Flooring the Beast

In May 2011, President Obama’s car was successfully attacked by an Irish speed bump. The car (called the ‘beast’) is a triumph of American engineering. When it was unveiled to the press in 2009, a spokesman said that “Although many of the vehicle’s security enhancements cannot be discussed, it is safe to say that this car’s security and coded communications systems make it the most technologically advanced protection vehicle in the world.” The BBC noted that the car probably included “bullet proof glass, an armoured body, a separate oxygen supply, and a completely sealed interior to protect against a chemical attack... Some joke the car is so tough it could withstand a rocket-propelled grenade. Its tyres are said to work flat, so the vehicle will keep going even if shot at.”

The fate of the beast and its vulnerability to a very low-tech attack by a speed bump is a metaphor for the fate of many military interventions in the last generation. The massive US effort in Vietnam was held back by an army of peasants equipped with AK47 rifles and supplied by thousands of men pushing bicycles on trails through the jungle. In Afghanistan, both Soviet and NATO armies have been defeated by tribesmen with rifles and home-made bombs. Somali pirates make vast areas of the sea unsafe despite all the navies, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines of the world. Even the Israeli Army was driven out of Southern Lebanon by the Hezbollah militia armed with obsolete Russian rockets and anti-tank missiles.

Why have armies and navies experienced such problems? One reason is that military forces need to be prepared for multiple threats, including the (hopefully rare) possibility of wars against each other. In such a conflict, armour, mobility and firepower would be crucial. They therefore compete to accumulate the best and most modern equipment, and this shapes the way they are trained and organised. The US Army, easily the best equipped in the world, took a few hours to gain victory in both its wars against the army of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. However, the same high technology weapons are less effective against warriors who do not wear uniform and merge back into the local population when their spree of killing is over. High technology armies could of course retaliate by bringing destruction on a vast scale on the civilian populations from which the guerillas come, but governments are now much less willing to wage wars of extermination than their predecessors in the last century. Instead, there have been some limited punitive or reprisal raids, such as those against Fallujah or Gaza. In the absence of action against civilian populations, the main role of soldiers in high tech armies is to be moving targets for snipers and roadside bombs.


There is a further problem with high technology forces - their very complexity. All depend on long and sometimes vulnerable supply chains, particularly for diesel and aviation fuels. The most vulnerable supply chain of all is money, and this depends on the willingness of governments to go on spending it. The experience of the Second Iraq War has shown that it is possible to mobilise public support for a limited period if the enemy can be presented as a threat to the homeland. The Libyan intervention shows that the public will support a short war of bombing. But less than a quarter of British people now believe our troops should remain in Afghanistan, and no political party in this country bothers to make a case for remaining. It is likely that future NATO policy towards that country will fall back on the old British Empire policy of ‘butcher and bolt’ - or punitive raids, carried out (nowadays by drones rather than by the Khyber Rifles) in retaliation to some terrorist outrage deemed to originate in that country.