War From the Ground Up (40 page)

I have suggested here two responses. First, that the nature of contemporary globalisation blurs the line considerably between these choices at the strategic and operational levels; in contemporary conflicts short of absolute war there does not exist a sealed military domain. However, that does not mean that thinking in terms of such a choice is not an important tool of strategic analysis. The consequences of not thinking in such terms are clear: operational areas become ill defined, and there is a real risk that operational approaches are elevated to become strategies in themselves, which look inwardly to their own metrics rather than connecting to policy.

Second, counter-insurgency, understood as a broad and flexible set of doctrinal ideas underpinned by the idea of armed political activity, remains a highly effective operational approach when faced with insurgents. However, the relative operational effectiveness of armed political activity should as far as possible be boxed by clear strategic boundaries.

A failure to think in terms of such a choice, and raise what is an operational concept to a policy, which creates wider international instability, or not to engage at all, and not contest insurgencies, are two paths to the same destination anyway: a world full of insurgencies is unstable. So either way, proper attention to the question is needed.

To answer this strategic question adequately, and to facilitate the application of the two responses set out, this book has sought to draw attention to particular modes of strategic thought. This represents largely an effort to rehabilitate older traditions rather than anything new. These modes can be summarised as follows. At the policy level, genuine political choices, based on strategic dialogue that often needs to extend right down to the tactical level, are required to provide a workable political context for an operational approach to function. Operational approaches need to be constructed pragmatically, adapting doctrine to particular problems, not being its slave.

To enable these approaches to both policy and operational issues, liberal powers need to move on from thinking about military activity (and its civilian operational equivalent) as a one-way, unquestioning execution of policy, to incorporate it as part of a two-way dialogue; the aim of such an evolution is to produce sound strategy through continuous reconciliation of what is desired and what is possible. Finally, strategic narrative as an interpretive framework needs to establish its boundaries through vision, and its credibility through confidence. Only
then can a narrative convince disparate strategic audiences in a fragmented political environment, and so avoid literalist debates with religious fundamentalists. In this context, the art of strategy can approximate by analogy to the classical art of rhetoric in its attempt to convince people of an idea through a combination of rational argument (
logos
), emotional appeal (
pathos
) and moral standing (
ethos
).

The interaction in war between policy and operational approaches, and the interpretive quality of war itself as a medium between military and political outcomes, are modes of strategic thought that originate from the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz. The notion that contemporary conflict has more to do with people, and their persuasion, as the boundaries between the political and military are blurred, may seem at odds with Clausewitzian thought, in which war does provide a clear military domain. However, people in war did matter to Clausewitz; the recognition that war is a human activity is essential to understanding his strategic ideas.

Clausewitz comprehended war in terms of the interactions between the three elements that make up the ‘one' of his trinity of war: policy, passion and war itself. Clausewitz saw a tendency in the logic of war itself to encourage war to move to extremes: ‘war is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels his opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes'.
⁹

Yet in reality, as opposed to in theory, human factors prevented war from operating in this manner: ‘concern, prudence and fear of excessive risks find reason to assert themselves and to tame the elemental fury of war'.
¹⁰
So ‘the vast array of factors, forces and conditions in national affairs that are affected by war' act as a ‘non-conducting medium': ‘logic comes to a stop in this labyrinth'.
¹¹
Thus while the ‘grammar of war' in theory, through reciprocal violence, would tend to drive war to extremes, in reality ‘war is not the kind that explodes in a single discharge… War is a pulsation of violence'. While war's grammar is subordinate to policy, policy itself is, in the final analysis, dependent on passion. Human passion is the oxygen whose presence animates combat (or whose absence stifles it), be it for the soldier on the battlefield, the population at home, or the politician in government.

The human element was what differentiated real war, as Clausewitz had experienced it, from war in the abstract, played out on a map. He
was keen that
On War
should aid strategists to prosecute the former, not the latter. Thus Clausewitz stressed the human, emotional, passionate aspect of war in the first chapter of
On War
:

It would be a fallacy to imagine war between civilised people as resulting merely from a rational act on behalf of their governments, and to conceive of war as gradually ridding itself of passion, so that in the end one would never have to use the physical impact of the fighting forces—comparative figures of their strength would be enough. This would be a kind of war by algebra…Theorists were already beginning to think along such lines when the recent wars [the Napoleonic Wars] taught them a lesson. If war is an act of force, the emotions cannot fail to be involved.
¹²

Clausewitz's recognition of the human aspect of war informs his understanding of war's military domain in terms of its political and cultural context, which provides its overarching logic. He reminds us that as much as one may like to blame ‘war' itself for its inhumanity, war is a human activity. For liberal powers to blame ‘war' rather than themselves for the problems they are facing is illusory.

Clausewitz's strategic ideas were based on his understanding of the nature of war. The titles of the first three books of
On War
reflect this supposition: ‘On the Nature of War'; ‘On the Theory of War'; ‘On Strategy in General'. Strategy had to balance the three elements of war's trinity ‘like an object suspended between three magnets'.
¹³
Policy, the rational component, had to be kept in line with human passion, the human component. Strategy also had to remain agile to keep its actions related to the aim of policy, and not allow war's logic to drive itself, through escalation, beyond the point of political utility. The reason why Clausewitz frequently uses dialectics in
On War
is, to my mind, to stress the need for balance in strategy, as if strategic answers are never finite, but kept valid through perpetual motion, like a tightrope artist keeping steady. Today this balance can be understood in terms of strategic dialogue.

This conception of strategy is intimately associated with the dialogue between theory and experience which Clausewitz repeatedly stresses in
On War
. Theory is necessary in the sense that it transmits what has worked in the past in distilled form; it is a bridge to access historical experience vicariously. Yet theory is really only a springboard of ideas which should be grounded in the experience of a particular situation.

The dialectics proposed in
On War
between the abstract and the practical, reason and intuition, theory and experience, desire and possibility,
history and the present day, are parallel tensions which run throughout the work; they go to the heart of the way in which Clausewitz thought about strategy in terms of balance.

Contemporary strategic thought is overly weighted towards one side of Clausewitz's dialectic tightrope. The abstract is not sufficiently kept in check by the practical, reason by intuition, theory by experience, desire by possibility, and contemporary issues by history. Effective strategy is formed when these factors are kept in balance. To privilege one part of a pair over its counterpart is to over-emphasise a ‘top-down' or ‘bottom-up' approach. In reality, neither can work without being properly situated in the other. Clausewitz himself summarises this best:

Should theory [of war] go on elaborating absolute conclusions and prescriptions? Then it would be of no use at all in real life. No, it must also take the human factor into account, and find room for courage, boldness, and even foolhardiness. The art of war deals with living and moral forces. Consequently, it can never reach the absolute, or certainty.
¹⁴

Clausewitz's work offered a counter-argument to a tradition of overly rational and unrealistic strategic thought, in particular the eighteenth-century emphasis on mathematics and algebra in the study of strategy.
¹⁵
Daniel Moran has argued that in this context ‘strategy would not merely organise the violence of war, it would replace it'. He notes the eighteenth-century connection between the ‘flourishing of strategic rationalism' and a new literature on perpetual peace. Both of these themes were probably more idealistic than realistic given the expansion of war's intensity that characterised the start of the nineteenth century in Europe.
¹⁶

In contemporary conflict and public discussion in general, policy justifications which stress rationality are normal, and often make sense. However, preference for rational concepts which do not find resonance in the human, emotional reality of the world encourages policy to privilege overly abstract ideas. War is a human activity as much as an inanimate tool of policy. However, the abstractive process that rationalises reality can suck out its emotional content: when people are statistics, and soldiers are military formations, war can truly resemble the board game ‘Risk'. For Clausewitz, the human element is what gives theory (and policy) a broader base than just rational argument in the abstract, which prevents the abstract from the prescription of definite (and typically extreme) concepts: ‘the probabilities of real life replace the extreme and absolute required by theory'.
¹⁷

The application of abstract doctrine is a prominent feature of contemporary conflict which typically occurs when operational ideas are confused with strategy and are scaled up to the level of policy. For those on the ground it can be clear that there is a disconnect between the strategic narrative and how people respond to it. If, for example, a commander in Helmand tells the local population that their opium crops will not be burned, he is going against Afghan government policy, but may need to do this to avoid totally alienating people.

In one personal example, typical of many others, an Afghan police commander was told to eradicate some opium fields. In front of an angry crowd protesting against the (legal) destruction of their livelihoods, he drove 5 metres into the field, in his red government-issued opium-crushing tractor, then stopped and lit up a cigarette. That was his opium eradication effort for that year. Neither is it uncommon for farmers to invite insurgents, whom they otherwise really tend to dislike, to place IEDs in their fields to deter opium eradication. Disconnections in strategic dialogue put commanders, both ISAF and Afghan, in such a position in the first place.

Strategies that are situated in the abstract encourage extreme prescriptions because they are not proscribed by the reality of human behaviour and the unpredictability of war. One cannot apply abstract templates of what has worked in the past and hope that they will produce the same results in wholly different social and political contexts. Yet that is what is done when counter-insurgency is thought to be a strategy in itself. Counter-insurgency is itself not the problem, indeed it is a legitimate and necessary set of conceptual tools which should be used in Afghanistan given current policy goals, but within a realistic political context. Problems arise when the political context, which any abstract doctrine has to assume as a hypothetical starting point (in this case: government versus insurgency), replaces the actual political context. This was in particular a problem with the earlier phase of the Afghan campaign. The campaign in Afghanistan has gone better since 2009, despite public perception, and part of this is due to a far more realistic association of policy goals and operational possibility. Whether this adjustment came too late remains to be seen.

Overly abstract thought can also distort national strategy. In the UK, for example, the 2010 UK National Security Strategy alludes to the ‘world of 2030' and the security threats of the next 20 years.
¹⁸
From one
perspective this makes sense. To consider broad global trends is no doubt of value. However, any expectations situated so far into an abstract future should at least be tempered by today's concerns. Abstract assumptions can be upset when the real world, with its human passions and uncertainties, such as the Arab Spring, comes to knock at the door. The UK Labour opposition at the time called for a revision to the Strategic Defence Review on this basis.
¹⁹
A distant-horizon gazing approach to strategy can leave one reacting to distant and fragile shadows that may vanish as one approaches them: the fact that major world events, which change the course of history, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, to 9/11, to the financial crisis of 2008, are typically not anticipated by mainstream policy should be a warning about any attempts too prescriptively to game twenty years ahead.

The UK Parliament's own report on UK National Strategy, published in October 2010, advances the proposition that: ‘we have found little evidence of sustained strategic thinking or a clear mechanism for analysis and assessment. This leads to a culture of fire-fighting rather than long-term planning'.
²⁰
The distinction between long-term planning and fire-fighting is important. The irony is that fire-fighting can be the consequence of overly abstract long-term planning: while looking into the distance too much, the realities of the present day can creep up and ambush you!