The Sociology of the Military and Asymmetric Warfare

Abstract

Once there was guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla fighters were able to stymie powerful, organized armies, like Napoleon’s in Spain in the nineteenth century, or the Germans’ in Europe during the Second World War. Nowadays it’s asymmetric warfare that allows David to challenge Goliath. This is a form of war in which a weak party, as opposed to a strong party, uses a non-conventional instrument of struggle in order to bridge the gap between the two sides. But Asymmetric Warfare takes place in a completely different context from which guerrilla warfare operated, it unfolds in a global society profoundly signed by emergencies. All this produces a socially and politically explosive mixture in many parts of the world, a mixture that often only needs a tiny spark to explode and give rise to wars of the poor against the wealthy, the small against the big one, the weak against the strong. In other words, to what has been defined as asymmetric warfare, whose components and fighting tools are guerrilla warfare, terrorism, media exploitation of the information and communication technologies proper to globalized modern society. From the definition of the new armed forces as a constabulary force proposed in 1960 by Morrris Janowitz to the term new wars used by Mary Kaldor, many are the terminologies used by military literature: from the irregular warfare (IW), stability operations, counterinsurgency (COIN), fourth generation wars, full spectrum wars, small wars, low-intensity conflicts—to those of military theoreticians such as hybrid wars; reaching finally a definition based on the main cause of its spread, the asymmetry of the contending parties, called asymmetric warfare, a term that is preferred here precisely because it gives the reason why more traditional forms of warfare (called “conventional”) were abandoned by one of the parties in conflict. The flourishing of these interpretations, of the debate, of the proposed solutions, in itself provides a measure of the process and, together, of the extent of the change to which our societies are exposed on the level of security policies. The relative certainties of the Cold War have been supplanted in the first decade of the twenty-first century with the general uncertainty of asymmetric conflict. It confirms and configures the passage from an international system centred on the Westphalian state to a post-Westphalian system.