Re: What's the end result of incresingly asymmetric warfare? More terrorism?
Warfare has become increasingly something that militaries inflict on civilians, rather than each other.
I very much doubt that's true, in any historical context or timeframe you can think of. Western forces take incredible amounts of care (and sometimes even increase their own risks) in order to avoid hitting civilians. Including developing all sorts of "smart-weapons" to make them more accurate. One of the advantages of more accuracy is that you can use smaller warheads, which means the area effect of a weapon is also lower - which is another aspect of reducing the casualties you might cause to civilians.
It's nowhere near perfect of course, but in comparision to warfare last century we're capable of being far more accurate. Whereas in World War II of course we resorted to an awful lot of city bombing - because accuracy was so appalling - even at trying to hit factories.
Contrast that with say Russia. They were accused of deliberately using unguided bombs in a campaign of attacks on Syrian hospitals, because then it would be harder to tell if it was them or the much less well-equipped Syrian airforce that had done it. Well a lot of hospitals got hit anyway, and then the Russian ministry of defence put out a video this Summer showing a montage of shots of their planes blowing stuff up, which actually included an attack on a Syrian hospital from 2016 I think.
But actually I think you're mis-understanding what you're quoting. What I think he's talking about is the ability of UK forces to sustain conflict at a low-intensity for long periods. This is aimed at people like Iran, who've been using a mixture of drones, Revolutionary Guards in speedboats placing mines, Revolutionary Guard just kidnapping whole ships (ship-napping?) and sometimes possibly outright missile attacks. We don't want to escalate, which is mostly what we can do at the moment. And it's expensive to increase our navy patrols. So maybe what we need is a few unmanned vehicles so we can hit back at the Revolutionary Guards ourselves - or if not, at least make them worry that we might. But that probably means the abilty to catch them while they're placing the limpet mine on the Israeli bitumen tanker (as they did last month) - when Iran is much less likely to retaliate and escalate if they're caught red-handed. Even the USA don't have the resources to keep 30 ships hanging around the Persian Gulf though. But how about 2 or 3 (as the Royal Navy currently does), each operating 5 or 6 drone speedboats, a helicopter and some aerial surveillance drones? That can be achieved at not much more expense than having the frigate, patrol vessel and minesweepers we already permanently base there.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
