Warfare

Forever Wars

“The war is not meant to be won; it is meant to be continuous.” George Orwell

By Mariam Khan | February 2025

Forever Wars
An Orwellian normal of the 21st century is the existence of a state of persistent conflict, with clear endings becoming increasingly rare. Ceasefires are somewhat considered to be synonymous with victory. What caused the confusion? Or is it engineered? With the frequency of new wars with alarming frequency and old ones refusing to be extinguished, the perpetual state of conflict has somehow made the world accustomed to a new normal where the ‘forever wars’ seem to continue.

Be it Gaza or Ukraine, or Syria or Sudan, is the world somehow adapting to a new version of peace?

In this piece, SouthAsia Magazine speaks to Dr. Alec Worsnop, Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) and a Research Fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), to discuss how the nature of war endings has transformed from the decisive conclusions of historical conflicts to today’s ambiguous stalemates.

To understand what constitutes a decisive conclusion to a conflict, Dr. Worsnop states that “conflict termination that has a clear end will be when one side capitulates and kind of gives up power. We can also have peace agreements – those are a lot muddier, and they always have been, but in general, the thing that sets apart a lot of kinds of insurgencies, or guerrilla warfare, is rarely do you have this one big event where there’s a battlefield defeat, and there’s a clear winner or loser. Instead, it’s much messier.”

Sharing an example of Afghanistan, Dr. Worsnop mentions that the United States could have continued to hold back the Taliban militarily, probably indefinitely, but would that define the U.S.’s victory and Afghanistan’s defeat? “It was about the United States’ political will and its ability to build a host nation that would come in a kind of strong host nation force. So, in terms of these smaller conflicts, the idea of victory or defeat is a lot less clear,” he says while highlighting an exception that went down in the history books recently. “What just happened in Syria is an exception to what we often see happening; we saw this enormous change of kind of military power very quickly when the Assad regime was removed. While this might be a clear defeat for Assad, it’s in no way clear who the victor is and what the long-term prospects are.”

From clear victories to ambiguous stalemates
Speaking of the key factors contributing to the shift from clear victories to ambiguous stalemates in modern warfare, Dr. Worsnop from UMCP discusses the works of international relations scholars Andrew Mack and Dr. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, identifying the asymmetric problem. “We have this clear asymmetric problem where the kind of thing on the line for these big interventions is the political commitment or will of the intervening forces, not their military will,” he states, mentioning the work of Mack, Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict.

Dr. Worsnop discusses Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton’s work from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, which challenges the notion of ‘hearts and minds’. “The second piece, which many have referred to recently, is the ease with which external actors—particularly Western ones, as we saw in Syria—can use technologies like unmanned drones and other tools to sustain low levels of conflict without significant on-the-ground involvement. Research highlights the increasing reliance on special operations forces to carry out specific military missions. While these actions may not contribute to a long-term victory, they do have the effect of prolonging the conflict.”

Dr. Worsnop highlights another factor scholars often point to: the general weakening of states in many regions. He explains that one of the key assumptions underlying conflict analysis is that states are usually much stronger than insurgent or guerrilla forces. However, this is often not the case in the conflicts being discussed. “Often, the state is just another actor at the table. This was certainly true of Afghanistan during the civil war in the 1990s, where the state wasn’t a hegemon much stronger than everyone else—it was simply another player,” he notes while discussing why many wars today seem to drag on without conclusive ends. “They taper off, but the violence doesn’t stop.”

Read More