The Art of War and Peace: From Ethiopia to Ukraine, what's changed, endured

Business Standard

2 days ago

The book contains analytical accounts of the 20-year Afghan War, which ended with ignominious withdrawal of US and Western military forces & with the Taliban gaining control over the entire country
Shyam Saran
The Art of War and Peace: The Changing Face of 21st-Century Warfare
by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills
Published by Harper Collins
336 pages ₹699 David Kilcullen and Greg Mills, authors of The Art of War and Peace, have been in the business of studying armed conflicts around the world, looking for common patterns but also specificities, and exploring whether there are larger lessons to be learnt. Their book contains analytical accounts of the 20-year Afghan War, which ended with the ignominious withdrawal of the United States and Western military forces, and with the Taliban gaining control over the entire country. They cover the civil conflict in Ethiopia, unprecedented for its bloodletting and extreme cruelty. And then there is a study of the ongoing Ukraine War. Sympathy for the Ukrainians does not prevent the authors from recognising the immense odds that Ukraine is up against. There are studies of other wars of different scales and a focus on what their drivers may be and why the end of hostilities may not always lead to peace.
When writing about the art of war and peace, the authors present a useful analytical framework. We need to distinguish among grand strategies, which are directed towards achieving national level goals at the global or regional level. There is military strategy, which concerns the use of military instruments to achieve war aims. The next level is operational or the orchestrating/sequencing of multiple military engagements across time and space to achieve strategic objectives. And, finally, there is the tactical level at which military operations at the field level must be designed to defeat the enemy in combat. This framework enables a much more coherent analysis of war. It also underlines the need for political and military leadership to have clarity on objectives, the assets available for deployment and a clear path towards exit, even though peace may be no more than cessation of hostilities. The pursuit of peace, however, is much more complex and not easily thought through in neat theoretical categories. And this comes clearly through in the treatment of various conflicts in the book.
The Afghan War is the only one among the three studied, which has ended on a note of finality. There is no contestation against its rule, however obscurantist the Taliban regime may be. But the Taliban's unexpected and comprehensive victory has had geopolitical consequences much like the US defeat in Vietnam in 1975 did. The authors argue, and one may agree, that the US cutting and running from Afghanistan may have triggered the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China's escalation of its military pressure on Taiwan. US credibility being severely damaged, both Russia and China have assertively expanded their influence. Donald Trump is a bonus.
The Ethiopian civil war has been a classic ethnic conflict in which an influential and relatively successful minority (the Tigray) invited the ire of the more numerous ethnic communities. A retreat into their own ethnic stronghold of Tigray in the north, invited a full-scale and bloody invasion by the national army. What sealed the fate of the Tigryans was the entry of the Eritrean Army in support of the Ethiopian forces from the north, thus catching the Tigryans in a deadly pincer. The war has ended with a ceasefire, but the scars from the conflict will fester. There is a sense of a temporary halt to the hostilities but not the restoration of peace and the necessary exploration of a political dispensation more suited to a multi-ethnic country.
The war in Ukraine is still on but there is a power mis-match that cannot be overcome without a level of military and economic support, which seems beyond the tolerance level of its Western sponsors. The power asymmetry favours Russia even though Ukraine has changed the nature of warfare through its use of cheap drones and missiles, which are inflicting heavy damage on Russian forces. Not that the Russians are not quickly learning and adapting as the war goes on, and this too is a race in which Ukraine cannot stay engaged for the longer term. Size matters in war, economic capabilities count. While there is admiration over Ukraine's staying power, Volodymyr Zelensky's leadership and the technological innovativeness from which even the rest of the world is learning, there is pessimism about its ultimate fate in the war.
What are the lessons from the recent wars? What has changed and what remains valid in matters of war and peace? The authors stress that the quality of leadership remains the key factor both in fighting a successful war and in delivering peace. There must be an awareness of how technological advancement is altering the nature of warfare, where out-of-sight lethality is increasing in evidence. We have witnessed that in Operation Sindoor. The balance between defence and attack has changed, with cheaper but more nimble systems able to deliver asymmetric advantages. Finally, the authors stress the role of narrative building through social media in war fighting and equally how countries may get trapped in self-serving narratives that interfere with peace-making. This is an informative book that will appeal to strategic analysts and commentators. But ultimately it appears that the age-old qualities of leadership, of prudence and deliberation, still count for something.