Foreign Policy

Winter 1999–2000

 

Rethinking War: The Mouse’s New Roar?
By Martin Libicki

 

This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

For most of history, the oft-cited correlation between the size of one’s battalions and the odds of military victory had a firm foundation in reality. In classic terms, larger forces won more battles. When technology began to matter, large industrialized nations proved uniquely capable of mobilizing the resources to develop trump cards such as nuclear arms or spy satellites.

The rise of globalization over the last half century has now given analysts cause to question such received wisdom. Today, almost every element of power can be acquired in the global marketplace. And so it seems that the small have caught up with the strong and that size does not matter, at least as it once did.

But while in some ways small nations can fend off superpowers more effectively, in others they are more at their mercy. The most obvious paths to power, such as the ability to hold others at risk through weapons of mass destruction, or, speculatively, through information warfare, may turn out to be show rather than substance. Instead, non-superpowers can exploit globalization in more subtle ways.

Over the last two decades, globalization (and a certain winking at where products end up) has enabled small and relatively backward countries to acquire chemical plants from Europe, biological research equipment from the United States, or missile technology from the former Soviet Union. But their ensuing development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction may not necessarily tip the scales. The ability of a small country to drop an explosive warhead on the city of a superpower may give the latter pause and remove the cloak of impunity behind which superpowers plot. As such, superpowers cannot contemplate military action against a missile-armed foe without the risk of civilian casualties. Yet, once that psychological barrier is breached and action proceeds, long-range missiles are nothing more than fancy artillery. Larger countries will always have more.

Since smaller countries are outgunned, weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear—are often touted as the great equalizers. Clearly, the scare potential of weapons of mass destruction is higher than conventional weapons, and thus, putatively, so is the pause that may refresh a superpower’s thinking. But, again, once the barrier is breached, superpowers have a decided advantage in throwweight, and large nations may more easily lay waste to small ones than the reverse.

If weapons of mass destruction are not the express lane to superpower status, then what about a more circuitous route? Small nations, it is often said, can exploit the chinks in the armor of the great powers through information warfare and terrorism. Even the smallest of countries can make use of a single connection, a cheap computer, and a clever hacker to disrupt or corrupt any of the world’s major information systems: funds transfer, transportation control, air traffic safety, phones, electric power, oil and gas distribution, and even military systems.

Or so Hollywood would have us believe. Were cyberterrorism or blackmail so easy, one or another malevolent party would have done it long ago to the United States or other advanced economies. Such societies have already been computerized for decades, and the United States has had enemies whose best time to conduct information warfare has clearly come (and often gone).

Small nations still have a long way to go before they can inflict sufficient pain to coerce the large powers. However, globalization has made it easier for small countries to resist efforts at control and incapacitation by an invading superpower. In the realm of conventional warfare, the means exist for sophisticated countries from large to small to undertake what has been called a “revolution in military affairs.” Traditionally, victory in combat was a matter of mobilizing, deploying, and utilizing the larger battalions (or battle fleets, or air squadrons). Skill counted, but numbers ultimately were the deciding factor.

The revolution in military affairs, however, is changing that balance. The development of precision-guided munitions (PGMs), which first came of age 20 years ago, has meant that the ability to see a target is tantamount to being able to hit and kill it. To be useful, however, PGMs have to be told where to go and that, in turn, puts a premium on being able to see the battlefield and communicate its relevant features to the operator—in a word, information. Most of what is needed to achieve information superiority in times of war is now available over the counter in the global marketplace.

Small countries also benefit from the globalization of perception—the ability of everyone to know what is happening in minute detail around the world and the increasing tendency to care about it. Exploiting this trend, a small nation can portray itself as a victim of aggression and often in time for the world community to react meaningfully.

Countries that wish to play the victim successfully must set the stage carefully and choose the background music well. Is Serbia a small state victimized by NATO or a medium-sized state engaging in ethnic cleansing? Making sure the answers come out right requires understanding what makes sense to the audience. For this trick, size is no help; sophistication is what counts.

Small nations cannot rest their security on others without some well-founded nervousness. The ability of the media to stir popular outrage predates the 20th century. Think of the Hearst newspapers hastening the Spanish-American War. Yet only recently has the 20th century been kind to small states. And today’s kindness is contingent on nothing more serious being at stake—a global depression or a new cold war could make such flowers of concern fade fast.

Harder Than It Looks

 

References

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica:RAND, 1997)

Paul J. Bracken’s Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999)

Dorothy E. Denning’s Information Warfare and Security (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1998).

Richard A. Falkenreath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer’s America’s Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998)

Ann M. Florini’s “The Opening Skies: Third-Party Imaging Satellites and U.S. Security” (International Security, Fall 1998)

Florini’s “The End of Secrecy” (Foreign Policy, Summer 1998)

Ryan Henry and C. Edward Peartree, eds., The Information Revolution and International Security (Washington: CSIS, 1998)

Ian O. Lesser et al, eds., Countering the New Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND 1999)

Keith B. Payne’s Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996)

James Rosenau’s “States and Sovereignty in a Globalizing World” in Understanding Globalization: The Nation-State, Democracy, and Economic Policies in the New Epoch, by Rosenau et al., (Stockholm: Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 1998)

Stuart J.D. Schwartzstein, ed., The Information Revolution and National Security: Dimensions and Directions (Washington: CSIS, 1996)

George Smith’s “An Electronic Pearl Harbor? Not Likely” (Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 1998)