History always continues

By Dave Anderson:

I currently have Robert Massie's Dreadnought and Castles of Steel and Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August next to my bed.  Both authors note the idea that circulated through certain circles that war between major, industrial states was impossible to sustain during the Edwardian era.  States were either too interdependent due to trade to consider war as war would be extremely unprofitable for every nation or the working classes of all combatants would unite in their class interests and sit out the war that would bleed their class but enrich the capitalist classes.

And yet World War 1 happened. Nationalism and the power of the state providing the manpower for the trenches and the hope of a massive indemnity to cover the cost of the war providing a fiscal push to fight. 

There always will be conflict between groups, and there will be ways that groups can successfully use force to gain objectives and advantages.  In World War I, the combatants were stuck between two generations of warfare and needed several years and several million casualties to figure out how to fight and win a mass-mobilization, mass firepower, low maneuverability war.  I think we are in a similar transitional period as mass mobilization, maneuver warfare is being replaced by a rebalancing towards the strategic defensive.  However, this does not mean war as practiced by states is obsolete.

Andrew Bacevich disagrees:

"If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars
(and from their Israeli equivalents), it�s this: victory is a chimera. 
Counting on today�s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes
about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you
better be really lucky...

By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory,
although without giving up on war.  First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan,
priorities shifted.  High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of
winning -- at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood
that term.  They sought instead to not lose.  In Washington as in U.S.
military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the
new gold standard of success.

I agree with Professor Bacevich that the Western desire for short, decisive wars that are also system transforming wars are at an end.  The United States was not able to impose its maximal will in Iraq, nor will it be able to do the same in Afghanistan.  However, limited objective wars, including the ability to launch large scale, short term punitive expeditions are completely comprehensible within the evolving framework of state based force utilization and war. 

War between states is less likely in the future, and less likely to be successful if and only if state based powers continue to operate under the constraints that states have imposed on themselves since World War II, even if they are observed in breech.  Large scale expeditions could be successful if the expeditionary force does not try to impose its will on the entire local political situation. 

For instance, imagine a world of $175 per barrel of oil, and the Saudis refusing to pump more than 7 million barrels per day despite their claims that they have 10 million barrels per day of easily pumpable oil. Since most Saudi oil is located in a few large fields that are isolated from major population centers.  If a foreign expeditionary force seizes those fields and some of the export infrastructure they can be profitable if there is a mass population transfer and free fire zones to minimize reinfilitration.  Oil production would be undertaken by imported foreign contractors after the short term sabotage was fixed.  The rest of the Saudi political/military system would be left alone once the looting area was secured.  The two big explicit constraints that are ignored in this scenario are intentional mass population transfers/population cleansing, and then freely targeting civilians who approach the looted area. 

"Successful" wars of the future are likely to be minimal objective wars.