A recent example of asymmetric warfare where the powerful lose the battle is what happened in Afghanistan. In fact, hard-line Afghans – be they Taliban or warlords – have managed to expel from their country the two most powerful armies in the world, the Russian (then Soviet) and the American.
An example of how bad it can be for a superior army could be seen in what was the most expensive war game in history , Millennium Challenge 2002 . With a budget of 250 million dollars, the US Army designed it to test a series of new combat theories based, not on the massive use of troops, but on speed, agility and the use of high-precision weapons. all perfectly coordinated from an absolutely computerized command and control. The intended scenario was a war against a fictional country in the Persian Gulf, curiously similar to Iraq.
The enemy (the Red Team) was put under the command of a retired general named Paul Van Riper, a Vietnam veteran and shot in this type of games in which he had always played the role of enemy chief of staff. The Pentagon had foreseen a total and overwhelming victory of the Blue Team, the “good guys”, using their new ideas of technological warfare. But the problem is that, sometimes, technology can do little for a creative mind.
The game started on July 24. The Red Team received an ultimatum from the Blue Team demanding their surrender within 24 hours. Van Riper was clear: the enemy war fleet had arrived in the Persian Gulf to launch a preventive attack against his country. So following the old maxim that the best defense is a good offense, he decided to attack first. Knowing he had lost electronic warfare, he decided to go back to before World War II: he shut down all his radios and used motorcycle couriers to deliver the orders . To circumvent electronic countermeasures, it armed fast patrol boats and pleasure boats with first-generation missiles, those that are to point, shoot and wait to hit the target. It also placed the same type of anti-ship cruise missiles ashore. And as if that were not enough, he prepared a massive wave of suicide attacks with small boats and propeller planes loaded with explosives in the purest kamikaze style. The result? When the (digital) smoke cleared it had sunk 2/3 of the Blue Team fleet. In total 19 ships, including the aircraft carrier, several cruisers and five amphibious ships. In 10 minutes, a vastly inferior army had defeated a technologically superior enemy. Blue Team boss General Bell admitted that Van Riper had “sunk my goddamn navy.” First war myth dismantled: being technologically superior does not guarantee winning a war .
But even if the battle is lost, the invader can still be stood up to. Because something that is easily forgotten is that every war has two phases: the actual invasion and the occupation. And that is what is really complicated for an invading army: look at the evil our guerrillas did to Napoleon, the resistance to Hitler or the Iraqi militias to Bush. A guerrilla war can even be envisaged from the outset, as Ukraine seems to be doing. It is the only way to deal with an invader with vastly superior capabilities. The clearest example of the effectiveness of this type of tactic could be seen in the year 612, when imperial China under the Sui dynasty decided to start a policy of expansion to ensure control of its own borders. He considered that the small kingdoms of Korea were the perfect target since, traditionally, they were seen as very weak both militarily and politically.
So the Yangdi Emperor sent over a million soldiers to destroy the kingdom of Goguryeo in one of the largest land invasions ever carried out by Imperial China . Obviously the Koreans were not in the mood to submit to Chinese ambitions and, aware of their lesser military power, they began a guerrilla war. The Chinese, constantly harassed by the retreating Koreans, wore down their huge army while their morale dropped as they were unable to secure the conquered ground. They finally reached the Salsu, a shallow river north of Pyongyang, the place where the Koreans had decided to stop running and face their invaders.
The one in charge of the defense of the capital was the one responsible for the guerrilla tactics, General Eulji Mundeok, and he had created a dam in the upper part of the Salsu River, so the water level had dropped remarkably. When the Sui troops were in the middle of the riverbed, crossing it on foot, Eulji Mundeok opened the dam, causing the onslaught of water to drown thousands of enemy soldiers. The Goguryeo cavalry then charged the remaining Sui forces, who were forced to retreat at a breakneck pace to avoid being killed or captured. The Sui dynasty lost all but 2,700 soldiers .
Necessity drives creativity, and that’s true even in war. In Iraq, the militias did a lot of damage to the US army. In the ambushes on the transports, the Iraqis detonated their explosives as the vehicles passed with a simple cell phone. When the Americans started using inhibitors, the Iraqis were clear: take a technological step back and detonate them as was done in World War II, pulling a cable .
The two most effective weapons in the armed confrontations of the 20th century have been two very simple: in close combat, the AK-47 assault rifle, with its characteristic curved magazine; and in the distance, the RPG, the anti-tank hand-held grenade launcher. Remember the movie Black Hawk Down ? In October 1993 the Somali militias in Mogadishu, with AK-47s and machine guns mounted on trucks, managed to give the elite American troops a real hard time with all their technological might. And they shot down two helicopters with an RPG! It would never have occurred to anyone that an anti-tank weapon could be used as a surface-to-air missile : it was a Van Riper-style hit.
Now, war today is not the same as it was in the last century. The go-to book for combat today was written by two Chinese People’s Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, in 1999. Its title says it all: Unrestricted Warfare . In it they analyzed how a nation like China could defeat a technologically superior adversary (obviously the United States). And they looked at another of the most widespread war myths: that a war involves battles between armies.
The Chinese colonels argued that the main weakness of the United States is that its military doctrine evolves based on the new technologies available to it: it does not consider other factors, such as legal or economic. This is the philosophy of unrestricted warfare (known today as hybrid warfare): going beyond the purely military . This is where the legal war comes in, with which to weaken international public credibility, the economic war -which is what the European Union is doing with Russia-, the iWar (with fake news to make the enemy nervous at home or attacking their communication, economic, transport, energy networks…, La jungla 4 ‘total chaos’ style), even reaching terrorism. Anything goes in an unrestricted war and that is what we are seeing – and will see – in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. And no one knows where such barbarity will lead us .
