After the October 7 attack by Hamas, Al Jazeera brought on a former Israeli general who told the audience that while Israel had failed to detect and preempt the attack, “we all know how it will end”, pointing to Israel’s military capabilities to crush Hamas.
Some 88 days after the initial attack, the situation has turned out to be less straightforward than predicted.
The clash of arms is as old as the history of human beings on this planet. Not surprisingly, there is a vast corpus of literature on war, both narrative and analytical.
The earliest books are by Herodotus (The Histories, an account of Persian Wars) and Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War). Since the Western tradition credits Herodotus with the birth of history, one can say that history (or its recording) began with wars.
Multiple questions about wars have vexed scholars. A central one is why do wars happen? For instance, in a 1995 paper for International Organisation, political scientist James D. Fearon argued that “The central puzzle about war, and also the main reason we study it, is that wars are costly but nonetheless wars recur. If wars are costly ex post then some explanation is needed for why a compromise cannot be found ex ante.”
Some historians put wars in the category of ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted.’ This categorisation assumes that while ‘wanted’ wars are or should be “Pareto-efficient”, the ‘unwanted’ ones are inefficient. From that perspective, as Fearon argues, wars must have a rational explanation. But the reality is that quite often leaders sleepwalk into wars. World War I is a great example of that.
There are other questions too. How do we define victory and defeat in a war? Is it about how many battles have been won or lost; how much materiel was destroyed on opposing sides; how many casualties suffered? In other words, is it about statistics or is there more?
“More often, war results in something clouded, neither triumph nor defeat. It is an arena of grey outcomes, partial and ambiguous resolution of disputes and causes that led to the choice of force as an instrument of policy in the first place.”
Capt Emile Simpson, a British infantry officer, has a vignette in his book, War From the Ground Up: “In April 1975 in Hanoi, a week before the fall of Saigon, Colonel Harry Summers of the US Army told his North Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tu, ‘You never beat us on the battlefield’, to which Tu replied, ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant’.”
If the US did not suffer defeat on the battlefield, how did it lose the war in Vietnam or since then, in Afghanistan and Iraq? And if battles do not define the outcome of war(s), why do we stress what the Germans call Entscheidungsschlacht (decisive battle)? Is there in fact a decisive battle, a battle that can lead to winning a war?
As I wrote earlier in these pages, Napoleon did not miscalculate Russia’s vastly expansive terrain. If anything, he understood it perfectly. He diligently focused on logistical preparations for the campaign for an entire year, forward deploying ammunition and supply depots, using artillery train battalions to keep his army supplied (since he had shed the old system of contracting civilian teams to handle horses for hauling artillery guns), establishing hospitals for the wounded et cetera. Despite these extensive preparations and excellent organisational skills, Napoleon’s campaign extended, both in time and space, beyond his original calculation because the Russians didn’t give him an early decisive victory.
Much chaos was caused by Napoleon’s invasion. The Russians burnt supplies on their own territory. By the time Napoleon captured Moscow, his army was exhausted and capturing the city was a hollow ‘victory’ because the Russians had set much of the city on fire. The retreat was even more harrowing with the Cossacks hacking at the French army’s rear and flanks. Despite various battlefield ‘victories’, Napoleon suffered a crushing defeat. Much later, the same fate would befall the Wehrmacht.
Military historian Cathal J. Nolan, in his 2017 award-winning book, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, writes: “The allure of battle would matter little had not the long wars it led to altered the course of world history in conflicts of prolonged destruction and suffering, in wars…that lasted many years or even many decades.”
Humans seek clarity. When dealing with complexity we try to parse and find that one factor that can solve the puzzle for us. Increasingly, we have come to use mathematical models to figure out how to cut through the clutter and sort out the internal logic of complex, multivariate relationships not only to understand an ongoing situation but also to find predictive value in our findings for assessing future situations.
But it’s tricky. It’s difficult enough to predict outcomes even as a conflict unfolds, let alone project trends into new situations where specifics may differ from past events. Someday when we have hugely vast amounts of data and use very advanced versions of AI, we might be able to predict outcomes. But not today. As Nolan put it, “More often, war results in something clouded, neither triumph nor defeat. It is an arena of grey outcomes, partial and ambiguous resolution of disputes and causes that led to the choice of force as an instrument of policy in the first place.”
Israel has fought interstate wars and performed well. It’s now fighting battles in a different kind of war. It was expecting trouble on the northern border against Hezbollah. But no one was banking on the kind of horizontal escalation that has since come to define this war and its many battles.
In his 2004 book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, Professor Stephen Biddle is not looking at wars but mid- to high-intensity conventional battles. His main argument focuses on force employment, what he calls the modern system, as pivotal to fighting battles. Detailing his argument is outside the parameters of this article but I mention his work because of his assertion that “War outcomes are products of more than just military power alone”.
As he argues, military power or capability “can mean different things in different contexts”. Militaries are called upon to do various things: defending national territory or invading another state (interstate, industrial wars); counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations (against non-state actors/groups); showing the flag; providing muscle to coercive strategies, even keeping domestic order.
“Proficiency in one or even several does not imply proficiency in them all,” writes Biddle. Years ago, I likened this to the different requirements of playing a Test, an ODI and a T20.
Israel has fought interstate wars and performed well. It’s now fighting battles in a different kind of war. It was expecting trouble on the northern border against Hezbollah. But no one was banking on the kind of horizontal escalation that has since come to define this war and its many battles: Houthis in Yemen disrupting commercial shipping in the Red Sea and armed groups in Iraq firing rockets at US military bases in Iraq and Syria.
According to Israel’s National Emergency Management Authority, some 300,000 Israelis have been internally displaced since October 7 from the southern and northern towns. NEMA calls it the biggest internal displacement in the history of Israel.
Hezbollah, which has continued to attack specific military targets, alternating between low to moderately high tempo within a certain territorial band in width and depth, has about 150,000 IDF active and reserve troops tied down in the north. Almost all the towns and settlements in the north have been evacuated, including from Kiryat Shmona, which is the biggest.
The situation remains fluid and fraught. The traditional notions of military capabilities have already been shown to be unsound and “mask crucial tradeoffs.” As Biddle argued, traditional calculi generally underestimate “capability’s effects relative to audience costs, signalling or resolve.”
What we are witnessing are battles in a bigger war. On that, later.