By Franz-Stefan Gady
Our obsession with technology can pose problems in doing good analysis.
Building on my recent post on the myth of Chinese counter-intervention (“The One Article to Read on Chinese Naval Strategy in 2015”), I would like to make a larger point about the overall difficulty of trying to ascertain how future conflicts will be fought. The doyen of military history, Sir Michael Howard, once compared figuring out the precise shape of the next war to a ship being trapped in a “fog of peace,” which, as a consequence, has to navigate by dead reckoning:
You have the terra firma of the last war and are extrapolating from the experiences of that war. The greater the distance from the last war, the greater become the chances of error in this extrapolation….For the most part you have to sail on in a fog of peace until at the last moment. Then, probably when it is too late, the clouds lift and there is land immediately ahead….Then you find out…whether your calculations have been right or not.
In that sense, we should never forget that most of defense analysis, beyond the technical level, is often a guessing game. War alone can test how well a military force and its weapons will perform on the battlefield. Naval warfare analysis is especially problematic since we have very few cases of actual combat (e.g., the Falkland War) to draw lessons from in the last couple of decades. In turn, historical lessons themselves, however, are often problematic and can prohibit intelligence services from adequately assessing an opponents strengths due to past-induced cognitive biases. Of course, we can always draw certain conclusions based on our assessment of the size, equipment, training, morale, leadership and logistical support bases of a force, yet all of this is subject to the dialectical nature of war and relative to who the adversary is, and in what domain the enemy will be engaged.
Read the full story at The Diplomat