When War Games was first published, British and American soldiers were still mired in the fight for Afghanistan; trying to build a country with explosives, without even the basic skills needed to win the fight. The Afghan war followed decades of our troops being managed as ‘capability delivery platforms’, while enemy soldiers were targets for ‘kinetic effects’. Humans had been obscured by buzzwords.
The failure to see combat soldiers as human precluded the use of the tactics that are essential for making enemy soldiers surrender. And it is only when enough soldiers surrender that they, their comrades and leaders really accept defeat and start negotiating peace. As the armed branches of neoconservatives and neoliberals are keen to point out, every insurgent killed simply inspires two more. Yet we kept on killing. Somehow, the techniques that ordinary soldiers had used to make Nazis surrender weren’t tried on Afghan farmhands. So even with a kill ratio of twenty-to-one, we still lost.
As the war dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to motivate Western combat soldiers even for brief periods. While publicly praising our brave boys and girls, leaders slyly bemoaned their collapse in morale – the platforms weren’t delivering the capability like they were supposed to. When soldiers refused to go outside the wire without air cover or a credible explanation of what the war was for, the war fizzled out. Leaders got bored and brought most of the troops home.
Lessons were learned by the bad guys. Having been forced to make the most of their meagre resources, rebel bandits had developed small units of suitably trained and motivated soldiers. These were used to eject larger government forces from key corners of Iraq and Afghanistan. They moved quickly and stealthily, tricking the defenders into thinking they were outflanked and outgunned. Their lessons spread to Syria, Egypt, Nigeria and beyond. It often takes years before these pockets of misery are cleared by foreign-backed armies – armies that succeed only when they outnumber the enemy thirty-to-one. Yet the core of the enemy force slips away from the rubble to set up shop elsewhere. Their use of tactical psychology has fuelled a remarkably efficient business model.
Lessons were learned by the good-ish guys too. Having realised soldiers are not automata, Western and Eastern governments are now investing in real killing machines: war robots with lightning-fast reflexes, unhindered by fear, fatigue, pity or common sense. Yet autonomous war machines will need to kill a lot of people to counter the rage they will generate. Every enemy killed breeds two more, but every enemy killed by a robot will breed a dozen. It’s like defence planners have taken the Terminator films as their blueprint for excellence. They haven’t spotted all the humans fighting back or the earth reduced to wasteland.
War Games is intended to show that we can win by accepting human frailty rather than hiding from it.
Leo Murray
January 2018