Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 157 ]
The Korean experience . . . impelled the development of the concept of
"limited war," the notion that the major countries could wage a war that
could be restricted in geography, weaponry, and goals. ... If war can be
limited, it may become "possible" again: if the combatants tacitly or
explicitly agree to stay within tolerable constraints, they can test national
will and military prowess while keeping damage within bearable bounds.
(Mueller, 1989, pp. 129-130)
Still, a limited war can be very bloody. Over 2 million died in Korea. But
considering the butcher's bill of a full war between China and the United
States it is clear that it was limited for them, if not for the Koreans. These
nontotal wars can range from skirmishes to a serious conflict, now labeled
midintensity. In U.S. planning, such limited wars were seen as police actions
or at the most half wars, worth half of a total war with another superpower.
But even before fighting raged up and down through the Korean
peninsula the first postmodern war began in Vietnam. What makes this war
so important is that it reversed the hundreds of years of European victories,
and not just in one battlefield but in the minds of millions of people around
the world. True, indigenous people had won many battles in the past, but
they had lost almost all the wars. And, true, Japan had defeated Russia in
1905, but Japan was an industrialized power and it had never been colonized.
In the long Vietnam struggle, a small agricultural country defeated first
France, its colonizer, and then the most powerful empire in history, by
framing war in basically political terms.
This was not a totally new strategy. In part, it was George Washington's
approach during the American Revolution, as the Vietnamese well knew. It
also was an approach that drew strongly on the hundreds of years of Vietnamese
resistance to colonialism and on the more recent experiences of the
Chinese Red Army. But, granting all that, it was still incredible. Politics
became war by other means for the Vietnamese. Not that military skill and
courage were not needed; they were crucial to keep the struggle going until
the eventual political exhaustion of the invaders. The theory of "people's
war," as the Chinese and Vietnamese call it, was so sophisticated that it even
laid out the transition between the lowest levels of military resistance on
through to eventual victory through conventional confrontations.
Some have argued that people's war is necessarily ideological, but the
last 50 years show it isn't, at least in a left-right sense. Not only have the
Algerians used it successfully, but so have the Afghans. And, with bittersweet
irony, more recently the same type of war has been turned against some of
its best earlier practitioners in Southern Africa (Angola and Mozambique)
and Southeast Asia. For example, in Cambodia the Vietnamese themselves
could not crush the Cambodian resistance fighters, some of whom were
supported militarily by China (the Khmer Rouge), others covertly by the