21st Century War

I’ve been listening to a podcast hosted by my good friend Pradyuma and prominent shitposter Noah Smith

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One thing that they discussed was the relative power of China and America and who will win when they inevitably start blowing each other up with cool missiles and exciting bombs (they used slightly different words). Basically, the central question is, will a great power war in the 21st century be different from those in the 20th century? And how much so? As someone who knows almost nothing about anything, I have some thoughts on the subject.

Wars have always been about making your enemy think that the cost of fighting on is greater than the cost of giving up. This is generally done by killing lots of their soldiers, taking lots of their territory and putting your soldiers in a place where it looks like they can do it again.

There have been a bunch of technological and societal changes since Cain and Abel first came to blows. Some of these have been at the level of pointy things, others at the level of making and moving pointy things and yet others at the level of making people less or more afraid of pointy things. For example, once nobody had any stirrups which meant they were very easy to push off horses, once stirrups where invented it became harder to do this, this meant that the tactic of running really fast at the enemy and cutting them to pieces as they run away became very effective (unless they didn’t run away and had long sticks, in which case you were in a bit of a bind).  Other exciting changes include the fact that you don’t need everyone to farm anymore, this means you can send more people to fight, which is generally considered to be an advantage.

Perhaps the biggest changes to warfare happened during the 20th century. For one thing, improvements in agriculture meant there were more people working in factories building exciting new things, including weapons.[1] Those same agricultural improvements also meant that you could send yet more people off to fight on the front lines. Other technological improvements had other implications. Trains meant you could send more of your agricultural and industrial products to the front (as well as more soldiers) and improvements in weapons had various exciting implications, perhaps most importantly making cavalry far less useful. In the past, cavalry had been used to chase down the fleeing enemy. This made it possible to break through enemy lines, because you could make them run away with your infantry and artillery and then kill or capture them as they fled. The German offensives of 1918 succeeded in beating the enemy, but they didn’t break the line because cavalry couldn’t be used to chase the fleeing enemy. Later, they invented tanks which filed the role of cavalry, among other things.

Now, where were we? Ah yes, the 21st century. Most of the technological developments since the last Proper War have been in the area of communications and psychological warfare. Every day, a new probe is invented to shove into peoples’ brains in an attempt to get them to buy more (or less) ice cream and drive more (or fewer) cars. Probably there have been other innovations in manufacturing and such, but I know nothing about them so they will not be considered here.

Now we reach the crux of the argument that Noah Smith makes in the aforementioned podcast. America leads the world in psychological warfare, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, AOL etc etc are all American companies, and they all specialise in the almost violent application of psychological techniques to the minds of their users. China, on the other hand, has been engaged in an active effort to reduce this sort of thing. Recently they banned girly men from being shown on television and I can only assume they’ve hauled off their equivalent of Jack Dorsey to some kind of mountain gulag where he’s been experimented on by imported Argentine dentists. Noah’s argument is that this might all be a mistake, specifically he cites the Video Game Gap, China doesn’t let its kids play video games so much, America lets them play them all the time. Noah’s point is that the future of warfare is unpredictable, people didn’t know aircraft carriers would be a big deal for example, then he makes a slightly different point and says that the impact on morale of banning video games might doom China. American soldiers can bravely sally forth, knowing that they fight for the right to play the next call of duty game, while China’s soldiers will, no doubt, surrender in order to enjoy the video gaming facilities of American prison camps.

This may well be the case. One interesting thing I noticed during the recent Armeno-Azerbaijani War was the degree to which poasters labeled it the ‘First Meme War.’ Personally, I saw more memes about the fact that it was a meme war than actual memes about the war itself. And I have no doubt that for people in Armenia and Azerbaijan the actual war was immeasurably more important than any memes about it. But, nevertheless, memes have always been a central part of war. Pericles made a very effective meme during the Peloponnesian war when he made a big speech about how the Athenians were better because of their liberty or something. Here is an even cooler meme from just before one of Britain’s wars with France:

Meme warfare was used during the American Civil War, when the Confederacy kept memeing about how their soldiers were better than the Union’s because they had more farming experience, this made Union commanders more wary of attacking. Nazi Germany innovated immensely in meme warfare, they gave everyone a radio through which memes about how Germany was doing well and Hitler was a good fellow were spread.

So, will meme warfare, which America is clearly better at, be enough to beat China? Well, maybe. The trouble is that reality is a real thing, and if you are losing it’s very difficult to meme your way out of trouble. This problem is multiplied if you have a democratic system where people are allowed to express themselves freely. The American Civil War provides us with numerous examples of cases where defeat in the field was reported by newspapers at home and demoralised the population. Contrast this with this radio broadcast from Nazi Germany:

it proports to be from Stalingrad but was actually faked and broadcast from Germany because Stalingrad was not in such a good situation. Authoritarian regimes can ‘meme from the top’ in a way that democratic regimes cannot. Furthermore, authoritarian regimes have an easier time blocking out the memes of their opponents. The seal is not total but efforts can be made to keep the enemy’s memes from the eyes and ears of the population. Just as America’s meme economy has provided its youth with memeing skills, it has also provided an inlet for the memes of its enemies. Your humble correspondent would never comment on such high matters of state as the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, but if this, or something like it, is true, it demonstrates how a foreign power can use America’s memeing advantage against it.

All of this is just one small part of war. As well as the power of memes, both sides will have to use the power of throwing lots of heavy and explody things at the enemy. If making your country better at, but also more vulnerable to, memery means that you make it less effective at launching things into the enemy then it might not be worth it. Of course, America can probably get India to do all the nasty business, and us Westerners can enjoy the memes while they get the fighting done.

One tactic that Azerbaijan used during the recent war was to make old planes remote controlled and send then into the sky above where Armenian anti-aircraft guns were expected to be. They could then see where the AA guns were without sacrificing anything too valuable. This is an example of using fancy-pants modern technology. It’s likely that America’s model will make it better at developing this kind of thing than China. The same technology that’s used to make self-crashing cars can probably be used to make self-crashing-into-the-enemy planes (which are considerably more useful) so maybe that’ll be good. You still have to actually build the stuff though so who knows.

Anyway, I’m bored now, so that’s the end of the essay.

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[1] See various works about how improvements in agriculture, rather than industry, drove the industrial revolution. This is because making something that 95% of people do 10% more efficient frees up as much labour as making something that 5% of people do 100% more efficient. I can’t remember who wrote about this, maybe Mokyr or Dean and Cole or Crafts or something.