The modern history of European nations has of course been marked by colonial wars, but these, by their very nature of peripheral conflict, have always played a limited role in the development of defensive systems. They have had understandably little effect on the collective subconscious of societies and populations, simply because of the absence of battles on home territory. Our minds have been imprinted over many decades with the image of the confrontational shock between two great powers, one of them destined inevitably to subjugate, even annihilate the other. At the cost of some over-simplifications, we have made Clausewitz the thinker of reference for this type of conflict, which culminates in Ludendorff’s preferred model of total war.

Nuclear weapons, with their destructive power and the different doctrines that have evolved about their employment, and indeed around their non-employment, dominated the Cold War period, and shaped our armed forces and also our way of thinking profoundly. Moreover, it would undoubtedly be dangerous to assume that this type of warfare is gone forever. Although the pattern most frequently seen in recent years has been the expeditionary war, limited in scope by virtue of the limited resources used, the absence of a direct threat against the homeland, which facilitated the acceptance, albeit fragile, of these conflicts by our populations. The recent rediscovery of counter-insurgency thinking clearly illustrates the search for new ways to respond to the questioning, inspired notably by the Afghan conflict.

It would of course be dangerous to draw conclusions from this theatre concerning the employment of armed forces in future decades. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks it was impossible to predict that ten years later, heavy armour, airpower, artillery and tens of thousands of soldiers would be deployed in Central Asia, and it is equally impossible to furnish a precise description of the conflicts of the coming decades, because of the intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing, or even admitting, who our future enemies are likely to be. On the other hand, without rejecting Clausewitz, still perfectly relevant to interstate conflict, another unprejudiced look at Sun Tzu’s The Art of War⁽¹⁾ could give us a better understanding of the realities of limited warfare, and particularly of insurrectional war.