War From the Ground Up (24 page)

As Hew Strachan has argued, during the Cold War strategic theory became increasingly focused on the use of force short of war, such as
nuclear deterrence, which made it more abstract as it drew on theoretical scenarios in the future, rather than actual historical experiences. It also moved strategic theory from the domain of the professional soldier to a domain dominated by civilians. This left a void in terms of the theory of actual war-fighting and the contribution to theory of military practitioners.
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The conceptualisation of the operational level of war in terms of ‘operational art' filled this void in the 1980s. This was especially in response to a renewed US focus on conventional warfare post-Vietnam, and a NATO re-assessment of its conventional response to the Soviet threat. Strachan posits that such a conception of operational art could take its geo-political and strategic context for granted, and so focus on battle: ‘although presented as a bridge between strategy and tactics, the orientation of the operational level in the late 1980s was towards tactics, not strategy'.
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While successful on the battlefield in the First Gulf War in 1990–91, the geo-political and strategic context of contemporary conflict is significantly different. Yet the divide between strategy-policy and the operational level survives, and has been applied to non-conventional conflicts. This is most clearly articulated in the endurance of the idea that while political direction comes from politicians alone, the military should be left alone to execute that policy. Strachan cites General Tommy Franks' comment to Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defence at the Pentagon during planning for the 2003 Iraq War: ‘keep Washington focused on policy and strategy.
Leave me the hell alone to run the war
[emphasis original]'.
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The result was that ‘there was no strategy that united the military and the civilian, the operational to the political, with the result that the operational level of war also became the de facto strategy, and its focus meant that a wider awareness of where the war was going was excluded'.
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When military thought is devised outside of a political context, real or generic, it rapidly loses meaning. Edward Luttwak, for example, has pointed out how the distinction between strategic and tactical air power lost meaning because it confused means with ends. Since the Second World War the adjective ‘strategic' has been used to describe long-range aircraft as opposed to ‘tactical' short-range aircraft. Luttwak locates the origin of the distinction in the Second World War: long-range bombers were called ‘strategic' because their effects in terms of bombing cities were strategic; short-range planes provided ‘tactical' support to ground forces.

Luttwak traces how the adjective evolved from describing an end, to become the means by which that end had been achieved; thus ‘strategic' became associated with long range and ‘tactical' with short range. However, in the 1991 Gulf War ‘tactical' F-117 aircraft were used to attack headquarters in Baghdad, while ‘strategic' B-52 bombers were employed to attack troop concentrations in Kuwait and other tactical targets. Luttwak also cites examples from the Kosovo War, in which ‘strategic' B-52, B-1A and B-2 bombers attacked Serbian ground forces, while all the strategic targets in Serbia were attacked by ‘tactical' F-15Es, F-117s and other such aircraft. Luttwak's brief history of this distinction exemplifies neatly how no means possesses intrinsic strategic or tactical value, as that can only describe an end, which depends on the particular context in which that means is employed.
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In the same spirit as Luttwak's analysis, wars and armed conflicts in general are typically classified in terms of their means, not their ends. Thus conventional warfare usually describes the phenomenon of two armies clashing in battle rather than a fight over absolute political objectives. The First Gulf War, for example, was a conventional war because of the clash of regular armed forces. Yet it was fought for limited political objectives. Several non-conventional wars have been fought for far higher stakes. Counter-insurgency is part of a tradition of conflict identified in terms of methods rather than of political objectives: small war, imperial policing, low-intensity conflict and counter-revolutionary warfare, among others. Those who advocate that ‘hybrid war' is the next paradigm also emphasise method over objective. To classify conflict in this manner is not incorrect, as there are evidently methods which are transferrable. What this type of classification excludes, however, is a particular political context.

General military principles clearly retain value in constructing operational approaches to contemporary conflicts. John Shy makes a compelling case when he argues that such abstract principles, which are frequently dismissed as too rigid and unrealistic, have, for the sensible reason of giving planners a handrail, remained popular in strategic thought since Jomini. He argues that Jomini's identification of strategic decision-making as a specific area of knowledge remains important; certain principles can help in strategic decisions (as opposed to overly prescriptive theories).
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Indeed the term ‘lines of operations', which is current in operational thought today, was popularised by Jomini's advocacy
of thinking in terms of
lignes d'opérations
.
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Shy's point indicates that following principles in itself can be a useful planning method; the real issue is whether the appropriate principles have been relied upon in the first place, which is a question resolved by the strategic context in which they are applied.

Counter-insurgency operational doctrine usually comprises three generic lines of operation: security, governance and development. In Afghanistan the government of Afghanistan-ISAF has expanded upon this template to create six theatre-specific lines of operation (as of 2011): protect the population, neutralise insurgent networks, develop Afghan security forces, neutralise corruption and organised crime that threatens the campaign (effectively all part of the security line of operation in generic counter-insurgency doctrine), support governance and support socio-economic development. These provide a very useful method of organising effort across an international civilian-military coalition, and with Afghan partners. The point here is that the abstract doctrine has been applied to reality within the specific political context of the Afghan conflict, and thus has more purchase on the reality of the situation.

In summary, properly to situate ‘Jominian' thought in terms of strategic theory, Peter Paret's distinction between warfare and war remains crucial. That professional military officers should seek to formulate general principles for generic problems is common sense. However, when that doctrine does not link into its political context, or is used as a substitute for that context, it oversteps its limits.

Counter-insurgency is often understood as a subset of state stabilisation. Stabilisation doctrine, the generic guidance for UK forces involved in this activity, is necessary in order to draw up contingency plans, to train, and to configure state resources appropriately in the anticipation of involvement in future stabilisation missions. The UK military's operational stabilisation doctrine sets out primacy of political purpose as its foremost principle: ‘The purpose of UK military participation in security and stabilisation is the achievement of the desired UK political aim. This should be at the forefront of the commander's campaign planning, implementation, and assessment efforts, noting that this may require adaption where political aims change in light of the conduct of the campaign'.
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However, as in conventional war, were operational doctrine to be up-scaled to the level of policy, there would be a risk that it would crowd out real strategic debate: hard political choices about what political end-state is to be sought may well be neglected, as the generic policy aims of doctrine, such as ‘avoiding state failure', become the actual policy aims. A policy aiming to avoid state failure is a definition in the negative. The definition of a state as having been ‘stabilised', or as not having failed, is exceptionally broad. Such an end state could range from supporting a repressive tyrannical regime to achieving a stable democracy. Because stabilisation does not provide an end state defined in the positive, it means little in itself.

The result may be a campaign that lacks direction. Susan Woodward, who had extensive experience of stabilisation in the Balkans during the 1990s, has argued that the real issue of state failure today is to do with its consequences, not state failure itself, which is actually very hard to define in practice.
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She argues that genuine strategic dialogue has to be defined against the outcomes of state failure, not the failing of the state itself. Hence the policy component of a strategy is of far more utility if it states what it wants rather than, or in conjunction with, what it does not want.

Like its parent, stabilisation doctrine, counter-insurgency doctrine demands a political context, as it concerns the conduct of armed politics. In the absence of positively defined policy objectives, which should properly be based on an understanding of the conflict on its own terms, an operational approach might well generate an artificial political context: the hypothetical political scenarios upon which the operational doctrine is based, such as generic support for a government versus an insurgency, may be imposed as a template over the actual facts on the ground; the doctrine now fills the policy vacuum and becomes a policy in itself.

When counter-insurgency is (mis)applied in this manner, its critics have a point. Colonel Gian P. Gentile of the US army, for instance, has described counter-insurgency (as articulated in the
US Army and Marine Corps Counter-Insurgency Field Manual
) as a ‘strategy of tactics', disconnected from wider political objectives.
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His preference for conventional war is tied to the argument that the US should only engage in wars which it can win decisively, rather than have a conflict's outcome be heavily influenced by factors largely beyond an operational commander's control, such as corrupt and incompetent local partners.

Colonel Gentile's argument presents an important policy choice between two legitimate positions, but does not present an operational choice in the context of the policy objectives of the Afghanistan campaign today. To satisfy the policy goals which the US-led coalition has sought in Afghanistan, an operational approach that excludes counter-insurgency doctrine would be problematic. To conduct exclusively what has been characterised as counter-terrorism would only satisfy significantly distilled policy objectives; conversely, to beat the insurgency through conventional battle would require indiscriminate killing, which would be a massive change of policy which liberal powers would not tolerate.

To distinguish between policy and operational choices is helpful in answering some of the questions that have arisen in the debate about whether counter-insurgency is the right option in Afghanistan, and in future conflict. Edward Luttwak, for example, characterised US counter-insurgency in an article of 2007 as ‘military malpractice'.
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He pointed out that the most successful counter-insurgents, such as the German Army in the Second World War, were successful because they out-terrorised the local population through reprisals. He states, of course, that the United States cannot engage in such activity.

That seems to me to be the point: liberal powers would not want to engage in terrorising populations. Luttwak legitimately points out the limitations of counter-insurgency as applied by the coalition in Afghanistan; but the limitations are there for good reason, and counter-insurgency remains the best operational choice given current policy demands in Afghanistan. Any jettisoning of counter-insurgency, and replacement with a more, or less, intense operational approach, would entail major policy changes; hence the concerns that Luttwak raises, as with Gentile, are to my mind primarily policy problems.

The public debate over counter-insurgency's utility in contemporary conflict suffers from confusion as to whether counter-insurgency is an operational approach, a strategy or a policy. An article in the
Financial Times
in March 2011 used all three terms to discuss a change in US approach to the conflict in Afghanistan.
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The title of the article was ‘US shifts Afghan tactics to target Taliban'; the first paragraph stated: ‘the US is escalating its attacks on the Taliban and its supply lines in a shift in strategy in Afghanistan'; the next paragraph asserted: ‘the move, which comes as the Obama administration debates the future of its military
presence in Afghanistan after a troop drawdown begins in July, is a sign of the difficulties of the counter-insurgency policy'.

There is legitimate scope for confusion in journalism, not just because it would be unfair to expect journalists to use military lexicon with consistent precision, but also given the US government's lack of clarity as to whether it understands counter-insurgency in Afghanistan as a policy, strategy or operational approach. The critical policy-level debates relating to the Afghan conflict by the Obama administration in 2009 appeared to be more concerned with operational approaches—whether to prosecute a counter-insurgency or a counter-terrorism campaign—than with policy objectives.

Counter-insurgency is a useful, and necessary, approach to contemporary conflict within a context that recognises two criteria for its use: first, that it is an operational approach; second, that like all operational approaches it must be applied pragmatically. Let us deal with each of these in turn.

The utility of counter-insurgency in contemporary conflict has been most prominently argued in debate between Colonel Gentile and Lieutenant Colonel (retired) John Nagl, both of the US army.
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Nagl argues that counter-insurgency is the most effective approach to many contemporary conflicts. He argues that it has been an effective operational approach in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that coalition forces should adapt to become as effective as possible in this approach to win the wars that they are in.
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