War From the Ground Up (31 page)

In reality it is often impossible to satisfy every audience, just as politicians who try to please everybody may find themselves to be in pursuit of an incoherent agenda which actually pleases nobody. An essential variable in strategic success is how far strategy has managed to bind potentially conflicting narratives together into a coherent strategic narrative. In the traditional inter-state paradigm of war, the presence of an enemy whose intention is one's own destruction tends to concentrate minds; where there is not such an existential threat (a circumstance normal in contemporary conflict), political differences tend to come to the fore and frustrate coherent strategy. This chapter examines how strategic narrative can be constructed in the fragmented political environments that characterise contemporary conflict.

In the film
Thirteen Days
, which is about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, there is a great scene when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confronts Admiral Anderson, who is directing the naval blockade of Cuba.
⁵
President Kennedy has specifically ordered that there be no firing against Soviet transport ships without his permission. A star-shell (flare) has just been fired over one of the ships as a warning. Secretary McNamara is furious, thinking it was actual firing. He orders firing to stop, and then confronts the Admiral:

ADMIRAL ANDERSON: Get out of our way, Mr Secretary. The Navy has been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones.

MCNAMARA: I believe the President made it clear that there would be no firing on ships without his express permission.

ADMIRAL ANDERSON: With all due respect, Mr Secretary, we were not firing on the ship. Firing on a ship means attacking the ship. We were not attacking the ship. We were firing over it.

MCNAMARA: This was not the President's intention when he gave that order. What if the Soviets don't see the distinction? What if they make the same mistake I just did? There will be no firing anything near any Soviet ships without my express permission, is that understood, Admiral?

ADMIRAL ANDERSON: Yes, sir.

MCNAMARA: And I will only issue such instructions when ordered to by the President. John Paul Jones … you don't understand a thing, do you, Admiral? This isn't a blockade. This, all this [US tactical moves during the crisis], is language, a new vocabulary the likes of which the world has never seen. This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev.

This exchange, though fictionalised, illustrates the importance of the interpretive structure through which people understand actions in conflict, as well as the instability of interpretive structures in situations which do not conform to more conventional templates of conflict, where improvisation is often necessary.

The essential variable governing the stability of a conflict's interpretive structure is the degree to which it depends upon the application of physical violence. Clausewitz's concept of the centre of gravity links physical action to a psychological, and essentially political, outcome (as
Chapter 6
discusses). For Clausewitz, strategy's function is to identify the centre of gravity and orchestrate tactical action to strike against it. Victory by ‘strategic manoeuvre' alone was for Clausewitz highly unstable; to call an enemy defeated because he has accepted the likelihood of actual physical defeat while his forces are largely intact may prove shortlived if he changes his mind.
⁶
Clausewitz placed a premium on tactical outcomes as the pegs on which strategic outcomes were hung. Tactics represented physical reality. Strategy was its exploitation, and represented the psychological component:

In strategy, there is no such thing as victory. Part of strategic success lies in timely preparation for a tactical victory… The rest of strategic success lies in the exploitation of a victory won.
⁷

Tactical actions provided the building blocks for strategy to convert into a political end-state: ‘the original means of strategy is victory—that is, tactical success; its ends, in the final analysis, are those objects that will lead directly to peace'.
⁸
Clausewitz wrote about how strategy is what invests the physical component of tactical victory with its psychological meaning: its ‘sphere of influence'. Superiority in war was a combination of the two.
⁹

Strategy was what gave meaning to tactical actions: ‘we are dealing with one of the most fundamental principles of war. In strategy, the significance of an engagement is what really matters… That is why, strategically speaking, the difference between one battle and another can be so great that the two can no longer be considered the same instrument'.
¹⁰
The point he makes here is that significance can only be defined against something, which in this case is the result of the war as a whole, and it is strategy's role to propose and exaggerate that definition. It does this by orchestrating tactical actions and adjusting war itself as an interpretive tool, as
Chapters 1
–
3
of this book set out. Thus, what Clausewitz is hypothetically arguing is that two battles could physically be identical, but as the result of a battle is only definable in relation to a given strategic context, this can vary, and therefore vary the results of the two battles.

In summary, Clausewitz stressed that the physical destruction provided by the engagement was the only advantage that permanently belonged to the victor.
¹¹
The perceived meaning, and ultimately the policy outcome, that strategy invests in tactical actions can never itself be considered permanent.

Nonetheless, approaches to conflict which emphasise the perceived over the physical will often be more tempting, often for very sensible reasons, such as the fact that they require, at least if successful, less investment of physical resources. Military approaches have oscillated in terms of the degree to which they have exploited perception in war. Karl-Heinz Frieser's study of the German 1940 campaign in France argues that
Blitzkrieg
was not a formal concept at this stage, but the way in which the more imaginative and aggressive German generals operated was a revival in some ways of an older tradition of manoeuvre:
¹²

The Blitzkrieg of 1940 at first seems like nothing other than the revival of the classic operational war of movement of men such as Moltke and Schlieffen. But that is only half the truth. The tie-in of traditional command principles with modern technology resulted in such a tremendous increase in speed during combat operations that there arose a dialectical turnabout, leading to a new, psychological quality. That is the essence of the revolution in the nature of war. The principle of psychological confusion replaced the old principle of physical annihilation… If at all possible, the German Panzers avoided all kinds of combat actions. After they had thrust deep into the enemy's rear areas, the enemy front collapsed by itself amid wild chaos.
¹³

Karl-Heinz Frieser's argument indicates that massive reliance on the perceived component of actions in conflict (an idea associated today as much, if not more, with al-Qaeda and its franchise groups as state actors) is neither novel, nor out of place across the spectrum of conflict, including as here in the context of high-intensity, conventional, interstate war. By the same token, the risks attendant on such an approach, which informed Clausewitz's scepticism about eighteenth-century warfare in his own post-Napoleonic era, are also neither novel, nor restricted to low-intensity warfare. Frieser argues that the German campaign of 1940 was, in its early stages, and contrary to popular perception, a very close run thing.

Great dependence on the perceived component of actions in conflict is therefore not new, nor are the risks of so doing. However, this dependence is undoubtedly driven and exaggerated by today's information revolution. There is a correlation here with Frieser's proposition that the successful German exploitation of perception in the 1940 campaign was also underpinned and enabled by agile exploitation of technological developments which irreversibly changed the nature of modern warfare. The
Wehrmacht's
spearhead Panzer groups were able to operate over long distances due to radio, and had command organisations which exploited the technology properly.

By contrast, Frieser offers an incredible vignette of the French supreme commander in the final stage of the campaign: Maxime Weygand, who at one point based himself in a headquarters in which there was no radio and only one telephone line, unavailable between midday and 2 p.m. as the telephone exchange girl insisted on her lunch!
¹⁴
By analogy, liberal powers cannot opt out of today's information revolution for the purposes of armed conflict, as General Weygand did, even if that makes it incumbent upon us profoundly to adjust the way in which we consider contemporary conflict. Given that the effects of the information revolution are probably irreversible, at least in the visible future, the implication is that the experience of conflicts such as Afghanistan are not anomalous, but actually point to the future.

In contemporary conflict physical destruction tends to matter less to a conflict's outcome than how those actions are perceived (with certain exceptions). This is primarily because the outcome is defined against several audiences who are not the enemy, and therefore are beyond the range of physical violence. Moreover as various audiences frequently
have significantly different interpretations of the conflict in which they are involved or are witnessing, it is much harder for strategy to invest physical actions with a meaning that corresponds with the desired policy outcome because there are so many possible interpretations of any tactical action.

David Kilcullen in
The Accidental Guerrilla
(2009) describes how the West tends to think about information operations as describing actions in war. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, however, tend to act in order to convey a message. They are conducting ‘an armed propaganda campaign. The informational side of AQ's operation is primary. The physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result… Contrast this with our [the West's] approach: we typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain or justify our actions'.
¹⁵

My view is that physical actions still matter, even if they are perhaps perceived badly at the time. An analogy might be made with a politician who introduces unpopular reforms which are only appreciated in retrospect. Moreover, the effects of campaigns thus fought are more durable, as Clausewitz argues. That said, the information revolution does not present liberal powers with such a convenient choice. Kilcullen is right to argue that liberal powers in many contemporary cases, such as in conflicts which are highly politicised at the tactical level, need to understand better how to orchestrate actions to achieve a given information effect. In these circumstances, the construction of strategic narrative approximates to the theory of rhetoric.

The construction of strategic narrative, like the construction of oratory, is designed to persuade people of something. The first question the rhetorician must consider is the relationship between the desired outcome and the audience. How does one break down the audience into segmented target groups? Does one seek broad approval from the audience or are certain sections of people targeted? How does one tailor one's narrative to resonate with each target audience without appearing inconsistent? Does one focus on timing parts of the speech to appeal to specific target audiences which may upset others, and if so, does one condition those who will be upset by appealing to them earlier on in the speech? Second, once the audience has been defined, the rhetorician considers how to convince his audience. In Aristotle's
Rhetoric
, he defines three rhetorical resources the orator could use to persuade:
logos
was appeal through rational argument, and thus referred to the speech itself (
logos
meant ‘word', ‘speech', ‘account' or ‘reason' in Greek);
pathos
was persuasion through emotional appeal, by putting the hearer in a certain frame of mind;
ethos
was persuasion through one's own moral standing.

Finally, how does one consider the length of time a meaning has to be impressed upon one's selected audience? If only short-term consent is intended or expected, rhetoricians may exaggerate the truth, lie, or construct arguments that have no basis in reality. Yet any effect gained upon an audience may quickly fall apart and damage one's future credibility.

Strategic narrative, as an expression of foreign policy, is often associated with rational propositions. I argue that in contemporary conflict strategic narrative needs to engage people in the domain of
logos
, the rational narrative, but also go beyond it by using
pathos
and
ethos
, in order to broaden its appeal and so gain purchase on politically disparate strategic audiences. This chapter looks at the function of and relationship between
logos
and
pathos
in particular; the next chapter examines the function of
ethos
in strategic narrative, and how all three require projection through confident vision.

‘King George
saheb kasto hunu huncha
?' (How is King George?) Man Bahadur Ghimire asked me. We were in his farmstead perched on a steep ridge, a balcony facing the Himalayas, days from the nearest road-head. I was on a duty trek as a Gurkha officer through the remote hill villages of eastern Nepal to check on our regiment's retired soldiers. It was thus that Man Bahadur Ghimire, former Rifleman in 9
^th
Gurkha Rifles, and veteran of the battle of Monte Cassino, broke a natural pause in the conversation. He posed the question seriously, as if we were discussing a great matter of state in his goat pen. I suddenly felt that I must break the dreadful news to him. In fact, when told about Queen Elizabeth, he immediately absorbed her into his world, and indeed seemed apologetic for having asked, as if he had reminded me of a recent loss. However, he immediately recovered by asking enthusiastically how the Queen was. What struck me was that, although united by a common regimental tradition, we could have been from different worlds, and he was adjusting to me as much as me to him. What fascinated me was his memory of war.