War From the Ground Up (20 page)

Strategy has been defined succinctly as a convergence of ends (objectives), ways (actions) and means (resources).
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Colonel (retired) Harry Yarger's pithy definition of strategy is equally convincing: ‘the calculation of objectives, concepts, and resources within acceptable bands of risk to create more favourable outcomes than might otherwise exist by chance or at the hands of others'.
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Essentially strategy is the dialectical relationship, or the dialogue, between desire and possibility. At the core of strategy is inevitably the problem of whether desire or possibility comes first. Does one start with the abstract idea of what is desired, or should one commence by consideration of what is realistically possible? This is a chicken and egg situation.

The two should ideally be in perpetual dialogue, not just before but also during a conflict. Desire must be grounded in possibility; possibility clearly requires an idea in the first place which informs any analysis of possibility. In the colloquial language often used to describe actual strategic process, this could be described as the continuous tension between ‘top-down' and ‘bottom-up' approaches to a problem set. Ideas coming from the top need to be rooted in ground truth; yet an un-coordinated bottom-up approach based only on what works locally lacks a unifying purpose and will be incoherent. This is comprehended in Admiral J. C. Wylie's argument that the plan produced by strategy ‘is a vehicle for conversion of an idea to a deed', but as a dynamic process: ‘the link between a thought pattern and reality'.
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Understood as dialogue between desire and possibility, strategy is as much the process that handles this dialogue as the output of the dialogue itself. The former can be seen as the procedural element of strategy
(how an actor, typically a state, organises its processes to set up dialogue between policy intention and ground truth); the latter can be seen as the substantive element of strategy (the actual strategy that is produced). This dialogue is very hard to get right in practice. Historical examples in which there has been satisfactory equilibrium are far more seldom found than instances in which desire has not been rooted in reality, or when actions have not had any unifying purpose. Often these last two scenarios are two sides of the same coin.

Taken as concepts, policy, strategy and tactics are representative of distinct types of thought that are universal in all situations. In the abstract, all human action can be understood in terms of the physical expression of intention, or desire. Strategy requires an abstract starting point, an idea, which is typically understood as policy. Clausewitz stated that ‘policy is nothing in itself … we can only treat policy as representative of all the interests of the community'.
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In reality, to reconcile all the interests of the community in relation to a given conflict is often impossible. Even those constituencies who support a military action may well do so for different, and potentially contradictory, motives. The further one moves away from wars fought for national survival, the more likely is one to detect such inconsistencies.

The requirement for strategic narrative to bind its audiences is crucial; that is hard to do when different parts of the audience expect substantially different outcomes, and strategic choices arise that make it impossible to keep juggling alternative versions. To take policy as representative of all the interests of the community, as Clausewitz does, is not a situation one would often expect to find in reality. Yet any analysis of a circular system, in this case strategic dialogue, requires a starting point, and this abstract, simplified notion of representation provides this. The point is stressed in this chapter to make the distinction between abstract analysis and practical reality. While an abstract understanding of strategic dialogue is important, in reality the policy starting point will be far more complicated. Policy aims in reality tend to be woven together and expressed as a strategic narrative; the construction and coherence of strategic narrative is the subject of
Chapters 8
and
9
. This chapter, however, continues to examine the abstract position.

The actual expression of that abstract desire, in the context of strategic theory, has been described variously as an outcome, an objective, an end, a result, a goal. This expressed idea is also comprehended by policy. The
distinction between an end (policy in the abstract) and an end-state (policy achieved) might be illustrated as a line which shows the expression of the idea: it starts with the abstract desire and finishes with the actual accomplishment of that desire. In this sense policy represents not just the starting point, but also the end point: strategic dialogue is a circular system.

The accomplishment of policy is achieved through deliberate action. In war this has traditionally been understood to come about through the use of military force. How one configures and orchestrates that force is an area of technical expertise, and requires specific knowledge. This had traditionally been understood as tactics. Clausewitz defined tactics as the coordination of actions within battle, which he termed the engagement. Tactical thought was distinct and lent itself more to scientific analysis: principles of battle, technical knowledge of military equipment and geometry, for example, were for Clausewitz associated with tactical thought.
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Clausewitz defined strategy as the use of the engagement (battle) for the purposes of war.
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This was more of an art. Hew Strachan has argued that strategic thought in this sense had originated from the growth of standing, professional armies in the eighteenth century as the type of theory which dealt with the general's plans and manoeuvres in the lead-up to battle.
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As war expanded in scale, predominantly due to technological advances in communication and transportation, what Clausewitz understood as strategy was significantly stretched.

Julian Corbett, the British strategist of the early twentieth century, distinguished between ‘major strategy' and ‘minor strategy'. ‘Minor strategy' is what would now be termed ‘operational' thought, which related to action within war, but outside combat. ‘Major strategy' was for Corbett the coordination of all military tools of the state to achieve the ends of policy. As Strachan argues, this prefigured conceptions of ‘grand strategy', or ‘national strategy' as it is usually termed today.
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Thus, while for Corbett major strategy principally meant coordinating the actions of the army and the navy, this mode of thought has expanded to include within the military, air forces, space and cyber. Beyond the military, national strategy also coordinates diplomacy, economic options and the role of international aid. In this ‘major' sense, strategy is very
close to state policy, and national strategy is indeed decided in most countries at the political level.

The stretching of the distance between policy and tactics can distort the fact that strategy is fundamentally the relationship between the two rather than just a ‘level' between them. Nonetheless, linear models which see strategy as a ‘level' of war are more typically encountered than a conception which understands strategy as a relationship. A common formulation is the policy-national strategy-military strategy-operational-tactical ‘levels of war' model (see
Figure 10
).

This can be a legitimate model if one recognises that policy is the origin and the destination of strategy: the idea and its expressed form. In this sense strategy not only adjusts actions in light of what is desired, but desire is also adjusted in light of practical possibility. Strategy seeks to reach a destination, and must adjust policy if that destination is not attainable. Strategy is therefore not a one-way road from policy to tactical action (which is the way such a model is often, mistakenly, interpreted); strategy should be a dialogue between the two.

Strategic dialogue ideally produces strategy that situates the desire of policy in the possibility of its execution. This juncture between desire and possibility, the strategic domain, is located at the point where actions have a political quality: the course of action potentially impacts on both the policy aims themselves, and the audiences against whom they are defined. In conventional war that juncture would be very high up the military chain of command, usually at army group or corps level. Thus there is an overlap between the commander of an army group, a very senior military officer that one would expect to have strategic authority, and the location of the strategic domain: while the action of the whole army group may have a political quality, actions of smaller formations and units within it seek a preliminary military outcome which only connect to the policy aim indirectly in their contribution to the actions of the whole army group; the key point is that commanders within the army group lower in the chain of command, the vast majority, do not need to make political choices when discriminating between courses of action. How strategic dialogue is configured in conventional war is therefore relatively straightforward, since it is essentially limited to how politicians and generals interact with one another to adjust policy and actions in light of one another.

The issue is then how effective such interaction is in producing balanced strategy. This depends on constitutional civil-military configuration, and the force of individual personalities. In the case of a military force micro-managed by a military dictator, for example, strategy would probably adjust policy seamlessly. In most liberal powers, strategists tend not to be the primary policy-makers, so this involves the strategists informing the policy-maker that a policy aim is unattainable, or requires adjustment in terms of its content and/or the audiences against whom it is defined.

In conventional war the overlap between strategic authority and the strategic domain means that politicians, if they do listen to their generals, have to consult a relatively small number of people. The problem in contemporary conflict is that the strategic domain often expands far beyond strategic authority, as discussed in the previous chapter: junior commanders routinely make political choices, either consciously or by
implication through a course of action; their actions may be of less significance in a mosaic, cumulative sense. The problem is that effective strategic dialogue in this circumstance requires the integration into that dialogue of all those who operate within their strategic domain, which typically includes junior commanders at the tactical level.

Liberal democracies are not constitutionally configured to do that: the notion that the strategic domain and the tactical level can overlap is a reality of contemporary conflict that is deeply uncomfortable because it pits constitutional and strategic arguments against one another.

Constitutional and strategic arguments are only aligned when liberal democracies (mis) understand strategy as a one-way process, in which strategy is an expression of policy, but does not adjust policy; where soldiers do not question the objectives of policy, as posited by Huntington in
The Soldier and the State
. The endurance of this one-way interpretation of the ‘levels of war' model is evidenced in the perception of the armed forces in liberal democracies as theoretically apolitical organisations. In a debate at Oxford University in 2010 on how far the military should contribute to policy-making, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, an expert in British constitutional law, argued that:

The distinction between policy questions and operational questions is not an easy one to observe, and perhaps especially difficult in military matters. Nevertheless, the chiefs of staff ought to do all they can to maintain it. It is important for the processes of democratic accountability that the dividing line is not blurred.
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The crux of Professor Bogdanor's argument is constitutional stability. The idea that the military are controlled by civilians and democratically accountable to them is standard in liberal democracies. This argument is entirely legitimate, and makes sense in a constitutional context. However, it does not make sense in the strategic context of contemporary conflict. This is a major paradox for liberal democracies. The military is often in the best place to assess whether policy is realistic. If the soldier on the ground can see that policy is unrealistic, but is unable to challenge it because he is at the end of a one-way flow of policy direction, policy cannot be adjusted in light of practical possibility. To my mind, while the military, and their civilian counter-parts who act in conflict environments (such as diplomats and development experts), should be involved in policy, they should stay out of politics (which is admittedly
difficult to do in practice); this is a fine line, but seems the only way to balance constitutional and strategic arguments.