Western military powers are being forced to rethink strategy because conflict in Iraq has shown the limits of their conventional armies, the International Institute of Strategic Studies said on Thursday. In its annual report on global military might, The Military Balance, the London-based think-tank said strategists had hoped new technology would let them target enemies accurately from ships and planes, avoiding protracted ground battles. Instead, it said conventional armies have been sucked into messy conflicts, often in towns, where they face enemies invulnerable to the advanced gadgetry that was supposed to herald a new era in warfare.“Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya demonstrate the limitations of modern conventional forces in complex environments that demand more of them than traditional fighting,” wrote editor Christopher Langton in the introduction.The US has some 137,000 troops in Iraq more than two years after crushing Iraq’s conventional army in a ground invasion. On Tuesday, the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since March 2003 hit 1,999.The Military Balance said that rather than winning “network-centric warfare” using electronic sensors to find targets and direct fire, Western forces were enmeshed in “netwars”, based on “agile and adaptive human networks”.The institute said British and Australian special forces and the US Marines were adapting to the new era of “asymmetric” conflict used by non-state actors such as Al Qaeda by creating smaller fighting groups. But it said there was unlikely to be any major shift in US strategy, or spending, for two reasons. First, because it feared the rise of conventional armies in countries such as China.The second reason was the immense inertia of the industrial groups that helped build US military might and the fact that it would take time to move away from decades of strategic thought. —Reuters
