This book shows how more perspectives—even contradictory ones—organized in a loose structure that illuminates through juxtaposition, can bring the reader closer to war’s true nature and character—or at least closer to what questions we should be asking, writes Dwight “Buzz” Phillips in his Joint Force Quarterly review on “Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War“.
Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War, edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, published by Hurst Publishers, 2024 (ISBN: 978-1911723165)
These are lively times for discussions about the future of war. After decades of conjecture about what war between two large nation-state militaries with modern ground, sea, and air capabilities might look like, we now have real data and experiences to draw on. Some trends now seem confirmed—such as the lethality of the modern battlefield for rotary-wing and fixed-wing aviation forward of the line of contact and, concurrently, the growing military value of unmanned autonomous systems. With other questions about the character of warfare, the debate has grown even fiercer—such as what the balance is between offense and defense, or what the significance and role of cyberwarfare is. Questions about trends—in what Michael Howard calls the forgotten dimensions of strategy—have also reappeared: What constitutes a sustainable defense industrial base, what is the value of professional armies versus citizen armies, and what causes a society to choose resistance instead of submission?
Beyond Ukraine tackles these questions and more in a collection of essays by leading defense theorists on both sides of the Atlantic. The edited volume arose from an October 2022 conference on the future of war, sponsored by the Netherlands Defence Academy in collaboration with the University of Oxford. It also reflects an increasingly sophisticated trans-Atlantic and transPacific military discourse that American readers should benefit from. Additional examples of those engaged in this discourse include the Royal United Services Institute, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies.
The chapters in Beyond Ukraine are grouped into four topics: bounding the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war, exploring landscapes of future war, examining military innovation in future war, and anticipating what future war will look like. These are weighty questions that defy singular synthesis by one author. In this edited volume, the authors grapple with first-order questions about the nature of war and character of warfare—questions that U.S. security discourse sometimes neglects in its focus on pressing questions about operational concepts, specific force-structure choices, and preferred budget allocations. The danger of this American discourse is that U.S. military officers and defense professionals can miss emerging trends and changes that do not fit neatly within their own bureaucratic fights. Beyond Ukraine is a welcome antidote to this myopia.
One of the curious elements of this anthology is how the editors and contributors toggle between assessments of the changing character of warfare and the evolving nature of war. Antulio Echevarria, for instance, recasts common explanations for the decline of interstate wars as factors that are instead spurring their outbreak and increasing their severity. Other authors reexamine assumptions prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that the next war could be a cyber war. Several authors, including Frank Hoffman, present new frameworks for categorizing war’s faces, dimensions, or typologies, with the goal of better understanding how war is changing. Intriguingly, Jan Honig explores the degree to which future war might be characterized by people’s war or professional war. David Betz wrestles with how war is changing because of conflict in a sprawling, three-dimensional urban landscape with layers of overlapping social orders. T.X. Hammes directly takes on the question of the rising dominance of the tactical defense, while Audrey Cronin describes how nonstate actors and minor powers would be able to exploit cutting-edge dual-use technologies to their advantage.
On the other hand, Paul van Hooft cautions against overestimating this tactical “denial-centric vision,” arguing that in a globalized, specialized, high-tech world, only a few Great Powers have the strategic capabilities to deny other powers their access to resources or movement of military forces outside their home territories. Other chapters consider the implications of artificial intelligence, drone swarm technology, and individual “new-age tinkering” on how militaries could innovate and how defense-industry complexes must change.
Grappling with the changing face of war is clearly like blind men trying to describe an elephant. The concluding chapter by Antoine Bousquet makes the case that those who argue that the nature of war is “immutable”—driven by anger, fear, hatred, and courage—miss the “unparalleled plasticity and open-endedness” of the human animal and thus miss the ways that both the nature of war and the character of warfare change as polities, societies, and technologies evolve. Indeed, that is an underlying theme of Beyond Ukraine—and it is a rejoinder against the singular focus on technology by most Western military establishments. Fortunately, Beyond Ukraine shows how more perspectives—even contradictory ones—organized in a loose structure that illuminates through juxtaposition, can bring the reader closer to war’s true nature and character—or at least closer to what questions we should be asking.
Dwight “Buzz” Phillips is a Senior Policy Researcher at RAND. He served 25 years in the U.S. Army as an Infantry Officer and Strategic Planner. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.
Source: Joint Force Quarterly, Vol. 113, Article 16, published by National Defense University.
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