War From the Ground Up (39 page)

‘Absolute war' in contemporary conflict can subvert Clausewitz's own definition of the same term. For Clausewitz,
ganze Krieg
is the ultimate form of decisiveness, not war without end. Moreover, in contemporary conflict, combat is not, as it was for Clausewitz, the ‘only means of war'. In the Long War, force is used across whole regions of the world, and sometimes in minuscule quantities in terms of firepower, in conjunction with other means (economic, legal, cyber, media-related, for example), to achieve political results more directly. In the Long War, therefore, ‘war' does not clearly contain violence within an interpretive structure. On the contrary, war is expanded to incorporate all means which deliver political effect: violence is mixed into other political activity, so that there is a severe erosion of the interpretive difference between military and political activity; war and peace.

In reality, the complete fusion of military and political activity is an abstract pole, which contemporary conflict may have moved towards, but elements of war as more traditionally defined remain in place. Indeed ‘military' activity remains a useful and legitimate term in contemporary conflict. In terms of distinguishing means, it can describe the activity of armed forces—the military—as opposed to their civilian counterparts. Even in terms of the ends which armed forces seek to achieve, the boundary between when soldiers seek ‘military' or ‘political' objectives, especially at the tactical level, is blurred and subjective. There are many people trying to kill coalition soldiers in Afghanistan; they can legitimately be considered an enemy, at minimum in a temporary sense.
The extent to which they can then be dealt with militarily is where the possibilities of defining military activity in terms of its means, ends, or both are blurred.

Military activity in the traditional inter-state paradigm sense of setting conditions for a political solution, in a sequential manner, is by no means redundant either. Enemies can be dealt with militarily by killing or capturing them, as in Sri Lanka's recent destruction of the Tamil Tigers.
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If conventional war thinking is applied in this extreme sense in contemporary conflict, the military might well set military conditions for a political solution in a literal sense. Yet the West, to my mind entirely correctly, does not engage in such practices, because they normally represent an evacuation of the moral high ground, which exaggerate rather than resolve the conflict in the long-term. Contemporary globalisation challenges the idea of war as a compartmentalised military domain, where decisions are reached on the battlefield, is compromised in most situations other than those where unrestrained physical force is used.

Thus most strategic audiences, including most insurgents, need to be persuaded of a strategic narrative while often being beyond the range of armed force, so cannot be ‘forced' to subscribe to a given narrative, as in the inter-state paradigm. Indeed the metrics that tend to be used to evaluate progress in the Long War are far more about global opinion than they are about any military balance, and as much about the control of political as physical space. General Stanley McChrystal, for example, attempted to reduce the use of indirect ordnance and air-delivered bombs in the Afghan War, not because they are not effective in military terms; they are. However, their political effect is often more harmful than their military value. As the use of force is often interpreted in direct political terms by audiences, the concept of ‘war' struggles to bind its audiences into recognition of a military outcome that sets conditions for a political solution. War moves towards becoming a direct extension of political activity.

The dynamics of contemporary conflicts can often be clarified, by way of analogy, in terms of what liberal powers would understand as normal political activity in a domestic context. When liberal powers base their strategic narratives on the template of inter-state war, they define expectations (in the conventional military sense) in relation to an enemy (which implies more absolute expectations of victory or defeat) before
political aims can be considered. In domestic politics, political aims are defined primarily against one's political constituencies rather than the opposition party (the ‘enemy'). Hence whether success in domestic politics involves cooperation with, or defeat of, the opposition is secondary.

The enemy therefore plays a very different function in these two conceptions: in the first, he is an obstacle to be fought before any outcome can occur; in the second, he is an inconvenience who, one has to accept, will permanently frustrate one's goals. Confusion of these two modes of understanding can encourage a belligerent to seek absolute outcomes to problems that might be better understood as part of the normal fabric of international politics. That is, in the context of domestic politics, nobody expects even the most successful government to persuade everyone, especially their opponents' ‘home base' political constituencies; that is unrealistic. Yet these false, decisive expectations are encouraged when a paradigm of ‘war' is employed to conceptualise conflicts that actually are a lot closer functioning according to the dynamics of domestic politics.

This mismatch between expectation and possibility has placed huge strain on liberal powers to explain what they are doing, and drawn attention to the role of strategic narrative in contemporary conflict. Strategy is a two-way bridge between policy on one side and action on the other, both violent and non-violent. Strategic narrative expresses strategy as a story, to explain one's actions. Different people may tell the story differently, to persuade different audiences, and perhaps place particular emphasis on different goals. That is fine, so long as the different versions of the story remain consistent.

A coherent strategic narrative not only enables one to convince different audiences according to the ends of policy, but also to bind together one's team across levels of authority and function: the diplomatic head of mission, the army company commander, the aid specialist, the politician working from a domestic capital, for instance. Effective solutions in contemporary conflict emphasise pragmatic combinations of means synchronised in time and space to achieve common objectives. Conversely, the language of ‘the diplomatic solution…' or ‘the military solution' as strategic alternatives is increasingly frustrated.

Liberal democracies are today not particularly effective in the configuration of strategic narrative. Part of this is to do with the Cold War legacy of rigid civil-military relations, in which those executing policy
on the ground are largely sealed off from those making it. This still makes constitutional sense, but no longer makes strategic sense.

In summary, the conception of war today is paradoxical. The West still understands war's mechanism essentially in terms of a paradigm of inter-state war, conceptualised so influentially by Clausewitz; yet in another sense, war, in this paradigm as employed today, often subverts Clausewitz's conception of war's political utility. Clausewitzian war still works if its two prerequisites are generally satisfied: polarity and the containment of strategic audiences within the opposing sides. The irony today is that we blame the failure of the Clausewitzian inter-state paradigm on the mechanism itself rather than on the contemporary circumstances in which it is used, and in which these two prerequisites are typically compromised.

Strategy today can to an extent shape war to ensure that the preconditions which give Clausewitzian war political utility are sufficiently satisfied. War in its Clausewitzian conception regulates violence in the world by confining organised violence (the use of armed force) within an interpretive structure (the battlefield, where outcomes are defined in military terms) in which it is regulated by policy. This idea contributed to the Weinberger doctrine of 1984 (slightly adapted by General Colin Powell's version of the doctrine before the First Gulf War) which rehabilitated US strategic thought after Vietnam. It worked. The limited and successful use of force in the 1991 Gulf War is a classic example.
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Conversely, twenty years on from the First Gulf War, one might argue whether any potential enemy will take on the US military in conventional battle in the near to medium term. Moreover, the inter-connectedness enhanced by contemporary globalisation has changed the world in the intervening two decades; strategic audiences beyond the polarised sides are likely to remain a key feature of future conflict. Reversion to a Weinberger-Powell type doctrine might be sensible for wider international stability, but such a reversion would also require refusal to intervene in many cases where genuine national interests were at stake.

This is a hard choice. The consequences of not paying attention to such a choice are essentially to get the worst of both possibilities: failure in the Long War and wider international instability. However, this book has argued for a pragmatic mentality in the formulation of strategy; part of this involves trying not to see strategic choices in absolute terms. Hence the choice outlined above offers a dialectic tool of strategic analysis,
rather than an absolute prescription to choose one or the other. This tool is available to consider the consequences and opportunities available in each, unique, conflict situation; such consequences, positive and negative, will be less visible if both forms are confused within a single conception of war.

War in the Clausewitzian paradigm is not the use of force for directly political outcomes. Clausewitzian war contains violence in human affairs; it has clear limits. The relevant international law is constructed on the basis that one can define specific ‘military' targets. Yet the idea that one can distinguish between ‘military' and ‘political' targets, when strategy uses force directly for political effect, is problematic: the definition of military activity in terms of its means rather than its ends is perhaps overly privileged.
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However, to challenge the practice of using force outside the paradigm of war for directly political ends on the basis of wider international stability raises its own concerns. Such practice is highly effective in operational terms, and the imperative to succeed in conflict obviously remains. Counter-insurgency opens up the operational option to use force for directly political advantage. If in a given conflict the policy choice has been to commit military forces to achieve an outcome in a country in which the enemy refuses conventional battle and lives among the people, counter-insurgency, properly resourced, and in a realistic political context, can be highly effective. There is a particular imperative to be operationally effective in less extreme forms of armed conflict: to avoid escalation to extreme forms that ‘work'. However, counter-insurgency should not be elevated to the level of global strategy. That would remove its limits, and compromise the boundary between war and peace.

Western liberal powers have genuine security concerns in many parts of the world, which are operationally most effectively addressed through the use of force more directly for political ends. However, the conflict generated when force is used more for directly political, rather than military, outcomes is not war in the Clausewitzian sense, but effectively a continuation of normal political activity, which is endless.

Clausewitzian war is brutal, decisive and finite. When liberal democracies fail to make such a distinction they contaminate the clear boundaries in which violence operates in Clausewitzian war. Because liberal democracies have generally failed to make such a distinction, the result has been a proliferation of violence in the world which has the potential
to drag the West into endless conflicts that go beyond political utility, not least in terms of their human and financial cost. The use of force as a direct extension of policy may be operationally effective, but it is a very dangerous game when unbounded by a clear strategic construct, the risks of which are masked by the idea that it is war.

One danger of the way in which liberal powers deal with contemporary conflict is the failure to distinguish between what is temporary and what is permanent. In his seminal study of Soviet strategic culture in 1977, Jack Snyder argued that Soviet nuclear strategy had achieved a state of semi-permanence that could be understood now to represent a culturally informed position, rather than mere policy. The boundary between culture and policy is primarily one of choice, in that policy implies a deliberate, as opposed to a default, strategic option.
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To take another example, in republican Rome the citizens could elect a dictator to rule with absolute power for a specified period in order to deal with a military crisis. This system was effective, but it was a policy of choice, distinct from the culture of absolute authority that later characterised the imperial period.

If liberal democracies become intoxicated with the idea that their contemporary conflicts represent the future of war, the result will be a challenge to the liberal tradition: we seem to forget that war should ultimately be about peace. Conversely, as was indicated in earlier chapters, the conflicts of the first decade of this century do not seem anomalous, and may point to the future, because the information revolution is likely to make many of the characteristics they exhibit irreversible. The challenge for the West is therefore to deal with the inevitable aspects of change, but also to recognise where there is room to manoeuvre.
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To summarise, there is a basic strategic question apparent in contemporary conflict, specifically the West's ‘Long War'. This question has two related parts: first, in strategic terms, should liberal powers aggregate their conflicts into one ‘global counter-insurgency' or disaggregate them, treating each discretely and on its own terms; second, in operational terms, should liberal powers only fight conflicts in which they can defeat the enemy in conventional battle (which would often mean to refuse battle with an enemy who does not present himself, and so take risk on legitimate security concerns), or beat the enemy at his own game through armed political activity?