The Empty Battlefield is Full

Posted by: Ion | April 19th, 2007 · 5:32 PM

Lebbeus Woods’ redesigned ROK watchtower on the Korean DMZ.

In 1599, the whole of the Spanish army invaded Westphalia merely for dry winter quarters. Already acutely conscious of the erosion and diminution of her power, the Holy Roman Empire –propped up now more by foreign interests than her constituent estates loyalty– mounted an massive attack to drive out the foreigners. The move failed spectacularly, in mass mutinies and small action defeats.

It was this demonstrative weakness of central government, rather than the Spanish invasion itself, which induced the creation of the territorial militias beneath petty crowns in the Empire. The same militias which would turn Germany in an anarchic, depopulating corpse in the Thirty Years War. The sudden visibility of the hollowness of the Empire, not its possible or even desired collapse, served the princes who came to find interests in self-justifying perpetual war, than in the expanded governance of their realms.

John Robb, writing with characteristic lucidity about more contemporary expressions of this dynamic, observed this week that the objective of modern insurgencies is not to replace states, but to eviscerate them. To delegitimize and weaken them to such an extent that as a “hollow state,” they are simultaneously incapable of suppressing the insurgency, yet remaining sufficiently consolidated that they exist to oppose. By such trials, the insurgent can further delegitimize and indebt the government to worried foreign powers, thus creating self-sustaining rationales for militias, internal independence and perpetual war.

The obvious modern example Robb cites is Hezbollah in Lebanon, which does indeed seem to have little ambition for national governance and instead enjoys its ability to injure and manipulate the strong states of Syria and Israel, under the aegis of a broken state and society. Its cause is almost perfectly ceaseless war in the service of impossible victory, thrives within the paradoxically impregnable openness of a crippled and structurally compromised country. Thus Robb concludes:

[N]early every guerrilla group worth observing is advancing on the objective of state failure rather than state replacement.
(GlobalGuerrillas)

A perfect analogue for their tactics toward that end, is the Indian Wars on the Great Plains in the 19th century, particularly against the Kiowa. Like in Iraq, warfare on the American Plains was almost completely offensive. The exclusive military art of the Kiowa was the surprise attack against American units outside of their fortifications and towns, by a small raiding party of near suicidal volunteers. The attacked party had no option but to simply be attacked. Typically under unfavorable geographic circumstances and at vulnerable moments, such as in extruded convoys, long-range reconnaissance patrols, dismounted resupply, etc. The only way to fight this foe, was to mount your own retaliatory surprise attack later on, after you’d repelled their strike.

In one sense it could be argued that the nomadic, stateless nature of the Kiowa obviated territorial defense as a purpose for their resistance. But it’s not that the Kiowa were without territorial possessions, as they were clearly fighting to defend them. They had streams, forests, camps and millions of buffalo. But of course, this territory was so vast and so worthless that it was impossible to destroy or ransom.

As Bernard Mishkin observes in his classic short study Rank & Warfare Among the Plains Indians, what ultimately made the Kiowa defeatable by the United States, was the transformation of their territory into capital through its connection to commercial agricultural networks. The Kiowa’s slow inclusion in this pastoralization through treaties, dilated their vulnerability not because it reduced their mobility or firepower (they still had the horse and rifle), but because it fixed their territory into definable targets, possessing economic value and subject to reduction, destruction or seizure.

It should be noticed, that this is a phenomenon identical to the effect of modern globalization on conflict reduction in previously rural societies. The more connected territory becomes, the more it fills up with valuable targets that cannot be easily risked in confrontations. It’s an analogy John Abizaid reportedly uses and Thomas Barnett captures splendidly:

America’s westward expansion was, much like globalization, an integrating and disintegrating process. It reformatted the land from one civilization into another, and because of the strong disjuncture between those civilizations, it resulted in genocidal conflicts, but likewise intense infrastructural networking, state building, and the extension of political rule. It was imposed out of a sense of destiny that was as much justified as it was unjust. It was simply unstoppable, bloody, nasty and ultimately settling.
(Thomas Barnett)

As geography became economic and thus more defensive in nature, military capabilities naturally began to develop for the elimination of threats to these properties at greater distances. This set off a chain reaction in the West which eventually introduced the problem of the Empty Battlefield. Bruce Barrett summarizes the theory:

Modern combat methods and equipment enable (and thus require) an increasingly deep battlefield, with fewer combatants, more lethal (accurate and destructive) weapons, and improved opportunities, techniques, and equipment for concealment. The result…is “the perception that a soldier is virtually alone on the battlefield.”
(Gestalt)

Since this is an evolutionary process, there exists a point where munition lethality, situational awareness, readiness and accuracy are so perfect, that it is impossible to deploy an army without it being instantly and completely destroyed. Thus the battlefield is perfectly empty, in that it is impossible to wage war. Air power, precision guidance systems and nuclear weapons have already accomplished this for about ten states, with the historical reinforcement that these states do not war on each other at all.

But while the battlefield has been deepened to emptiness between the great powers, lesser interests who do not possess the ability to clear the table and yet possess concentrated assets, are instead victimized by the enormous destructive capabilities these weapons supply. Worse, the costs required to clear their foes field are so high, that they’ve proven largely unattainable for most states, much less militias. There is no better expression of this than the first Gulf War. A war that could never have been fought between the allies themselves, but only against Iraq.

But there’s another way to look at this. As the efficacy of weapons improves, their cost relative to the target become less justifiable when forced to be pitted against opponents which cannot achieve reciprocal battlefield emptiness. Collin Powell once remarked that beyond a certain point in 1991, the United States was merely bouncing million dollar warheads off of rubble in Baghdad to little effect in hastening the collapse of the Baathist regime. What this hinted at, was that Iraq was being very nearly reduced to the old problem of the Great Plains. The territory was becoming valueless, the leadership had moved into residential headquarters and thus destroying their assets wasn’t returning political benefits.

In modern Iraq the problem is even more extreme. It’s not that the insurgency doesn’t possess assets or territory, its that those assets and territories have little value and are well mixed in with a vast collection of other targets that have no value at all. There’s nothing for them to lose by the destruction of their safehouses, barricades and stolen vehicles…yet it costs the United States billions of dollars to destroy this junk. Last year Israel found similar problems in confronting Hezbollah with her sophisticated air power capabilities. Capabilities which made Syria and Egypt wary, had no dissuasive effect on the militants in Lebanon. The multiplicity of useless targets in effect, made the bombing campaign completely ineffectual. What Hezbollah has done is circumvent the problem of the empty battlefield by filling it up with physical noise.

The experimental architect Lebbeus Woods has been quoted as saying that he views architecture as war. The politics of that war for Woods are rather complex, but at its essence is an architectural conflict for individual autonomy and the atomization of unified national and transnational societies. Toward that, he wrote in his monograph in 1992, that “the nation-state of the future is the individual human being.”

It’s probably not the most salable pitch to clients. Indeed, as far as I know, he’s never built so much as an out house. But his design work as an artist, has unquestionably been influential on those who do build. Sometimes a little too much so, as he has been involved in lawsuits in the past where people have raided his designs without attribution. If you’ve seen the Terry Gilliam film “Twelve Monkeys” you’ve seen the borrowing. The underground plague city was almost entirely derived from his work.

One of his lesser known projects was a massive and brilliant redesign of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and due to its conditions and scale, is unlikely to be borrowed anytime soon. However, it is an ingenious metaphor for how states might confront the revocation of the advantages of empty battlefields. While his purposes were largely symbolic and aesthetic, it’s worthy of contemplation conceptually here.

What Woods did, was bisect the Korean peninsula vertically with a gargantuan steel and aluminum canopy which would conceal all military hardware beneath it. This canopy stretched the length of the peninsula on both the ROK and DPRK sides and provides near complete concealed frontal deployment of an army, invisible to satellite or aerial inspection.

The metal structure pivots south to cover the length of the Han and Nakdong Rivers whose course have been modified, finally ending at the coast on the Korea Straight. To the North, a less extensive system ascends the Imjin, covers the Changjin Reservoir and ends shy of the border, at the feet of the Hamgyong Mountains.

By adding cheap military infrastructure to every square inch of exposed front line and arterial supply route, he has reduced the value of any given inch of that territory to nothing. When everything is a target, nothing is. The system also largely avoids population centers, as revealed by this map:

I mention this project, not for its practicality, but because it represents the conceptual possibility of a powerful modern state competing against the filled battlefield of aggressive insurgencies. The current application of emptying battlefield forces, versus filling battlefield forces, is not a durable solution for military confrontations in the modern age of insurgent terrorism. The filled battlefield perfectly negates the advantages of precision and lethality that the major powers have built for themselves. They will need instead, to develop ways of filling the battlefield with their own multiplicity of low-cost targets, if they wish to engage insurgencies effectively.

In contrast to Woods design, which is purely defensive, an offensive application is probably best represented in the development of cheap armed robotic devices, which can spread throughout a territory, utilize inexpensive prefabricated base points, multiply faster than the insurgency and whose loss costs little more than that of a modern rifle. Metal Storm’s cheap, solid state weapons platforms, married to packbots, already represents such a solution. Complementing these units with non-lethal supply robots, decoys and other distractions will also enhance the filling effect. If autonomy and mobility can be increased sufficiently, flooding hollow states with such equipment would quickly reduce the merits of their hollowness to an insurgency.

An autonomous, posthuman military presence, could be fought forever by an insugency, whilst they gained nothing but casualties. Only a consolidated state, imbued with political legitimacy, could persuade the hostile foreign power to deactivate this armada of junk warriors. Thus filling the empty battlefield to match the insurgency, can induce incentives for political consolidation into more solvent forms than the hollow state.

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1 comment to “The Empty Battlefield is Full”

"The Empty Battlefield Is Full" | shloky.com, April 20th, 2007 at 10:48 am:

• […] Incredibly fascinating post over on PostPolitical on the idea. Ties in history, hollow states, architecture and future-think. […]

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