Coming shortly after both the ramshackle American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the twin killings by US forces of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qassem Soleimani, Putin’s failed coup de main on Kyiv punctuated the end of an era marked by the long-running American war against various varieties of revolutionary Islamism. Nevertheless, the degree of disjunction between both sides of this historical Zeitenwende (turning point) remains questionable. The scale and significance of the Russo-Western confrontation in Ukraine obviously surpasses anything seen since the Cold War, including the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. However, the social media frenzy connected to the war in Ukraine also hearkens back to the digital and mimetic representations of wars in the Middle East, culminating in the final shot of an American general departing Kabul through the the ghostly green lens of a night vision device. The following morning, Taliban “Badr 313” troops wandered through the detritus of equipment left behind by American forces while dressed and equipped in much the same sartorial style as their foreign foes.
To rub salt into the wound to American prestige, the Taliban even made a meme-worthy mockery of the Marines’ iconic flag raising photo from Iwo Jima. It was as if the American imperium had reached a low point of disgrace and humiliation.
Fortunately for the Kyiv government and NATO powers, the American Empire proved far more resilient than even its own functionaries expected. The fruits of Russian military reforms proved to be vastly overstated by Pentagon fears of “great power competition,” while Putin’s powers of disinformation in “hybrid warfare” proved to be no replacement for more conventional types of military competence—combined arms operations, appropriate logistics, and rational planning. Moreover, it quickly became clear that Kyiv and its western allies had achieved social media supremacy, as Twitter became flooded with videos of Russian military humiliation and Ukrainian courage. The digital media that had once subverted the American-led international order, whether it was grisly ISIS execution videos or Taliban “owns” of the United States Marine Corps, has now boomeranged around in support of that same order.
As we continue to try to make sense of the implications of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins’ Radical War: Data, Attention, and Control in the 21st Century made its appearance last summer. Written after American defeat in Afghanistan but before Putin’s massive escalation on February 22, the book stands on the threshold of the recent Zeitenwende, crossing disciplinary boundaries in a deep and profound way.
Carl von Clausewitz’s linkage of politics and war looms over all of us; Ford and Hoskins boldly call for a break with the Prussian specter, arguing that the Clausewitzian “trinity of state, people and armed forces becomes irrelevant” in a digitized and interconnected era where “distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon become meaningless” (10). Post-Clausewitzian war is Radical War, which has slipped out of the control of nation-states; “the principle actors include technologists, the professionals of violence, non-state actors, corporate organizations and the connected mass of users of digital and social media. War is no longer about compelling enemies to do the will of the state. Now war is principally about managing the attention of populations and different audiences where the will of the public is a constantly churning spectacle of opinions and perceptions that spill out and feedback into each other, irrespective of whether they are expressed online or not” (11).
The digital democratization of war creates a process of fragmentation “in which Radical War polarises, distorts and undermines social and military cohesion” (203). State narratives of war, traditionally founded on a coherent archive of centralized official documents and mass media sources, have lost control of war’s representation, while “the configuration of the internet and the nature of the new war ecology further encourages echo-chambers, information prisms and social media ghettos” (199). Due to the proliferation of internet-connected devices, even private individuals have become participants in radical war through devices that elide the boundary between participants and bystanders, and which themselves become sensor nodes in militarized networks.
Radical War serves as an important intellectual marker of where we stand at the precipice with the raging conflict in Ukraine. However, while some aspects of the conflict clearly bear out the crucial traits laid out in the neologism of Radical War—the seemingly non-stop video footage of destroyed vehicles and equipment on social media, the prominence of unofficial OSINT, the importance of a mercurial billionaire’s private communications network (Starlink), and dueling digital narratives—the actual war has arguably represented the revenge of the modern state. Or at least a shadow of it.
Before the war, part of Putin’s vaunted reputation was his embrace of radical (or hybrid) warfare, including disinformation operations that were supposedly so effective that they delivered the Presidency to Trump, the use of parastatal proxy forces such as Wagner and Kadyrovite Chechens, sophisticated electronic warfare exploitation of networks, etc. But what the conflict in Ukraine has in fact emphasized is the importance of blandly modernist forms of military expertise—combined arms, competent logistics, and humdrum mass. What is the most famous weapons system of the conflict, at least in the West?—HIMARS, a rocket artillery system rooted in the late Cold War. NATO has just now agonized over the provision of Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks to Ukraine, while the New York Times has recently published a piece about the United States scouring its world wide depots for 155 mm artillery shells to send to Ukraine.
What if the war in Ukraine was not so much a harbinger of the future as Radical War, but to use Adam Tooze’s locution (drawing off of the work of Alex Hochuli) Putin’s badly planned and executed “special operation” was a “‘Bunga war’—frivolous, gratuitous, neither a serious act of great power politics, nor a dramatic effort to restart history”—of a piece with a decadent and depoliticized End of History, where brutality and farce could coexist and feed off one another. But did Ukraine’s successful military defense of its capital end the Bunga-Bunga festivities by reviving “the classic form of a nation in arms rallying around a nation state”? Zelensky—the state-building “founding father” of a polity forged in the crucible of war—thus presides over “the end of the end of military history” and a return to the “dramas of 19th-and 20th-century history.”
But are we seeing a true return to modernity and its nation-states in Ukraine? The ramshackle and vicious nature of Putin’s army is well known, but while Ukraine’s armed forces have proved brave and proficient, the Kyiv government remains completely dependent on the United States for even the most basic munitions. Its war effort is thus bound to the vagaries of internal NATO politics and western powers’ creaky military industrial base. Indeed, so difficult is it to generate military mass that Ukraine’s aspirational goal is to raise one single armored division with new kit before a late winter/spring offensive in 2023. As the historian Martin Van Creveld has pointed out, military forces have drastically shrunk since the end of World War II, despite drastically larger populations and economies. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union with 144 divisions, but “since 1945 there has probably not been even one case in which any state has used over twenty full-size divisions on any single campaign” (p. 32). Whatever the exact causes of this phenomenon (van Creveld emphasizes nuclear weapons making conventional war increasingly implausible among great powers), and despite the demise of attempts to use smaller maneuver units—the current war in Ukraine has only highlighted the persistence of the larger post-World War II movement away from military mass.
The complete saturation of the Ukrainian battlefield by sensors, especially through ubiquitous and networked drones, also helps militate against mass by forcing the dispersal and concealment of military forces (p. 3)—a technological development that also fits the paradigm of Radical War. However, much of this new surveillance regime has also simply reinforced the importance of long-standing military tactics and techniques—combined arms, concealment, timely targeting, and sensible logistics. Moreover, the Russian Army’s failures in Ukraine have shown the limitations of some of the new techniques most closely associated with Radical War—for example, the FSB’s “troll army” (Radical War, 67-69) has proven in the long run less effective than portrayed in Ford’s and Hoskins’ book, written without the hindsight of the last year.
Indeed, even for those rightly skeptical of overly sanguine assessments of Kyiv’s military prospects in the current conflict, the ineffective and self-destructive performance of Russian policy in Ukraine stands in sharp contrast with liberal hysteria over a supposed Trump-Putin axis, with the latter playing the puppet master over the former via nefarious firms such as Cambridge Analytica. Similar fears underly the frenzied reaction to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Both of these conspiratorial theories cannot explain how Putin could be both a master manipulator of American presidential politics and the victim of endless social media mockery, the latter helping lead in turn to massive packages of western military assistance to Ukraine.
However, if the war in Ukraine is neither a RETVRN to the world wars or nineteenth century, because all parties to the conflict no longer possess the ability to mobilize their polities in a manner recognizable to the generals of the first half of the twentieth century, nor a harbinger of a postmodern Radical War, then how should we categorize it? I would argue that the war has highlighted a decades long process by which technological and political economic trends have eroded the nation-state’s ability to mobilize populations and monopolize violence, even as American military power remains dominant due to both its logistical expertise and its potent kill chain.
The Taliban may have defeated the mighty American Empire on both the physical and social media battlefields, but the former’s current inability to suppress ISIS’ Afghan affiliate highlights the significance of the American counter-ISIS campaign. While the United States failed miserably in its efforts to create stable democratic polities in Iraq and Afghanistan, it did manage to decapitate the leadership of both Al Qaeda and its successor organization at the forefront of Sunni Islamist extremism. Al Qaeda’s ambitions reached a nadir with Ayman al-Zawihiri’s death at the hands of an American drone strike after the American flight from Kabul—a powerful symbol of the reach of American power—while the Islamic State’s attempt to create a polity outside of the US-dominated liberal international completely failed. Despite putting only a very small numbers of its own troops at risk, American air power in conjunction with local proxy forces destroyed the Islamic State in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland even as most Americans hardly noticed the conflict.
Indeed, even in the world of social media, American power also flashed its might, especially when Donald Trump presided over the Empire. What else could have been more humiliating for the eschatological ambitions of the Islamic State than to see its most famous Caliph mocked as a dog during perhaps one of the most infamous Presidential announcements in history. As for its revolutionary Shia rivals in Iran… Qassem Soleimani, famous for his social media savvy and selfies from battlefields even dared to enter a meme war with Donald Trump.
Soleimani did not survive.
All the recent challengers to the American led international order have failed, despite the United States Government’s feckless waste of precious blood and treasure throughout the Middle East. Osama bin Laden, Baghdadi, Soleimani—all killed by the fearsome American kill chain. Even the victorious Taliban presides over a failed state in Afghanistan as it struggles to suppress its Islamic State rivals. Ali Hosseini Khamenei hangs on in Iran, resorting to ever more brutal methods as his regime bleeds away its legitimacy among younger generations, even as its program of nuclear blackmail mostly succeeds in fending off direct American military action. Washington’s ineptitude, fecklessness, and yes, callousness, has contributed to a veritable charnel house in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, but none of its many enemies has built a durable and sustainable alternative order. Furthermore, in the last few months, Putin has seen his expensive and supposedly “near peer” army mostly destroyed in Ukraine—at best he will walk away from all this carnage with a pliant statelet bordering a hostile NATO-supported garrison state.
The only serious remaining challenger to American hegemony is the Chinese Communist Party, but its military capabilities remain untested, and even more importantly its governance model has seen its own share of catastrophic failures during the pandemic. American state capacity, of course, also mostly embarrassed itself during the pandemic. Both regimes revealed in their own ways the deep rooted inequalities of their political economies, the failings of expertise, and the structural inability of our era’s state structures to build and rule for the sake of a credible common good. The nation-state’s administrative and political structures have proved to be mostly unable to manage the challenges of a globalized economy built on predatory finance and offshoring, digital transformations of the self and community, mass migration, and climate change. Indeed, the Ukraine crisis also calls into question the viability of the European Union as a plausible competing model of political order, because it has laid bare the EU’s near complete dependence on the United States for leadership in the security sphere.
The failure of nation-state politics to serve a plausible and human scaled public good has stripped the modern state down to its most basic foundations—its ability to mobilize violence. Ford and Hoskins rightly highlight the digital dissolution of coherent national narratives of political purpose that can in turn be coherently linked by states to military action and policy. However, violence need not serve politics—it can in fact justify itself as a spectacle that appeals to the darkest recesses of the human heart. How else can one explain the ubiquitous presence of video footage of recent wars where the boundaries between video games and actual combat operations have blurred, where war has become a form of sport and entertainment. We now have a digital simulacrum of what the Romans in the Coliseum might have felt when they watched mock battles between gladiators. Once again, Trump serves as our era’s exemplar—marveling at the technology that let him watch the progress of the Baghdadi raid “as though you were watching a movie.” But digital democratization has made such video feeds no longer limited to Presidents hunting down self-styled Caliphs, but ordinary individuals on Twitter watching conscripts or convicts or thugs or who-knows-who get…. smoked by various types of guided munitions.
In an era where violence has became post-political amidst political fracture, the American Empire remains dominant due to its raw material capabilities. What other global power could orchestrate the logistical feats needed to supply weapons to Ukraine on short notice? Or whose aging legacy weapon systems would prove so lethal? Or whose intelligence and surveillance capabilities would prove so dangerous when paired with Ukrainian tactical expertise? And to perform all these feats while still conducting lethal counter-terrorism operations across the globe, from Somalia to Syria to Afghanistan. And to flex these muscles amidst domestic political discontent, a pandemic, and with the two most recent American Presidents being either a semi-delusional celebrity or a doddering dotard. In the absence of plausible and coherent competing political visions, it seems mostly irrelevant that Americans have neither a clear view at home as to the meaning and purpose of their empire, nor even the strong sense that it even exists.
American might goes beyond the simple employment of machines, of course. Take, for example, the example of the current American spymaster, William J. Burns. A career diplomat, he began his career during the late Cold War, saw first-hand the “end of history,” served as George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Moscow, and ended his initial diplomatic career as Deputy Secretary of State for Barack Obama. He has proved to be a dangerous adversary for Putin who has made multiple personal visits to Ukraine, but like the Abrams tank and Stinger missile he is something of a Cold War relic (as are, in less direct ways, the HIMARS and Javelin, which built on technological breakthroughs pioneered by DARPA during the late Cold War). The Pentagon has also ably moved its machine into motion to harass its old Cold War adversary without hardly missing a beat as it eagerly attempts to forget the fiasco in Kabul. My own belief is western commentary has dangerously underrated Russian military potential, but there is no plausible scenario where the military balance of power between the United States and Russia does not dramatically favor the former over the latter at the end of this conflict. However, over time the economic costs of this confrontation will build, with unpredictable effects on the future of the EU and relations between the developing world and the western-led anti Russian coalition. Furthermore, Beijing’s continued status as the world’s workshop means that it remains a potent player, if chastened by the failure of zero COVID.
For now, the legions remember as their eagles soar, but the wary should still watch for Nemesis lurking behind the Reapers.
The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.