, destroying a larger area and causing more deaths and other casualties even than the two atomic bombs.

Every major participant in WWII lost huge numbers of civilians except for the US, which was still at the time outside of the range of state-of-the-art delivery systems. That changed with the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile, for which no one was out of range.

And overall, far more civilians died in WWII than combatants.

The defining characteristic of total war is that the enemy's civilians are viewed as a military asset, and thus as a legitimate strategic target. The Cold War was a total war, but mercifully it remained cold, with isolated hotspots all over the world. That's why it took 50 years to win it, and that's why civilians didn't die in swarms. But if it had turned hot it would have ended very quickly, and upwards of a hundred million civilians would have been killed.

The "War on Terrorism" isn't as straightforward. For our enemies it's a total war; but we're not fighting it that way. One of the biggest reasons is that we don't have to.

Total War is a strategy and consequence of industrial age war, but not necessarily for information age war. Industrial wars are won through attrition, but information age warfare is the strategic equivalent of sniper fire: one bullet, one kill, and you take the most important guy down first. Information age bombing is precise and carefully planned and targeted to gain maximum effect using minimum force.

A pre-industrial military fighting against an industrial age military will be defeated because it will drown in a mountain of supplies, said mountain being delivered to the industrial age military and fired at the pre-industrial military. No amount of field maneuver will change that, because no matter where they maneuver, they eventually have to fight, and get drowned in machine gun and artillery fire. By the same token, an industrial age military which tries to fight a war of attrition against an information age military will find itself on the wrong side of a preposterous, and unsustainable, attrition exchange rate, taking massive losses without hurting its enemy at all.

And because of the ability of an information age military to call its shots, it doesn't need to target enemy civilians or even accept the necessity to kill them in huge numbers. The Lancaster and B-17 and B-24, among the greatest triumphs of industrial era military technology, made it possible for the RAF and 8th Air Force to make mass bombing attacks against German industrial complexes, but the only way they could hope to hit factories or rail yards was by dropping thousands of bombs and hoping a few of them got lucky. Almost all of the bombs which were dropped didn't hit what they were aimed at, and because factories were necessarily in or near urban areas, those that missed killed civilians. To put 20 bombs into a critical factory you might have to drop a thousand, with 980 hitting things other than the factory.

An information age military force that needs to put 20 bombs into a particular factory uses 20 bombs, and at least 19 of them will hit that factory.

That's why the wildly despairing predictions for civilian casualties before the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq were so inflated. In part it was propaganda, but in part it was because those making those predictions didn't realize just how much things had changed, and knew less about our military capability than they thought they did. Extrapolating from the 8th Air Force bombing of Germany and the B-52 strikes on VietNam, they assumed we'd have to carpet bomb Iraq's cities, resulting in tens of thousands of dead. (And often credited us with the evil intention of doing so even if we didn't have to.)

An information age military can target and kill civilians, and is better at it than any industrial age military. Usually it won't want to, for a number of reasons. First is the simple fact that it's inefficient. It's also risky; every attack carries some risk for the attacker.

Wars are (usually) fought to achieve political goals and the political situation has to be taken into account when considering strategy and tactics. Most of the time the political consequences of mass slaughter of enemy civilians are considered unacceptable if they can be avoided, and an information age military can indeed avoid it.

And there's also moral revulsion: few soldiers want to kill. They accept it as their duty, and will kill to accomplish the mission and support the political goals of their nation, but at least for American soldiers it's natural to not want to kill unnecessarily.

For all those reasons, we killed or wounded a remarkably small number of Afghan civilians during that battle.

But sometimes a low casualty rate is a direct strategic goal. That wasn't the case in Afghanistan but was in Iraq; the ideal outcome was that we won with no one at all dying. That wasn't achievable, but for a variety of reasons the lower the overall casualty rate for everyone involved, the more politically effective it would be.

The "War on Terrorism" is badly named, since the terrorists are only a part of the political situation which led to war and are a symptom of a deeper threat facing us. President Bush recently offered a succinct explanation of the real problem:

As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

He also correctly identified the real solution: we have to induce the region to reform and modernize. The primary reason for invading Iraq was to coercively impose reform there, as an example to the other people and nations in the region, as an example of what might happen to them if they don't reform, and second as an example of why reform is to their benefit.

But that means that part of our strategic goal was to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people themselves. It's not by any means certain we'll do that, but if we'd killed huge numbers of Iraqi non-combatants during the war it would have been much more difficult.

We had no need to slaughter Iraqis as direct military targets. Saddam's military power was all purchased, financed through oil revenues and massive loans; the Iraqi people were neither producers of war matériel nor taxpayers supporting Iraq's military force. The men in Saddam's army were conscripted by force. And information age militaries don't have to fight attrition war against enemy industrial might in any case.

But there are other political reasons why total war might become necessary. In theory, the enemy civilian population might become a target not because it is a military asset for the enemy, but because it is a direct strategic target. In certain extreme cases, the only way to win a war is through genocide.

Part of what we face is an implacable ideology, one rooted deeply in the past, one incompatible with the modern era, and one which finds our existence intolerable and wants us all dead. There are only two ways to defeat such an ideology: by convincing most of those who subscribe to it to change their minds, or by killing them.

If a man means to kill you, either you persuade him that he should not, or you kill him first, or you die. Sometimes you can get him locked up, but that only postpones the problem. By the same token, if an enemy political power is engaged in war with you with the goal of your destruction, you either persuade its supporters that they should not, or you kill those supporters, or you die. The international equivalent of imprisonment (diplomatic and economic sanctions) only postpones the problem.

We are engaged in a massive effort to destroy the ideology which threatens us by persuasion and coercion. We mean to eliminate the ideological threat by convincing the bulk of its supporters to abandon it. This is unprecedented and it is risky; we're on uncharted ground. To a great extent we're making this up as we go along, and that means we're making mistakes and learning-while-doing. We might not succeed.

If the experiment in Iraq fails, if we cut and run, and Iraq reverts to savagery, if reform efforts elsewhere in the mid-East falter and succumb to an extremist backlash, and if the governments in that region become more radical and unite against us, then all hope of reform in the region in the short run (20 years) would be gone. As time went on, those nations would certainly acquire (covertly or overtly, developed or purchased) more and better industrial age military capabilities, with range and striking power able to threaten us with catastrophic losses.

If our attempts to eliminate the threat through reform fail, then we face the decision to either kill them or let them kill us. It's worse than that: we would inevitably have to kill them. Once our cities begin to get nuked, we would respond massively, causing unprecedented devastation, resulting in a tragedy that it might take centuries for the world to recover from. Such attacks against us are inevitable based on the ideology that opposes us unless we surrender to it. If we refuse to surrender (and we aren't going to surrender), then the only decision we'd have would be whether we should kill huge numbers of them before or after they'd started killing huge numbers of us.

Whatever else you might have to say about genocide, the one thing everyone can agree on is that once completed it is conclusive and irrevocable. (But nearly everything else you will probably want to say about genocide is negative.) If you face an implacable foe who refuses to be dissuaded or deterred from trying to kill you, you must kill or die. At the level of nations, you must commit genocide or become a victim of genocide.

If we reach that terrible eventuality, where we must commit genocide or succumb to it, we would not rely on anything as clumsy as fleets of aircraft indiscriminately scattering bombs over enemy cities. For an information age military, it's still one bomb per target, only the targets would be cities and the bombs would be thermonuclear, and the destruction would be total.

No one wants it to come to that. That's why we must remain dedicated to fostering reform. It may be risky, and difficult, but it's still preferable to surrender, or committing genocide, or being the victims of genocide. The reason we're following the strategy we are is that it's the only way we can avoid defeat without resorting to total war.

Update 20031114: TMLutas comments.