But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
Great article on the evolving face of warfare and how, as long-range and unmanned systems replace on-the-ground and manned conflict, people are assuaged into treating missiles and bombs being lobbed between countries as something “other” than war.
Everyone in the world (except for Russia, with their ‘special operation’ euphemism) recognizes the invasion of Ukraine as a war. People are still pretending that Israel bombing targets inside Iran and Iranian military units in other countries, and Iran launching a large-scale missile strike against Israel, isn’t a war. It’s no longer a proxy war, it’s a direct conflict, but because people are still stuck in exactly that mode of thinking- that ‘war’ means artillery and troops and taking ground- people are treating this as something else.
I don’t think the author is correct that war won’t still look like the WW1/2 paradigm of conflicts as well, but as of right now there are 16 countries involved in the Israel/Iran not-war:
Direct involvement:
Logistical involvement (including intelligence sharing and air defense deployment):
I think the salient point is that the US’s insistence that they/we’re not yet in a war is a lie designed to both avoid blame being put where it belongs (Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and the US’s involvement, that kicked this all off), and to temper calls for more action to stop the war, which will require stopping Israel in Gaza.
By calling for preventing a war, the US is attempting to blame future actions, whereas if they acknowledge we’re already in a war, they’d have to admit that it’s because of actions that already took place, and the US wants desperately to make Iran the bad guys here, and claim this has nothing to do with Israel doing war crimes both in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Yes, but a handful of conventional missiles going back and forth against symbolic targets is not a very useful definition of a war, much less a world war, if for no other reason than it is to broad to be useful. The on again/off again three way between India/China/Pakistan comes to mind, as might India and Canada if the definition goes much beyond that. The word war tends to imply that nations don’t have active trade between them for instance, and generally implies that at least one side is attempting to achieve some sort of military victory.
So you’re saying that people fighting with nail-studded sticks, or secretly assassinating internal political opponents in the other’s territory, is a similar level of conflict as flattening an embassy with a laser-guided bomb, or firing 300 drones and ballistic missiles, and then having a retaliatory strike on the location of another country’s nuclear program?
This strains my credulity, that you are suggesting this.
If China bombed a US embassy in Japan, the US fired 300 missiles at targets on China’s eastern seaboard (which were intercepted), and China retaliated by striking targets in San Diego… no one on earth would be denying that they were at war.
All of the above are cases of one nations government killing a handful of another’s people for minor political posturing, and are all far more similar in scale to each other than say the US-Vietnam, Ukrainian, or even the undeclared Falklands war.
If the ultimate goal of a war is to force one nation
or group to surrender to another through military might, then I don’t think anyone in Israel expected Iran to surrender to them after they ‘accidentally’ blew up an embassy, nor do I expect anyone in Iran to have expected Israel to send an offer of surrender after they launched a single wave of largely outdated missiles against a handful of airfields.
In practice there are of course secondary effects, but the primary political motivation is internal, not external. Iran doesn’t expect Israel to surrender, but primarily wishes to reassure its public and keys to power that it can respond to military aggression. Israel does not wish Iran to surrender and end the ‘war’, it wishes to commit the US to giving it more resources while finding a situation in which it can play the victim.
So yes, I would say it is far more similar in scale, scope, and goal to assassinating a foreign citizen or sending a bunch of soldiers to beat another off ‘your’ land with nail studded sticks than it is sending tens of thousands of soldiers to occupy territory and replace the local government with your own.
I don’t think it is the ultimate goal of war, that’s overly restricting the definition based on, as I said, this conception of war as only being these wide-ranging conflicts (really, what “total war” refers to). Many wars have been fought purely over control of land or resources, where surrender or government toppling was never the goal.
Merriam-Webster
Surrender of or the replacement of the government on that land or resources through military might either directly or indirectly is however the way control over those resources is achieved, and no, I am not just taking about total war, as one of my examples there was the Falkland’s war, which was not even close to a total war for either side.
Moreover your definition would seem not to apply to the current Iran- Israel conflict, as it is being discussed and decided on a case by case basis for both sides instead of an open and declared conflict.