There was a time when battles were fought between groups of men wearing uniforms. While the clothing was in some cases sold to both sides by one and the same company, the uniforms were deliberately different; usually the colors contrasted, so that the soldiers, and as often as not they were mercenaries on the one side could see who it was they needed to kill, on the other side. This form of warfare runs like a red thread through western history from the American War of Independence, through Waterloo, to the Vietnam War. It assumed there was a clear “them” and an even more clear “us”. And things only got complicated if someone put on their outer uniform inside out and thus became a turncoat.
Bipolar uniforms
In the bipolar world of the Cold War, uniforms still counted for something, Red Army officers wore peaked caps so wide you could land a sputnik on them back then or a modern drone now; lines of medals and ribbons attested to military prowess and confirmed membership. The rows of soldiers in the Chinese Army parades were as endlessly uniform and uniformed as the country is vast. Even members of the NVA, the Viet Cong army, past masters at guerilla warfare, all wore ‘uniform’ jungle fatigues and wide-brimmed hats – and thus set themselves off from their compatriots in the South who opted for a sartorial look based on the French colonial army rather than any Asian traditions.
In an age increasingly characterized by a fundamental bipolar opposition between 1 and 0, presence or absence, strangely the structure of warfare has changed fundamentally and is anything but as straightforward. In the post-1989 world, the notion of sides itself starts to change. The unipolar world in which the United States is the clear hegemon and (however much the Russian or Chinese military hierarchy may wish it were not the case) will continue to be so for some time to come thanks to its technological edge logically does not have sides in the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sense, as between the black and the white there are now any number of shades of grey.
Difference, no difference
This is a truly novel state of affairs, as even back in the Middle Ages friend could be distinguished visually from foe, the Crusaders who arrived by boat from Saladin’s defending warriors. You could tell the difference not just by the physiological or physiognomic differences between a red-bearded Frank and a black-bearded Egyptian. For there was the red Cross of St. George on many a white robe donned over the armor to keep the knight’s temperature (not temper) below boiling point, while the other side dispensed with heavy armor and just wore cool robes over thin linked armor. You could also tell the two sides apart by the weapons, and the type of horse – those huge Crusader chargers, heavy and hard to stop once they got moving vs. the dexterous Arab ponies that have since become the preferred stock for racehorses on all continents. The double-handed broadswords that required a giant to swing them and a lot of room in which to do so vs. the subtly worked scimitars with their bone breaking properties.
If you fly into the same stretch of beaches and mountains today, or fly over them filming, you will find a complete absence of such clarity. In all the local conflicts it is now by no means apparent who is killing whom? All that is clear is that civilians are constantly the victim. In the days of the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ (or in Subsaharan Africa of Boko Haram) the real question is: Do the sides joined in fatal battle know each other and if they do, how exactly do they keep each other apart? After all, the days of uniforms as defining features have vanished, leaving would-be warriors whose insignia are a Kalashnikov and possibly a turban or headscarf. These anonymous killers are the new-millennium equivalent for the anonymous structural deaths of the 20th century, the gas attacks of World War I and the blanket bombing of World War II, both of which marked new heights to anonymity.
Fragemented confusion
Indeed, in the unipolar world, conflict has become so fragmented that it is nigh impossible to structure it in uniform terms, or, to put it differently, ensure a clear-cut, tailor-made antagonism. Who, after all, are the real Jihadists? Is it wrong to suspect the one or other is simply out to settle an old score? And who is simply creating a new one? If there are no uniforms then we must assume at least some of the one side knows some of the other, which would suggest that here we may have to do with erstwhile next-door neighbors warring over village spoils? If uniforms are not needed then we must be witnessing some latter-day tribal conflict. Take Northeast Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The members go riding round on armored cars looted from Libya and which can be recognized as such. But from a distance it is hard to guess that the Kalashnikovs they have were bought in a market in Darfur. After all, their faded desert camouflage fatigues are identical to those worn by the Nigerian Army regulars, who likewise love to brandish their Kalashnikovs, assuming that is they haven’t sold them in a market place in southwest Nigeria to boost their pathetic pay rates.
Take, for that matter, the TV images we see of Syria, men at random holding machine guns up above their heads and shooting over walls. Who are they and how do we know who they are (is the media misleading us) and how do their opponents know who they are? Now and again I have a sneaking suspicion when viewing such images that actually no one really knows who is what and that this is possibly the existential core to all the killing. The members of the “Islamic State” organization possess a flag, a new-age battle standard like the Jihad banner of yore. Yet when marauding they have any number of different sets of battle fatigues, and boast scarves wrapped round their heads to keep out the dust and, one must assume, keep in the heat. According to the list on Wikipedia in August 2014, they were fighting at least 20 different other groups and armies, which certainly brings a new meaning to waging war on more than one front. In fact, basic training for each member must surely first involve recognizing all the uniforms he (no she’s allowed) might encounter that belong to his opponents. There is a surreal level at work here somewhere, because I find myself imagining these guys having to have little picture flick-through books in their fatigue knee-side pockets: Manuals they can flick through quickly with one hand while holding binoculars to their eyes with the other in an effort to decide whether the man down the road in similar attire is a ‘friend’ or ‘foe’.
Or take the TV images we see of Ukraine, once again men at random holding machine guns up above their heads and shooting over walls. Since the separatists and the members of the regular army wear the same battle fatigues one assumes the only distinction is the black balaclava helmets that all the members of the one side presumably suffer desperately under in the summer heat. Running round proudly in a woolen face mask at the height of summer, when the thermometer peaks 35°C in the shade, brings a new meaning to the idea of separatists being hot-headed. But what happens if the infidelity of the government loyalists runs to them also donning black balaclavas…
Who’s who
In our unipolar world, the militarization of some societies has evidently run so deep that all of society is seized by the syndrome in one homogeneous mass of weapon-brandishing men. And what remains as a mark of distinction? The playing fields: The neatly structured world is, as we all recently saw on TV, now reserved for football, where the players don a national uniform before taking to the pitch at the World Cup. Sport is the residue of the past when you knew whom you were out to beat. And the losers, they all wear the same uniform: A trawl through TV stock footage of refugee crises soon sadly reveals that the clothing of the poor and displaced is invariably branded; be it the polo player or the crocodile head on shirts, or the Nike swoosh on a pullover. Nowadays it is not a sergeant who has three stripes, but a refugee in an Adidas sweatshirt.
