The Long War

Possible Futures, Installment Four

America has been at war, almost without interruption, since 2002. Not a “real” war, not a declared war, but war, nonetheless. The frequency and severity of “interventions” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as the various proxy wars in Syria, Oman, Yemen, Ukraine, and a handful of others is unprecedented by US historical standards (which are already quite militaristic).

During that same time, the US has drawn down its foreign-deployed forces to a startling extent.

At first blush, these two factors would seem to be contradictory, but there is a causal relationship between them. All throughout history, when an Imperial power takes the stage, relative peace follows for a time. The presence of the Imperial authority—which comes from the barrel of a gun—discourages flashpoint wars and, if the Empire lasts long enough, exsanguinates local and regional power blocks and their attendant armies. Local martial traditions decline, and martial knowledge evaporates, until the subject countries are incapable of fielding a capable army at scale.

When the Empire declines, this creates power vacuums throughout the Imperial sphere, and wars flare up just as quick as everyone can build an army and re-learn the ways of war (the hard way). This happens for the same reason that brothers fight with one another after a divorce or the early death of their father: human’s can’t interact successfully without knowing the rules, and the person who has the power to squash the others in the room is the one who makes the rules. It’s brutal, it’s primitive, but don’t let eight decades of relative global peace fool you: this is how humans do things, and always have, and always will.

The United States is an empire in decline.

If it seems odd to describe a country with a navy that could handily defeat the combined armies, navies, and air forces of the world in a single pitched battle as “a declining empire,” consider this:

The United States concentrates this power into a little over a dozen super-carrier battle groups. Any one of these groups could literally level any country the President cares to point them at.

But contra Muad'dib in Dune, the ability to destroy a thing is not the same as the ability to control a thing. To actually pacify the ocean-going trade lanes of the world it requires over six hundred destroyers.

The United States has eighty.

To pacify the important resource extraction and manufacturing regions of the world it requires ground-troop deployments at local military bases, so that they can respond to conflicts among land-based powers.

The US now has fewer troops deployed abroad than at any time in the past century, and the draw-down continues.

Even if the United States wanted to maintain its empire, it no longer has the capability, and it would take a decade-or-more of military build-out to get there. Not an easy thing to do when budget problems already have the US skating on the edge of an economic depression that, thanks to the demographic implosion, will likely last up to a decade if a few factors don’t break exactly the right way.

Meanwhile, the troops needed for land-based occupation simply don’t exist thanks to a pair of factors that are hitting the US Armed Forces at the same time.

The first is the deliberate attempt to reshuffle the cultural loyalties of the Armed Forces (which, for a long litany of complex reasons, tend to attract and retain people of a more conservative bent). This attempt started with the fight over Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and has since been extended to a number of other explicitly political fronts aimed at dis-incentivizing the enlistment and re-enlistment of people who might be temperamentally inclined to favor the Republican party, populism, or nationalist politics.

The second, and much more profound, is the impact of the demographic transition upon the pool of available candidates for enlistment. To be blunt, there simply aren’t enough young potential enlistees in the nation to fill out the ranks of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Force, and Special Forces even if there were no other disincentives (such as the Zoomer disinclination to work for anyone but themselves, the culture wars in the military, and another half-dozen minor-but-important factors).

Simply put, the American Empire will not return in the foreseeable future, and the Pentagon knows it. In its R&D programs, DARPA has long been focused on disruption, not on pacification. The United States’s strategic footing has shifted from keeping the peace to ensuring that no rival power can rise high enough to pose a credible threat. In other words, we can expect that, over the coming decades, the United States will put all its military and financial resources towards ensuring that peace and stability do not prevail outside of its own bubble of vital interests (which it construes, largely, to be confined to the western hemisphere and a handful of players in East Asia).

The current conflict in Ukraine is the first major war of the US-led disorder. Since Russia’s plan necessitates not only annexing Ukraine, but also Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (all of whom are NATO members whom the US is treaty-bound to defend), the smart, brutal, cynical play is for the US to pour all the money and arms into Ukraine that it can in order to permanently halt the Russian advance, and thus cripple Russia as a potential global power.

Expect a similar playbook to unfold as Turkey invades Greece (currently ramping up at the time of this writing), as China makes strategic moves to attempt to stave off its own collapse, as Iran and Saudi Arabia battle for control of the Gulf, etc.

Normally, such periods of geopolitical instability resolve themselves after a few years. Some new power eventually arises that can stabilize its region, or its hemisphere, and the world settles down into a new, if often unhappy, rhythm where all the rules are predictable. This time, there is a good chance they will not.

Not only is the US positioned as an agent of global disorder, there simply aren’t enough young men in the rest of the world to build the bottomless armies we saw in World War 2, and not enough under-thirty workers to bootstrap the industrial economies needed for robust technological warfare.

Instead, we should expect World War 3 to look very different from the fever dreams of Werner Von Braun and Henry Kissinger, and even more different from the endless platoons of bodies being thrown into the face of the war machine as has been common in inter-state warfare since the Napoleonic era.

We will instead see constant propaganda warfare and political subversion through the intelligence services—the campaign against free speech and internet freedom (under the guise of “controlling disinformation” to protect “the norms of liberal society”), which has now reached the United Nations General Assembly is a necessary precursor to this kind of warfare. It is much easier to poison a country’s internal politics or whip up a population against the strategic enemy of the moment if the free flow of information is pinched off for the “public good.”

And should such censorship campaigns, however attractively justified, fail to get traction, the propaganda wars will wage regardless—the difference will be between a world of “how heavily is my government controlling my media?” and a world of “how heavy a thumb is on what part of the scale, and whose hand is it attached to”?

We will also see constant hacker warfare, as is already on display in the endless fires at food processing and manufacturing facilities across the world since late 2021.

We will see states favoring mercenary armies (as we see now in Russia and Ukraine), and we will see state militaries conducting operations that look a lot more like what we’ve come to expect from guerrilla warriors and terrorists.

These forms of warfare have the best bang (sorry about that) for the buck. Asymmetric tactics will allow small actors to stand toe-to-toe with greater powers unless and until carrier strike groups are brought to bear and all-out warfare breaks out—which it will, from time to time...but only for a little while.

Even the largest modern wars persist for only a handful of years. This war will be different. The current economic and strategic situation around the globe means that we should expect constant warfare for at least another generation, if not two or three. The closest analogue in world history is the Thirty Years War which was settled with the Treaty of Westphalia—a document that, among other things, defined the “nation state” as a legal and diplomatic concept.

We should expect the resolution of this period of warfare to be no less momentous.

When that happens, the world will change around us, and it’s anyone’s guess how, but the road between this point and that is long, difficult, immiserating, and very, very bloody.

And there isn’t a goddamn thing anyone—not even the most powerful actors in the world—can do about it. Unless...

…

something very unusual happens. But that’s for next time.

In the meantime, I invite you to post any corrections or arguments in the comments, or send them directly to me at feedback@jdsawyer.net.