Professor Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University, addresses the first lecture on global security issues at the University of Glasgow. Global Security (MSc): www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate/tau...
The speaker raises a number of interesting points. I wonder if war is regarded as so useless as a means to achieve a goal, is it still possible for western governments to mobilize their populations as occurred during the Napoleonic wars and the World Wars.
I think it's interesting that Professor Strachan talked about the US excercising its military might over Iraq and Afghanistan with only a fraction of its military technological capability and military prowess. Isn't this also true if you look back half a century ago where this is interesting also about Vietnam and North Korea. But regardless of the outcomes of those wars and the more recent ones, the interesting thing about these wars is they all fueled the drama for the newsrooms that mesmerised the masses like Hollywood does, sustained long enough to write a historical account from the epics gathered for a decade or so. If you had used nuclear warheads on any one of those, then boom(!), and there would be no more news any more after just one day of fighting - in terms of military epic. Of course, you then got only the medical stories like the aftermath of Fat Boy and Fat Man and the cancer diseases afterwards. Then after that, someone else would be launching a post-mortem and question the use of the most ultimate lethal weapon to see if it had been the most ethical and appropriate. So it's true that when we look back at Iraq and Afghanistan, most stories in the news tend to be harking back to third-generation warfare, similarly to the tank and air force jet stories of WWII - the hide and seek, running around Mosul and Kandahar, and guerilla-style hit and run, and all that sort of stuff that allow you to hear some machine gun rattling here and there, smokey wisps of gunfire momentarily casting a pall in front of the camera lenses, and then loud bangs behind where Liz Doucet stood to deliver her live stand-ups, and the audience may also see some artillery fire flashing behind her, perhap then the reverberating loud bangs muted her microphone for a few seconds and rendering her momentarily speechless, shell-shocked. It's similar to film-making. That's the effect overall and it is really audio-visual, although you can hardly call this an art form, but actually it is - stuff that goes into future documentaries. I think culturally that may be so, but the actual length of war is the decisions of the respective war departments of the states concerned. About the nature of these wars aforementioned, I think these have had to do with the absence of democracy in those countries that drove America to butressing those people to implement some sort of democratic rule, if you want a general, simple answer. This is what characterised much of the nature of warfare after WWII. It was no longer the kind of warfare we saw earlier, where a Hitler or Napolean rose up somewhere in Europe to want to unify the whole of Europe. The latest (the past decade or so) has been about whether or not someone is a democracy or a tyranny that America is reputedly obsessed with. Factually, these wars in the middle east were pretty much regional in scale, but their consequences are not. Ideologically, these wars have been more or less Wilsonian in purpose from the American perspective, and Churchillian in British terms with respect to the call for democratisation of states. But on the Balkan situation in the early 1990s you could argue in Churchillian terms, but the epic-scale significance is beyond that. It entered into the domain of human rights as a result of the ethnic cleansing committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina - yet another seemingly new domain in the UN charter, that professes the protection of human rights, now via conducting peacekeeping missions. So ideologically speaking, this has to be read as some new ism underlying the UN, being enforced for the first time on a grand scale. But since the professor likes to flash back to WWI, it's also worth noting that WWI is only a continuation of Westphalia (at that time mainly restricted to a covenantal relationship amongst the states of the European Protestants and Roman Catholics), though now made to apply on a different people who had lived in Europe (some are actually Europeans for a long time), but were really the followers of a middle eastern religion. This all came to light during George V's time, when the British Mandate was enforced, culminating in charting the maps for Cis-Jordan and Transjordan to enforce a promise of biblical significance. This was the denoument resulting from 300 years or so of British colonisation efforts, and the global-scale military might the empire had accumulated thus far, and with the formation of the Jewish Brigade warring in Palestine to carve out a piece of land for the Jews. WWI technology-wise is second-generation warfare, and its nature, though, is Westphalian, which is the continuation of first-generation warfare, which is the Thirty Years' War and Eight Years' War in Europe.
