War and Power, page 3
However, just being economically and technologically powerful is not enough, as post-1945 Japan and Germany can attest. Here we get into the shaping variables. First, the political leadership of a state has an enormous influence on how economic/technological power can be used (or abused). One of the great fallacies of international relations is that there is some abstractly understood national interest to which all leaderships aspire. It is more accurate to say that national interest is determined by political leaderships and reflects their prejudices and policies. These can be wildly divergent, ranging from hyper-aggressive and genocidal – such as with Adolf Hitler – to more passive or domestically focused.
Of course, leaders don’t operate in a vacuum. Another whole set of shaping variables includes a state’s society and its political structure. Certain societies at different times will applaud war, while others will oppose entering a conflict. Certain political structures will place limitations on what a leader can do; others will allow leaders practically untrammelled opportunities to act. Society and political structure also interact and shape power in areas such as morale and corruption. There is also no easy categorization here. Democracies can have certain advantages in terms of flexibility and creativity, and yet we are also seeing right now how vulnerable democratic societies are to outside penetration.
If the foundational element of national power is economic/technological strength, which is shaped by leadership, society and political structure, there are two important tests for that power: what kind of military does it create, and what kind of international relationships does it produce? A military must always be understood as a product of the factors above, not some sort of physical end in and of itself. The Russian military has punched well below its weight in Ukraine, and at times in the twentieth century too, because its shaping variables have tended towards corruption and a lack of efficiency. On the other hand, the US military of World War II reflected the personal views of the US leadership (Franklin Roosevelt’s obsession with sea and air power) combined with the technological and mass productions provided by the nation’s economy. Don’t look so much at the number of tanks in an army, but rather at the elements that create those tanks.
Beyond a nation’s military, its international relationships play a massive role in the exercise of its power and influence. Another of the failures of the great power paradigm is its focus on the nation state as an individual actor. However, even the most powerful states are far more limited than people often realize. They all work with and indeed need allies to ensure their security and buttress their influence in peace and war. Often, international politics is presented as oppositional, and states are defined by their supposed enemies. Actually, a state is more easily judged by its friendships, and the skilful operation of those friendships can amplify national power significantly. On the other hand, the creation of weak international relationships can hobble even the strongest of powers.
After looking at power, the next five chapters will look at how power operates in war. In other words, what are the key variables that need to be considered in assessing what determines the course of a war once a state gets involved in one? The disconnection between assumed and real power becomes exposed when a state goes to war, and assumptions face the test of reality that only a conventional war can present. To understand the test of war, it is crucial to start with the process of war-fighting, which is very different from the process of battle-fighting. War is a test of various systems in a multitude of different ways; it is not a test of armies, and certainly not something that is determined by supposedly decisive battles.
These systems run from the highly advanced and technological to the very human. Complex operations involve the operation of many different weapons, sensors, and even means of transport in concert with each other, for maximum impact. They are not determined by weapons per se, but by the operations of weapons systems in constant combination, where speed, reliability and technological sophistication all influence the outcome. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, no complex systems have been as important as those needed to operate air power and logistics. The ability of a state to provide for its military in order to apply air power effectively and supply itself through logistical systems separates the truly powerful from the imposters.
A key element in the success of complex operations and all other elements of war-fighting is human influence. It’s easy to count tanks; it’s much harder to assess how well those operating the tanks have been prepared for combat, and whether those operating the tanks really want to operate them in combat. Militaries (at least for now) still must be controlled by human beings, and often it is their learned skills and continuing ability to take risks that determine the course of wars. Of course, human abilities need to be backed up by constant operational sustainment. When the myth of the short, decisive war collapses, as it usually does, what is left is a long-term struggle to constantly regenerate – and even grow – military force as it is being destroyed in combat. The military equipment with which a country starts a war is normally eaten up in short order, and the war becomes a desperate test to make, repair and recreate military force.
Finally, even more so than in peace, alliances often determine the outcome of a war even for the most powerful states. Allies play an enormous role in providing aid, and can even take over a significant amount of the fighting burden. The two world wars were decided by alliances acting in concert, not individual states fighting their own wars. Or, to put it more bluntly, the states that acted most like individual actors – such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in World War II – were doomed when faced with the Allies, who were willing to act far more cooperatively. In other words, those states that try to act like individual great powers, like Germany in both world wars, ended up defeated; while those nations that were able to work in larger coalitions – such as Britain – had their victory parades.
The importance of alliances also underlines one of the purposes of this book, which is to explain the different elements, beyond military forces, that make up a country’s power and help determine how it will perform in war. Returning to the start of this introduction, the more complex nature of power means we should dispense with the phrase ‘great power’, as very few powers are great, and those that are not considered ‘great’ are often surprisingly successful at achieving their strategic goals. Correspondingly, rarely if ever have ‘great powers’ won wars on their own. What is far more sensible is to understand power as a construction in which a number of different elements play a role. The economic/technological strength of a power can be shaped by leadership, society and political structure – and can be reinforced by alliances. A ‘full spectrum’ power has elements of strength in all these areas.
Hopefully we won’t have to worry soon about which of the two most powerful states on the earth today will have a victory parade or not. A war between the US and China would far eclipse any conflict we have seen – other than the world wars – in terms of its potential to kill and destroy, and it has the possibility of surpassing even them. And yet, it must be understood that a war between them is a very real possibility. This book will end by using the methodology outlined on war and power to assess what would matter if these two states (and their allies, of course) end up at war. Perhaps, just perhaps, a proper understanding of the limited nature of power and the disastrous consequences unleashed by the decision to go to war might lead states and leaders to think twice before making a fateful decision.
Footnotes
i From now on, the Russian full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022 will be referred to for the sake of clarity as the Russian invasion. This is no way detracts from the fact that the original Russian invasion of Ukraine was in 2014.
ii Though there will be reference to occasional events from Napoleon’s time and earlier, the core of this book will run from the origins of World War I in the late nineteenth century to today.
iii The word ‘system’ appears regularly in this book. For clarity’s sake, when you see ‘system’ on its own, it is normally referring to a weapons system and can cover anything from the most advanced missiles such as the Patriot anti-air system to small arms. When weapons systems or logistics systems, etc., are operated together, that will be referred to as a ‘complex operation’. Other uses of the word ‘system’ will have a prefix such as ‘political’ or ‘economic’ to specify what is being referred to.
iv This is the subject of my book: The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler – How War Made Them and How They Made War. All five of the famous grand strategists had very personal experiences of war early in their lives, primarily in the years 1914–21. These experiences helped shape their individual strategic outlooks, which strongly influenced their policy choices in World War II.
PART ONE
Power
1. Economic/Technological Strength
Power in both times of peace and times of war depends on the ability to design, build and manipulate ‘stuff’. The stuff in question has to be the most technologically advanced for its time, well made, produced in substantial quantities (especially during wars), and at a cost that is sustainable and competitive. This matters more than geographical size or population numbers when it comes to national power. Indeed, looking at which states have been the most powerful over the last two centuries, it has been the economically largest and technologically most advanced that have dominated.
The size of a state in area or population terms plays a comparatively marginal role. The two largest countries today in terms of geographic size are first Russia and then Canada, neither of whom would qualify as a full-spectrum power. In 1900, the largest countries would have been Great Britain (with the British Empire), Russia and China – and in this case only one, as World War I would show, was a full-spectrum power. The United States, on the other hand, has never been more than the fourth-largest country in the world in terms of area, though it has dominated global power for more than a century.
The same holds true for population. Looking at the ten largest countries in the world by population now, it’s interesting to see that the two full-spectrum powers of the moment (the US and China) are in the top three, with India above both, and a large range of less powerful states grouped below.1 Some of these latter states are very close to the US in population, including Indonesia, whose population is more than 80 per cent of that of the US, and Pakistan, at 70 per cent.
It’s worth realizing just how out of balance international power is with population. Though the US has been the greatest power in the world for well over a century, its population has only made up about 5 per cent of the globe’s total. Yet at the same time, the US has been labelled, successively, a ‘great power’, a ‘superpower’ and even a ‘global hegemon’.2 What seems to be the case is that a state needs enough people, but certainly not the most people, to be a significant power. Indeed, if pressed, long-term demographics could be said to matter more than raw numbers. A state needs enough people at the right ages to support future growth. When a nation’s population ages rapidly, such as Japan after the 1990s and China today, it presents serious challenges to a country’s future development as a power.
The same is not the case with economic/technological power. Economically there have been three states that have been dominant since the mid-nineteenth century. Britain and the British Empire industrialized first and led the world in production and much of high technology until the late nineteenth century. Then Britain was surpassed rapidly by the United States, which became the largest economic power in the world sometime in the 1890s (in both overall and per capita terms) and by 1914 was an economic powerhouse the size of much of Europe.3 The recent rise of China economically and technologically has posed the first legitimate challenge to US dominance since the 1890s.
Looking at what mattered in the nineteenth century, before the two world wars and today, one of the best ways to see the differences between what the powers were able to accomplish is by examining variables such as gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP). There has been one constant since the beginning of modern statistics: the dominance of the US. Now there is a situation where the US and China are in a league of their own. The US is still the largest country in the world in absolute GDP size, however if GDP is readjusted to take into consideration the purchasing power of capital in the different countries, China’s GDP is now larger.
In fact, when it comes to economic size, the US was a rival or superior to most continents in the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first. At the end of World War II, the United States even rivalled the rest of the world – about 50 per cent of world GDP was contained within its borders, and it possessed 80 per cent of the world’s currency reserves.4
Of course, looking at economic size alone is a rather blunt way of gauging relative power. That is because in basic terms what makes a state powerful (both in peace and war) is how its economic/technological strength can be translated into military power – and, as such, economic size can mask different capabilities. For instance, a state such as Russia, which creates much of its wealth through resource extraction, can struggle with many of the technical and complex operational parts of war-fighting. Similarly, over the past few decades, many western states whose wealth is derived from services have lost the ability to create military force quickly and efficiently in times of need. This has left Russia and large European economies in particular (economies far larger than Russia’s, such as Germany’s) punching below their economic weight. A nation needs the economic/technological strength not just to buy the military systems it needs, but to make them itself – and if needs be, significantly scale up their production in times of war.
Thus, how economic/technological strength can be used to create military power matters most in relative power balances – and in many ways this separates the very small number of full-spectrum powers from the pretenders. The act of creating military power requires a range of abilities. First, the state must have the ability to tap into the most important and potentially disruptive technologies of the day, and to use those in the creation of its military equipment. It must also have the ability to integrate these weapons with others by creating and operating complex systems. Having a weapons system is very different from having the ability to integrate it into a complex operation to extract its greatest impact. Finally, the state must have the ability to increase production of such systems and refine and improve their complex operations in times of great crisis or outright war. Essentially, military power depends on having the best and the most – and only the very top of the economic/technological pyramid can possibly do this.
To see how the need for the best and the need for the most have worked together in the modern age, we can look at the construction and operation of some of the defining weapons systems of their time – weapons that determined the course of World War I and World War II, and which today are seen as crucial to any war that would break out between the two full-spectrum powers. These are dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers before and during World War I; four-engine bombers before and during World War II; and, more recently, large aircraft-carrier battle groups. Though many states aspired to create and operate all of these, only a very small number could do so effectively – and as such they separated themselves from the pack.
Dreadnoughts
Dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers were the most complex and expensive creations on the globe in the decade leading up to World War I. The specific ship which started the class designation, HMS Dreadnought, was launched by the British in 1906 and represented an important milestone in the construction of modern navies. A century earlier, in 1805, British maritime dominance had been established by the Royal Navy’s victory over the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. Then, the Royal Navy’s largest ships, under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson, were powered by sail and built of wood. They engaged and defeated the French fleet at point-blank range.5 At times during the Battle of Trafalgar, the largest warships on each side were so close that they collided, and Nelson himself was killed because of the close-quarters nature of early nineteenth-century naval combat. When his flagship, HMS Victory, got tangled up with the French vessel Redoubtable, Nelson was so close to the enemy that he was shot by a French marine with a smoothbore musket. The bullet that killed him was tiny, weighing only twenty-two grams.6 The French marksman, up in the rigging of Redoubtable, was able to put this bullet into Nelson’s shoulder. It then passed through his lungs and spine, causing such catastrophic internal damage that it quickly led to death.
By the start of the twentieth century, however, naval technology had so transformed warships that Nelson’s fleet was closer in capabilities to the Athenian triremes in the Peloponnesian War more than two millennia earlier (also fought at point-blank range) than those cruising the oceans before World War I. This was particularly the case for the largest, best-protected and most powerfully armed vessels of the day – usually referred to as battleships. These were the technological marvels of the early twentieth century, the highest expression of industrialized economies, and cost more than any moving thing on earth (and most immobile things as well). They were made of steel and iron, propelled by enormous yet finely engineered engines, and sported guns of immense weight and precision, capable of firing shells for many miles. Building such battleships was a supreme test – one that taxed every power that had pretensions to a modern navy. This was the test the British set for the world when they launched HMS Dreadnought in 1906.7
