Forecasting Future Wars is Hard

Since 1805, combat between well-equipped air and naval forces has become rarer and rarer. This is because states which can produce such forces have little to gain from fighting one another, and because it has become harder and harder to sustain such forces at all. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy was usually overwhelmingly superior to everyone else (although the French and the United States sometimes gave it a run for its money). Since the 1950s, the US air force has had a similar advantage over everyone else’s. Small states look at these navies and air forces, decide they can never defeat them, and either stop bothering with their own navies and air forces, or side with one of the big powers, or hide in harbour or in neutral countries when war approaches (the fleet-in-being strategy). Big states do some spectacularly stupid and thoughtless things, but rarely something as stupid as getting into a war with their allies or a nuclear power, and pretty much all the states with sophisticated air forces and navies are either each other’s allies or nuclear powers.

This means that stories about how a future naval or air war would go are fantasies based on speculation and imagination and peacetime tests, not observation and experience of actual warfare.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the last war where major warships were sunk was the Falklands in 1982. I have seen wargamers use the Falklands war to estimate how likely warships were to be damaged or sunk if they were hit by various missiles. Since the Russians and Ukrainians don’t share too many details, its hard to be sure about exactly how Ukraine has been sinking the Black Sea Fleet. Wikipedia points to the Indo-Pakistani Naval War of 1971 where a grand total of two destroyers, one submarine, and one frigate were sunk.

Christopher A. Lawrence can’t think of a time that a large force landed on a defended beach since the US marines landed on Koh Tang Island in Cambodia in 1975. (Wikipedia claims that only 300 US personnel were involved and they landed by helicopter, so “large” and “amphibious” are debatable) A commentator suggests an operation in 1991 during the Sri Lankan civil war where “several battalions” landed from the sea but I’m not sure if the “heavy resistance” was on the beach or inland. And my understanding is that the Russian air force has not been seen to carry out an operation involving more than four aircraft in hostile airspace this century. NATO militaries have thirty years of experience with operations involving dozens or hundreds of aircraft against Soviet-type air defenses, but Russian experience is much more limited. That may be one major reason why the Russian air force’s participation in the Russo-Ukrainian war has been based on flying around their airspace lobbing missiles, not darting into Ukrainian airspace to smash Ukrainian air defenses like NATO forces dismantled Iraqi, Yugoslavian, and Libyan air defences (SEAD).

During the Cold War submarines were developed to sink the submarines carrying ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. All of this incredible engineering and tireless training can’t change that as far as I can tell, only one submarine has ever sunk another submarine while it was fully submerged, and that was back in 1945 when subs still burned oil (HMS Venturer v. U-864). People in the right part of the right navy have some idea of how the game of submarine and counter-submarine is going, but each side probably has some secrets which they would reveal in an actual war.

Its very hard to know if a military is any good at fighting wars unless it has fought them recently: modern history is full of cases like Charlemagne smashing the Avars, the collapse of the Prussian army at Jena, and the poor performance of the French army and the Red Army in 1940. The last time thousands of Chinese soldiers, sailors, and airmen fought was their invasion of Vietnam in 1979 (building a village in the jungle of Bhutan or beating a few Indian soldiers to death with rocks and clubs in the Himalayas is not the same thing). Foreigners can watch their ships and aircraft zipping around the South China Sea or their missiles landing on an aircraft-carrier-shaped patch of desert, but there is no way to know how these things would work once there was someone shooting back, deploying countermeasures, evading, and otherwise trying to make life hard for the People’s Liberation Army. The last time the US fought someone with an armoured division was 2003.

And the kinds of navies and airforces which can conduct big complex operations were willing to say “that is a really **** stupid idea which would get thousands of us killed and irreplaceable equipment destroyed, we are not going to do that” rather than attack in all kinds of conditions to give defense analysts and hobby wargamers data points. The German military looked at the prospect of invading England in 1940 and said “nein.” They did not decide that if they attacked they would probably lose everything and attack anyways just to prove it. There are many reasons why soldiers are not sure it would be feasible for anyone to launch an amphibious attack on Taiwan (for starters, the few beaches are fortified and backed by steep mountains, and the USA could intervene when it felt like). So the argument that amphibious operations in WW II usually succeeded, so a Chinese attack on Taiwan would probably succeed, does not convince me.

Its good that countries with big sophisticated navies and air forces rarely fight each other. But it makes it very hard to predict how a Russian attack on Estonia or a Chinese attack on Taiwan would go. A Chinese attack on Taiwan would be the biggest amphibious operation since the Battle of Incheon in 1950, and the last time a military tried such a big, long-ranged landing against defended beaches without practice making smaller landings was at Gallipoli in 1915. A few years ago the Taiwanese army was not trained for combat or supplied with enough munitions for a long war, but the terrain which invaders would have to cross is incredibly difficult. All the commentary and analysis is based on wargames, observations of exercises, and a lot of guessing and judgment.

Further Reading

This report by Ian Easton admits the uncertainty on page 10 https://project2049.net/2021/07/22/hostile-harbors-taiwans-ports-and-pla-invasion-plans/ T. Greer raises the issues with the state and will of the Taiwanese military which American commentators sometimes avoid talking about (the former dictatorship relied heavily on the army so the democratic regime is not eager to have an effective army)

This Canadian column is a good example of someone who rushes to assume that a war between a country with a tiny air force and a country with an airforce limited by sanctions and poor training is the Future of Warfare with Universal Lessons! (He does not answer “wait, if most of the Russian artillery park is old towed guns, some which were designed under Stalin, is it a Universal Lesson that self-propelled guns are better than towed guns? Or just that if the other guy has more aircraft and more artillery shells, life as a towed artillery gunner sucks?”)

(scheduled 9 February 2024, updated 2 April)