Feral Jundi

“In other words, the very things that should make politicians less likely to want war – productivity growth, democracy, and trading opportunities – have also made war cheaper. We have more wars, not because we want them, but because we can. Finally, under present international arrangements this deep seated tendency is not something that any one country is going to be able to control.”

This paper was fascinating and I highly recommend reading it.  Some of the findings will be surprising to some folks, and especially the cause of increased war. Or even ‘whom’ is the cause of increased war…

I also wanted to tie this into my Opensource Military Hardware post, because this DIY concept meshes well with the conclusions of this paper. Opensource concepts, like DIY wireless nets that the Fablab is producing, or opensource software construction, are ideas that are spreading.  It is the ability to empower individuals or communities to create the kind of product or service that they want, based upon their needs and financial standing.

To not depend upon someone else to make it for you, but to have the means to design and create it yourself is a powerful thing. It is about choice and not being dependent on someone else. You can either buy the store bought, expensive cookies, or learn how to make those same cookies with a little work and some research. Or you make those cookies, because the store no longer has those cookies.  And if you can make that cookie cheaper, and even better than the store bought cookies, all because you were well informed, like with a recipe wiki or some forum, then now you can see the power of this concept as applied to other industries.

To piggyback the conclusion of this paper, opensource will probably be the next trend that will further empower states and non-state actors to wage war. And specifically poor countries and 4th generation war practitioners. Organizations at war, no matter what their wealth and size, will always have a military industrial base.  It could be a couple of guys in a garage, welding rocket pods to jeeps, or it could be a massive industrial complex that produces stealth bombers and tanks.

I think what is interesting to ponder though, is that with today’s wars, the small scale industrial bases of today’s enemies, have certainly been able to hold their own against the west’s massive industrial bases. It is as simple as some ‘maker’, creating an EFP at the cost of ten dollars, and using that device to destroy a multi-million dollar M-1 Abrams tank.  Of course there are other examples of competing industries during times of war, and we are witnessing such things in Libya or Mexico. All of these groups are trying to figure out how to exploit the weakness of the other side’s weapons and hardware.

With more collaboration and information sharing, the learning curve for how to exploit these weaknesses increases. Opensource concepts really speed things up, and I think organizations around the world will recognize the power of such a thing. Simply because they will see how it is applied to ‘productivity growth, democracy, and trading opportunities’ and come to the conclusion that this could also be used to make war ‘cheaper’. Cheaper gives politicians a choice and the ability to say ‘we can’ go to war.

As a sidebar, it is also interesting to note that contractors are a big part of today’s war fighting, because we too give politicians the ability to say ‘we can’ go to war. That whole adage that ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had’, has kind of been tweaked thanks to the concept of contracting. A country can go to war with the army ‘it was willing to pay for during times of peace’, and instantly supplement that force with a highly flexible support mechanism. A support mechanism that ‘you do not have to pay for during times of peace’, and one that gets absorbed back into other industries and society when war is over. Probably the biggest advantage of this support mechanism is that it ‘chooses’ to serve and work in a war.

Politically speaking, not having to implement a draft is incredibly attractive to a country’s leaders, and further gives them the ability to say ‘we can’ go to war.  Using an army of choice, equates to organized violence that is created out of passion/desire/commitment, and not created by forced labor. Might I also add that a well compensated contractor, still must make a commitment to exposing themselves to a war. Thus this choice is as much a patriotic choice, as it is a financial one for many that go. Because if it was all about the money, then all of society would rush the door called ‘contracting’ and compete in this industry. As it stands now, there is only a select segment of society that is willing to risk life and limb in a war and service in the military or as a contractor is something they have committed too.  And personally speaking, I would much rather participate in a venture of the willing, as opposed to being a slave in an army of slaves.

Of course then we go back to the discussion of just because we can, should we?  And that is a matter for politicians and the country they have sworn to protect to get into. All I am trying to do with this post, is to ponder this study and speculate on the future of warfare. –Matt

Wars steadily increase for over a century, fed by more borders and cheaper conflict
28th June 2011
New research by the University of Warwick and Humboldt University shows that the frequency of wars between states increased steadily from 1870 to 2001 by 2% a year on average. The research argues that conflict is being fed by economic growth and the proliferation of new borders.
We may think the world enjoyed periods of relative freedom from war between the Cold War and 9/11 but the new research by Professor Mark Harrison from at the University of Warwick’s the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and Professor Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University, shows that the number of conflicts between pairs of states rose steadily from 6 per year on average between 1870 and 1913 to 17 per year in the period of the two World Wars, 31 per year in the Cold War, and 36 per year in the 1990s.
Professor Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick said:
“The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.”

One of the key drivers is the number of countries, which has risen dramatically – from 47 in 1870 to 187 in 2001.
Professor Mark Harrison added:
“More pairs of countries have clashed because there have been more pairs. This is not reassuring: it shows that there is a close connection between wars and the creation of states and new borders. Besides, no matter how you divide it, we have only one planet. Our planet has already seen two world wars. As that experience suggests, you can never be quite sure what little conflicts will not suddenly snowball into much wider, more deadly struggles.”
The fact that inspired the research is illustrated in the figure above. The number of conflicts between pairs of states around the world has been rising since 1870. (“Pairwise conflicts” are measured by the number of pairs of countries in conflicts. Conflicts include everything from full-scale shooting wars and uses of military force to displays of force such as sending warships and closing borders. This doesn’t measure the intensity of violence, but it does capture the readiness of governments to settle disputes by force. Because we look only at wars between states, civil wars are not counted.)
When the researchers have discussed their work with colleagues, the most frequent questions have been about the extra wars since 1945: “Aren’t these just America’s wars?” and “Aren’t these just coalition wars in which many far flung countries join symbolically, yet most never fire a shot?” “No” is the answer to both these questions. If one removes “America’s wars” altogether from the data, it makes no difference: the rising trend is still there. Other scholars have shown that the average distance between countries at war has fallen steadily since the 1950s.
Looking specifically at the countries that have initiated disputes, the researchers show, larger countries (defined by GDP) have tended to make more frequent military interventions, but there has been no increase in this tendency over the 130 years of their study. They also show there is no tendency for richer countries (defined by GDP per head) to make war more often than others, and again this has not changed over 130 years. In other words, the readiness to embark on military adventures is scattered fairly uniformly across the global income distribution.
This raises two sorts of problems. One is that it’s somewhat alarming. The other is that it’s a bit of a puzzle. Much of what we know, or think we know, says this should not be happening. The countries of the world have tended to become richer, more democratic, and more interdependent. The thinkers of the Enlightenment held that these things ought generally to make the world more peaceful. Much political science is built on the idea that the political leaders of richer, more democratic countries have fewer incentives to make war and are more constrained from doing so.
Professor Mark Harrison said:
“We do not think these ideas are wrong, but they are incomplete. Without being certain of the answer, we think political scientists have focused too much on preferences for war (the “demand side”) and not enough on capabilities (the “supply side”). Capabilities may be the missing factor in the story of the rising frequency of wars. We argue that the same factors that should have depressed the incentives for rulers to choose conflict are also increasing the capacity for war. In other words, we are making war more frequently, not because we want to, but because we can.”
The research gives three explanations for this. Firstly, economic growth has made destructive power cheaper, not just absolutely cheaper but cheaper relative to civilian goods. Second, the key to modern states’ acquisition of destructive power was the ability to tax and borrow more than ever before, and the growth of fiscal capacity was hugely assisted by the rise of democracy. Third, war is disruptive of trade, but those countries that succeeded in maintaining external trading links in wartime could wage war more effectively.
Professor Mark Harrison concluded:
“In other words, the very things that should make politicians less likely to want war – productivity growth, democracy, and trading opportunities – have also made war cheaper. We have more wars, not because we want them, but because we can. Finally, under present international arrangements this deep seated tendency is not something that any one country is going to be able to control.”
The full paper entitled the “The frequency of wars” by Mark Harrison and Nikolaus Wolf , is forthcoming in the Economic History Review.
Link to source here.