WARS OF ATTRITION AND RESILIENCE
Weaker powers and non-state actors can manipulate the wide spectrum of new-age warfare to their advantage; Ukraine and Gazareflect this paradox.
Lt General Harinder Singh (Retd), Former DGMI and Commander 14 Corps during the Eastern Ladakh Crisis 2020
Wars have always been about strategy, tactics, and technology, which holds true even now. However, new-age conflicts seem to be forging some novel and fascinating ways of waging war. For instance, asymmetric parties to a conflict are using disruptive technologies to prevent the stronger power from attaining its political and military objectives.
With weaker powers privileging quantity over quality, or `cheap mass` as Kelly Greico, a Washington-based analyst, argues, we can well imagine what future wars might look like. Wars driven by first-person view drones, low-tech missiles and garage–assembled rockets, when used in large numbers, demonstrate how a weaker party to a conflict can blunt a sophisticated force with expensive platforms on the battlefield.
Whether these disruptive capabilities can cause prohibitive attrition to a stronger power in asymmetrical conflicts of long or indeterminate duration remains the moot question. And what impact these new-age wars might have on future force structures, designs, and war-fighting concepts are issues to ponder. These and many other new war-fighting trends and technologies are legitimate questions on the evolving character of war.
Return of Attritive Wars
Wars in Israel and Ukraine signal the return of attritive wars. In fact, they symbolize the new-age wars. For Ukrainians, the Hamas October 7 assault on Israeli civilians bears stark similarities to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. Earlier, Ukraine suffered the wrath of Russian strikes targeting towns and cities and the local infrastructure, leading to mass displacement and suffering. Israel is now fighting a wily adversary in dense terrestrial and subterranean environments. Possibly a war far more difficult than any other conflict in recent history, be it the tunnels of the Vietnam War or battles in Mosul, Aleppo or Fallujah.
Recent events in Gaza and Ukraine also remind us of what happens when wars turn brutal. Both wars demonstrate how the populace becomes victims of wars of attrition, and when laws of armed conflict take a backseat, vengeance rules action, and violence escalates to horrific levels. As these new-age wars of attrition play out, collateral damage on population centres, hospitals, and schools is internalized as a normative outcome of the war. As the real fight ensues in Ukraine and Gaza and the wars evolve, the warring side narratives in the form of lies, mistruths and accusations only grow, obscuring the real purpose and human cost of the war.
From the war-fighting trends observed so far in Ukraine and Gaza, it seems prohibitive attrition could be a way to prevent or deter stronger powers from attaining their military objectives. Hopefully, adequate evidence exists to conclude that weaker powers can inflict prohibitive battlefield losses through innovative military actionthat compels a stronger military to miscalculate or re-think and that such ideas lead us to find new and resilient ways of waging wars.
Three Contexts
Three aspects assume importance in asymmetrical contexts: resilience in war, innovativeness in war, and the ability of a weaker power to cause prohibitive attrition in war.
Resilience in War: Russia took Ukraine by surprise in February 2022 and, as a stronger military power, was expected to liberate Kyiv in quick time. A weaker Ukraine, however, stalled the Russian offensive with fewer and borrowed resources at hand. Whether such outcomes are a simple function of superior men, machines, or material, which Ukraine did not possess at the beginning, and Russia did, or it has more to do with a state’s will to fight, its societal resilience and innovativeness on the battlefield is a question that seeks an answer. As a weaker party to the conflict, Ukraine has successfully leveraged theintangible attributes of state resilience to match up with Russia. Everything else, including political and military leadership, doctrines, organizational structure, and technology, comes next. In fact, Ukraine's ability to community-ise its war effort to produce war outcomes, which its stronger opponent could not deliver, is a lesson on conflicts between asymmetrical powers.
Innovativeness in War: History tells us that technology favours the strong rather than the weaker side in battle. This is fast changing, with weaker parties to a conflict leveraging inferior technology in more innovative ways. Ukraine's use of borrowed military equipment and innovative exploitation of low-cost disruptive technologies highlights this point. While the West has lent a major part of this war effort, Ukraine's ability to train and absorb these borrowed technologies on the run has been remarkable. Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are reshaping the balance between humans and technology in war. The fact that a war-fighting effort can be `corporatized` through your allies and partners, in case one lacks the military capacity, is a new learning from this war. The horrific Hamas strike in southern Israel is yet another example. A banned and reckless outfit lacking material resources to make war with a powerful state has delivered the most unthinkable outcomes. Employing cheap and simple-to-use technology, Hamas squarely used a technology-laden approach to secure the Israeli state. Both wars highlight that military boots matter more than the machine in war and that innovative minds with `cheap mass` can deliver disproportionate outcomes in asymmetrical conflicts. Innovative use of `cheap mass` is achieving near-mythical status on the battlefield.
Prohibitive Attrition in War: Brutality comes at a great human cost, and both wars demonstrate this fact. A favoured strategy is to rely on prohibitive attrition to drive decisive outcomes in war. At the tactical level, wars of attrition are about bitter battles of control over contested territory and urban rubble, while at the strategic level, these are about shaping perceptions, mistruths or half-truths, and about who is the aggressor or the victim. Ukraine has done well in capitalizing on this idea and keeping Russia embroiled. The more Russia tries to achieve a decisive victory, the more successful the Ukrainians have been in inflicting heavy losses on the Russians. While Russia might possess the logistical stamina for a long war, the prohibitive costs imposed by Ukraine have been impactful. Elsewhere, Hamas leveraged the tunnel labyrinth to impose caution and attrition on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Despite its recent successes in degrading Hamas inGaza, a long and risky battle confronts the IDF. An urban landscape compounds the effect of attritive battles, and how the IDF might maintain operational momentum and achieve its war objectives, including the repatriation of the hostages, remains to be seen. As expected, Hamas's allies have jumped in to open new fronts and are trying hard to overwhelm Israel's capacity to re-generate reserves and military wherewithal. That would be a big challenge, but given its reputation for innovation and fighting against all odds, we can expect IDF to come out undefeated in this war.
Some Lessons
Clarity in Knowing Your Capacity. Wars are often started, fought, and progressed over various assumptions, some with misplaced optimism. Policy-makers sometimes assume that diplomacy can deliver on national security needs without developing its war-fighting capacities. Elsewhere, they assume that the resident military power can deliver on any politico-military objectives that a state desires to achieve. Both policy positions are fraught with biases and intolerable strategic risks, which can result in a mistaken view of a state's real diplomatic influence or war-waging capabilities. Here lies the importance and significance of building state resilience and clarity in national security concepts, policies, guidance, structures and deliverables.
Sustainability and Endurance. War-fighting resilience's real intent and purpose is to develop the capacity to sustain higher intensity of conflicts and endurance to impose prohibitive losses to the aggressor, particularly in asymmetrical conflicts. Resilience in such conflicts requires a state to systematically convert its limited or inferior economic, industrial, financial and technological resources into `attritive` war-fighting capabilities within a defined period. In other words, the ability of the state to `innovatively` convert its assets and industry to sustain conflicts of long or indeterminate duration and at levels higher than what threats the adversary can bring to bear upon the state.
Lessons for India
For India, national security resilience could provide the state with the framework and ability to field an indigenous and sustainable deterrent capability for asymmetrical conflicts. India's military challenge is to develop resilient war-fighting requirements to achieve a stalemate in a possible asymmetrical conflict with China. From a policy perspective, the key question is, how can the North's threat be contained or attrited? What are the main lessons from the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and how and what war-fighting capabilities are deliverable through innovative or new technologies and disruptive methods to cause prohibitive attrition that could stall a stronger power? What could be the force design for causing prohibitive attrition, and can an `attritive` military action possibly be developed as a preferred operation of war for our northern borders?
For any war-fighting capabilities to build and take shape, the policy lines of effort must first be doctrinal rather than structural. More doctrinal than structural. But then, the Indian military establishment is caught up in an endless theatre-isation debate. Simply put, this debate serves a narrow structural requirement, not the doctrinal purpose of India's attritive war-fighting capabilities. This requires both correction and pragmatism.
