Where to Fight ?

During the long period of time before firearms, battlefields were small and compact. A face-off at close quarters between two armies might unfold on a small expanse of level ground, in a mountain pass, or within the confines of a city. In the eyes of today’s soldier, the battlefield that so enraptured the ancients is a “point” target on the military map that is not particularly noteworthy. Such a battlefield is fundamentally incapable of accommodating the spectacle of war as it has unfolded in recent times on such a grand scale. The advent of firearms led to dispersed formations, and the “point” type battlefield was gradually drawn out into a line of skirmishers.

The trench warfare of the First World War, with lines extending hundreds of miles, served to bring the “point” and “line” type battlefield to its acme. At the same time, it transformed the battlefield into an “area” type battlefield which was several dozens of miles deep. For those who went to war during those times, the new battlefield meant trenches, pillboxes, wire entanglements, machine guns and shell craters. They called war on this type of battlefield, where heavy casualties were inflicted, a “slaughterhouse” and a “meat grinder”.

The explosive development of military technology is constantly setting the stage for further explosive expansion of the battlespace. The transition from the “point” type battlefield to the “line” type battlefield, and the transition from the two-dimensional battlefield to the three-dimensional battlefield did not take as long as people generally think. One could say that, in each case, the latter stage came virtually on the heels of the former. When tanks began roaring over military trenches, propellor aeroplanes were already equipped with machine guns and it was already possible to drop bombs from zeppelins.

The development of weapons cannot, in and of itself, automatically usher in changes in the nature of the battlefield. In the history of warfare, any significant advance has always depended in part on active innovating by military strategists. The battlefield, which had been earthbound for several thousand years, was suddenly lifted into three dimensional space. This was due in part to General J.F.C. Fuller’s Tanks in the Great War of 1914-1918 and Giulio Douhet’s The Command of the Air, as well as the extremely deep operations that were proposed and demonstrated under the command of Marshall Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky. Erich von Ludendorff was another individual who attempted to radically change the nature of the battlefield. He put forth the theory of “total war” and tried to combine battlefield and non-battlefield elements into one organic whole. While he was not successful, he nevertheless was the harbinger of similar military thought that has outlived him for more than half a century. Ludendorff was destined only to fight at battlefields like Verdun and the Masurian Lakes. A soldier’s fate is determined by the era in which he lives. At that time, the wingspan of the war god could not extend any farther than the range of a Krupp artillery piece. Naturally, then, it was impossible to fire a shell that would pass through the front and rear areas on its parabolic path.

Hitler was more fortunate than Ludendorff. 20 years later, he had long-range weapons at his disposal. He utilized bombers powered by Mercedes engines and V-1 and V-2 missiles and broke the British Isles’ record of never having been encroached upon by an invader. Hitler, who was neither a strategist nor a tactician, relied on his intuition and made the line of demarcation between the front and rear less prominent in the war, but he never really understood the revolutionary significance of breaking through the partition separating battlefield elements from non-battlefield elements. Perhaps this concept was beyond the ken of an out-and-out war maniac and half-baked military strategist.

This revolution, however, will be upon us in full force soon enough. This time, technology is again running ahead of military thinking. While no military thinker has yet put forth an extremely wide-ranging concept of the battlefield, technology is doing its utmost to extend the contemporary battlefield to a degree that is virtually infinite: there are satellites in space, there are submarines under the water, there are ballistic missiles that can reach any place on the globe, and electronic countermeasures are even now being carried out in the invisible electromagnetic spectrum space. Even the last refuge of the human race—the inner world of the heart—cannot avoid the attacks of psychological warfare. There are nets above and snares below, so that a person has no place to flee. All of the prevailing concepts about the breadth, depth and height of the operational space already appear to be old-fashioned and obsolete. In the wake of the expansion of mankind’s imaginative powers and his ability to master technology, the battlespace is being stretched to its limits.

We can anticipate that every major alteration or extension of the battlespace of the future will depend on whether a certain kind of technological invention, or a number of technologies in combination, can create a brand new technological space. The “network space” is now drawing widespread attention among modern soldiers. Network space is a technological space that is formed by a distinctive combination of electronics technology, information technology and the application of specific designs. If one maintains that a war prosecuted in this space is still a war in which people control the outcome, then the “nanometre space” which is emerging hard on the heals of the network space, bodes well for the realization of mankind’s dream—a war without the direct involvement of people.

Some extremely imaginative and creative soldiers are just now attempting to introduce these battle-spaces, comprised of new technologies, into the warfare of the future. The time for a fundamental change in the battlefield—the arena of war—is not far off. Before very long, a network war or a nanometre war might become a reality right in our midst, a type of war that nobody even imagined in the past. It is likely to be very intense, but with practically no bloodshed. Nevertheless, it is likely to determine who is the victor and who the vanquished in an overall war. In more and more situations, this type of warfare will go along hand-in-hand with traditional warfare.

The two types of battle-spaces—the conventional space and the technological space—will overlap and intersect with each other, and will be mutually complementary as each develops in its own way. Thus, warfare will simultaneously evolve in the macroscopic, “mesoscopic” [between macroscopic and microscopic], and microscopic spheres, as well as in various other spheres defined by their physical properties, which will all ultimately serve to make up a marvellous battlefield unprecedented in the annals of human warfare.

At the same time, with the progressive breaking down of the distinction between military technology and civilian technology, and between the professional soldier and the non-professional warrior, the battlespace will overlap more and more with the non-battlespace, serving also to make the line between these two entities less and less clear. Fields that were formerly isolated from each other are being connected.

Mankind is endowing virtually every space with battlefield significance. All that is needed is the ability to launch an attack in a certain place, using certain means, in order to achieve a certain goal. Thus, the battlefield is omnipresent. Just think, if it’s even possible to start a war in a computer room or a stock exchange that will send an enemy country to its doom, then is there non-battlespace anywhere?

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