CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

some tentative predictions about the nature of conflict in the foreseeable future but it
must do so with caution and caveat.
It has become something of a cliché to claim that the nature of war, as indeed of
international relations in general, underwent a revolutionary change with the collapse of
the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s. Many would argue that a further paradigm shift
was marked by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on
September 11 th 2001. As with all clichés there is, of course, a considerable element of
truth in these claims but, again as with all clichés, they belie the subtlety of reality. It is
often held, for example, that whilst the Cold War nuclear stand-off held the spectre of
global nuclear annihilation over the World, it also kept the lid on simmering local
hostilities that were then to explode into open conflict in the 1990s. Consideration of
the very many conflicts throughout the Cold War era in Africa, South-East Asia, Latin
America and the Middle East, however, renders this a rather incomplete analysis. So
we must recognize in looking at new challenges, that there are likely also to be many
continuities. Indeed this is the central thesis of Colin S Gray’s comprehensive treatment
of future war Another Bloody Century: ‘Historical perspective is the only protection we
have against undue capture by the concerns and fashionable ideas of today. These
concerns and ideas may be valid and important for now, but they are inadequate as a
basis for understanding future warfare.’ 9
There is a considerable body of literature discussing the Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA) and likening the advent of ‘information age’ warfare to the RMAs effected by
the widespread adoption of firearms in the 17 th Century or by the industrialization of
warfare in the 19 th Century. In fact, though, these technological changes only appear
revolutionary in (fairly distant) hindsight. The reality is a much more gradual,
evolutionary change. Where truly revolutionary changes have occurred in military – or
more properly strategic – affairs they have resulted from a juxtaposition of military-
technical with profound politico-sociological change, such as the adoption by
revolutionary France of the levee en-masse. Coin Gray warns that ‘(t)here is a perennial
temptation to misread recent and contemporary trends in warfare as signals of some
momentous, radical shift. As often as not, the character of warfare in a period is shaped,
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