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War is coming. Every commander-in-chief, active or retired, from every country, even China, has confirmed it was their current scenario. The invasion of Ukraine tipped over 10 years of wobbly international relations. It made the impossible possible again. Mutually Assured Destruction is an actual potential scenario, as demonstrated since 2 years.
Even if it is not a “hot” war, with artillery exchanges and missiles criss-crossing the skies, the Mexican standoff between a triangle of superpowers is enough to trigger a complete shake-up of our defences. We have all started to switch desert camouflages to woodland–winters. We stack shells, dig trenches, and re-occupy the forward positions abandoned during the 90s.
Something else is about to change too. Active defence over the last 2 decades has been a military-only affair. But conflicts between peer powers cannot be fought at arms’ length through proxies, special operations teams and drones. To man trenches, operate tanks and shoot artillery, you need numbers.
And to get the numbers, you need the active participation of your citizens.
Just when most countries citizens do not seem ready to join up, fight and die – confirmed by poll after poll, by posts after posts. Of course, this is declarative only. Maybe we will fight for our country when it comes down to it. But, strikingly, even in the most engaged countries – which happen to be as well the most familiar with violence – a third of the people would not fight. The figures for the West are just jaw-dropping: 47% of the British, 54% of the Germans would not fight. Only 16% of the Dutch would fight.
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There is something natural, even reassuring, to a strong pacifist sentiment. It is logical, human and humanitarian. Pacifist sentiment will always be there, even during the most divisive eras: long before Greta Thunberg sailed to address the UN, Henry Ford took a boat to Europe in 1915 to try and stop the war. And, after all, some of the earliest North American colonists were also trying to escape enrolment in European wars.
But war, hot or cold, won’t just go away. The 70s peaceniks did not win the Cold War. An unsustainable balance of standing armies did.
So, where do we stand and what to do to prepare for the coming wars?
Armies today. What about enlistment?
War needs bodies.
Until war is waged by competing robot AIs, you need troops to man your bunkers, shoot your guns, drive your tanks and fly your planes. You cannot do that with the current numbers. France has one of the biggest standing armies in Western Europe. It can current defend only 80 kilometres of its borders…
A smaller recruitment base
Whether it is France, Belgium, Japan, or even China, everyone struggles to even meet the recruitment targets for military careers. The problem is accelerating, regardless of the material efforts made around pay and conditions. The shortfall is stark. The UK alone sees 30% declines in regular recruitment forces. These are not idle thoughts. Even highly motivated forces such as Israel Tsahal miss numbers.
Some of the reasons for the shortfall in recruitment are political and cultural. Mostly though, the recruitment problems are mechanical and rational, as highlighted recently by an American Colonel in Time Magazine:
“Put directly, less young Americans are eligible to serve than in the past, due to changing demographics, education performance, and especially health (weight, behavioral health, and other medical conditions). Only 23% of American youth fully meet the Army’s eligibility requirements, compared to 29% in the previous years.”
In addition, there is the mechanical effect of an aging society, which hits most of the world.
So, a smaller initial pool, a smaller volunteer pool.
You simply cannot rely purely on enthusiasm then to fill the numbers. Even when there is an immediate, pressing need for volunteers – such as a war hotting up – you will just go faster through your initial volunteer lake. However enthusiastic the volunteer pool was, it will dry up fast as we saw in Ukraine.
Coercion is unsustainable
There are centuries-old solutions, such as the penal battalions used by Russia, or door-to-door visits by the military police in Ukraine. Coercion indeed is nothing new, however appalling it may seem in an Anglo-Saxon context. France had the penal Bataillons d’Afrique made famous in songs and texts.
Coercion can only ever be patches, however exotic. They are good for striking images, like the head of Wagner recruiting in gulags.
But nothing will replace having a core minimum of acceptance to join up.
The image of the military is alien, but solid
It may be unfamiliar to many, exotic even, but the underlying image of the military is strong, regardless of generation. You can easily see that in the fact that recruitment for elite forces around the world are oversubscribed: only 1 in 8 candidates are selected for the Foreign Legion. The Marines, Para-Commandos and Special Forces, all have to reject candidates.
So, if the “regular army” is missing 20 or 30% personnel, it is not because of a hard-wired anti-military culture.
Time and again, the argument is made of the supposed frailty of Millennials, Gen Z and tomorrow’s Alpha. The fact that these special corps are as over-subscribed today as they were yesterday says something. It is not a question of mentality, but of circumstances. And although the Legion is still over-subscribed, even they are faced with a dwindling attraction.
Efforts to attract the numbers
The renewed interest in all-things-army is globally present in the news, TV documentaries (just check Netflix), and now even TV shows. Many countries have been running “military survival” shows. Take SAS: Who Dares Wins or Kamp Waes. The intent is not even hidden, as the Special Forces themselves are often populating, or at least helping to design the episodes.
Speaking today’s language
While the military language and visuals don’t change, a clear effort is made to reach out to the public. There exists YouTube outreaches in the form of PE close-combat tutorials, with high quality presentations. All of this, Netflix, YouTube, mainstream TV programs, creates a common language.
More than combat roles, weapons or techniques, these shows are crucial in demystifying the military, making it less of the alien planet it has become over the past 20 years. The military is not anymore these strange people fighting over there, in exotic places on the other side of the planet.
Talking about these TV programs with people around me, made me realise how far the military reality appears to most. The common reaction I got from 100% on my observation sample is “It cannot be real!” “It is surely exaggerated!” By design, it cannot be exaggerated. The target is not to recruit everyone tomorrow for spec ops, or make people think that they stand a chance to join, or even qualify, for these elite forces. These shows create the conditions for it to look, feel and sound familiar to a public, which has mostly not been in contact with anything military for the past 30 years – except in museums and movies.
It remains a two way street
When RAND researched who joined the professional US Army, why they joined and what was the level of satisfaction of the recruits, a few elements stood out that would apply as well to any conscript or volunteer force to be led by the military. The answers quoted directly the fact that for many potential candidates, they had to take care of their kids, as a single parent. Or the issue of not being able to smoke marijuana.
As much as accepting women in its ranks, embracing the wider cultural shifts within their root society will also be a challenge for some armies – beyond TikTok videos and meme recruitment.
For example, it may seem gimmicky for the Japanese forces to accept longer hair than the ancestral crewcut to ease up recruitment, but it goes beyond this. Accepting beards in the military around the world happily meshed male Afghan social codes and hipsters. It was probably not a planned move, but it certainly did not hurt. Hair-code, nicer hairstyles for women volunteers, this is a last mile argument.
It needs to be done.
Military representation versus reality
There is a chasm between the military and civilian experiences. This fact was recently illustrated staringly to me during a French radio program. The main presenter of the nr1 French radio program suddenly realised, during a live caller interview, that French military personnel recently wounded were listening to the show. He never realised that. As if they belonged to some History museum, not today’s reality.
War is not Call of Duty
The early XXIth century was one of foreign low intensity wars. This was irksome, and some great initiatives like the Invictus Games tried to bridge the gap. But as we rebuild our armies, it is now a pressing to close that chasm.
As we saw in the early stages of the Ukraine war, even self-styled special ops forces will not have significant impact on the actual war. The self-styled spec ops armies of 2010 are inadequate to a peer-to-peer war. This was demonstrated in the most dramatic way by the annihilation of the Chechen “special forces”, after they recorded at length their arrival on social media.
The audience must be informed and practically involved about what the military really is. Today.
Everyone is in the frontline
We have a basic cultural memory of war as a fight between two lines of warriors charging at each other, Gladiator style. That is the most ancient tribal warfare we can think of, and it remains the underlying layer of how we look at it. Or we have a vague recollections of war WWII movies. Cities bombed, sirens. Tanks. Or more recently Black Hawk Down maybe, Afghanistan movies: quick, intense raids and back home. Or we see the social media captures in Ukraine.
The common trait to all of these, is that there is a space for war and another for non-war. Activities of war and activities of non-war.
Not in tomorrow’s peer-to-peer war.
Drones will be hovering everywhere, our phones will give away our positions, what we do and where, regardless of whether we are actually combatants. Maybe google maps will give away the highest population concentrations for a more effective missile strike. This is probably how the Ukrainian decapitated the Russian army mid-2022.
Targets will not be, cannot be, only military hardware or soldiers. The “front” simply won’t exist.
Who will be the combatants?
Conscription ended up in the 1990s with the exhausted image passed down generations from the creation of national armies for “total war” in the XIXth century. Back then, everyone had a duty to be “patriotic”. So, basic military conditions could be, at best, rough and ready. The objective – accepted by the population – was to build-up and maintain a mass of bodies to throw at the invaders, with some variations of styles, uniforms and tactics. After the professional troops would hold the line for the first few weeks, eventually, survivors would build up experience and learn the trade of war. That is the scheme that was repeated time and again over the last 2 centuries.
War tomorrow will be different.
As Russia showed, with today’s weapons, throwing on the line a lot of bodies will just create an unnecessary meatgrinder.
And what defines a soldier, a civilian, a non-combatant? When each country could chose uniforms like a football team – red coats vs blue coats – it was somewhat easier to define. Today, 10 years on, we still struggle to close the cases of the women who travelled to Syria to become ISIS brides. Combatants and civilians. Some fight, some don’t. It is clear that, even though we like to think that “civilian” is an absolute, the actual UN definition is anything but.
What I will be doing in the next war: Support
If there is hardly any rear or frontline today, it also means that the role of soldiers have changed over the last decade.
9 soldiers out of 10 are in support roles of the frontline.
It means that the usual argument “you might be ready to die, but would you be ready to kill”, falls nearly by itself. You are likely to do the dying, unlikely to do the killing.
Peer-to-peer war won’t be like in WWII. Tooth-to-tail, as the jargon goes, was low in Antiquity: soldiers carried their shield, weapons, food. The “war” was a handful of decisive engagements (e.g. the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Salamis…) and the army essentially a shield wall. Regardless of technical progress, that form of war is what we kept in mind. This is now totally obsolete.
War will not even look like the Napoleonic armies with a logistical train of followers, the American Civil War, or even WWI. By now, the complexity of war machines and surveillance systems means that the largest part of the army is NOT involved in shooting.
War-as-it-would-be-today should be better communicated
Speaking today’s language is also a two way street. If you address the Call of Duty crowd, they will expect some kind of tactical SWAT training, which is obviously the more spectacular scenes that make their way to Insta or TikTok, from Bakmuth or Gaza.
Frontline action is the exception in the role.
The primary job will not be to flashbang a room, heroically posturing, assault rifle on the hip. But rather ensuring that the right shells reach the right gun at the right time. This will definitely require some readjustment as the military ads remain hell bent on the mystique. The “ancestor worship”.
In today’s world, where Tuesday last week is ancient history, this can only feel off-trend for the vast majority of the audience.
And once the realities and language are aligned, then what?
Ready to join? Maybe. Ready to die? Hmmm, no thanks
Whether through research, polls or social media, it seems that the majority of adequately aged generation would not fight for their country. Not fighting for their country means not being convinced to join, but possibly also not wanting to die nor kill for the cause.
Just google the topic and the Guardian debate will pop up: the pretty direct question about dying for your country is characteristically re-routed toward the immorality of killing. Sure, this “discussion” was held in 2000, and if happening post-9/11, post-ISIS, Charlie, Taliban, Ukraine, Gaza, Mali, the core answer would be different. Actually, once the outrage died, there was pretty much a return to form.
Why me? To which the answer should be: Who else?
International structures deter from personal involvement
Surely, we have all of these institutions and people who will “do” it. The current International order certainly deters from personal involvement.
The International system is unlikely to suddenly wake up from its contented torpor, except to ask for more money, build up its clientele further, express outrage on-trend, or solve malaria (again). After all, these are the people who asked us to pay for 30,000 employees at the UNRWA to “solve” the Arab-Israeli conflict since 70 years. 30,000 people. It is 3 times the size of the Belgian Army. A quarter of the British Army.
International relations are approached as a sacrificial mission. Killing is bad, death penalty is bad, war is bad, nothing much we can do about it though. So, let’s stick to delivering food and toy parcels. You guys keep dying, we will be suitably outraged and organise an International Day in your memory.
That is the example set for personal engagement: just sacrificial.
So why would I join, especially since I have poor mental health, I may have children one day and I have a bad back. Why don’t you go and find some NGO to fight the good fight?
And this is how we slowly slid back into something that we thought gone since the Renaissance: mercenaries.
Outsourcing world peace to Mercenaries
Go find someone else to fight? No issues. There are people who would get paid for that.
The ubiquitous security company G4S has the biggest private army in the world, with more than 800,000 “employees” to date.
China has 2.2 millions active military, India 1.5m, Russia and the US 1.3m. Crucially, G4S is active in 85 countries. Anyone else? They release a much-awaited “global security” report each year, in a kind of parallel world order. If you think you never encountered them, G4S is present around the globe as office guards, building security, luggage screening, some passport controls, … An outsourced para-legal enforcement agency.
G4S is the modern, polite, face of an older form of outsourced security. Athens used Scythian slaves as outsourced police. The Emperor of Istanbul – formerly known as Constantinople – used Varangian (Viking) bodyguards as a source of neutral protection.
And that leads us to Wagner, today.
The UN did react to the widespread use of mercenaries. In 2021, it issued a strongly worded report. Shockingly, it seems to have had no effect: Wagner continues to healthily spread across Africa.
Business has boomed for the past 20 years for private armies.
We turned a blind eye to our borders being managed by outsourced security, so why not expect them to crew our bunkers and drive our tanks?
Because this is not possible anymore in the coming peer-to-peer war.
The moment the war has more than limited spatial and temporal objectives, out go the condottiere, in comes loyal mass armies through necessity. We could chose to deny it, avoid it, refuse it. It may actually be against our value system. But especially if we believe in the ideas and values laid out in 1945, after the last peer-to-peer war, we need to be seen ready to stand up and defend them.
Citizens visibly ready to join, die and kill for these principles are the only true deterrence today.
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