War From the Ground Up

WAR FROM THE GROUND UP

Crises in World Politics

A Series of the Centre of International Studies, and the Centre for Rising Powers, University of Cambridge Edited by Professor Brendan Simms and Dr Amrita Narlikar

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MARK ETHERINGTON
Revolt on the Tigris

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Landscapes of the Jihad

AHMED HASHIM
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq

ERIC HERRING & GLEN RANGWALA
Iraq in Fragments: the Occupation and its Legacy

STEVE TATHAM
Losing Arab Hearts and Minds

WILLIAM MALEY
Rescuing Afghanistan

IAIN KING AND WHIT MASON
Peace at any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo

CARNE ROSS
Independent Diplomat

FAISAL DEVJI
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

JOHN BEW, MARTYN FRAMPTON & IÑIGO GURRUCHAGA
Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country

HANS KUNDNANI
Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

AMRITA NARLIKAR
New Powers: How to Become One and How to Manage Them

EMILE SIMPSON
War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics

EMILE SIMPSON

Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simpson, Emile.
War from the ground up : twenty-first century combat as politics / Emile Simpson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-01-9932788-1 (alk. paper)
1. Strategy. 2. Politics and war. 3. Afghan War, 2001—Political aspects. 4. Afghanistan—
Politics and government—2001– 5. Counterinsurgency—Political aspects—Case studies.
6. Counterinsurgency—Afghanistan. 7. Insurgency—Case studies. 8. World politics—
21st century. 9. War (Philosophy) I. Title.
U162.S54 2012
355.4—dc23
2012031599

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

I dedicate this book to fallen brothers: Captain Martin Driver, Royal Anglian
Regiment, and Lieutenant Neal Turkington, Royal Gurkha Rifles.

Endpapers

8 Platoon, C Company, First Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles, patrol outside town of Maiwand, Kandahar Province, March 2008.

Riflemen of C Company, First Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles, pause during operation
Palk Wahel
, Upper Gereshk Valley, Helmand Province, September 2007.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Language of War

2. Clausewitzian War and Contemporary Conflict

3. Globalisation and Contemporary Conflict

4. Strategic Dialogue and Political Choice

5. Liberal Powers and Strategic Dialogue

6. Pragmatism and Operational Thought

7. British Strategy in the Borneo Confrontation 1962–6

8. Strategic Narrative

9. Ethos, Vision and Confidence in Strategic Narrative

Conclusion: Contemporary Strategic Thought

Notes

Index

I am grateful to the British Army for granting me a Defence Fellowship, and to the Royal Gurkha Rifles, for allowing me the time to undertake it; this gave me the opportunity to consolidate the range of experiences that form the basis of this book. I would like to thank the Oxford University Changing Character of War Programme for the stimulating collegiate environment that enriched both the text itself and the process of writing it. Thanks also to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College Oxford, in particular Martin Conway and Nicola Trott. Above all I am indebted to Prof. Hew Strachan, without whom this work would not have been possible, and whose insights encouraged me to see my own experiences in new ways. I owe especial thanks to all those who made the Fellowship possible and whose responses to the manuscript have been invaluable, namely Prof. Daniel Marston, Lt.Col. Gerald Strickland, Maj. Shaun Chandler, Prof. Brendan Simms, Brig. Richard Iron, Col. Jon Hazel, Col. Alex Alderson, Maj Bruce Radbourne, Maj. Nick King, Capt. Mike Martin, Andrea Baumann, Capt. Mike Stevens, John Jenkins. I extend great thanks to those whose conversations have shaped this book, in particular Ian Gordon, Will Clegg, Thomas Wide, Angus Henderson, Mark Hreczuck, Charles “Mitch” Conway, Scott Peelman, Paul Hollingshead, Dr. Conrad Crane, Dr. Robert Johnson, Nate Pulliam, Jerry Meyerle, Rowland Stout, Robert Hargrave, Stephen Carter, and Rhys Jones for help with the title. I would like to thank Michael Dwyer, Jon De Peyer, Brenda Stones, Dr. Sebastian Ballard for the maps, the publishing team at Hurst, and the Cambridge University Crises in World Politics Series for accepting the book. Thanks for their support to
my parents, James and Luisella. Thanks also to Maj. (retd.) Gerald Davies and the Gurkha Museum. Finally, I would like to thank the officers and soldiers of the 1st Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles with whom I served, especially Maj. Will Kefford, Maj. Charlie Crowe, Capt. Jit Bahadur Gharti, and C Company, to whom I owe a permanent debt of gratitude:
hami jasto kohi chaina. Jai Gurkha
!

War From The Ground Up
presents a discussion of the concept of war in its contemporary context, specifically in terms of the conflict in Afghanistan. The tension that animates the argument throughout the book is the distinction between these practices: first, the use of armed force within a military domain that seeks to establish military conditions for a political solution, a practice traditionally associated with the concept of war; second, the use of armed force that directly seeks political, as opposed to specifically military, outcomes, which lies beyond the scope of war in its traditional paradigm.

These two practices are often not clear-cut in reality: they are not mutually exclusive in terms of a conflict's definition, as force can be used in alternative ways by different actors in the same conflict; neither can individual actors always be identified exclusively in terms of using one practice or the other, as the same actor can use force in both modes at different moments. However, my central proposition is that in order to clarify what is happening on the ground in contemporary armed conflict, there is a requirement to make the distinction between these two applications of armed force.

Conflicts that approximate to war in its traditional sense still exist, and will continue to do so. These are conflicts in which the military outcome does effectively force a political result. The military destruction of the Tamil Tigers in the Sri Lankan civil war is a recent example. However, the general tendency is a movement away from situations in which the armed forces set military conditions for a political solution: in many contemporary conflicts, while the activity of armed forces often
remains crucial to achieving a political result, military activity is not clearly distinguishable from political activity. The outcomes of contemporary conflicts are often better understood as constant evolutions of how power is configured, in relation to various audiences, and how that configuration is adjusted through the application of a variety of means, both violent and non-violent. This is distinct from the notion that war is the ultimate political act: decisive, finite, and primarily defined against one audience, the enemy. In correlation with this trend is the increasing departure from the traditional, sequential notion that diplomatic and military means set diplomatic and military conditions for one another through the lifetime of a conflict, but are essentially distinct both as means and conceptual boundaries, towards circumstances in which both are used simultaneously within conceptual domains that are not clearly military or political; neither war nor peace.