Climate change pushing armies towards 'Mad Max-like' type of warfare, Defence Forces told

Rescuers search for killed civilians when a Russian Shahed drone, similar to that seen inset right, hit an apartment building in Sumy, Ukraine, yesterday. Drones have changed the mode of warfare and the style and way Western armies engage in warfare, says Brendan Flynn. Picture: Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP

All armies are edging towards a “Mad Max-like” era of warfare that relies less on fossil fuels or energy-intensive weapons, members of the Defence Forces have been told.

Academic Brendan Flynn opened a conference attended by senior Defence Forces figures, titled ‘Climate change, security, and defence’, in University College Cork (UCC) with a detailed assessment of the new “western way of war”.

Mr Flynn, the University of Galway’s head of political science, said the model of war that centres around tanks, helicopters, and battleships will become “literally unsustainable” if armies are faced with “disruptive climate change” and high fuel prices.

In his address, titled ‘Running on empty towards a ‘Mad Max’ world: Climate change and the Western way of war in question’, he said: “The future of war is likely to be hybrid. This is firstly as regards the mix of energies used by militaries.

“Secondly, hybridity will probably emerge in combinations of novel, energy intensive, high-tech systems with less energy-intensive, sometimes lower tech and often legacy equipment.

“In the last decades, the Western way of war has arguably delivered strategic failure in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Mali. It also remains utterly dependent on fossil fuels.”

Brendan Flynn: ‘The future of war is likely to be hybrid.’ Picture: Neil Michael

He referenced Furosia, last year’s latest installment of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max action series and — as he described it — a world in which “rival warlords, tribes, and gangs fight over what little freshwater and greenery they can find”.

He later referenced the futuristic film series in the context of the war in Ukraine and in parts of Africa. He said that soldiers are increasingly relying on a combination of low-tech legacy weapons, like decades-old machine guns and rifles but used with night sights and more modern war weapons — like drones.

“One of the things Western militaries are worried about is that the whole drone thing has changed the mode of warfare, the style, and way they engage in warfare,” he said.

“At the moment, the Western way is based around a manoeuvre model as opposed to attritional warfare, which is like World War I in the trenches, and that is what we are seeing in Ukraine.

“The idea of manoeuvre warfare is that you are highly mobile, and you need fleets of tanks and motorised vehicles, and then you use loads of helicopters and loads of aircraft.

“Drones mean you can’t because they just get shot down, and they [drones] have removed the manoeuvrability.

Added to that, there may well come a time when armies don’t have the fuel anymore to run their helicopters and fleets of tanks. The mobility we take for granted now, that is all kind of gone because drones have changed that.

“Mobility is now going to be more difficult for the military partly because of drones and partly because the climate change transition will make it even more difficult again. If you ask them to change to new energy systems, they won’t be able to go as far or as fast, so manoeuvre warfare is over.”

He said the future of war now looks likely to be centred around “slower attritional strategies, fortification, sieges, or raiding”.

Threats to Ireland

Organised by UCC’s Andrew Cottey in the Department of Government and Politics, and Lieutenant Commander Stuart Armstrong, the conference also heard about a string of threats faxing Ireland.

Ian Hughes, the senior research fellow at Cork’s MaREI Centre at the Environmental Research Institute, said that while there are many issues, Ireland is probably better placed than most countries to cope with them. This is, he said, because of our neutrality and our ability to be able to act as — in effect — an honest broker between opposing sides in conflict.

Ian Hughes: ‘Ireland is going to be affected by all these crises.’ Picture: Neil Michael

“The issues being discussed at the launch are around climate change, but I don’t believe you can take it as an isolated crisis on its own,” he said. “It is part of a much broader confluence of multiple crises.

“It is the climate crisis, it is Gaza, Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war hanging over us, environmental crisis, species extinction, inequality, and the crisis in democracy.

“All of them have their common roots in the pathology of individuals and the way we design our social institutions, which is such that dangerous individuals can get into power. This is a problem we have to address.

“Ireland is going to be affected by all these crises, and it is being affected by them because they are all global. Even if we do nothing ourselves about climate change, we are still going to be affected by it.

“You are seeing migration, and everywhere is seeing it becoming more of an issue because of the climate crisis. There is going to be more movement of people as a result of climate change, just as there has been more movement of people to the developed world because of war.

“There is no outside anymore. It used to be that we could be cocooned, and disconnected from the outside world on our little island, but those days are gone.

“It is one world and everything is interconnected.”

A Ukrainian officer examines a downed Shahed drone launched by Russia in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine last year. Picture: AP/Efrem Lukatsky

The Defence Forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Seán Clancy, told the Irish Examiner: “Climate change is affecting us all and we all have to do our best, and defence is no different to that.

“We have been active now for over a decade-and-a-half to reduce our footprint, our carbon emissions, and we have made significant changes.

“We have to look critically at what we are doing in order to maximise efficiency. Everything we do has to have an energy consideration. We must apply an energy lens, or a climate change lens.”

Commandant Paul O’Callaghan also spoke, discussing how climate change is a “driver for the far right”.

He warned: “If far-right politics become increasingly popular in Ireland, it may become a threat to the liberal democratic values that have been the cornerstone of Irish civil values.”