Abstract
“Small wars” have returned to the international political agenda in the early twentieth century with almost a vengeance. Leaving aside the factors of social media and satellite television today, the nature of small wars has adhered to its politicized, xenophobic, and asymmetrical characteristics. The latter were predicted by British and American military manuals produced in the early to middle twentieth century. This special issue aims to revisit the nature of small wars in the era of great power interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the 2000s. It will be apparent that two further characteristics need to be appended to small wars: chameleonic missions and virtual aggression.
Keywords
Small wars have historically defied definition by blurring the front lines of combat and military protocol. This special section aims to account for two additional characteristics: chameleonic missions and virtual aggression. The original “classics” of conceptualizing small wars remain Charles E. Callwell’s volume simply titled Small Wars, 1 reprinted several times between 1899 and 1937, and the Small Wars Manual 2 published by the US Marine Corps in two prominent editions in 1935 and 1940. But it was Callwell who first called attention to small wars as a residual category of combat that does not fit anywhere else. In Callwell’s words, “it comprises the expeditions against savages and semi-civilised races by disciplined soldiers, it comprises campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerrilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field, and it thus obviously covers operations very varying in their scope and in their conditions.” 3
Between the two manuals, small wars have been broadly attributed the following features. First, a small war can only be said to exist when a Great Power, or a “civilized state,” attempts to quell insurgencies and punish rebels at home or overseas. Second, the opposing forces must constitute an “irregular” otherness: they are not uniformed, disciplined soldiers trained to fight similarly professional counterparts employing recognizable doctrines. Third, fighting against irregulars is a matter of confronting inferior cultures. In Callwell’s racist tone, one significant “difficulty which the regular army has sometimes to contend with in small wars is treachery on the part of ostensibly neutral bodies or tribes, while in civilized warfare such a thing is almost unknown … The standard of honour varies greatly among different uncivilized or semi-civilized races; but it is not by any means the case that those lowest in the human scale are the least to be trusted. When operating in certain parts of the world or in contact with certain people a commander has always to be on his guard…” 4 The US Marine Corps was more subtle in arguing that engaging in small wars is tantamount to combining doses of diplomacy with military force, the mix of the two being dependent upon the nature of the political objectives at war’s inception, the character of the opposing forces, and their preferred modes of operations. 5 Fourth, a highly localized, contextual understanding of the vulnerability of the enemy is needed if the intervener is to successfully bring the irregular forces to heel. Once again, there is no better description than Callwell’s in all its vintage, derived from the era of British imperialism: “when there is no king to conquer, no capital to seize, no organized army to overthrow, and when there are no celebrated strongholds to capture, and no great centres of population to occupy, the objective is not so easy to select. It is then that the regular troops are forced to resort to cattle lifting and village burning and that the war assumes an aspect which may shock the humanitarian.” 6
In the twenty-first century, small wars remain unequally brutal contests where the technologically and numerically weaker combatants revel in their asymmetry or inventively amplify their operations in spite of limited technological means. Their political ends however, following Carl von Clausewitz, need not be consigned to the size of their weaponry’s caliber. Captured between 2005 and 2012, the following three excerpts illustrate in no uncertain terms the return to the paradigm of waging small wars while raising a number of research questions 7 along the way. These are aspects of the research agenda that the authors in this special section have responded to in their diverse ways.
Let us begin with two excerpts from the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. First, a snapshot quoted from David Kilcullen’s book The Accidental Guerrilla: Ninety percent of the people you call “Taliban” are actually tribals. They’re fighting for loyalty or Pashtun honour, and to profit their tribe. They’re not extremists. But they’re terrorized by the other ten percent: religious fanatics, terrorists, people allied to [the Taliban leadership shura in] Quetta. They’re afraid that if they try to reconcile, the crazies will kill them. To win them over, first you have to protect their people, prove that the extremists can’t hurt them if they come to your side – Afghan provincial governor, March 15, 2008.
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It doesn’t achieve what they say it’s going to achieve. It’s a bio-metric data-gathering device—send the rabbits out there to get IED-ed so you can figure out who to kill at night. How ethical.
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Finally, the third excerpt examines a fundamental assumption that Western powers ought to always retain an armed response to tackling small wars. After all, it does seem logical that if their opponents are relatively impoverished in the technological sophistication of their weaponry, the West should employ their advantage in armor, electronic intelligence, naval and air superiority to the hilt. A second research question can thus be teased out: Does a “magic bullet” lie in the state of knowledge and technological development of the West’s military lethality? The consequences of an armed response based on this fundamental assumption is evident in the aftermath of the Libya humanitarian intervention of 2011. While Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, and President Barack Obama of the United States hailed the “clean” intervention of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air power and limited numbers of special forces advisory teams among the Libyan rebels, the ouster of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi left a power vacuum on the ground that has remained incompletely filled by a Transitional National Council.
The local military councils, based in major cities such as Misurata, Zintan, and Tripoli that had organized the networks of disconnected resistance efforts into a holistic resistance against Gaddafi, had a different attitude toward demobilizing their arms: We are the ones who are holding the power there—the people with the force on the ground—and we are not going to give that up until we have a legitimate government that will emerge from free and fair elections,” said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan lawyer who is a leader of the armed groups in the western mountains and is also close to top leaders of the transitional council. “We will make sure we are going to bring the country to a civil constitution and democratic system,” he added, “and we will use all available means—first of all our might on the ground.
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State of Research on Small Wars: Still Fingering the Pulse
Now that we have established three research questions, it is possible to analyze whether existing research on the subject has been sufficiently comprehensive in enabling twenty-first-century inquirers to respond to the challenges of our time. One clear theme that was most pronounced in the first two excerpts commenting on community relations policies to counter the Taliban is the tension between civil and military relations, experienced either within the bureaucracies of the political system where the decision to intervene is being made or between the external military interveners and the local civilian protagonists. In fact, this theme runs through the remaining third excerpt to some degree as well.
In his landmark work, The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington argues that “the principal focus of civil-military relations is the relation of the officer corps to the state.” 11 While we are not concerned with the strictest understanding of the relationship between the officer corps to the established state that pays their salaries, we are more interested in how Huntington further elaborates this relationship in terms of tension between “functional and societal pressures.” The functional imperative stems from “the threats to the society’s security.” The societal pressures arise from “the social forces, ideologies, and institutions dominant within the society.” The interaction between these two pressures forms the nub of civil–military relations. 12 Recent research on civil–military cooperation (CIMIC) in peace-building operations have built upon this broader vein of civil–military relations by suggesting that when soldiers are engaged in building schools and drilling water wells, it augments soldiers’ occupational pride over staging the umpteenth patrol and numerous house raids to weed out suspected insurgents. 13 Moreover, CIMIC increasingly involves coordinated efforts to shape the local psychological atmosphere for either peace building or the restoration of political normalcy.
The existing literature on small wars nonetheless remains underdeveloped in terms of probing how and why civil–military relations may hold any solutions on the ground hostage. A number of interesting research angles are worth sampling from recent works on civil–military relations. Damon Coletta and Peter Feaver have argued that some form of CIMIC, however grudgingly performed, is now possible in the context of American interventions overseas based on the sophisticated electronic monitoring technologies made available to the civilian “principals,” that is the President, his cabinet, and political allies, to ensure that their military “commander-agents” executing a military operation on the ground do not apply inordinate force. 14 The watchword is to apply force appropriate to the nature of the political stakes in any less than total war. Coletta and Feaver had the Kosovo campaign of 1999 in mind. However, it was Andrew Mack’s seminal work “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict” that laid the groundwork on how domestic constraints in the metropolis result from the “asymmetries in the structure of the conflict.” Mack went so far as to claim that “in a asymmetric conflict, the potential for the generation of internal divisions in the metropolitan power exists regardless of the historical epoch, the nature of the polity of the external power, the interests perceived to be at stake, and the international context in which the conflict takes place.” 15 Gil Merom’s work examining the link between democratic politics and its levels of patience with military conditions on the front lines of small wars provides another insightful venture in that direction. His argument, that democracies generally lose small wars due to the constraints imposed by their domestic constitutional structures, personalities and civil society, is grounded mainly in his case studies of the French war against Algerian insurgents between 1954 and 1962, and the Israel–Lebanon war of 1982. Merom contends that democracies suffer from the allergy against “escalat[ing] the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory.” 16 Jonathan Caverley has added his voice to Merom’s by arguing via America’s Vietnam War that President Lyndon Johnson opted for suboptimal counterinsurgency strategies that were firepower-intensive and capital-intensive simply because they proved politically popular at the time. 17 David Ucko’s 2009 volume grandiosely titled The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars, devoted a whole chapter accounting for the political ambivalence at home for the Bush–Obama policy of ordering a “surge” in troop commitments to stabilize postinvasion Iraq. 18 Although the “surge” ultimately proved successful on the ground, it was remarkable that it occurred in spite of the American public’s deep disillusionment with the unending “small war” in Iraq in the transition between the Bush and Obama Administrations. This of course begs the question of whether civil–military harmony is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for the successful conduct of small wars under all circumstances.
It must also be acknowledged that the very concept of “small wars” is not immune to the wider debates of how war, as a generic operational term, has undergone several transformations in the post–Cold War era in the direction of subliminal definitions. The impact of the 9/11 terror attacks have hastened the trend. Identifying the profile and character of a small war as precisely as circumstances allow has a direct bearing on the question of whether a magic bullet can ever be found for either protagonist in such a conflict. This is surely a question that vexes the military professional and politician alike. As several scholars ranging from Mary Kaldor to Rupert Smith, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have argued, wars in the post-1989 era straddle the gray area between contests of military men and matériel on a battlefield to an endless struggle of open-ended goals.
Kaldor’s thesis of “new wars,” derived from the conflict trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s, implicates the interpenetration of the influences of globalization in its political, economic, military, and cultural facets. 19 New wars thrive on the indistinct nexuses between war fought by uniformed state-led combatants, organized crime, and grave large-scale violations of human rights. 20 Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are cases in point. There are significant transnational logics that keep local combatants motivated to do violence. Jihadist solidarity operated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there were also profitable agents trafficking opium, oil, hostages, and underground monies in all three weak states. Somalia has notoriously established itself as the pirate haven among the world’s piracy hot spots.
Looking very much within the same grave frame of post–Cold War conflict, retired general Rupert Smith warns the militaries of the twenty-first century to retool themselves for operations other than full-fledged conventional war. 21 The Tofflers, 22 and Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 23 all articulate visions of decentered, polycentric, or network-centric warfare, attributing this mostly to the advancements in portable electronic technology (from smart cell phones to miniaturized computers that fit into the palm) and their ability to empower individuals to either assist or counter the state. Terrorists and insurgents ranging from Palestine to Pakistan and Indonesia equipped with laptops and palmtops come to mind immediately.
Michael Ignatieff goes further to suggest that Kosovo in 1999 represented a prototype of a new form of colonial warfare: virtual war. While civilians, soldiers, and paramilitary groups were strafed and bombed on the ground in Kosovo and Serbia, citizens of the NATO states had been mobilized by their governments, as mostly television and Internet “spectators” to support what was billed as a surgical war executed from a safe distance. The heavy reliance by NATO on digitally enhanced and remotely guided airpower assuaged popular liberal consciences concerned about saving the Kosovars while bombing the “Serbian aggressor.” Moreover, according to Ignatieff, it was also a “virtual war in a political and legal sense. It did not receive explicit sanction either from the United Nations or from the legislatures of the nations who went to war. It was prosecuted in an ambiguous legal state and it achieved a ‘military technical agreement,’ which decided nothing but the detail of NATO’s unopposed entry into Kosovo and left open the future status of the very territory over which the war was fought.” 24 The United Nations was consequently invited by most of the NATO powers to facilitate the creation of the independent state of Kosovo. In short, what may start out as ambiguous and intangible, sometimes far removed from the experience of the intervener’s citizenry, can have clear and far-reaching political consequences both home and abroad.
Other scholars have either reverted to case studies of small wars during the Cold War and the 1990s, or returned to Clausewitz for inspiration. Beatrice Heuser is one scholar who falls into the latter category. 25 Heuser finds that while parts of Clausewitz’s key sections in both his classic On War and in his translated lectures are obsessed with light infantry and light cavalry operations in dealing with materially inferior and elusive opponents, another important part of his focus is on the role of ideology in rendering small wars on the battlefield into popular wars in the minds of local populations. In an insightful quote, Clausewitz explains away the insurgent’s willingness to sacrifice his or her life in place of good salaries in a uniformed armed force: “The fight for the Fatherland is the most beautiful reward for merit, the greatest attraction for talent.” 26 Another rare attempt at theorizing directly upon small wars is the article by Raj Desai and Harry Eckstein discussing insurgency in terms of the transformation of peasant rebellion. 27 Interestingly, their argument approaches small wars from the angle of explaining the potency of insurgency as a “syncretic phenomenon” comprising traditional peasant grievances, modern ideology, and organization dating from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, and finally doctrines of guerrilla warfare of the Mao, Giap, and DeBray varieties. This effort is significantly laudable for reaching into anthropological explanations for the tenacity of small wars. 28 Cold War studies of Latin American insurgencies also draw attention to the endemic social structural causes of patterns of ingrained violence practiced by both rebels and government soldiers against hapless civilians as well as suspected traitors. 29 A study of the Sierra Leonean conflict published in 1999 however identified mercenary intervention as a political market-driven need by some combatants who wish some form of termination of an ongoing small war so as to facilitate continued exploitation of mineral deposits in Africa. 30 In this case, the intensity or termination of small wars is subject to a global economy that depends on so-called blood diamonds and other raw material exploitation. It might even be said that mercenarism has revived the nineteenth-century-colonial content of small wars in the twenty first.
The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have triggered perhaps the most intense soul-searching efforts at treating small wars as a serious scholarly subject. David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla has for instance argued that guerrilla activity is most often provoked into being by the very foreign intervention that was supposed to dampen its fervor. 31 This is because hitherto familiar and sacrosanct local monopolies of political and social spaces have been intruded upon by outsiders who are hamstrung by their inadequate intellectual capacities for exercising full empathy toward their host populations. As a result, the interveners are perceived mostly as illegitimate and hostile occupiers, and hence liable to be targets for righteous violence aimed at ejecting them from local spaces. Kilcullen’s prism is of course America’s ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another like-minded author who addresses small wars under the moniker of Armed Humanitarians is Nathan Hodge. He has analyzed the problem of intractable insurgent strengths faced by American and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of the psychological and material deficiencies in comprehending the synonymity of today’s small wars in weak and failed states with “nation building” interventions. 32 Nation building requires the muzzling of guns in favor of civil affairs activities scoped within the range of ensuring a quick restoration of peaceful civilian normalcy via electricity generation, the regeneration of civilian jobs and schools, and the projection of a viable police presence that can ensure that the gains of normalcy will not be compromised by groups opting for a violent revision of the promised peace following intervention by a foreign force. A distinctly British postmortem of the small war in Basra, Iraq, where a British contingent was stationed in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom, reflected likewise on the failure of British defense planners in reading their own colonial history carefully and applying lessons learnt from counterinsurgency in the 1920s in Iraq itself, as well as from Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. 33 Frank Ledwidge’s indictment of his country’s Ministry of Defense was deliberately titled Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan in an ostensible nod to Callwell’s guide from the century before. Ledwidge warns that not only must history’s lessons be heeded, knowledge of local psychological misgivings and predisposition toward foreign occupiers must be factored into civil affairs operations. In many ways, these books by Ledwidge and Hodge lead us back to that venerable disciple of Clausewitz, Colin Gray, who counsels that the military mind must live with the chameleonic, and kaleidoscopic, colors of distinguishing regular and irregular warfare in any given situation, since one morphs effortlessly into the other, depending on the prevailing political winds. 34
The preceding surveys reinforce the questions of inquiry we have interpreted at the beginning through recent empirical trends: is the meaning of military deployment for community relations on the front lines a practice recognized among civilian populations as a legitimate military role? Can there exist a magic bullet for ending small wars to the satisfaction of one or the other protagonist? Moreover, is war termination a sustainable and potentially consolidated proposition in the context of waging a small war? Small wars that veer toward either the undermining or restoration of statehood and “nation building” are in many ways put under the microscope of the authors in this special issue. These are territorially, psychologically, and logistically “small wars” in the first sense that they are partly mopping up operations in the wake of conventional military hostilities and the need to prevent occupied areas from backsliding into all-out violence. Clausewitzian centers of gravity are prolonged and rendered subterranean, and battles by proxy for unnerving enemies in peacetime are par for the course among most military establishments and irregular combatants. All these defy conventional war labels, hence our final section summarizes the various authors’ findings in relation to defining the chameleonic and virtual characteristics of small wars.
Chameleonic Missions
Taken together, the authors in this section jointly articulate a vision of treating small wars as a set of chameleonic missions, and in its alter-dimension, virtual aggression. The enemy switches combatant and noncombatant statuses as one would camouflage according to the seasons and the lie of the land. The intervener, or occupier, labels the enemy an insurgent, the latter counters by demonizing the former as the foreign invader and infidel. The hate dimension is essential in motivating supreme sacrifices in blood and treasure for either side especially if one protagonist treats the small war as a disproportionately large one in the national psyche as a war to be waged for the stakes of survival. This could be survival in the Clausewitzian political sense, or it could be equally construed within an atavistic discourse, even associated with cultural preservation. The goals can shift across time across all these categories, in sequential order, or in mixed and reverse order. The chameleonic nature of small war is thus obvious, the resort to virtual aggression less so, but nonetheless discernible through sharp observation.
Civilization and Governance
Emrys Chew’s comparison between British and American ways of unconventional warfare draws attention to the culture-bound nature of engaging in small wars. Each power fought small wars in the name of seeking either empire or independence, or the latter before the other. These experiences collected over three centuries were to leave a lasting impression in the psychic repositories of the national military organizations through political frames, doctrines, and field manuals. The British were task-driven rather than means-driven whether in massacring bow and arrow tribesmen, or fending off rifle and cannon armed natives imitating European military revolutions. The Americans turned out to be bound by the tradition of imitating the formal European Armies and Navies, preferring doctrine over improvisation, despite the legacies of colonial pioneers and militia, the fight against North African pirates, and the campaigns of conquest against the Filipinos in the late nineteenth century. As Chew puts it, this historical method “reads” small war traditions seriously and confirms to the modern military man and woman everywhere that the cultural past always matters to the way one is conditioned to face an enemy who may not share the same.
Cornelius Lammers’s contribution on interpreting the lessons of an American Occupation style abroad picks up on the importance of culture as an explanation of how Operation Iraqi Freedom woefully failed to translate into a textbook occupation of the likes of US interventions in Central America, Germany, and Japan. In fact, Lammers identifies five characteristics of the “American style”: a clear preference for interventions of short duration of weeks and months rather than years; a predilection for seeking local allies to share in the common objective of a benign occupation, hence the need to propagate the theme of a “liberation” rather than an occupation; the furtherance of American national interests in any occupation; the institution of American control with a local face wherever possible; and the exculpation of any qualms about the ultimate fate of the populations of the occupied territories. In contrast, the traditional Dutch modus occupandi has historically proven to be more instrumental and colonial in its thoroughly more self-serving purpose, to the point of tolerating and abetting the old order of native rule even if it were repressive and exploitative. The British pattern, as Lammers points out, is closer to the American since it is the heritage from which the Americans draw upon through the experience of British colonization, with the exception that the Americans have supplied the more idealistic tone to countering irregular forces. Lammers posits that Iraq 2003–2011 presented a mixed test result for the American modus occupandi simply because Washington’s local allies exhibited sharp dissension rather than consensus, forcing American arms into the breach to discipline the process of transition. In any case, both Chew and Lammers’s articles draw attention to the need to consider how the salience of civilizational traits impose themselves upon the local populations in any form of small war engagement, especially if it requires a period of occupation to stabilize the peace.
Rene Moelker’s treatment of a reinvented Dutch approach to asymmetrical conflict nicely taps into another dimension of the civilizational showcase involved in fighting small wars. He argues strongly that the Dutch have learned to adapt community policing methods developed after the mid-1970s to deployments in “stabilization operations” that gained momentum with the end of the Cold War and the increase in multinational peace operations across the globe. Moreover, Moelker sees continuity in the way the British and the Dutch practiced colonial stabilization operations in the nineteenth century and earlier in the sense that both national cultures have adapted both coercion and blandishment toward their local enemies with varying degrees of success. This is attributable to the ability to fit operational styles to the tempo of the local circumstances. As a result, a widely hailed Dutch approach to the stabilization of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan has come to be variously coined a “smile and wave,” or “softly softly” policy, emphasizing the legitimacy of minimal force and maximum dialogue in convincing the indigenous population in a conflict zone to share the same vision with the interveners of restoring normalcy.
CIMIC
In many ways, Chew, Lammers, and Moelker’s studies all deal with CIMIC either directly or indirectly. In order to be effective in defusing the explosively kinetic features of small wars, national military cultures have found effectiveness in unmaking existing doctrines on counterinsurgency, or inventing new ones that emphasize soft power. In this usage, soft power is employed to elicit cooperation from local protagonists, and neutrals alike, toward upholding a fragile peace by signaling to them and their followers that the intervention forces are more than the symbolic equivalents of the mailed fist, they are equally capable of wearing the velvet glove. The military and the civilian could theoretically be seen to mutually enhance, and where need be, substitute for one another in a chameleon-like seamless transition. The soldier who is trained to patrol with his rifle and pistol at the ready is the same person doling out food aid and consulting with indigenous protagonists on their most immediate requirements for rebuilding the peace. Hence, the comparisons between the American, British, Dutch, and French approaches across the articles.
Shawn Cochran’s contribution explores a different angle to the CIMIC dynamic by examining what he calls the institutional legitimacy factor within the bureaucratic organizational model of the military. This manifests itself sharply in relation to the termination of protracted small wars. When protraction occurs due to the costs imposed by the rival protagonist’s fighting strategies, the other party’s military organization will weigh the costs and benefits of continuing with the campaign in a rational manner. Once it is concluded that the entire legitimacy of the military bureaucracy is at risk of protraction, the military will strive to persuade its civilian political leadership to refocus its war aims toward conflict termination short of outright victory. Scanning through case studies of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and Portugal in its African territories, Cochran concludes that there are variations to the degree to which the military is prepared to force termination of an unpopular small war upon the civilian political leadership. It is no longer simple obstruction, there are gentler ways through which the military facilitates a turnaround by the civilians in power.
Virtual Aggression: Fighting Through Discourses and Taking Out the Enemy Culturally
All the articles in this special section have either directly or indirectly alluded to the fact that prosecuting small wars to a definitive conclusion requires a large degree of deft maneuver of narratives to either shore up one’s troop morale in the face of battlefield reverses, or to outflank the enemy’s moral and psychological advantages. The articles by Chew, Lammers, and Cochran draw attention to these diverse aspects, even if their analyses are more clinically oriented to their specific research foci. Narratives reflect a history of cumulative experience or a mental map of retrieving past formulae for present application. The asymmetrically disadvantaged adversary would do well to acknowledge this and direct all due diligence to dislocating their enemy’s sense of complacency toward time-honored doctrines. Historical perspectives on small war traditions and comparative studies of occupation modes are a laudable way to illuminate these aspects of psychological warfare within small wars.
Finally, Moelker’s insights into the twenty-first-century Dutch approach to peace operations reveal a new doctrinal innovation: match the adversary on his own cultural frequency. The Dutch experience in Uruzgan is not a bland public relations exercise by undesirable foreign policing forces. The “smile and wave” and consultative psychological operations are meant to disarm the opponent’s cultural advantage in claiming the nationalist high ground exclusively for their cause. This form of virtual combat is a battle of rival versions of trust: we can be friendlier and more helpful to your lives and aspirations than your other suitor, so why not treat with us, until proven otherwise?
In short, what may appear intangible and virtual (particularly when juxtaposed against the superior lethality of Western militaries) do get transformed into clear military and political outcomes. Indeed, in Clausewitzian terms, “war is more than a mere Chameleon” capable of more than just superficial changes, but small wars exhibit a multidimensional asymmetry which twenty-first-century military professionals and politicians alike can only ignore at their own peril when all protagonists enjoy almost equal access to social media and digital camera platforms for extending the battlefield across global domains. 35
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.