War has escaped into the wild from its government cages. Although I think the purported tidiness of the past is just the mist of time obscuring the constant fluid uncertainty. Kinetic NGOs can wage war just as they wage diplomacy and subversion. The Peace of Westphalia was unavailable for comment.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that conflict no longer behaves the way we expect it to. Wars don’t end cleanly, responsibility is always blurred, and decisions with real consequences seem to be made everywhere and nowhere at once.
Clearly waged and cleanly ended wars are a fiction that flows from summarizing wars in books.
But I digress. Before I even began.
This is what I find interesting:
The observation that states no longer hold an exclusive monopoly over organised force is not new. Analysts, historians and practitioners have been tracking this trajectory for decades. What has changed and what demands attention now is not the existence of non-state coercive power, but the speed, scale and normalisation of its influence.
We're back to the future. And with the Internet, the ability to materially support war has spread to a wider population of non-state actors. And into the real world. NGOs are already in the logistics game. Imagine what they can do with combat capabilities, too?
We're still in a state-centric system. That's what creating the United Nations codified. But yes, the Westphalian system lost its ability to pretend it means a state monopoly on hard power. Yet this is a constant in military history.
The mass armies of the twentieth century were a relatively brief interlude of state supremacy when conscription made it cheaper for soldiers rather than mercenaries to do all military jobs.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: You may also like to read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved. Go ahead and subscribe to it. It's the right thing to do!
NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
