Yesterday’s, Today’s, and Tomorrow’s Small Wars
For two decades, Small Wars Journal (SWJ) has curated and enriched the exchange of ideas on warfare below the threshold of large-scale combat operations. Many of these were popular, hotly debated topics, but editors also regarded explorations of undervalued events and themes packed with import for scholars and practitioners. The journal has been and is distinctive for its willingness to wade into nuanced, complex, and dynamic discourses on unglamourous small wars that form the bedrock of modern conflict.
Small wars are far more common than large-scale combat operations. Indeed, they are the venue where great powers clash while carefully avoiding crossing the threshold into total war. They are also more diverse, and therefore harder to study systematically. We agree with SWJ’s animus that, for better or worse, regardless of how difficult or distasteful, small wars are an enduring feature of modern politics. The United States (US) and its allies must be prepared to fight and win them just as much as major theater war. This held true during the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it holds true now as leaders shift focus to great power competition. All along, SWJ has refused to look away from these constant currents that lie barely beneath the surface of what has been securitized and deemed salient.
War is Nuanced
Encompassing a hefty portion of the continuum of competition and conflict, studying small wars is no small task. We commend SWJ for spotlighting this less sensational segment of the spectrum of war. Even more, however, the journal’s most inspiring contribution has been to dimensionalize small wars and bring attention to their breadth and depth across the various analytical frameworks employed to ensure all elements of national power receive proportionate consideration (DIMEFIL – diplomacy, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, law enforcement; PMESII – political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure; ASCOPE – areas, structures, capabilities, organizations, people, events; etc.).
The hard work for leaders, decision-makers, scholars, and practitioners is in parsing those details, scoping the scale, and mapping the connections and cross-pressures that span them.
The United States’ relationship with the Republic of the Philippines offers a successful example of a dynamic, mutually beneficial, whole-of-government approach to security. After the Second World War, the US built bases and permanently assigned naval and air forces in the island nation. The US was a major contributor of funds, training, and equipment to help defeat the communist Huk Rebellion. In 1951, the Philippines and the United States signed a mutual defense treaty that is still in force today. During the Cold War, the Philippines’ strategic position in the South China Sea made it a critical base for naval and air forces seeking to contain Soviet and Chinese communist influence.
While the political and economic relationship between the two nations was not always squeaky clean, the US has invested billions of dollars over seven decades to support Filipino agriculture, education, public health, economic development, and governance. Between 2002 and 2014, the US supported the government of the Philippines’ efforts to neutralize the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah. The relationship continues as the US helps the Philippines defend itself from Chinese bullying and incursions into Filipino territorial waters in the South China Sea. That China pays agitated attention to this alliance indicates it is working. All of this is strategic, long-term, and vital. None of it is spectacular, large-scale, or existential. It is the before, during, and after of omnipresent small wars.
Writing from the vantage point as leaders of Project Air and Space Power for the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI), we take a similar approach. Our team’s vectors for exploration focus on the same diverse scale of air and space power, trust and capacity building to foster resilience for small wars, and also gray zone activities that simultaneously release and stoke near-peer pressures. Each category has its own logic and attributes, yet also has connections to and impacts on other actions along the spectrum of competition and conflict. To succeed in small wars, leaders must grasp the devilish details as well as the extensive scale, understanding how local or tactical issues reverberate up while strategic strokes trickle down.
The hard work for leaders, decision-makers, scholars, and practitioners is in parsing those details, scoping the scale, and mapping the connections and cross-pressures that span them. Thus, the beauty of outlets like SWJ. Here, the debate continues, issues are explored, and when enlightened leaders choose to pay attention, divergent and innovative concepts are put forward without the corporate hobbles that restrict creativity and deter professional dissent.
War is Complex
SWJ’s mission statement explains that “small wars involve a wide spectrum of specialized tactical, technical, social, and cultural skills and expertise, requiring great ingenuity from…a broad community of practitioners.” Surveying and analyzing each category and their confluences is a Herculean task, but SWJ intentionally and boldly engages the complexity and rewards the kind of cleverness and cross-functional collaboration that success in small wars requires.
Since humans first sought to use mechanical means to overcome the strictures of gravity, airmen and air forces have neglected the complexity of airpower to focus on complication. Complicated challenges present a cause-and-effect relationship that can usually be solved through scientific or mechanical analyses. Complex systems are human-centric, though, typically do not have clearly defined end-states, and feature relationships and factors that express differently across contexts. Complex systems adapt and they are characterized by unpredictability and irrationality. Building an airplane or a rocket is complicated. Changing behaviors through air or space power is complex.
Elements of both complication and complexity are inherent in small wars. SWJ has not shied away from examinations of the latter. During the long wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, SWJ engaged in discussions about “warheads on foreheads,” or the relative effectiveness of the US’s persistent surveillance and precision strike systems in its global counterterrorism campaign. Rationalized as an effort to limit collateral damage against an enemy that embeds its fighters in and among civilian populations, leaders invested in the platforms, training, and sustainment of exquisite medium- and high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
The consequences of the US’s pivot to “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations were far less clear than its causes. Though tactically efficient in certain situations, drone campaigns must be judged in political terms. Critics have argued that they undermine legitimacy, signaling to local populations that their government is incompetent or subservient to the US, thereby demoralizing collaboration and capacity-building. There is some evidence that drone strikes unravel social capital, especially in Pakistan, sowing distrust of pervasive informants and fear of punishment by militants. Their tactical effectiveness of decapitating terrorist organizations might also reduce control of rank-and-file members with less experience, incentives to display zeal to organizationally ascend, and fewer constraints on indiscriminate violence. Insofar as drones lower the costs and risks of using force, they are more likely to become platforms of perpetual force, exercises in risk management that set off geographic and temporal limitations, that does not comport with the notion of war as a foil of peace. Finally, in the gray zone between peacetime and wartime legal frameworks, the US has set precedents of covert strikes in sovereign nations outside of hot wars that the quickly growing global drone club has already begun to follow.
Future wars will most likely be fought in settings where exquisite capabilities, manned or unmanned, are less appropriate and less useful. They will be fought in environments where low technology mass, both humans and systems, is employed to overcome the high-tech advantages of modern military forces.
SWJ was a strong voice in the debate on the efficacy of large drones, especially in population-centric operations, capturing concerns from mission success to population perceptions to strategic backlash. Contributors recognized the “seductive lure” of this new expression of airpower’s reach, power, and precision, yet questioned whether the US could “kill our way to victory.” This debate continues, one of many, both old and new, that earnest scholars and practitioners must ponder carefully. The journal continues to be a key place for these conversations, including beyond airpower into other domains, from other angles, and importantly, across domains.
War is Dynamic
Globalization amplifies and accelerates all the above. Grievances, tacit knowledge, and propaganda can rapidly disseminate to galvanize combatant groups, whether state or nonstate. Innovation cycles are speeding up as weaker actors adapt under pressure, often harnessing commercial technologies for war, while stronger states take note and adapt concepts to address the unknown challenges of future war. This is especially true in the current open era of innovation, when civilian and commercial innovation epicycles have the potential to run circles around the stolid pace of systems development that is the US’s military-industrial complex.
Another air-minded case in point, during the 2010s airpower again became the province of garage tinkerers. Much like the way two bicycle shop owners (the Wright brothers) achieved manned powered flight before heavily subsidized government-funded efforts, the commercial industry is now keeping pace with or outstripping the military-industrial processes in many emerging technologies including UAS. Furthermore, the internet is a hotbed of information on after-market modifications to improve drones’ technical specifications or to add features. This has enabled dabblers and enthusiasts, from the benign photographer to the ambitious terrorist, to take to the skies frequently and flexibly.
Thus, while the US took a single-track approach to drones, concentrating on expensive, large, and highly capable long-range platforms, militant tinkerers married hobbyist UAS, commercial cameras, and recreational navigation systems to bomblets and cargo packages. Furthermore, adversaries took note of what the tinkerers were able to accomplish and commercialized their successes, simultaneously developing high-end drones while also pursuing small, inexpensive analogs. China is soundly the primary manufacturer of commercial drones. Iran has promoted commercial UAS and provided military-grade models to its proxies for approximately the same duration as SWJ has been in the game. Russia, after having “overslept the UA[S] revolution,” is on a path to indigenously produce models across the full range of drone diversity and densely integrates them in its strategy in Ukraine.
The US has been exposed to this trend from the get-go but has only just begun to move. To be fair, emerging phenomena are difficult to forecast. Drone warfare’s emerging nature suggests that it will remain an enduring characteristic of future warfare but like the disruptive technologies that preceded drones (e.g., English longbow, airplane, and tank), it is unclear whether UAS will remain as dominant as it appears on today’s battlefields. As the technology-tactics epicycle continues to spiral forward, one can only speculate who will most benefit—militant tinkerers, the military-industrial complex, or cash-rich extremist organizations and cartels.
Nonetheless, more astute attention to small wars, where many of these instances seed and unfold, will enable practitioners and decision-makers to progress further and faster along the curve of such trends. SWJ has been in the thick of issues like this and as it continues, and our Air and Space Power project joins the fray, we look forward to helping shape conversations committed to deep, careful thinking about what matters most in modern warfare.
Current and Future Wars
Now that the United States has largely disengaged itself from the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq and is keeping a healthy distance from the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the Department of Defense has reoriented for the kind of wars its prefers: large-scale combat operations against peer competitors. They are cleaner, technophilic, and mostly complicated. Focusing on a single strategic competitor, the People’s Republic of China, simplifies the DoD’s primary military challenge—the Beltway budget battle. This in turn informs the military service subsets of doctrine development, systems acquisition, tactical training, and leader education. People and institutions are thus able to study the preferred adversary in depth, develop quantitative rubrics and systematic expectations about how the adversary will likely react to given stimuli, and create bodies of statistics-based knowledge to inform political, economic, and military decision-making.
Regardless of how clean, technocentric, and preferable, large-scale combat operations against a peer competitor are also unlikely, a fact that history confirms. The United States is heavily investing in deterring these clashes. Given their presumed ruinous and lethal outcomes, all parties have keen incentives to resolve escalating crises prior to the event horizon of war. Consequently, the wars the US and its allies will most likely fight will not be on the eastern flank of NATO (the acute threat) or in the South China Sea (the chronic/pacing threat). Instead, they will be fought in the global South—Africa, South America, South and Southeast Asia, or the Middle East.
Future wars will most likely be fought in settings where exquisite capabilities, manned or unmanned, are less appropriate and less useful. They will be fought in environments where low technology mass, both humans and systems, is employed to overcome the high-tech advantages of modern military forces. In short, they will be fought as small wars. While the US certainly should structure its forces to deter major war, it must also do the same to fight small ones of all stripes.
Written by authors with extensive credentials and fresh ideas, both academic and battle-borne, SWJ generates knowledge and indexes experience to stitch the seams across the spectrum of small wars. As we at Project Air and Space Power research and debate the complexities of airpower as an influencing tool in irregular warfare, we recognize that we are a stipple (arguably a vivid, pointed one) in the broader ecology of multi-domain small wars. At the same time, we estimate that only about five percent of SWJ’s scholarship has been air or space related, and that sliver has focused on over-the-horizon capabilities that yield global power, global reach, and global vigilance. Insofar as we delve into the Indiana Jones examples of proverbial sword versus gun in irregular warfare, we are in avid conversation with and support of SWJ. IWI’s Air and Space project offers analytical depth while the journal provides strategic context. The fact remains that small wars will remain small wars, and we look forward to serving, in discourse and in stride, alongside SWJ as it embarks on a rebooted season under new leadership.
