Part 2

The Warfare Spectrum

by Hugh M. Lewis

There is a fog of mysteriousness enveloping the objective understanding of warfare, which gives rise to prejudicial attitudes about warfare as being so complex that only very few skilled persons can even attempt to understand its fundamental nature. There is in open societies a natural proclivity towards peace and a subconscious repulsiveness as well as an attraction toward warfare, educational systems shy away from teaching objective analysis about warfare. Warfare occupies a realm of knowledge which most individuals view only from a distance, very few seek to objectively analyze its elements. The responsibility from a conceptual understanding about warfare is shirked by the average person and is relegated to the business affairs of a small cliquish minority of mysterious technocrats, often stereotyped as war crazed generals and cold hearted inhuman scientists. This general attitude is reflected in certain Machiavellian comments that can be often heard, that war is hell and therefore all forms of transgression are justified, that nothing can be done to prevent war--wars have always happened and is a natural behavioral pattern of mankind--therefore war is inevitable, that war is even good--helping to unite a country and dispel poverty. Political governments rely on this popular ignorance about the nature of warfare and even help to promote it to ensure social approval for its more militaristic doctrines and policies and to maintain unquestioning loyalty to its causes precluding the need to publicly justify them.

The few of society who are enlisted and become involved in warfare are often caught up in relatively limited roles of conflict and toil, objective perspectives about warfare are often clouded by extremely emotional first hand experiences. These subjective experiences filter back to the larger social group and become part of a total subjective social perspective of warfare. Mass media capitalizes on these subjective experiences, glamorizing war, intensifying the fog of war by bringing subjectivity into the home environment. For every person in the vanguard of conflict there are a host of supporting uniformed and civilian personnel each receiving a transmitting the second hand experiences of war, the fog of war becomes intensified by the alteration and adornment of truth with the creation of rumors and exaggerated falsehoods.

Objective analysis of warfare is highly fragmented and often transmitted independently and sporadically. Objectivity can be shrouded in the technique and terminology of the military profession. Official opinionation leads to instilling of prejudiced attitudes. The historical perspective of warfare is often over emphasized documentation of dates, facts and of battlefield experiences to the exclusion of an objective analysis of warfare as a dynamic social function. Many analyses are drawn from second hand sources which tend to undercut their objective value. Analysis has been dominated by a few prolific writers to the exclusion of less well known analysts, while the objectivity becomes obscured by popular and trite clichés and anachronistic misinterpretation. All these factors contribute to the fog of war and do not help to dissipate its crippling effects on the ignorance of the public in general.

The general opinion of the complexity of warfare leads to premature despair in many attempts to understand in depth its whole nature. This feeling of complexity must be dispelled. The complexity of warfare is only surface noise which once penetrated leads only to simplicity and rational analysis. The fog of war is then dissipated. Dispelling the prevailing ignorance about warfare is a step in the right direction. Understanding warfare is the responsibility of the citizen, part of the same responsibility of understanding the issues when voting. The natural rights and privileges are not freely granted to the citizen, but have the price of the responsibility to understand and participate in social decision making and not merely to be unquestioning sycophants of the states' dictates. Dispelling the ignorance of warfare by establishing an objective perspective would produce greater expectations from the government, for the leaders to assume the reciprocal responsibilities to know and to do the jobs to which they were elected. It would help eliminate unjust and inefficient policies. The issue is fundamentally one of leadership, of which all share in the responsibility. Warfare yet occupies a mysterious realm in the social consciousness, contributing to the proliferation of militarism and increasing social insensitivity to its ill effects.

One problem in the objective understanding of warfare is the confusion by the wide variety of different terms used in its description. Many different terms may describe the same type of warfare and many are only directly attributable to specific periods of history. There is a void of unity in the defining vocabulary of warfare. Warfare is no longer a completely separate function from peace in which a formal declaration of a state of conflict can be issued, but it is today a more protracted form occurring spontaneously within the warfare continuum. The warfare spectrum is a classification system by which all forms of warfare may be categorized systematically and thus understood as part of a comprehensive warfare continuum.

The evolution of militarism has reached a plateau. The technology of weapons may continue to increase firepower and the potential destruction by quantum increases compared to the current level, but the inherent potential in the modern weapons has reached a critical junction in terms of human valuation. The potential for destruction is hard to quantify due to the unlimited diversity of possibilities and variations, but the quantification of aggression is irrelevant without it finally becoming a function of the qualification of human valuation. Destruction is meaningless without the human element that attaches value to what is destroyed. The technological potential for humanity's suicide has become embodied in nuclear weaponry. This sets an important upper limitation in the realization of destructive force potential, as the upper definable limit of the warfare spectrum.

The future of civilization is ultimately in the hands of a handful of men. It is irrational for anyone to plan and attempt the complete devastation of civilization. The nuclear weapons are conceived on the basis of rational use by rational people, but protection against irrationality cannot be built into the system or planned against. A feasible doomsday strategy planned and conceived by a few lunatics could be implemented with complete ease, such as the use of nuclear warheads on all the world's population centers, followed by an attack of deadly biological agents that would work in conjunction with the residual radiation of the nuclear holocaust to reciprocally magnify the ill effects of each. Then perhaps a well organized extermination corps might be implemented to insure the extinction of the human species. Once the corps has completed the extermination it would in turn be eliminated by the fanatical mastermind who would afterward kill himself--his God send mission completed. Such a scenario stirs images of a worldwide Jonestown massacre masterminded by some Hitler or a Dr. Strangelove. A critical juncture in the evolution has been reached and overpassed. Doomsday weapons are no longer future fiction but they are a fact of the present, already in the employment of the superpowers of the world.

It is not to predict that Armageddon will arrive nor is it to say that the evolution of militarism will cease, nor that doomsday might become embodied in the destructive potential of a single weapon the size of an ink pen, and that many thousands of such ink pens might be employed in the arsenals of many nation states. It is not to say that man couldn't have destroyed himself at any time in history armed only with stones or knives, even though such massive destruction would have required a concentration of social willpower to an extreme degree. It is not to say that the possibility of doomsday is not still remote, that if a nuclear or biological war did occur that humanity would necessarily be completely destroyed. Humanity might suffer such an event and afterwards quickly rise to even grander potentials. The evolution of civilization would not be irreversibly destroyed. The evolution of civilization is basically irreversible. It may regress or be slowed but only a complete extermination of life on earth would insure that civilization would not again occur. It is only to state that such a possibility of total devastation is much less remote and much more realistically feasible. A general nuclear war would be a spasmodic unleashing of destructive forces that would have unparalleled implication for the future of humanity.

The evolution of militarism has reached certain upper limitations. Just as civilization in its evolution in beginning to feel the effects of certain limitations of confinement on earth, such as overpopulation, pollution and scarcity of certain previously abundant resources, societies are also experiencing the limitations of militarism. In the execution of national strategies more subversive and controlled forms of aggression are becoming preferable to the more overtly destructive types of open warfare and these subtler forms of warfare are often highly successful. In terms of the human condition militarism has reached an upper limit. It also has a lower limit. Even if militarism was generally eradicated from civilization, low level aggression such as crime and subversion would probably still occur. Recognizing these upper and lower limitations of warfare that exist today, it is possible to construct a classification system for warfare. Certain characteristic patterns are recognizable of distinct types of warfare that occur between these limits.

Warfare as a whole takes on characteristics of a spectrum, very much similar to the simple rainbow color spectrum of light. The warfare spectrum has two polar extremes which are recognizable as peace at the lowest intensity pole and total warfare at the other extreme. Just as the light spectrum may be broken down into certain primary colors, the warfare spectrum may be broken down into primary types of conflict. There are four of these primary forms: cold warfare, political warfare, limited warfare and nuclear warfare. Just as the primary colors of the light spectrum may be combined to produce secondary types of colors and an infinite variety of shades of each, so too can the primary forms of warfare be combined to produce a variety of distinct secondary types of warfare and an infinite variations of intensity and extent. Just as distinct colors are a reflection of the underlying chemical properties of the surface that reflects the light, warfare takes on distinct colorings that reflect the underlying characteristics of the societies involved in conflict. Finally just as all the colors combine as a whole to produce white light, a colorless combination, all the types of warfare combine to produce an overall conceptual understanding of warfare.

Military Dimensions