WASHINGTON, May 27 (UPI) -- There has been no war between the major industrial powers of the world that girdle the Northern Hemisphere for almost 64 years since the end of World War II. But other forms of warfare abound.
So far the first decade of the 21st century has been an improvement on many before it, but it has still been a far from a peaceful one. An ongoing genocide continues in Darfur in western Sudan, and perhaps 10 million people have died in chaotic and tribal violence that has swept Congo, formerly known as Zaire, the vast and tormented heart of Africa. The U.S. Army continues to fight counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in 2008 the Russian army carried out a startling conquest of one-third of the small former Soviet republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. The Israeli army entered Gaza in a three-week military operation at the beginning of this year and then withdrew leaving Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, still very much in charge there.
All these conflicts, in their wide variety, document a continuing theme we have explored and warned about in these columns in recent years: It is that the contagion of war, like different diseases, cannot be limited to one form. As they have throughout human history, wars and conflicts come in many different forms and different sizes.
The five-day Russian blitzkrieg that conquered one-third of Georgia in 2008 for negligible losses was a reversion to a direct, clear-cut, old-fashioned kind of war that was supposed to be long since banished from the European continent. And it carried a grim warning for U.S. President Barack Obama: Major land wars that could involve U.S. armed forces against formidable opponents are no longer inconceivable.
We do not mean to argue that some major war between Russia and either the United States or the nations of Europe is either likely or imminent. But in the first decade of the 20th century, most people thought a full-scale war between the major world powers of that generation was inconceivable, too. Sometimes, international catastrophes happen and nations stumble into them without realizing the consequences until it is too late.
Russia and other nations have indeed developed their conventional military forces for the possible contingencies of having to fight land wars on a very large scale in different parts of the Eurasian land mass. India and China have come to the same conclusion.
Over the past eight years India has bought 657 front-line T-90S Main Battle Tanks from Russia. Russia used less than 10 percent of that number of T-90s in its Georgia operations from Aug. 8-12, 2008. The annual production run of the T-90S for the Russian army is only 90 MBTs.
The lessons of what happened in Georgia fly in the face of the Conventional Wisdom complacently assumed by U.S. military planners and most American strategists since the collapse of communism. They have taken for granted the idea that gigantic, full-scale land wars on major continents involving hundreds of thousands or even millions of troops have become inconceivable. But as George Gershwin famously wrote in one of the songs for his opera "Porgy and Bess," "It ain't necessarily so."
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(Part 2: Georgia's lessons for 21st century war)
