Perpetual Policing Wars

‘As of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the mightiest, richest, best-equipped, best-trained armed forces that have ever existed are … looking into an abyss.’1 The abyss to which Martin Van Creveld refers in the opening to his book The Changing Face of War (2006) is the prospect of regular (state) forces locked in counterinsurgency wars wherein they are unable to prevail, yet at the same time cannot concede defeat. Thus Van Creveld raises the prospect of ‘regular, state-owned armed forces being forever doomed to go on losing [wars]’.2 John Mueller draws the same conclusion when he states: ‘“Decisive” is a military term and does not pertain to police work. Wars may end, but policing never does.’3 The notion of ‘policing’ being logically ‘perpetual’, that is, perpetual by its very nature, will be explored in this chapter. Is Mueller is right to say that by metaphorically conceiving current wars as ‘policing wars’ the liberal world eschews any ability to end the wars it is fighting? This would appear to be an immediate conclusion from analogies between war and criminality and, by extension, war and policing. There are few aspirations to the use of policing as a means to putting a final end to criminality or disorder in society. Instead policing, in the domestic setting, is conceived as the means by which disorder is managed and kept to a minimum. What, may we ask, happens to war when it is conducted under such a logic? What, more profoundly, accounts for the seemingly contradictory impulse to think of war as perpetual policing?