It is commonly said that asymmetrical conflicts have become the norm worldwide, and that the threat is impossible to assess and thus anticipate. As a result it has become increasingly difficult to programme solutions at system and equipment level. Such an analysis has to be balanced, and one has to avoid thinking or allowing it to be thought that industry is unable to respond to the operational uncertainty. On the contrary, thanks to its mastery of technology, industry is in a better position today to propose a ‘reactive adaptation’ to face any evolution of the threat.
Reactive Adaptation, the Only Answer to Operational Uncertainty
Since the end of the Second World War and the advent of the nuclear era, large conflicts between the major countries have been ‘frozen’ as a result of deterrence. This has been even more the case since the end of the Cold War, most conflicts, having been ‘asymmetric’, being played out by opposing forces that have been fundamentally mismatched as well as being non-state in nature (wars of independence, upheavals, civil wars, anti-terrorist wars).
In its broadest sense, the asymmetry refers to the resources used, the declared targets, the strategies pursued, as much as the rules of play applied. It produces varied forms of conflict (Vietnam, Algeria, the Gulf War of 1990-91, the military intervention in Iraq of 2003). The nature of asymmetrical threats is basically the same: they are nothing more than an antagonist’s way of compensating for operational and technological inequalities. The only difference between them, and the only unknown in the equation, is the means employed.
Most conflicts today are asymmetrical mainly because of technological differences in armaments, whatever the root cause of the crisis. This inequality in resources avoids the resurgence of traditional conflicts between states that could degenerate into all-out confrontations. Further, it contributes to a drop in the level of violence of the conflicts by reaching a quicker issue, as typically happened in the 1990-91 Gulf War.
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