The 21st century has already seen plenty of armed conflict around the world. But how different are these more current wars than those from the past?
The answer from Amos Fox, a retired U.S. Army officer, may surprise you.
Fox retired last year after 24 years in the Army. Fox is also a professor of practice at Arizona State University's Future Security Initiative and author of the book "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Casual Logic of Modern War and Warfare."
Fox joined The Show to discuss how different war is now than it has been in years and generations past. He’ll also be speaking Tuesday night at a virtual event sponsored by the Future Security Initiative.
Conversation highlights
How different war is now than it has been in years and generations past?
AMOS FOX: Yeah, so this is, this is the fun part, and this is where I drew a lot of ire many times. The short answer is it's not. The only thing that's truly different are the toys that are at play. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to two sides wanting different things and fighting about which side gets their way. So the only thing that's really changed is the tools that are used to try and kill each other, if we're being frank. And so that's changed significantly, obviously, just like living life has changed significantly. We no longer live in mud huts or cave carveouts, right? We live in fairly sophisticated homes. We drive fairly sophisticated cars. And so war hasn't necessarily changed at some revolutionary speed that's just mind blowing to the average human being. It's basically stayed on step or slightly ahead of the modern technology we use in our everyday life.
The tools have changed, the weapons have changed. That's got to cause or lead to some pretty significant changes in how wars are waged, right?
FOX: Again, this is another one of those — I'm gonna throw a curveball and say no. At the end of the day, things have been swung at each other — either at close range or at distance — from the beginning. And so again, it's comparable to the technologies at play in everyday life to the technologies that are used in wars. It's just the, the way that we can get long-range fires fired has changed, significantly, obviously. Just like we can fly airplanes across the world, we can now fire rockets and missiles across the world. And that that really hasn't been much different since, you know, [World War II].
There are new technologies in war and conflict just like there are new technologies in our everyday life. The question is if your argument is that it hasn't really changed that much, what kind of impact has it had? The fact that you can send a drone deliver a bomb now, for example, as opposed to having to have a human fly a plane? What kind of impact maybe has that had on how war happens and how it's carried out now than than it has in the past?
FOX: Yeah, so the first impact, in my assessment, is that it's made for the ability to disperse a bit greater, right? So you don't have to cluster together to fight. Now that that isn't to say that not clustering together is beneficial. If anything, that perhaps prolongs conflict in ways we didn't necessarily anticipate. But it's allowed for the dispersal of forces. At the same time too, you know, the drone aspect — and this is where it's important to understand that almost the whole wars are still land wars, right? They're either fought for a piece of terrain like you see in Ukraine.
And so like I use that as an example to illustrate like it's a land war. It's fought for land, it's fought for possession of land, it's fought for controlling territory. And so as long as wars remain land wars, drones are just an auxiliary element of how militaries and non-state militaries fight. And so that dynamic is not new. That dynamic has existed for forever. And this is where part of this hype around drones is just that — it's hype. It's people looking at a technology and saying, "Oh my God, this is a game changer." When no. No, it's not. This is just a continuity of warfare.
It has removed an element of of human sacrifice to a degree, but it also raises the question — if we go back to what we talked about at the beginning — where we talked about the ability to shoot further and faster, is now a reality. Does that then make drone operations stations, say in Nevada, for drones that are operating in, you know, if we go back to Afghanistan. How we, you know, used a lot of those drones over or even Iraq for that matter. Those drones are being flown in Afghanistan and Iraq from Nevada, right? Does that then make that, you know, nice little Air Force base in Nevada a target for hypersonic long-range strikes from whomever?
