Key Reflections
* Wars are psychological, and Ukraine has maintained the psychological momentum against Russia on its side, whilst building and sustaining an alliance of support for Kyiv.
* There is an intelligence bias known as mirroring, where actors incorrectly assume their enemy thinks like they do. The Russians believed this about the Ukrainians, which contributed to Moscow’s misunderstanding of Ukraine from the outset of the war.
* Issues such as morality, religion, and ideology are often perceived to be part of key narratives and fault lines driving violence in conflict but can actually serve to reduce conflict.
* Drones are developing greater importance both in terms of reconnaissance, but also when it comes to conducting actual operations. They are becoming smaller, whilst still retaining their effectiveness.
* Lessons learned from the war in Afghanistan can be applied to Russia’s war in Ukraine, such as having a realistic and well-resourced strategy that is aligned with overarching goals.
* Private military companies like the Wagner Group have been utilised by the Kremlin as a quick way of generating military power.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
MM: Mike Martin
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast, I’m your host Dr. Sajjan Gohel and in this episode I speak with Mike Martin, who is a War Studies Senior Fellow at King’s College London. In our discussion we talk about lessons that can be learnt from war, the use of technology, and what Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could mean for future conflicts and geopolitics.
Mike Martin, welcome to NATO DEEP Dive.
SG: In your recent book, How to Fight a War, I found the illustrations and the graphics very interesting. You helped to break down strategies and conflict. Simple, effective. But what was your motivation for writing this book?
MM: The book actually stemmed out of my Twitter feed. So, I have a feed @threshedthoughts, where I commentate on geopolitics and conflict and when the Ukraine war kicked off, I actually happened to have COVID and be in bed. And so, what do you do when you have COVID? You sit on Twitter, don’t you? It was a sort of mild bout. And it became really clear over the proceeding weeks that actually we don’t really know how to fight wars. And Putin’s made a catastrophic misjudgement, but when you think about it, the West made catastrophic misjudgements in Iraq and Afghanistan and we can look around the place and see lots of wars, in fact, most wars failed, what they set out to do.
And the second thing that became really clear from my Twitter feed, is that actually, the general public, but also commentators, journalists, politicians, who maybe should know a bit more about war, also don’t know anything about war. And that led to a discussion between my publisher and I, and we decided that actually what was needed, hopefully, was a general, plain speaking, summary, if you like, of how to fight a war. And so that’s what we wrote and we wrote it in the second person, so it’s a bit like Machiavelli, The Prince, the idea is that the reader is the commander in chief and we are advising you on what you need to do, all the elements that you’d be putting together to fight a war.
SG: I certainly did notice traces of Machiavelli’s The Prince in that book, and it’s a very interesting read, indeed. We’re talking about war and conflict. And the most blatant signs of this are Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where are we at when it comes to this conflict? Who is gaining the advantage? Who is making the most headway? Is this a stalemate? How long is this going to last for?
MM: So, I think we’ve got to start with the basis that all war is psychological and all of the tanks, the planes, all of the stuff, is merely there to affect the mindset of your enemy, and also to affect the mindsets of other observers of that conflict. And I think if we look at war in that way, we can say that Ukraine has so far kept the momentum on its side and the psychological momentum on its side. And also, has managed to build an alliance of people supporting it and keep that alliance in place. And Russia is largely ostracised, certainly from the rich nations of the world. I know not all the nations of the world are ostracising Russia, but certainly the majority of the rich nations. And even China, a close ally of Russia, is supportive, but to a very limited extent. So, I think if you view war like that, Ukraine is certainly acquitting itself much better than Russia is.
And the things that Ukraine has done on the battlefield, like stalling the Russians out to Kiev, in the first bit of the war, so that the Russians had to withdraw, then taking back Kharkiv in the north, and then Kherson again in the south, towards the end of 2022. All of these have painted a picture of a failing Russian attempt to achieve their goals. I think that’s one of the most important things in war that you can gain and maintain momentum. And now, this year, in 2023, what we’ve seen is, starting at the end of January, the Russians kicked off their spring offensive, quote, unquote, and that’s been fairly lacklustre. They’ve taken some small areas of territory in Bakhmut and some other places in Donbass, but too great costs, and it appears now as we record this in the beginning of April, that they’re starting to culminate. And now all talk is turning to, ‘great, where’s the Ukrainian counter offensive, they can use all this armour that the West has given them,’ and people again, talking about, ‘great, the momentum is passed back to Ukraine and they’re going to be kicking off,’ and everyone’s thinking about that. And so, the next few months really, I think, will decide what’s going to happen in this war. I don’t think—you mentioned stalemate—I don’t think it’s going to go on into 2024 because we have the U.S. presidential election there and if you look at some of the candidates or potential candidates in that, there’s no way that Ukraine is going to escape unscathed without U.S. support being called into question, at least on the campaign trail. And so, I think the Ukrainians and the other allies want to finish this one way or the other in 2023 before the U.S. election kicks off.
SG: Another aspect of this, often there’s this intelligence bias that is called mirroring and in many ways the Russians think that the Ukrainians think like they do, there is that cultural dynamic, they share a lot of similarities. There have also been marriages between both cultures across generations. Do you think that the Russians misunderstood Ukraine when the war began, in terms of how they thought the Ukrainians would end up fighting, partly because of the previous standoff in the Donbass region where Russian backed militias were given support and Ukraine wasn’t able to retake them?
MM: Yeah, so I think there are definitely lots of biases and all the biases that come into strategy formation and intelligence are why strategies fail. Mirroring is one of the most important, where you look at your enemy and you see yourself in them. I think actually too—and that is happening now, so for instance, at the moment with this Ukrainian counterattack, the Russians are thinking the attacks are going to happen everywhere, but actually, of course it’s not, they’re going to concentrate their force somewhere. But because that’s how the Russians act, they assume that the Ukrainians are going to act in that way.
I think at the beginning of the war, the two most important biases though, were overconfidence, so hubris definitely, overestimating the capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces and underestimating the capabilities of the Ukrainian forces. And also, I think, a kind of in-group—it’s weird, isn’t it? Because there’s, yes, the Ukrainians are a separate group, but also, as you say, well, but they’re also Russians and the Russians have never quite resolved whether the Ukrainians, psychologically, are in their in-group or in their out-group.
SG: One of the other aspects in this is that the war is being fought in the grey zone, especially when it comes to various different, interesting, aspects of modern warfare. Where do you think the importance has been when it comes to say, cyber warfare as well as also the use of proxies, such as the Wagner Group, which is gaining more and more attention and notoriety?
MM: So, my view generally on things like the grey zone and hybrid warfare is that these are just warfare. And these are terms that we invent to help us accrue funding from big bureaucracies. Of course, if you’re fighting war you use all the levers of power. I think that, specifically to your point about cyber or information versus what you might call more traditional military power, I think, actually, this conflict has demonstrated very clearly that cyber information will only get you so far. And when it comes to the crunch, actually, when you need tanks, you need tanks. There’s nothing that you can use to replace them. And I think it’s been a very interesting lesson for lots of countries in Europe, particularly for the UK, right? Three months before the invasion, the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson went in front of the Defence Select Committee and said, ‘oh, the days of tank battles on the plains of Europe are over.’ So, the lesson is, yes, you need cyber and information and all those other things, but they’re wraparounds for your core capabilities, which are infantry, tanks, artillery, all those other ground capabilities.
Proxies, I think, are very interesting. We can see why Russia has brought them in because it’s a quick way of generating military power. It’s not a particularly skilled military power and it introduces its own problems. For example, the Wagner Group created a rift within the construction and then you’ve got competition between the military and the Wagner Group and the Chechens and all the rest of it. So, I think, in the same way that the West in Afghanistan tried to raise village militias and village defence militias and all the rest of it, often these things seem like a good idea at the time, but they are really hard to control and integrate into your wider command, and they can only ever produce very low quality troops anyway, so I’m not really sure if it’s a thing apart. I see it more as a kind of a recruitment tool, and not a particularly successful one.
SG: Talk to me about the role of drones in conflict. They are developing greater importance in terms of reconnaissance, but also to carry out actual operations. Is this now the future of warfare?
MM: One very interesting trend with drones is that they’re getting smaller. So, they came around at the turn of the millennium and led to the big Predators and Reapers and all the systems that we saw in use in Iraq and Afghanistan, predominantly, but also more widely in the war on terror. What we’ve seen in Ukraine is very interesting. So, first we’ve seen the Bayraktar, the Turkish drones, which cost single figures millions or $20 million, depending on which version you get, so, a tiny amount compared to what a Predator or a Reaper costs, so you can obviously have many, many more of those on the battlefield.
And we’ve also seen the use of commercial drones with slight adaptations, or even without adaptations. I can go on Amazon right now and order a Quadrocopter with a camera and I can use that for artillery spotting, for a few thousand dollars. With small modifications, I can use one of those to drop a grenade or something, and we’re seeing that all the time, if you look on TikTok and Telegram you see all the time, slightly modified commercial drones being used to drop high explosives into Russian trench systems and all the rest of it. So, that to me is a really interesting trend, I guess you could call it the democratisation of them, because anyone can buy them and modify them. And also they’re getting smaller and smaller and we’re not that far off from having drones the size of a 5p piece or a dime if you’re American, and all being networked together and controlled with a decentralised processor held with a little bit of the processor on each drone, so they can, with an algorithm that enables them to, swarm, we’re not very far away from that being the case and its very, very, very difficult to defeat technologies like that. So, I think that’s a really interesting trend in UAVs and drones.
SG: Yes, a very interesting trend indeed. You mentioned Afghanistan, and you actually served in Afghanistan with the British military with great distinction. So, I’m curious what lessons can be learned from the Afghan conflict that can be utilised for the Ukraine-Russia dimension? Or is it that they are just two very different, separate, issues?
MM: No, there’s one central lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan, which is don’t fight a war unless you have a strategy. And by strategy, I mean a realistic strategy and one that is resourced appropriately for the goals that you want to achieve. What the Western nations had in Iraq and Afghanistan were a set of goals, but no real idea how to connect their activities up to those goals—and at times, they weren’t very well resourced, but there were times when huge resources were poured into those wars. The Iraq War, sorry, the Afghan War, was over $2 trillion, humongous amounts of money. And so, the problem wasn’t necessarily resourcing as such, it was, ‘how do we connect these activities that we’re conducting to the overall goals that we’re trying to achieve?’ And if you kept plugging away that problem in Afghanistan, which obviously I know very well, you may have come to the conclusion that it wasn’t possible. And therefore, at that point, you should then withdraw.
And so, this was the problem. It was because we didn’t understand the countries enough, we were unable to connect our activities to our eventual goals. And that lack of understanding just meant that we didn’t realise that we weren’t making any progress. And so, the fundamental lesson is, have a strategy before you fight a war. And I think that if I look at Ukraine, I think the Ukrainians have got a strategy, certainly, very clear: evict all Russian soldiers from Ukrainian lands, using Western resources, and we pay the blood, and the West pays the treasure. And that’s okay, as far as it goes, very simple, very clear, the whole nation can get behind it, the support, the trinity between the government, the forces, and the people is very strong, and they’re very well agreed on that strategy.
It’s not so clear—and it’s obviously more difficult—in an alliance where you have America, Europe, lots of different countries, but I feel that although we’re in a much better position now, than we were at the beginning of the conflict, we’ve all agreed now that we agree with Ukraine’s goals and we support Ukraine in evicting Russia from Ukrainian lands, although you do see some equivocation over things like Crimea, what’s going to happen to Crimea? And then, of course, you see Macron’s comments recently, over the last couple of days, although it appears maybe they’ve been mistranslated, but Macron, throughout the conflict, has always felt he’s been able to make peace, he’s gone to Putin and all the rest of it and he said that Putin shouldn’t be humiliated.
And so, although there is a strategy, there is probably a difference of view within the Alliance about exactly where the bounds of that strategy are. But I think, it’s clear that what’s happened this year is that the alliance has decided that Ukraine is going to be given as much as possible this year to try and allow it to finish the job. Because, as we discussed, 2024 is the U.S. presidential election. I suspect if Ukraine hasn’t made significant gains by the autumn of this year, then we’re going to look at a shifting of those goals, I think we’re going to see the conflict being closed down by the West.
SG: Well time will tell, I guess. When war occurs, things such as morality, religion, ideology, they often become the key narratives, talking points, potential motivations, as well as the fault lines in conflict. One thing I thought was interesting is in your book, Why We Fight, you’ve argued the opposite is true that actually rather than driving violence, that these things can actually help to reduce a conflict. Could you expand on this?
MM: Yeah, sure. Again, this grew out of my time in Afghanistan, where a very common refrain was that people were, in the case of suicide bombs, blowing themselves up because of twisted ideology, or the Taliban were driven by religious fundamentalism. And it seemed to me that ideas, be they ideologies like jihadism, or democracy, or whatever, or religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, whatever, and moral codes like Pashtunwali, all these ideas of good and bad, but it seemed that these were always cited as the causes of violence. My first degree was biology and so I found that quite confusing, because if people are going to risk their lives, and conflict is risky, or in the case of suicide bombers, end their lives, that’s a profoundly anti-evolutionary activity, in the sense that it exerts a negative selection pressure. So, you’ve got to explain very clearly how one thing leads to the other, otherwise we have a bit of a problem.
And so, I looked into it and what became clear was, I couldn’t make that link, but I could make a link to some evolutionary drivers that we have, namely towards status and belonging. So, at the level of the individual, this status, as in social status and belonging to a social group, have clear evolutionary advantages to the individual. And they have a slightly negative effect as well, which is that they drive you to go and fight in wars and that slightly increases your chance of death, but overall, the benefits that the average person gets from having those drives towards status and belonging, outweigh the average effects of the chances of you going to war and dying in that war. And so, it’s an evolutionary argument for why we fight wars which, as I’ve explained at first, look like they shouldn’t exist according to evolution.
And so, then I looked again back at ideology and morals and religion. And it seemed to me and there’s a lot more evidence in the book, it seemed to me that those three things were how we built bigger and bigger societies, from hunter gatherer bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms, to Ancient Empires, to the nation state, to the huge nation states that we have now, to the quasi-global culture we have. We’ve built bigger and bigger groupings throughout the last, say 12,000 years since we made the transition from hunter gatherer into living in villages. And what’s enabled us to do that, is these ideas about how we order society, predominantly moral codes, religions, and ideologies. Now the thing about bigger societies, a la Steven Pinker, is that bigger groups tend to have lower levels of violence in them, by definition, social groups are non-violent places, with vastly reduced levels of violence. That’s why we want to live in them, or that’s one of the reasons why we want to live in them. And so, these frameworks, to me, seemed to actually be things that helped us build societies which reduced levels of violence rather than being things that drove us towards violence.
SG: You’ve got a huge and vast array of on the ground experience in various different places. So, one other part of the world that I’m very interested to get your take on, as kind of a final question in our discussion, is that in 2013, you, along with two friends, set off on a journey, an adventure, starting from Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, all the way to Juba, the capital of South Sudan. That’s travelling effectively two and a half thousand miles of some of the toughest terrain on the planet. Aside from the bureaucracy, fire ants, non-existent roads and some of the challenges from locals that you are encountering, you managed to develop a very intimate look into one of the world’s, perhaps often neglected parts of the world. And one of the most fragile states, the DRC. The DRC faces some of the most virulent insurgencies today and it really doesn’t get a lot of attention. And to the surprise of many, this also includes the fact that there are ISIS affiliates in the region, such as the Islamic State of Central Africa Province and also the Allied Democratic Forces, which is a Ugandan-based group that also operates in the eastern DRC. I’m curious, you were in the DRC, are you now surprised when you see the growth of ISIS in the region? Or were there tell-tale signs about what was happening in the DRC that have actually now manifested themselves into what we’re witnessing today?
MM: My experience of travelling in conflict zones, I’ve done it in Afghanistan, I’ve done it in Colombia, I’ve done it in DRC, in Somalia, and Myanmar, and all the rest of it. My experience is that the further away you are from a place, the worse the narrative will be about it. And as you get closer to it, and you obviously talk to people, you go a little bit closer, you get another bus to the next town, then you talk to people, the closer you get to it, the less of a problem it is because for them, it’s just normal people. And so, you mentioned the ADF, I mean, just to give a really specific example, we actually had to cross a bit of the DRC in the Northeast that supposedly was under the control of the ADF. And obviously, we were concerned about that, we were just three of us in a Land Rover, but we did what we always do, we just kept talking to everyone. And when we got nearer and nearer, it became clear that there wasn’t any ADF, this was a thing on a map drawn by researchers who, and obviously I’m not saying that this is the case everywhere, there had been ADF there previously, but what I’m saying is, once these things get drawn on maps, they tend to then not get taken off them.
I think there’s a few other things that contribute to that kind of stuff. And again, these are not general comments, but these are comments about what I saw specifically in northeast Congo. So, we found quite a large UN presence up in that bit of the Congo, that wasn’t really doing anything, and we stayed with the UN, and clustered around it, we also found lots of NGOs who were running various projects and art, and again, these are not general comments, but all of it seemed to us a bit like a self-licking lollipop, in that because there was a problem there, which was the ADF, and it was the NRA were meant to be in that bit of Congo as well, and it created a reason for those people to be there, doing something, and they were doing lots of good work, but the narrative of those things, they were improving people’s lives, but the narrative of those things enabled them to—faraway bureaucrats in wherever to go, ‘Ah well, there’s that problem there, therefore we need those solutions there. And again, for the third time and the fourth time, I just want to caveat, that I’m not saying that that’s a general problem, but that it was something that we saw, specifically in that area.
So, am I surprised that there’s an ISIS affiliate in that area? What does that mean, an ISIS affiliate? What is ISIS? It’s not the Caliphate, like it was in 2015, and what does an affiliate mean? That some guy in the Congo has agreed to become part of the franchise, some guy and his group have agreed to become part of the franchise for the Caliphate, and what, are the Caliphate going to be sending them weapons? Maybe, I doubt it though, because they’ve got their own problems in the Middle East. So, I just wonder whether that actually means anything of any substance. Like it means something in that it’s true and he’s maybe declared his allegiance, but does it actually mean anything in terms of any substance? And so, that’s what I would question, but in most of the places I’ve been, again, the closer I’ve got to the problems, the more that they seem to have disappeared or become less of a scale. Things are much scarier when you’re further away.
SG: Interesting. Well, you’ve given us a lot of food for thought in this discussion. Let me thank you again, Mike Martin, for having the time to talk to us on NATO DEEP Dive.
MM: Thanks very much.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.