Small Wars & Internal Unrest
In the 1980s we witnessed a number of wars - for example the Falklands conflict (1982), the Israelis and Pakistan, and the Falklands themselves, where sovereignty is still a bone of contention between Britain and Argentina. Individually these problems (and there are many more worldwide) pose very serious questions in their own right, but if they are all taken together as symptoms of the global inequality between East and West (an inequality that has been especially accentuated by the financial movements of the 1980s), they may even be seen as portents of a more universal explosion.
The West will certainly have to stay alert to the many so-called brushfire wars’ that will in all likelihood break out around the world; and in the absence of an over-arching global balance it may even be tempted to intervene more frequently than before. In this context the Christmas 1989 invasion of Panama may be seen as something of a model, insofar as the USA was encouraged to take action partly because the USSR was so spectacularly distracted by its own internal concerns in Europe.
Since there was no obvious counter-balance to the US military initiative, American decision-makers were doubtless more ready to go ahead with the use of force than they might otherwise have been.
The ‘outbreak of peace’ in Eastern Europe has certainly created, in the prediction of imminent hostilities elsewhere, a whole new industry. It is possible that current talk about potential brushfire wars’ is merely a case of ‘governments and armies in search of an enemy’, or still more so of ‘weapon manufacturers in search of a market’.
Yet even without this, most Western states will wish to ‘keep their powder dry’ by staying abreast of the new weapons technologies. No army can afford to sit back doing nothing while other armies are perfecting new and exotic super-weapons and preparing themselves for future conflict.
It has of course always been notoriously difficult to predict the shape of future battle. Lieutenant Colonel Sir George Chesney discovered this in 1871.
