By Javier Gil Guerrero
CBCG collaborator. Researcher, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra.
The West has been preparing for the wrong kind of war for more than three decades. Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not ended, and the war in Gaza continues to spread to Lebanon and other countries in the region, three years of war in Europe and one year of conflict in the Middle East offer more than enough examples and lessons to conclude that NATO countries need to seriously rethink their defense policy.
Since the end of the Cold War, Western countries have inexorably and systematically reduced the major assets of their armed forces. Large combat formations, firepower and heavy armor are now a fraction of what they were in the 1980s. This slimming regime (which has become anorexia) was justified by a new military doctrine advocating the suitability of smaller, more agile and sophisticated armies. Precision bombing, electronic intelligence and special forces became the paradigm for future battlefield victory. The military could see the enemy perfectly on a “glass battlefield” and then destroy him from a distance or the sky by precise bombing and, occasionally, by rapid interventions on the ground by small, perfectly armed and trained units. Clean, fast, precise, low-cost warfare with almost non-existent casualties. The bulk of the infantry would only need to be prepared for humanitarian and pacification work once victory over the enemy had been achieved.
The touchstone of this new approach to defense was a total commitment to the technological development of weapon systems that were increasingly complex, expensive and, therefore, less numerous than those they would replace.
The wars of the last thirty years seemed to support this new doctrine. Major military operations are dispatched in days or weeks. The Gulf War lasted barely six weeks of air campaign and four days of ground campaign. The intervention in Yugoslavia was a ten-week air campaign while the invasion of Iraq was over in five weeks. In Libya, twelve days was enough for the most intense bombing phase, led by the United States. In all these cases, the enemy was largely defeated from the air. In cases where there were large troop deployments, these were practically limited to harvesting the victory fertilized by the bombing, with the enemy falling into their hands like ripe fruit. This explains why only 147 US and allied soldiers were killed in the Gulf War, while the invasion of Iraq was carried out at the cost of only 172 US soldiers.
The reason is that these military operations were carried out against poor, underdeveloped countries or countries with armed forces deeply depleted by economic sanctions or internal strife. In none of the above cases were the enemies of the US-led coalitions an opponent on the battlefield and the outcome of the confrontation was known in advance.
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