I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that the nature of war has shifted in the last half century — everything else seems to have changed.
Putting in a multiple-century lens for a moment, we can see changes in war mostly focused on the advancement of weapons. First there were rocks, then bows, then traveling bows on horseback and then the rifles. Add to that cannons and missiles, another few steps into long-range destruction.
Have you ever contemplated the difference airplanes made in wars? Along those lines, there is an excellent fantasy series that explores the Napoleon wars with the addition of an air force of trained dragons. Those historic battles took on a whole new dimension. (For those interested, the series is the “Temeraire” books by Naomi Novik.)
And then there was the edge and threat of nuclear weapons.
After that and the logic of “War Games,” the movie, a cold front moved in. The Cold War term encompassed the strategy and more hidden battles being waged below overt threat level. Since the main opponent in the 1950s was the Soviet Union, when that aggressive bloc was broken into parts and regions, some thought the Cold War was over. A new age appeared to be beginning.
Will our society ever not have an enemy with serious grievances? Now the shift is elsewhere and has different dimensions.
Since it is nearly September and the day that is seared in most Americans’ memories — Sept. 11, 2001 — approaches, I’ll confine my perspective to the Middle East source of conflict.
Beginning in the 1990s, Osama bin Laden declared a militant jihad against the United States. He followed up his threat — or perhaps it was a declaration of war by new means? — beginning with the bombing in 1992 of a Yemen Hotel targeting U.S. soldiers on a humanitarian mission in Somalia. It killed two Austrian tourists.
The next year, he brought the destruction to America directly by bombing the World Trade Center by detonating a truck bomb at the base of the North Tower. It killed six people who were in the basement garage at the time. But the tower didn’t collapse and take out the South Tower also, as they had hoped
Also, in 1993 they used Somali militia to attack U.S. forces in the Battle of Mogadishu and killed 18 American soldiers. In 1995, a car bomb went off at a U.S. managed Saudi National Guard training center and killed five Americans and two Indians.
More battles continued in this unnamed war. In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia at the Khobar Towers. In 1998, two truck bombs in a coordinated attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Then in 2000, the USS Cole was bombed by ramming the Navy destroyer with suicide bomb boats. That attack killed 17 U.S. sailors.
For a fervid war against the U.S., all these attacks hadn’t come close to bringing down the evil Americans. After seven different attacks with various sympathetic partners, the death toll of Americans was only 77, thankfully.
And then came 9/11, when they shifted from truck or boat bombs to airline attacks. Perhaps this shift came from the NYC officials’ boast that Trade Center Towers, the ones the al Qaeda had tried to take out in 1993, could withstand even an airplane hit.
On that day, not one, but four airplanes were hijacked to hit the Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and one other destination — most likely either the White House or the Capitol. This time, the still unnamed war escaped no one’s attention across the globe. On that day, 2,996 people died.
Is this the way modern warfare works now? Hatred declarations, sneak attacks and covert assassinations? Such methods leave another lingering effect. Fear. The world becomes a bit more hesitant and afraid.
Which is why the immediate and uncoordinated answer of the American people to gather together on Sept. 12 across the nation in all kinds of ways was a powerful message back. We are not defeated. We are still standing.