ISIS and the New Modern: A Review of Islamic
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by Jim Werbaneth
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in The Victory of Arminius
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by Jim Werbaneth
This issue of Line of Departure marks a first. The lead review is of
Islamic State: Libya War. This is the first time that the magazine has
covered a game from any generation of One Small
Step, let alone one of its magazines. Secondly, this is Line of
Departure’s first article looking at a game on the current conflict with
the Islamic State. Call it that, or call it ISIS, ISIL or DAESH, as the game
does throughout, this is a difficult enemy to fight, at once mustering a
conventional army capable of attacking, and then defending against, regu-lar,
national armies. At the same time, it calls to action ter-rorist cells and lone
wolves, not to fight the likes of the Iraqi and Syrian governments, but to shoot
up and run down the innocent, in Europe and America.
Just as fighting
these characters poses challenges, so does simulating the struggle against them.
Islamic State: Libya War is basically alone is trying to do this. The slow
start in designing games on the subject runs parallel to the tardy recognition
that this was indeed not the junior varsity of terrorist organizations,
arrivistes of evil. The dangers posed by the Islamic State were recognized too
late by the Obama administration, and countermeasures equally tardy and
insufficient. It would be no wonder that wargame de-signers would be similarly
late to discerning the nature of the enemy, and the war. Compare this to the
stories of Jim Dunnigan designing Sinai at SPI, even as the Yom Kippur
War raged. That kind of war was familiar, and could be seen as a sequel to World
War II blitzkrieg.
As this issue discusses, Islamic State: Libya War
looks at a new type of modern warfare. It is not quite mechanized conventional
conflict, and much of it takes place in cities, rather than open ground. Nor is
it anything like guerrilla and irregular warfare. It is something new.
The technology of those real and anticipated seventies conflicts still owed
something to the Second World War. Israel went to war in 1967 with Shermans and
Centurions, World War II-era tanks, albeit upgunned. Its infantry rode into
battle in M3 halftracks. While there was a dawn of electronic warfare and
precision guided munitions in Vietnam, and of course nuclear weapons, themselves
of course dating back to World War II.
On a temporal level, our
understanding of modern war-fare is also in flux. When many of us started
wargaming in the early to mid-seventies, World War II was no more than about
three decades in the past. Many of the veterans were not only still alive, but
still in the prime of their careers. Some combatants were even still serving on
active duty. The Second World War was a matter of memory, not just history.
Move forward to today. In 2017, we are now further away in time from the
Falklands War than our younger, seventies selves were from World War II. The
Vietnam generation is now increasingly in retirement and their elder years. As I
tell my students, we will see the passage of the last World War II veteran in
our lifetimes, just as we saw the loss of the last combatants from the Great
War. That is a given. But what many do not realize is the veterans of the Korean
War, the first “modern” American conflict to most wargamers, will follow shortly
after their World War II comrades.
As a prematurely old professor, I
might not be there for these historical events, but surely most of my students
will be.
Judged in this context, it is clear that our old, seventies-era
understanding of modern warfare as anything after World War II is obsolete. Just
because an event occurred after the Second World War does not make it
automatically “modern.” Modernity in warfare is a concept that is in continual
flux. What was modern in Vietnam or the Arab-Israeli Wars is already in another
era, one that soon will be seen as distant as those jerky silent movies of men
in flat helmets marching Over There. We may not be quite to that point yet, but
even now, these conflicts are not really modern.
So, what is the coming
modern? First of all, the world is becoming more urbanized, and so will be war.
Historically, warfare in cities has been something of an anomaly, with most
conflict taking place in rural or even wilderness areas, punctuated by the
occasional Stalingrad or Hue. But from the fall of Baghdad onward, Operation
Iraqi Freedom was largely an urban war. One can expect that to be a pattern for
the future, in which more wars will be essentially urban, with the battles in
the farmlands and forests being the anomalies.
As wars move into the
cities, the ranges at which enemies engage will be expand and contract.
Precision guided munitions and drones, then the deployment of truly autono-mous
weapons systems, will enable technologically-advanced combatants to engage
enemies, even under cover and concealment, from ever-increasing distances. But
for the grunts on the ground, the trend toward urban warfare will force them to
engage at ranges that can be best described as up close and personal. This will
entail not just changes in weapons and tactical doctrine, but culture as well.
The Unit-ed States Marine Corps, for example, puts a premium on long range
marksmanship, as every Marine is a rifleman. In time, the sort of marksmanship
prized by the Marines, in which troops put metal on a target from hundreds of
yards away, might be as useful as training in swordplay.
The experience
of war, and its memories and trauma, will change. When I was in junior high
school over forty years ago, a World War II veteran who taught history told us
what it was like to kill a man on Okinawa. As a United States Army infantryman,
he said he saw a group of Japanese soldiers. This teacher said that he raised
his rifle first, got a good site picture, and put a shot into the man’s chest.
He was able to look his target in the eye and saw the expression of fear in the
face of the young Japanese soldier immediately before he died. I asked my
teacher how he felt.
“I threw up,” was the answer.
While he was a
rarity, as World War II soldiers rarely saw the enemy clearly, future soldiers
will not have the luxury. We can expect war to involve a return to something
close to ancient and medieval warfare, in which soldiers were close enough to
smell what the enemy had for breakfast. Many more soldiers on all sides will
have the experience of that history teacher from many years ago, looking the
enemy in the eye, and remembering it for decades afterward.
Additionally, wars will follow the pattern laid out in William Lind’s The
Four Generations of Modern War*. One of the predictions that Lind makes is
that war will pass in part from the nation state, which has been the main player
since the Treaty of Westphalia. Increasingly, combatants will include non-state
actors, and as I tell my own military history students, those who reject the
nation state altogether. Previously, irregular warfare has taken place in the
context of the nation state, as movements from the Viet Cong to the PLO to the
Bosnian Serbs have fought either to establish their own nation states, or join
their countries to an existing one. By contrast, groups such as al Qaeda and the
Islamic State fight in total rejection of the western, Westphalian concept of
the nation state. Expect to see more of this.
On the other side, one can
expect the coming generation of war to include non-state actors fighting on the
side of western powers. Prostitution might be the world’s oldest profession, but
the mercenary soldier has to be the second oldest. Call them mercenaries, call
them soldiers of fortune, or security contractors, their use is already on the
rise by western nation states. Outsourcing is not just a practice for private
industry, but by governments as well, including the military.
Contractors
offer their clients flexibility and cost-effectivness, and sometimes an off the
shelf military power beyond homegrown means. They are not unmixed blessings
though. My first brush with mercenaries occurred about six years ago, when I had
two in one of my brick and mortar political science classes. Both were honorably
discharged United States Army Rangers who then went to work for KBR. One talked
about how much better the pay was in private practice. When I asked why they’d
left all that money, they responded almost in unison: “I didn’t want to go to
prison.”
Part of the flexibility of mercenaries is that they operate in a
gray legal area, somewhere between the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the
law of the jungle. Their status will continue to evolve for the modern
environment as their use expands.
Similarly, game designers will be
called upon to incorporate the new generation of mercenaries into future
war-games. This will not just be a matter of evaluating firepower, but also
doctrine and roles. Will future contractors fight to the death against non-state
insurgents, considering the example of their predecessors killed and strung up
at Fallujah in 2004? Or will they operate with strict rules of engagement
based as much as their terms of employment as strategic considerations? Will
they operate closer to the jungle than the UCMJ, and alienate local populations
and governments? Will there be places where they cannot go and things that they
cannot do, or will there be places that they can go, and missions that they
undertake, barred to regular troops? At one time or another, and in one conflict
or another, all will have to be considered.
Naturally too, following the
example of Fallujah, there will be more encounters between such non-state,
private enterprise soldiers and non-state, anti-nation state elements. By this
reasoning, the likes of both the Islamic State and KBR are the future. They may
not be the prime military actors, but they will be on the stage, in increasing
frequency and importance. Thus the future does not just belong to Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi and Islamic State; at least a share belongs to men such as Eric
Prince and Blackwater.
All of this is largely missing from modern
wargames of the past. The political context is almost, without exception,
Westphalian, and the combatants are either fighting for or against a nation
state, and sometimes both. Future games are likely to see a shift in which these
have to share space with the forces of the fourth generation. So as war moves
into a version, call it the fourth generation or War 4.0 or something else, so
will wargaming.
*William S. Lind, The Four Generations of Modern
War (Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2014) [Kindle Edition].
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