The future of war (no. 20) scares me -- and underscores the importance of resiliency

By Puong Fei Yeh


Best Defense
future of war contest entrant

The future of war
scares me.

It scares me the
most when I think about the world we live in -- the long-standing threat of
nuclear weapons and proliferation, the rise of unmanned combat platforms, cyber
weapons, and not-yet-invented or imagined ways to conduct war. Some of the
earlier posts in this blog have touched on the inviolate laws of war, and
therefore what we can expect war to look like in the future, but if there is
one law that gives me pause it is the power law of war.

I'm not referring to
the capacity of countries or groups to wage war, but rather Lewis Fry Richardson's insight in 1948 that wars exhibit a power
law relationship.

Richardson
discovered that the magnitude of wars as measured in how many people die is
inversely proportional to the frequency with which those wars occur along a
smooth curve. At one extreme end of the scale are the First and Second World
Wars, in which tens of millions of people were killed, and at the other end of
the spectrum are greater numbers of conflicts in which the number of
causalities range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Conflicts
like the Vietnam War (1965), Iran-Iraq War (1980), and the Taiping Rebellion
(1850) lie in the upper range of the curve. Since Richardson's discovery,
scholars have duplicated his results using larger datasets and subsets of
conflict-related data, including fatalities attributed to terrorism. Power law
explains a diverse range of natural and human phenomenon, from the magnitudes
and frequency of earthquakes to the population of cities.

Are we (or our kids)
due for a high magnitude event? One of the most frustrating things about
Richardson's discovery is the complete lack of predicative power. Simply put,
power law is nice, but as many others have pointed out, so what? Knowing in the
aggregate that a lot of people die in a few wars and not as many in many more
wars doesn't help us plan for the future. Although that's true, I believe
Richardson's insight is useful in providing some perspective and humility about
the future, both near- and long-term. First, wars will continue: People, in
large numbers, will continue to die. Second, the unthinkable -- the risk of
another world war or even a more localized, regional war -- should not be
unimaginable. Power law suggests events of intense severity will occur more
often than random chance. Unfortunately, we lack of a good sense of where we
lie on the curve.

So whether we think
the next big one is an all-out war between China and the United States, a
global cyberwar, a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, or a
terrorist organization detonating a nuke in one of the world's top 10 cities,
managing the risk that stems from any of these wars occurring is just as
important as reducing the risk that these deadly conflicts will start.
Borrowing from Nassim Taleb's theme of antifragile and other works on
resiliency, what series of steps can we begin to take to mold our system today
-- political, military, economic, and social institutions -- to withstand
devastating shocks? Ideally, you'd like to take a series of short-term steps
towards solving what is hopefully a long-term problem, because if you don't,
you're screwed when the high-magnitude event arrives.

If I'm going to make
a bet on the future of war, I will bet on the country that is most adaptive and
most resilient as the one to survive and prevail through the next series of
shocks.

Puong Fei Yeh is an
analyst at the Department of Defense, specializing in WMD and arms
proliferation. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the
official policy or position of the Department of the Defense or the U.S. government.

Tom note:
You're smart, you can do things. When you get back from taking Michael to the
airport, why not jot down your own views of the future of war?  Consider submitting an essay . The contest remains open for at least another few weeks.
Try to keep it short -- no more than 750 words, if possible. And please, no
footnotes or recycled war college papers.