At the end of an eight-week exchange between American and Japanese journalists many moons ago, I had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima. That city had rebounded from the first atomic attack at the end of World War II, but dramatically displayed that history of a never-to-be-forgotten disaster of human experience.
The face of war changed in 1945 when President Truman made the fateful decision to drop A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction and loss of life was so horrible that 80 years have gone by without the further use of nuclear weapons.
Prior to that, I had been given a top secret clearance in tactical nuclear weaponry as an artillery officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. One of our training exercises boiled down to whether we would need two or three nuclear artillery shells to take out San Francisco. I’ll never forget that sobering calculation. I can’t remember what the answer was.
Just as those two explosions ruled out further atomic attacks, conventional warfare may have hit a similar point of extinction. Is frontline, trench warfare no longer feasible? It would appear so.
The Russian army reportedly has been losing 35,000 to 40,000 troops per month in its frontline warfare against Ukraine. Drones seek out individual soldiers, send coordinates back to control centers and then a second drone takes them out.
Ukraine, Russia and their allies are producing tens of thousands of drones per month. The drone and missile warfare will only intensify.
Clearly, those kinds of losses make advances from the front lines untenable and unsustainable. Warfare will never be the same.
Recognizing the stalemate, Russia, never adverse to committing war crimes, is targeting the civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities. Putin, a war criminal, is targeting civilians.
Putin is already a pariah in most foreign capitals, but tyrants are never seeking popularity; they primarily seek expanded power.
With an eye on the dramatic change in conventional warfare in Ukraine and Russia, Taiwan and China are also rapidly adjusting their approaches to warfare. They are both reportedly accelerating the manufacture of unmanned explosive vehicles. There is strategic discussion in Taiwan about creating a “Hellscape” of drones that would stop a Chinese invasion.
As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the price of violent, explosive warfare may be too high for any nation to launch. Even for the tyrants seeking power.
More likely is a change in the nature of war. A new book by Ram Charan, a prolific Harvard professor who has written more than 36 books, has published a “wakeup call” to American leadership.
The book is titled “China’s 90% Model.” Charan warns that China means to take over the world economy, not militarily, but by nationalistic policies to dominate the top ten economic sectors in the world.
Charan writes, “Since becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist party in 2012, President Xi Jinping has “executed a strategy so meticulous, so coordinated and so effective that it has reshaped the global order.
“He has encircled America economically, technologically, militarily, and through logistics and data flows.
“He has systematically dismantled American industrial capacity while building China’s unstoppable machine.”
Charan posits that Xi is building enough industrial capacity to meet 90% of global demand in critical sectors and makes Chinese exports unbeatable on price, Charan argues, by undervaluing the Chinse currency by about 20%.
Have you ever heard leaders in the White House or in our Wisconsin Congressional delegation address the economic warfare launched against the U.S. by Xi?
President Trump did impose tariffs on China, mainly paid for by American businesses and consumers. But facing a new form of non-violent, economic warfare from China, has hardly been front and center for most American politicians top to bottom.
Charan has answers that use the far superior economic collective might of Western allies to stalemate China. But that will take an integration of national policies across the Western world. Trump and his lapdog Republicans in Congress have gone the other way. They have been adversaries of our former allies.
They spend their energies on ICE and deportations, despite our labor shortages, and on ballrooms and a golden arch.
(Torinus, a retired Marine officer, holds a graduate degree in International Relations from the University of Stockholm.)
