Over the last two years we have seen a serious uptick in confrontations between NATO and Russia and the US and China in the South China Sea. These confrontations have led some analysts to return to discussions of what we call “great power wars” which had receded after 1991. Russia in Global Affairs is a great source on Russian thinking about this matter and a new essay offers a troubling perspective. The authors suggest a new form of warfare, much like World War I caught the great powers by surprise because of the industrialization of war. The next great power war will look very different:
“While the great power wars of the past often involved large-scale conventional operations, this will not necessarily be the case in the 21st century. The goal of new wars will be to devastate not so much an enemy’s armed forces as the country’s economic and political system. As a result, an opponent’s military and government structures will be downgraded to the 20th century level. A future war among near peers is unlikely to start at the phalanx of formations arrayed at the front, but instead in space and cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. The first salvo will be fired almost entirely with electrons, seeking to degrade command and control systems, important national infrastructure, and knock out or disable key enablers for the opponent’s military effort.
“These strikes will target economic and energy infrastructure, disabling nodes of communication, power distribution, and wreak havoc against civilian infrastructure. Their objective will be to prevent an opponent from being able to put up effective resistance, while rapidly raising the costs to its economy and political system. Second and third order effects could prove catastrophic, from nuclear power plants to satellite navigation on which many civilian and military systems depend.”
The unfortunate implication of this perspective is that civilian populations will be very seriously affected by future conflict.
The United States has the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world, ahead of Spain and second only to Mexico. Americans often forget that Spain colonized much of North America long before English-speaking colonists arrived on the continent. The Human Development Index ranks Spanish as the second most important language in the world, behind English and ahead of Mandarin–but Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world.
A serious struggle has emerged in the Indian state of Gujarat. Many Hindus regard cows as sacred animals and killing or mistreating them is a serious offense. In recent months, mobs of people have killed or attacked those suspected of mistreating cows. Usually, the victims are non-Hindus who do not hold cows as sacred. But Hindus rely upon the lowest caste of Hindus, the Dalits, to remove cows that have died naturally and to use or sell some of the animal bodies for their personal use. In a recent incident, however, mobs have attacked Dalits performing this task and the response of the Dalits has been to go on strike, leaving putrefying carcasses in the streets. The Hindi nationalist government is thus posed with a serious matter: to compromise Hindu principles regarding cows or to enforce a code of conduct on a caste whose religious sanction was removed by law in 1950. We will see how Narendra Modi decides to resolve this conflict.
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