War From the Ground Up (19 page)

This is not a point about narcotics; that is just one example of a much wider problem that realistic policy cannot be made unless there is frank official debate and willingness to actually confront very hard policy choices and ultimately make those choices. This is further complicated by the nature of coalition operations, and the difficulty of establishing coherent strategic dialogue with so many actors on the Afghan government-ISAF side alone. The anti-narcotics policy is just one example of the difficulties of wanting to eat one's own cake. The coalition wants to satisfy several audiences, which include both the domestic public and the Helmandi public, among others. This is the equivalent of a politician in domestic politics trying to win an election by refusing to commit decisively to an issue and thus have broad appeal. This approach may gain support for a while, but will come to grief when actual choices need to be made, especially since most of the real power in Helmand is held not by the Taliban but by tribal factions dependent on narcotics, who will simply not back anyone whose official policy is anti-poppy.

As transition takes place to full Afghan government control there, the coalition will need to make hard choices between different agendas; yet
the likelihood of those hard choices actually being made is very low. Failure to make real policy choices will simply result in the coalition being overtaken by reality on the ground.

The next chapter considers how well liberal powers are configured to conduct strategic dialogue in order to make such political choices, to tailor what is desired in the light of what is possible.

Because liberal powers tend to organise strategic dialogue through procedures in which the military executes, but does not adjust policy, adequate substantive output from strategic dialogue—sound strategy—is often frustrated in contemporary conflict. To use armed force to have political effect as a direct extension of policy, those on one's side whose actions involve making political choices, which typically will extend down to the tactical level, need to contribute to policy to keep the gap between desire and possibility as small as possible. The neat policy-operational distinction, an idea firmly entrenched in both constitutional and strategic thought, is untenable in many contemporary conflicts, not least in Afghanistan.

Strategic dialogue is essential for the desire of policy and the possibility of its implementation reciprocally to inform one another, in order to craft coherent actions that serve the end of policy. In
On War
Carl von Clausewitz deals with the interaction of policy and war during conflict. He advocates that the head of the Army should have a place in the Cabinet so that the reciprocal interaction between military possibility and political intention can take place.
¹
The importance Clausewitz attached to the understanding of the position of the commander-in-chief is revealed by his promise to the reader in book 8 to write a ‘special chapter'
on ‘the structure of supreme command' to conclude
On War
.
²
However, he died before it was written.

In reality the relationships between senior military commanders, senior civil servants and politicians (if indeed there has been a distinction) in any conflict have produced a strategic dialogue particular to that circumstance. While there are many possible variations in the processes by which strategy has been formulated, what consistently comes to the surface is that personality seems to be a more powerful variable than the official state system.

Samuel Huntington's
The Soldier and the State
(1957) was one of the most influential post-1945 texts on the subject of civil-military relations.
³
While Clausewitz does not figure prominently in this text, Huntington draws on Clausewitz to emphasise the concept of war as an instrument of policy. However, Huntington's interpretation of Clausewitz is particularly partial, as he makes a connection between war's instrumentality and robotic military obedience that Clausewitz's own argument does not sustain.
⁴
Clausewitz's own view was that: ‘when people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not saying what they really mean. If the policy is right—that is, successful—any intentional effect it has on the conduct of war can only be to the good. If it has the opposite effect the policy itself is wrong'.
⁵
Clausewitz's work engages with how policy and war interact during conflict. To see the military as a politically inert executor of policy in a one-way system is to misread Clausewitz.

Huntington locates his propositions in an inaccurate interpretation of Clausewitz's historical reception. Thus he posits that as ‘disciples of Clausewitz' von Moltke and von Schlieffen, both chiefs of the Prussian/German General Staff, were strict adherents to this interpretation of the instrumental view, in which war and politics were clearly separated. However, one of Huntington's problems in terms of argumentative clarity is that he rarely distinguishes, including in this instance, between party politics and government policy.
⁶
This is not only a partial interpretation of Clausewitz but of historical fact. Moltke's arguments with Bismarck, his civilian master, during the siege of Paris in 1870–71, for example, went against this idea in practice. Huntington asserts that ‘since political direction only comes from the top, the means of the profession [the officer corps] has to be organised into a hierarchy of obedience…
His goal [the ‘military man'] is to perfect an instrument of obedience; the use to which that instrument is put is beyond his responsibility'.
⁷

Huntington associates military professionalism, which he sees at the core of this instrumental, robotic, military ethic, as the ideal to which officers should aspire. This military ethic (for Huntington based on a philosophy of ‘conservative realism') apparently informs the ‘military mind', which ‘emphasises the permanence, irrationality, weakness, and evil in human nature'. The supposed qualities that make up Huntington's military ethic elevate it to a cult to which all military officers subscribe. Huntington makes a fetish of the officer corps, and even makes an absurd claim that enlisted personnel ‘can never develop professional motivation and the sense of professional responsibility characteristic of the West Point or St Cyr [US and French Officer Academies] graduate'.
⁸
Did Huntington ever meet a sergeant major during his brief time in the US army?

Huntington's arguments about the military are seriously out of date, if they ever were in date. Officers think for themselves; they are not robotically programmed by a conservative realist ethic; to argue that enlisted men cannot have the same level of professional commitment is utter nonsense. There is some irony in the fact that a text which jars with the reality of military experience is today still a reference point in the widely held military view that the military should only execute, and not contribute to, policy.

The Soldier and the State
makes more sense when read in its historical context. The arguments advancing a clear distinction between policy and the execution of war were already established in US military thought prior to the Second World War. Huntington cites a US Command and General Staff School publication of 1936: ‘Politics and strategy are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once policy is settled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from politics… The line of demarcation must be drawn between politics and strategy, supply, and operations. Having found this line, all sides must abstain from trespassing'.
⁹

Huntington saw the Second World War as an unwelcome departure from this principle, as he argued that military chiefs held too much power, which expanded beyond the military domain into diplomacy, politics and economics. He argued that the fixation with victory in war,
which obscured the importance of thinking about political consequences subsequent to that victory, was driven by a military domination of policy over civilian authority. He took issue with the fact that by 1945 the War Department was enmeshed in US foreign policy. By the end of the war more than half of the papers of the Operations Division of the General Staff were devoted to matters that went beyond the US army's traditional military domain.
¹⁰
Huntington made an astute point that the absence of real opposition to the military's views on war policy was not necessarily a sign of a well-functioning process: ‘too much harmony is just as much a symptom of bad organisation as too much conflict'.
¹¹

Huntington's key reference point, writing in 1957, was of course the showdown between General MacArthur and President Truman over policy in the Korean War, which led to the former's dismissal from command. Huntington analysed MacArthur's desire to expand the war to win in absolute terms as a continuation of the military domination of policy during the Second World War. That MacArthur should challenge the President's authority was for Huntington an attitude not present before the Second World War, but it had become so overly inflated by 1945 that Admiral Leahy, the Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief (President Roosevelt), and effectively (though not in title) the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could ‘quite frankly and truthfully say' that ‘The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the present time are under no civilian control whatsoever'.
¹²

Huntington argues that in the Second World War the American people traded ‘military victory for military security', as the military domination of policy led to an end state based on total victory that did not necessarily leave the United States in a more secure position.
¹³
He makes the connection with MacArthur's position in Korea, in which his obsession with total victory, which might have involved the deployment of atomic weapons against China, was not in the US security interest, at least in the President's view. Hence Huntington's thesis is not just about constitutional stability, although he is concerned about the ‘weakening of liberalism' in the Cold War environment.
¹⁴
His main argument concerns the effectiveness of the US strategy-making process.

Huntington's advocacy of the military ethic and of an apolitical military officer corps, which should ‘serve with silence' and in so doing ‘remain true to themselves', made more sense in the years following the Korean War.
¹⁵
Given the possibility of escalation to nuclear war, to limit
war, rather than to think of war in terms of total victory, was eminently sensible. This required a challenge to what Huntington saw as military domination of policy and a rehabilitation of the tradition of civilian control. This may explain why Huntington does not distinguish between policy and politics: it made strategic (policy) and constitutional (politics) sense for the military to stay away from both. To back up this argument he elevated military professionalism, the inward-looking cult of the ‘military man' and the officer corps, its guardians, to a state that did not correspond to historical or contemporary reality.

The problem with his thesis is that he requires an ideal to serve his broader argument; in trying to present this ideal as reality he loses purchase on the actual historical record and does not relate to the modern military. In today's context Huntington's argument would have the military in contemporary conflict pursue exclusively military goals in the name of professionalism—this would not work in mosaic conflicts, in which tactical actions have a political quality: to refuse to engage in politics would just mean not knowing what political effect one is having, or refusing to discriminate between military courses of actions on a political basis, leading to chaotic outcomes. Huntington's ideas taken literally today, outside their legitimating Cold War context, isolate the military from wider society. This frustrates, rather than balances, strategic dialogue.

The Soldier and the State
is a seminal reference point for the theory of civil-military relations. While its constitutional arguments still make sense, its strategic arguments only made sense in their Cold War context. In contemporary conflict, the effectiveness of strategy must be predicated on an inclusion, not a total separation, of the military in policy. To reject this possibility is either to deny the reality that activity, civilian and military, at the tactical level tends to be highly politicised in contemporary conflict, or to accept this, but to maintain that, even this being so, the military should not have a viewpoint on policy.

While the political nature of war is clearly not a new idea, the extent of the penetration of the military domain by political factors even at the lowest level is a key evolution. Thus when Clausewitz envisions an interaction between political and military officers, he is concerned that generals commanding whole armies, not majors commanding companies, have their opinions on policy heard. While strategic dialogue between statesmen and generals may well be established in Clausewitz, in contemporary
conflict, where tactical actions have policy implications in a small but cumulative manner, strategic dialogue needs to be extended much lower down the chain of command.

In short, the necessity of linking political choices at the tactical level with policy outcomes is a strategic necessity in today's mosaic conflicts. Only in this way can strategy and its expression as strategic narrative be adjusted to local circumstances and actually work coherently. The way in which the West tends to think about strategy frustrates this because it is frequently not understood that strategy is a relationship between policy and tactical action in which both should be adjusted in the light of the other; it is not a one-way road from policy to tactical action.