Total Mobilisation After the Zeitenwende
A.W. Taubenberger
The war in Ukraine has prompted a litany of comparisons to wars of the past, with the First World War holding pride of place in such assessments. On a material basis, there is no doubt that the comparisons are apt. The Ukraine War has stunned many of today’s great tactical minds in the manner in which new technology has seemingly returned the battlefield to old ways of war: heavy artillery usage, trench warfare, and stunted possibilities for manoeuvre, among others. What contemporary commentators discuss less often, however, is the broader manner in which this now-revived warfare of the early 20th Century forces the modern critic to reframe the place of warfare within modern society. In attempting to do so, one may profit greatly from analysis of the military and societal criticism of that era, and in this there is a clear exemplar, that of the German novelist and critic Ernst Jünger.
Jünger is, both in his time and ours, most famous for his memoir Storm of Steel, published in 1920 and detailing his account of wartime heroism which won him the fabled Pour le Mérite. Less well known, though no less distinguished in their quality, are his later critical and philosophical writings which span from the interwar years up to his death in the late 1990s. This broader period begins with his foray into philosophical or social criticism, his 1930 essay Die Totale Mobilmachung — Total Mobilisation. As a contribution to Jünger’s edited volume Krieg und Krieger (War and Warrior), Jünger attempts to chart out how the Great War represents an epochal shift away from the manner of war hitherto, and how this is reflective of a deeper change in the form (Gestalt) of society as influenced by modern, industrial technology. In the spirit of military ressourcement, I wish to examine anew this pivotal essay by Jünger, and interrogate how it may provide insight into the changing landscape of European defence in the wake of the Zeitenwende.
The point of departure that modern war takes is in its impersonal, unbound nature, fuelled by progressive industrialism, as compared to the outmoded warfare of previous centuries. War in the pre-industrial age was an action confined to the military sphere. This does not mean that there was no collateral damage and thus no involvement of the civilian world (stories of looting and destruction of cities are tales as old as time), but rather that the basic structure of society and production was not contingent on the goings-on of the war state. War was a phenomenon, not a state of being.
In an industrialised war, the complexity and scale of the chain of production pull the entirety of a society and its economy into the war state, turning all into warriors and thus into (strategically) legitimate targets. There has been a consistent attempt to erect legal boundaries around targeting to protect “non-combatants” and civilian infrastructure, but decades of industrialised warfare has proven such attempts to be frequently overridden when strategic necessity demands; still today, the war in Ukraine has yielded consistent targeting of civilian energy infrastructure by both sides, justified as a necessary act to cripple enemy supply chains and capability. Similarly, the human scale of industrial conflict is one that demands practically unlimited manpower. The nature of a mass war involves mass casualties, one in which the average infantryman exists not for actions of individual heroism, but to be a component of a larger tactical machine, wherein the taking on of a casualty is simply an assumed proposition, anticipated by the metrics of the higher planner. Even for those who escape frontline duty, the fact that the entire chain of production is united to the war efforts entails that all workers therein are, to some degree, working for the war effort. Thus, even the civilian who has no care for some particular conflict, who in earlier times would have no involvement unless forced by public means, is enlisted in his capacity vis-à-vis the work state to the war effort. This is the state or form of society which Jünger terms total mobilisation.
The past years of the war in Ukraine have borne out the reality of this thesis. Firstly, the war has seen the unmistakable return of attritional warfare. While casualty estimates range considerably, there can be no doubt that both sides have lost considerable numbers of men. This can occur in a day-to-day attritional setting, wherein small units attempt to broach the line of the enemy, being stopped and incurring casualties both from traditional enemy fires and by novel technologies like FPV drones (drone attacks often occur much deeper than the front line as well). It can also happen in larger-scale attempts at manoeuvre warfare, exemplified in earlier years of the war such as at the Battle of Avdiivka, wherein Russia attempted a standard mechanised assault which proved to be unsuccessful, only slowly taking the city in intense, attritional, light infantry combat while still incurring heavy losses. Indeed, such attritional combat, while being tactically necessary, costs significantly more over time in both lives and equipment.
Another pivotal element of the fighting at Avdiivka and since has been the extensive use of weapons like heavy artillery, systems many Western military strategists deemed to be falling out of use, production and procurement levels before the war being accordingly low. The most famous weapon to emerge from the war, drones, especially light, man-portable systems like FPVs, also sees heavy use that is defined best by volume. Ukraine alone uses up to 10,000 drones per day at current rates, with statistics for daily usage of artillery shells lagging not far behind. The primary factor, therefore, in determining Ukraine’s military capability as regards attritional warfare, is the industrial base upon which the war effort sits (Indeed, the Ukrainians blamed the loss at Avdiivka on insufficient supply of armaments). Naturally, Ukraine itself is limited in such industrial capacity, relying on Western nations to provide the necessary equipment and armaments. These nations are, however, fairly limited in their own defence industrial capacity relative to the demands of the war, and when one considers what such an attritional scenario would require for these nations’ own defence, they are simply woefully unprepared.
Such remarks on the war economy are not novel, but what Jünger can provide is a broader sociological or even philosophical analysis upon which one may construct a holistic policy response to this issue, prompted by the Zeitenwende proclaimed by the then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz following the commencement of the Ukraine War. The question of total mobilisation is one which asks necessarily of every facet of society; it asks of every European institution at every level, “How are you to contribute to the war effort?” Naturally, the scope of this question is highly contingent on the particular nature of any institution or facet of society. A kindergarten is not likely to substantially alter its profile in either a preparatory state nor in the state of total mobilisation (normal operations would indeed be the ideal in a state of war), whereas that scale shifts for a university which has a research profile, and even more so for some kind of dedicated national research institution, which would presumably be mobilised to directly support military research and development.
Additionally, the operational malleability of each productive asset must be considered. Heavy manufacturing is not just capital intensive but time and labour intensive to develop. Modern drones have the benefit of being technologies amenable to rapid prototyping and production, but other pivotal attritional technologies, such as artillery shell production, require more complex machine tooling which can not be spun-up nor reiterated upon in the relatively short timescales which govern operational viability in war. This problem is only compounded when one considers the production of armoured vehicles, assets which have seen both continued heavy usage and heavy casualties in Ukraine, in many ways echoing the mass tank usage of the Second World War. Going forward, armoured vehicles will need to incorporate more sophisticated sensors, onboard automated sensor fusion, and drone countermeasure systems to increase survivability, all of which require far more complex and multifaceted production lines and supply chains than the structure or mechanical systems of the vehicle itself.
To provide the necessary scale and cost-effectiveness for modern attritional warfare, Europe must massively grow its defence-industrial base, not just by investing in novel and next-generation technologies, but also by ensuring that the base industrial capacity is present and ready. Great strides have already been made in this regard, perhaps best seen in Rheinmetall’s shell production, projected to expand over 2000% since the start of the Ukraine War by 2030. Still, such efforts must expand to encompass the entire critical-attritional supply chain. Additionally, the building up of a robust defence industrial base ought to involve civilian industry, as many parts of a supply and production chain may be dual use, and because consistent civilian industrial production provides a robust capital basis upon which a firm can pivot to more directly defence-related production as necessary. Even in Jünger’s time, he could see that such melding of civilian production and military order would be necessary, something only compounded due to the greater complexity of modern weapons technology. Such efforts, therefore, can serve as a key component of a new European industrial policy, giving sufficient motivation not just to restore lost heavy industrial capacity, but also to shore up the continent’s high-tech and precision manufacturing capability, now under threat from both internal pressure and that from Eastern nations.
Holding the state of total mobilisation in mind, one observes that it is contingent on being in a state of existential war. Thus, the normal military operations a state undertakes in peacetime (included in this are limited expeditionary operations) are not per se incumbent on the building up of a war state and war economy. What matters most in considering the application of Jünger’s description of total mobilisation is not that any given state (or Europe more generally) actively mobilises as such, but that it develops the preparatory capacity at all levels and in all facets of society for such mobilisation. This question, again, bears upon every aspect of society, including the cultivation of human capital. If Europe is to truly be prepared for a great conflict to come, as the proclamation of the Zeitenwende has announced and the reality of the war in Ukraine has detailed, it must not only invest in material capacity, but in its people, shaping all to be contributors to the war state to the best of their personal capacity. Discussions of a return to mass conscription certainly may be a critical component of such human preparedness, but one must interrogate the issue at a deeper level to develop sufficient educational capacities for the development of technical skills, strategic knowledge, leadership and judgement, and most crucially, renewed spirit.
The Zeitenwende offers Europe a chance to radically alter the state of its society and economy. As the continent’s demographics shift to being older and older, as its economy continues into stagnation, as it faces renewed competition in technology, energy, and industry from abroad, and as its situation vis-à-vis its historical international partners shifts, Europe must adapt radically to maintain its place in the world, and with it, its standard of living. The impinging necessity of war and defence provides the best opportunity to effect such change. The Zeitenwende, thus, impresses the continent to prepare for a war state of total mobilisation, calling upon Europe to address all the problems hitherto described. This could represent, if one holds the implications of what total mobilisation means at hand, the best contemporary opportunity for the renewal of Europe, in technical-material capacity, but more crucially, for the renewal of the European spirit.
A.W. Taubenberger is a founding fellow of the Carlsbad Institute.