The False Premise of Modern Warfare

November 1st, 2026

At Trebia the Romans lost some 30,000, at Lake Trasimene the Romans lost some another 30,000 dead - both in a single day. Carthaginian losses for both battle combined, less than 10,000. At Cannae the Romans lost more than 60,000 - in perhaps 5 hours. The Carthaginian losses were said to be less than 2,000. The Carthaginians cut the “SPQR” signet rings off the dead Centurions and sent 2 large barrels of rings back to Rome. 

In 217 BC, Rome and her Italian allies had a combined population of perhaps 3 to 4 million.

Think of those numbers, I’ll return to them in a moment.

Dominant Battle-space Awareness, Precision Delivery, Focused Logistics, Persistent Surveillance, etc., etc., etc.

These and another score of buzzwords emerged over the course of the last 35 years, promising that a new, more precise, perhaps even elegant and more humane style of war would emerge. The proliferation of drones, robots and most especially Artificial Intelligence has rekindled these dreams. AI will mean a revolution in weapons technology and a revolution in warfare. The army that masters AI will win the next war.

These are only dreams. Or, perhaps nightmares; technologies do not win wars, specifically, these new technologies will not win wars.

Don’t get me wrong, these are tools and in many cases very good tools. And any craftsman wants the best tools. I certainly want our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force to have the very finest weapons, and in great abundance. But that doesn’t assure victory. The woodworking shop doesn’t make a fine piece of furniture, the carpenter does.

A long time ago I recall sitting in a comfortable chair, from a million miles away, watching a US team of operators getting ready to leave their compound and head out into some hot, dry place, to grab a bad guy. There were several drones with beautiful, high resolution cameras, following the unit, and there were more drones over the bad guy and his troops, there were planes and more technology than you could shake a stick at. 

And then, as the various vehicles left the compound, in the model of the night, the drone camera zoomed in on some kid, maybe 12 years old, standing outside the gate, perhaps a half mile away, bare feet, with a cell phone, and the bad guy’s folks were alerted, the targeted bad guy moved, and the raid was a bust.

Years later, the bad guys are still there.

Anyone in the US or any NATO country, or many of our friends and allies in Asia or the Mid East, who has spent any time in the military working on some sort of war plan, has at one time or another “fallen in love,” at least for a short while, with a plan - and the associated technology - that was going to let us “poke out the other guy’s eyes” (break his sensors), “freeze him in place” (drop his bridges and destroy his mobility assets (aircraft ships and trains) while still in home port), we would “deny his command and control” (jam all those links), and, then as he had no idea what was going on, he had no weapons, and he had no mobility, and with his communications systems down, the evil dictator was isolated from his forces in the field, and he was left with no choice but to surrender. We’ll be home in 6 weeks - tops. Maybe sooner. Certainly before Christmas.

Why doesn’t it work? Why doesn’t all this technology, all this firepower end the war in 6 weeks?

Because the other guy gets a vote. And he casts that vote based on will. Because in the end war is about one thing and one thing only: will.

These technologies can, in fact, win battles. And winning battles is of great importance. But winning battles alone does not win wars.

A really smart friend of mine likes to remind me that killing everyone is one path to victory. It is. But, as he knows, if there were ever a strategy that required will, that is it. It’s a very hard, very unpleasant path. Remember that it was as much the blockade and starving of the German people, as it was the fighting in the trenches, that ended World War I. That tactic: the blockade, wasn’t targeted at armies, it was targeted at German civilians. And World War II involved slaughter at a never before imagined level, and in that case, the West, and the US, demonstrated the will to win - even if it meant slaughtering our enemy, slaughtering civilians.

Yes, we killed a great many Germans and Japanese. We had the will to do so in order to win the war.

Go back to Rome, 2,200 years ago: Rome and her allies lost more than 100,000 soldiers in just a few battles; 3% or more of the total population killed in three battles over the course of a year. What did Rome’s citizens do? They raised another army each time. They had the will to fight - and win.

Weapons, technology, wunderwaffe - these do not win wars. And insisting that because we have all the neat technology and all the neat buzzwords that we can fight and win this or that war isn’t correct. The premise that superior technology guarantees that we’ll win the war is simply false. We may win the battle, we may, as Col. Harry Summers said of US operations in Vietnam, never lose on the battlefield. But, as Col Tu answered him: “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

One thing you can bank on, some guy in the future, looking out on his country, being invaded not by other men, but by robot crawlers and super-sophisticated drones, will know, down in his bones, that no matter who is controlling those drones, that that guy, his enemy, does not have the same spine, the same will, he has to fight the war.

Will wins. Everything else? Just tools.