Proving Ground

At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, a British army under General Kitchener took on a Mahdist force outside of what is now Khartoum in modern day Sudan. Kitchener had about eight thousand infantrymen against over fifty thousand enemy soldiers. The British arranged themselves in a shallow mile-long arc, as was their style, and waited for the Mahdis (or “Dervishes” as they were known) to make the first move. The excited and howling Dervishes did just that, whirling their scimitars and launching wave after wave against the British line. When the smoke cleared, over twelve thousand Dervishes were dead, and another fifteen thousand were wounded. The British dead totaled forty-eight.

It was one of the most lopsided major battles in military history, a result staged by asymmetrical weaponry and tactics. Against a Mahdi army equipped with spears and swords and outdated small arms, the British brought to bear a menagerie of industrial death instruments, including fast-firing rifles, accurate rear-loaded artillery, and one particularly nasty piece of new hardware: the Maxim machine gun. The Mahdis had become unwitting lab rats trapped inside an experiment in industrial warfare. British soldiers at Omdurman — including a young Winston Churchill — praised the Dervishes for their bravery and up-close lethality, and a hundred years earlier a battle between these Dervishes and muzzle-loading redcoats may have gone a different way. But the Dervishes were little more than target practice against a martial machine from a civilization that had been undergoing the most significant technological surge in the history of the world. The Industrial Revolution had flexed its muscle in the American Civil War, tweaked some things in the short and decisive Franco-Prussian War, and now had effectively put to bed any notion that the Europeans would be challenged in their dominion over the entire continent of Africa and the world beyond.

But this new factory-forged sword was double-edged. The great powers of Europe had been more or less at peace with each other since the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and had spent the last century using their new powers of manufacturing and travel and mobilization to beat up on less advanced peoples with only the occasional speed bump (a Zulu defeat of the British at Isandlewana in 1878 being one of these rare exceptions). They honed their new toys and tried them out against practice squads, but European leaders who observed slaughterhouses like Omdurman started to get nervous. Yes, they thought, we can train these Maxim guns on some sword-wielding Dervishes and put up some wild kill/death ratios. But what will happen if we ever turn those guns on each other?

The arc of technological advancement only accelerated from there, and it put immense pressure on the great powers of the Old World. The Boer War, which flared up soon after the destruction of the Sudanese Dervishes, gave the British Empire a taste of what accurate fast-fire rifles could do in the hands of a more capable adversary, as the Afrikaners of South Africa used expert marksmanship and guerrilla warfare to inflict heavy casualties on British forces before they were finally put down by massive Imperial numbers. The Boers had provided a glimpse of what a lot of accurate lead in the air of a modern battlefield might look like, but skilled though they were, Dutch farmers were a faint shadow of the great Industrial Age armies being amassed on the European continent at the dawn of the 20th Century.

When they inevitably clashed in 1914, there was simply no way for all these Old World militaries and the sclerotic governments that managed them to foresee or quickly comprehend what was happening. The German Imperial Army, then the most advanced and fearsome military machine ever assembled, initially smashed French armies under a hail of bullets and artillery shells of such disorienting volume that it drove French officers to walk onto the field and shoot themselves in the head in front of their own troops. But the near-victorious German machine churned to a halt just short of Paris, when everyone dug into the ground just to find some shelter from the apocalyptic shower of munitions that all these first rate armies could unload on each other. The four-year bloodbath that ensued likely dealt classical European civilization a mortal blow in the long arc of history. We in the West are still living amidst its embers.

Much of military history can be viewed as collision events in the mold of either the Battle of Omdurman or the First World War. Either there are predictable routs when advanced societies bring their latest toys to bear on a technologically inferior foe, or powers that have spent a long time practicing against lesser opponents finally get to test their mettle against legitimate adversaries, and find out just how ahead of or behind the curve they really are. It’s safe to say the latter of these two is more significant when it comes to shaping the geopolitical world, and they don’t always wind up as peer-on-peer grindstones like the trenches of France. Sometimes a power that had spent a long time beating up on provincials finds that its weapons and tactics don’t stand up.

The Persians had poked and prodded the lesser Greek states for over a century when Alexander the Great took his Macedonian phalanx and smashed their empire to dust. The French and English had fought a long series of indecisive clashes between mounted knights when the English longbowmen at the Battle of Crecy announced the dominance of projectile weapons. The Confederate Army dealt regular defeats to the Union forces during the early months of the Civil War, but they learned that such classical single-day battlefield victories on the backs of gallant leadership charging on horseback didn’t mean much against the relentless churn of large-scale industrial warfare and continental naval blockade — this discovery took four years and 750,000 lives. When paradigms have fundamentally shifted, major powers never really understand it until they see it play out before their eyes. And when they finally clash, either one finds out they were way behind the curve, in which case the war might end blessedly quickly, or two Goliaths smash each other back to the drawing board, endangering both their societies with the specter of drawn-out conflict.

Which brings us to now. There hasn’t been a war between two major powers since the Japanese signed their surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri in 1945. The United States and the Soviets danced around the cliff’s edge for a half century afterward, perhaps saved from disaster by the fact that the paradigm shift toward nuclear weapons had been previewed at the end of the previous war — even just a couple cities erased by nuclear fire takes things out of the realm of the theoretical. In fact, it’s likely that the successful avoidance of nuclear war has further confused the picture of the what the next war will look like. After all, once you develop your nukes and have them targeted at your enemy’s cities there may not seem to be much else to do in terms of strategic planning. At least two and possibly three countries have buttons that could end the world. But the great powers of the world still find themselves in the same situation that Europe did in 1914, perhaps worse. They’ve spent decades skirmishing with and often embarrassing themselves against technologically inferior opponents with better thought-out long term strategies. Much like in the years leading up to 1914, profound geopolitical shifts had been happening during rapid globalization (consider that the world was in many ways more globalized in 1914 than it was in 1945), and have been doing so without direct military conflict between first world nations.

The Russian war against Ukraine has yielded some clues, but the picture has been fuzzy. The Russian advance has been stop-start and plodding, but it’s also been in accordance with their doctrine — like the Union advance during the American Civil War, it has been thundering and relentless and executed knowing full well of its massive advantages in industry and resources. The lessons are also obfuscated by a hyperreal media environment on both sides of the conflict, with a firehose of modern propaganda sprayed over the reality of the battlefield, and leadership castes across the globe that all look as though they have bought into delusional ways of thinking that could lead to catastrophe. And remember that most of the “next-gen” weaponry possessed by the Great Powers — hypersonic missiles and cyber barrages and DNA-targeted bioweapons and all manner of other Digital Age horrors — has yet to see use in peer-to-peer action.

With a large scale proxy war between East and West burning on the European continent for the first time in decades — and with the sabers rattling quite loudly in east Asia — the age-old mouse trap looks primed to snap yet again. Weapons tested, simulations run, delusions bulwarked and woven tight into policy. Every planner surely submitting reports up the ladder about the war being “over by Christmas.” But you never know which of those dynamics illustrated above will play out when the live fire starts. In the long arc of military history, the theoretical rarely seems to satisfy. The real game must be played.