War From the Ground Up (11 page)

The physical component of a war's outcome can be adjusted to give little room to be persuaded of an alternative view. As Admiral J. C. Wylie argued in
Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control
(1967): ‘the ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with a gun'.
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This can be taken to extremes in war. If the enemy is entirely destroyed, one's own side can dictate the interpretation of events into the historical record. There is no Carthaginian interpretation of the destruction of Carthage. Rome's victory was truly written by the victors. This theme comes across powerfully in the speech the Roman historian Tacitus attributes (fictitiously) to the tribal chief Calgacus, who describes Roman imperial practice in a speech defying the extension of Roman rule in Britain: ‘to robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government'; they create a wasteland and call it peace'.
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The outcome of war at its end, in the Clausewitzian conception, connected a military outcome (the physical component, as defined by the use of force) into a political outcome which ideally served the ends of policy. In a very few cases the political outcome took the form of the utter destruction of the enemy in lieu of a political settlement, such as
the total destruction of Carthage by Rome in the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE). However, in most instances the political settlement is a verdict subscribed to by the enemy: this may be imposed on the defeated party, who lies prostrate; in other cases the relative gains and losses in war give a military outcome which provides the basis of a negotiated or de facto political settlement. Hence beyond extreme cases in which a war's outcome is exclusively defined by the total destruction of the enemy, war's outcome includes a perceived component in terms of having forced the enemy to accept a certain behaviour.

Thus the purpose of force in war was for Clausewitz to make the enemy acquiesce in one's intent: ‘war…cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy's will has not been broken'.
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The strategist used war to impose a decision on the enemy; that decision, the war's outcome, was as much what was perceived to be real as what was real. This is encapsulated by none other than Russell Crowe as General Maximus in the film
Gladiator
when, taunted by the enemy commander across the battlefield, one of his officers states: ‘People should know when they are conquered'; Maximus answers: ‘Would you, Quintus? Would I?'
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The problem Clausewitz identified was that perception is often not durable; it can evolve. The enemy's ‘will' could return: ‘the hardships of that situation [defeat] must not of course be transient—at least not in appearance. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but wait for things to improve'.
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For instance, the rhetoric of the ‘undefeated army' in inter-war Germany compromised the notion of German ‘defeat' upon which the stipulations of the Great War peace treaties were predicated. Field Marshal Viscount Slim deals with this problem in
Defeat into Victory
(1956), his classic account of the Burma campaign.
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He ordered all the Japanese officers ceremonially to snap their own swords at the surrender parades so that there could be no myth of the undefeated army. The stability of strategic effect—the output which war's mechanism offers—corresponds to how durable is the perception of defeat.

Defeat for Clausewitz was a perceived state, a construct. As perceptions can change, defeat is not a stable concept, and therefore neither is victory. For instance, a battle may destroy part of the enemy force, but it is how that event is interpreted by the enemy that invests the battle with significance in terms of the wider war: the enemy may perceive himself to be defeated or, alternatively, carry on. Clausewitz argued that
there was a ‘culminating point' of attack which is the furthest extent to which one can go before one's position becomes over-extended and indefensible.
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That is where attack must turn to defence. If one goes too far, what might initially have been interpreted to have been a success may come to be seen as failure.

The unstable nature of victory is evident in history. For example, the Roman Emperor Trajan conquered vast swathes of territory, such as the new province of Mesopotamia; many of these ‘gains' subsequently had to be abandoned by his successor Hadrian, as they were not realistically sustainable. In retrospect Trajan's victories seemed more like failures for the Roman Empire. The idea of the culminating point makes just as much sense in political as military terms in contemporary conflict: coalition policy goals in Afghanistan, whose ambitions inflated after the success of the initial Taliban defeat, have had to be scaled back to allow the coalition to succeed in the goals it sets itself.

This applies as much to wars as to battles. In 1529 Sultan Suleiman failed to take Vienna after an unsuccessful siege. A major Ottoman campaign had failed. Yet he returned to his capital Constantinople in celebration, as if he had won a major victory through the campaign's moderate extension of Ottoman territory in the Balkans. By adjusting his strategic narrative he was received as a victor, and has been remembered as ‘Suleiman the Magnificent'. Ironically this is an appellation used by Westerners, who tend to identify with those who defeated him at Vienna; the Ottomans themselves called him the ‘lawgiver'. Ultimately victory is what is interpreted as such.

So is defeat. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued in
The Culture of Defeat
that defeat is a malleable concept.
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He focuses primarily on three cases of defeat: the Confederacy after the US Civil War; France after the Franco-Prussian War; and Germany after the First World War. In each instance post-war narratives were suggested, and gained considerable purchase, by the ostensibly ‘defeated' who rejected that claim.

Even at the lowest level of war victory and defeat are often subjective constructs. For example, there was a small skirmish on 27 September 2007 near the village of Hyderabad in the Upper Gereshk Valley, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. 8 Platoon of C Company, First Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (1 RGR), was engaged by insurgents on the banks of the River Helmand. Objectively, one could describe the events in terms of its physical reality. Gurkha soldiers and insurgent fighters
moved in a certain way. Bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar-fire were exchanged, which travelled on certain trajectories. Commands were given. There were casualties. However, no person ever has access to that complete and objective understanding. The underlying physical reality is understood though subjective, perceived interpretation.

I remember the event mainly in terms of staying low and moving fast, as the army's expression goes, in a field of high corn which was above head height, speaking to my company commander on the radio, and trying to reposition my three sections (eight-man combat teams) based on my fragmentary understanding of what was going on. Even after the skirmish, when experiences were compared with the rest of the platoon, the event, like all combat, remained a subjective collection of experiences as remembered by members of the group. Rifleman Padam Shrees, for example, spent twenty minutes pinned down in a field at the forward point of the platoon, returning fire despite being highly exposed. Corporal Basanta, commanding the forward section, was at the most vicious point of the action, with great courage directing his section to suppress the various enemy firing points to the front while under sustained rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and machine-gun fire themselves.
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The platoon sergeant, Bel Gurung, assisted by Lance Corporal Chaman's section, was focused on dealing with two of our casualties, both riflemen: one with RPG fragment in his leg; the other, the platoon radio operator, with a small piece of shrapnel in his neck. The two four-man fire teams of Corporal Tara's section were bounding past one another and firing in turn up an irrigation stream at 90 degrees to the forward section, trying to set up some depth to our platoon position to block the insurgents who were trying to outflank us.

All the participants in this skirmish would only see it from a particular and fragmentary perspective. Even if the insurgents' recollections of the event were incorporated, or indeed those of the local villagers (some of whom may well have been insurgents themselves), the interpretation of the event would remain subjective, both in terms of what happened and who ‘won'.

However, this was a small and short skirmish, which makes it possible to gather together the various perspectives, at least on one's own side, and paint a relatively coherent picture of what happened. The problem of subjective interpretations correlates to the size of the picture. When a battlespace is an entire country, and there are multiple, overlapping
sets of target audiences, the instability of any assertion of ‘what happened' really starts to become problematic.

This subjectivity makes narratives malleable, just as Suleiman the Magnificent understood. In July 2010 Major Shaun Chandler was commanding A Company 1 RGR in central Helmand. He knew the insurgents were telling villagers that we were cowards because we did not fight man to man, but used aircraft and artillery. Major Chandler shaped perceptions by very rarely using helicopter support, never using aircraft, and never using artillery. He repeatedly outmanoeuvred the insurgents using basic infantry tactics and snipers. At one point he invited the insurgents, through the villagers, to a ‘fair' fight in a field at a given time in which he would only bring twelve men, and not use air support or artillery. He showed up on time, the villagers showed up to watch, but the insurgents refused to fight. After thirty minutes Major Chandler walked into the middle of the field by himself and looked around, making a visual statement to the villagers. This lost the insurgents a lot of credibility in the village as the events were perceived by all parties—us, the villagers and the insurgents—as a defeat for the insurgents' narrative.
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In the language of strategic thought today, Clausewitz's emphasis on the perceived quality of a war's decision is expressed in terms of the ‘strategic narrative'. War has an underlying physical reality (the events), and the interpretation of that reality (the version). Strategic narrative is essentially an aspirational version of events which associates the two. If one's strategic narrative is to defeat the enemy in order to impose a given political outcome on him, one is victorious, or has ‘succeeded' in today's parlance, once that is understood to have happened. In this sense, success or failure in war are perceived states in the minds of one's intended audience. War can be understood as a competition between strategic narratives, a theme fully considered in
Chapters 8
and
9
.

Clausewitz understood that the perceived component of a war's ‘decision' was subjective because the interpretation of the physical component could vary depending on the interpreter. It may therefore appear paradoxical that Clausewitz both recognised the conceptual instability of war's outcome—its decision—but equally stressed that war's function was a mechanism to provide a decision. This paradox is largely
resolved by two concepts that Clausewitz implicitly presupposed in all war. The first, described above, was the polarisation of war on a single axis, which produced two ‘sides'. This narrowed the possible conceptualisation of war's outcome in terms of a see-saw of victory and defeat. The second was the idea that, even though war's outcome was an interpreted state, its interpreters—the strategic audiences—were primarily the sides themselves. To return to the metaphor of war as a trial, this is the idea that each side is its own judge and seeks to impose its verdict on the other.

For Clausewitz, although he did not use the term, the definition of ‘strategic audiences' in war was very straightforward: the first division was between one's own side and the enemy, according to the principle of polarity; the second division was between the army, people and government within each side (assuming, as Clausewitz did, that the sides were state actors). In today's terms these would be seen as ‘strategic audiences', that is, the groups of people whom strategy seeks to convince of its narrative. Ultimately they are the arbiters of war's outcome: their perceptions are the strategist's objective, in terms of influencing them, or of making them irrelevant, in accordance with the intent of policy.

Thus in war one seeks to defeat an enemy. The enemy loses when he is defeated. This can be either because he accepts himself that he is defeated, or because even if he does not accept it, he is now irrelevant to one's definition of victory. For example, the remnants of the Malayan Communist Party only surrendered in 1989. However, for most people, including Britain, the Malayan Emergency had been ‘won' by 1960. The Malayan Communist Party in this sense could interpret the outcome however it wanted; it was no longer relevant to British policy, and thus no longer a strategic audience.

What is central in Clausewitz's conception of war is the idea that the strategic audiences of war were contained within the ‘state' of either side. They won or lost the war with their state. This is really the essence of
inter-state
war as a mechanism of war, as opposed to just the description of two states fighting. The element ‘inter' communicates the notion that the issue is between these two polarised constituencies, and does not primarily involve other ‘audiences'. The mechanism by which war provided an outcome was for Clausewitz brutally simple. Rendered in today's parlance, strategy sought to impose its strategic narrative on the enemy through force, or its threat. The enemy came to subscribe to one's narrative, died, or became no longer relevant.

Yet success in war was not just about the defeat of the enemy; it was also necessary to unify the strategic audiences who were within one's own side behind one's strategic narrative. Strategy had to maintain unity between the strategic audiences who were within one's state: government, army and people. Since war was for Clausewitz a ‘clash of wills', all three of these elements contributed to the coherence and strength of a given side's will. Clausewitz discussed cases where the government resists the people's ‘passion' for war because it is not a good idea in rational terms. He also discussed cases in which the people's passion has to be artificially stoked to get support for the government plan.
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Clausewitz repeatedly stresses the ‘moral' component in terms of the army. The army is not a robotic tool; soldiers are human; the inference for strategy today is that the army is an audience in itself.