Saco a colación un antiguo texto del mes de abril de 2021 publicado en este modesto Post, porque los eventos en curso en Ucrania lo ameritan, y además lo menciono en el texto precedente, y así ahorro al gentil lector a excarvar mayormente
Classical readings of the asymmetric conflict in the Pacific Basin and Eurasia
A recent publication makes a classic military potential count of different countries to reach the conclusion that in the air the United States of America would win an eventual conflict, Russia would win on land and China would win at sea (https://www.military.direct/blogs/news/which-world-military-would-win-in-a-war).
These types of comparisons lack, in my view, predictive capacity, as they do not incorporate fundamental factors in the strategic equations that, on occasion, allow us to glimpse a winner in armed conflicts of different scales. Thucydides, whom I have mentioned several times in this blog since 2010, enlightens us with his detailed description of the Peloponnesian War, when at the very beginning of his narrative, in the magnificent chapter entitled "Archaeology" he explains why the war between Athens and Sparta was so prolonged: both powers had a decisive capacity in the military sphere in which the other did not. That is, Sparta was omnipotent in land combat, as Athens was at sea.
However, as kind readers will remember, at the end of the war the victory of Sparta was not in "its sphere of power" but precisely in the maritime sphere, where Athens had an overwhelming superiority not only in numbers but also in the quality of human resources, from the seamen to the strategists who directed the naval operations. The decisive factor of that final naval battle, at the mouth of the river Egospótamos (Chersonese) was the tactical surprise originated in a tactical error of the Athenian strategist, added to a factor as important as random that the strategist Lysander, commander of the Spartan fleet, knew how to take advantage of: the coincidence that his fleet sailed in the vicinity of the beaches where the enemy fleet stranded to rest. I leave to the reader the pleasure of the brief and forceful description that Thucydides makes of the final event of this very long war, which exceeded the initial calculations of the contenders. Something similar happens with other initial moments of wars that are prolonged beyond the horizon foreseen by military strategists. I am referring for example to the First World War, or to the Second World War, where Barbarrosa's mistake is only equivalent in the European West to Napoleon's miscalculation both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Russia.
From a current perspective of firepower, and of the doctrines of use of the vectors of that power, we can say that there is not at the present time a technical advance such as to allow a victory in the Pacific basin in an overwhelming way of any potential adversary. The potential major contenders, both in the Pacific and in Eurasia, have sufficient nuclear capability to escalate at any time a direct conflict through even minimal fractions of their respective nuclear arsenals in such a way as to cause decisive damage. That is, damage to demographics and environmental resources of such magnitude that even an eventual winner in such an exchange would see its own socio-political and economic structure profoundly altered.
From this point of view, a conflict simulation exercise takes us back, as Henry Kisinguer is warning, to cold war scenarios, where the outcome of the nuclear conflict was described in the acronym of the scenario that generated the direct nuclear conflict: Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
So, can we locate the asymmetry of a direct nuclear conflict today in the Pacific or in Eurasia? Indeed, having reached the point of no return of the spiral towards extremes- sensu Clausewitz commented by R. Aaron- the use of nuclear fire could hardly guarantee a complete annihilation of the opposing force in its entirety. Once again Mao's strategic intuition emerges forcefully in the sense that the demographic factor in such a conflict becomes a significant variable: the largest surviving population is the population that in the long term would gain the use of the territory, which is the central core of wars.
My personal impression is that the power or strength of the United States is far superior to that of China and Russia combined, but it is not an overwhelming superiority, like that of the Spaniards, English, French, Dutch or Belgians when they confronted and conquered immense colonized territories with few troops and weapons systems infinitely superior to those of the original inhabitants, whether native Americans, Asian or African. Thus, in the rapid course of an eventual confrontation, an asymmetric response on the part of Russia or China would be enough to generate a change of political regime in the American Federation, and ,or conversely, mostly in Russia than in China.
This potential asymmetrical tactical surprise can have profound strategic consequences, as has already occurred in the universal historical drama. For the German command, for example, there were two significant surprises during the war against the Allies: one purely military: the Russians were able to build huge numbers of tanks and had very important Western assistance at key moments. The other was purely geopolitical at two points in time: at the beginning of the war they miscalculated the reaction of France and the United Kingdom to the invasion of Poland, and at the end of the war they also failed to predict the time it would take for the Soviet Union to confront the Western bloc. They intuited it correctly but they were wrong in the fundamental matter of the Grand Strategy: the real, operative time of the events.
For the fundamental matter of the Grand Strategy is time, not space.
Although, some military men have a tendency to think that the exercise of the strategic art is space, we think that there is already enough experience and knowledge to think that only time is the essential engine of the art, and this explains then that the asymmetric action has fundamental consequences in the definition of all strategic conflicts.
But we will continue with this in the near future because the times we live in are fertile for those of us who observe the events that precede human actions.
Igor Parra
un dia ventoso y oceánico oriental en Lebu y Vitacura
