War From the Ground Up (5 page)

My platoon was not the only one in contact; in fact, we were at the periphery of the main battle. The insurgents were probing the company
from several directions. The most intense fighting was going on to my flank, where there had been a serious casualty. JJ's 7 Platoon did very well and repelled the insurgents through sheer aggression, extracting the casualty under fire [two Military Crosses were subsequently awarded in relation to that action].

Charlie Crowe got on the radio net to give a reverse SITREP (situation report) and told us that we were now fighting a company defensive battle. The Apache helicopters circling overhead, and our snipers on the ground, were detecting and engaging insurgent teams in depth too. This was the opening of a three-day battle of frequent small skirmishes against a probing enemy.

How do we understand this event? On the one hand, we can see it through the concept of battle: one company did this, another company did that, and the enemy responded in a particular way. Within this military frame of reference, the outcome of the battle is an evolution of the
military situation: success or failure is judged according to one's position relative to the enemy. If one asks a commander what is going on during a battle, the typical response will be a briefing, describing arrows on a map illustrating friendly and enemy forces. In this sense the concept of battle allocates a rational meaning to events. What could be seen as several men fighting somewhat chaotically is rationalised as the articulation of a military plan that gives meaning to the actions of individuals.

Yet battle is as much this rational phenomenon as a set of personal experiences for those involved. While this may be common sense, we typically distinguish personal experiences from the military outcome. Banter on the tarmac may be part of how a solider remembers the battle, but has nothing to do with its military outcome. Yet in the West's contemporary conflicts people's reception of events, including battles, through the lens of their personal experience does matter to the conflict's outcome.

In Afghanistan today the support of the people is vital to the outcome of the conflict for all sides. However, the peasants of the Baluchi Valley would not have seen the battle in terms of arrows on maps. For them it is not a ‘company clearance of an objective as part of a wider battlegroup operation', which it was for us; they would not have known what that was. The discourse of battle we use to understand the phenomenon we are in makes little sense to them. From their homes they see snapshots of the battle between us and the Taliban and hear about other incidents from their friends. Their primary interest is the safety and property of themselves and their fellow villagers, usually far more so than the wider political struggle between the Taliban and the government.

In this case gaining the support of the people of the Baluchi Valley was not the primary objective of the operation. The objective was to clear out entrenched insurgent positions which were protecting their resupply route and to clear the way for an Australian reconstruction task force to hold the area. In a different part of the operation, Dutch troops were to clear the valley from the other end. This turned out to be problematic at the Dutch government level. There were thus several lenses available to view the operation, depending on one's point of view.

This has important ramifications for how we think about war and armed conflict more generally. If our strategy attempts to persuade people to subscribe to a particular political position (in Afghanistan essentially
the rule of the Afghan government), we need to think about how those people will interpret our actions in political terms. To an extent, the concepts of battle, and war, do not need explaining; people are familiar with the concept of two sides fighting. However, to use this as an exclusive interpretive framework to judge success or failure in battle or war is a very narrow basis for understanding, as it does not incorporate the possibility of a personal response being the basis for a political viewpoint.

We may well have ‘won' the battle in our own definition of the event, but members of the audience will have had their own political interpretation of the event, be it apathy, anger, satisfaction, or disappointment, that the insurgents have been cleared out, or something else: whatever it is, there will have been a political response as locals understand us on their terms. To borrow a term from social science, we ‘cannot not communicate'.
³
Once we acknowledge that people's political views matter to our own definition of success or failure, an exclusively military definition of success or failure relative to the enemy in battle is insufficient.

At the political level it is perhaps too easy to assume that local actors understand the conflict in the same way. Conrad Crane, who edited the US Counterinsurgency Field Manual, has argued that this is, however, a common mistake that Westerners have tended to make in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, local politicians at all levels of government simultaneously have a longer and shorter political viewpoint than does the coalition: while they will have to deal with the situation when the coalition leaves, they also need to survive the next political crisis.
⁴

Time matters in interpretation of conflict. To use an analogy from the world of finance, that an investor making a long-term investment does not expect decisive short-term gains is the norm. However, war as a concept tends to associate the battlefield with brutal, finite outcomes whose results are immediately apparent (there are evidently exceptions, but the issue here is one of general public perceptions more than historical reality). The quick victories in the Gulf War, in 2001 in Afghanistan, and in 2003 in Iraq could legitimately promote such attitudes, since the Gulf War was a genuine war, and in their early stages these last two conflicts were genuinely wars too. One problem of extending the idea of war beyond the stage where that concept can legitimately be applied is that the association of battlefield activity with decisive outcomes is
maintained. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan the investment on the battlefield has often proved to be realised on a longer-term basis.

A good example of this was Operation Moshtarak, to secure key parts of Central Helmand that were held by insurgents in 2010, specifically in Marjah and Nad-Ali. The operation was also intended to have effect beyond Central Helmand, in presenting a clear defeat of the Taliban narrative to the Afghan people and wider international audiences. The initial clearance was successful. However, properly securing the area, gaining the people's confidence and establishing a basic level of governance have taken longer. Only around two years later, in late 2011, did it become clear that the insurgency had been marginalised there to the point where the Afghan government could legitimately be said to control those areas: a long-term success.

Counter-insurgency is a long-term investment. The effort has only been properly resourced in Afghanistan from 2009, and since then it has borne fruit. However, by applying a construction of war to the Afghan conflict, a counter-insurgent's successes are often masked because the bandwagon, which according to the traditional paradigm of war only really pays attention during periods of intense battlefield activity, has left by the time the gap between initial costliness and eventual success is closed.

The way in which people's perceptions are influenced by the presence or absence of interpretive structures such as war is essential to understanding contemporary conflict, but is sometimes neglected by strategy. To analyse the evolution of war as a military interpretive structure, we need to examine the relationship between war and strategy, and how this has evolved in the West's contemporary conflicts.

What is war good for? War can provide an existential justification for its participants on an individual level, who may see their participation as an end in itself. Yet in terms of its political actors, typically states, war is usually understood as a political act. What defines ‘political' has been contested. Policy can be defined narrowly as state policy; this suggests a degree of political calculation. Policy can, however, be defined more broadly. Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), for instance, understood policy as war's animating idea.

There is perhaps a temptation, particularly for liberal powers, to see war as an instrument of policy which is used ‘rationally' for legitimate ends. Clausewitz's point is that all war has some kind of rationale (‘policy') because it is a human phenomenon, but that rationale need not be ‘rational' in the liberal sense. Indeed Clausewitz lived at the juncture of the Enlightenment, with its advocacy of reason, and Romanticism, with its penchant for emotional instinct. However one defines policy within the conception of war as a political instrument, the essential point is that war's justification, and thus its basic logic, lies beyond itself. This was famously summarised by Clausewitz: ‘war…is a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means'.
⁵

Two concepts are contained within the term ‘means' in this dictum. The first concept is that war can be understood to be the phenomenon by which the clash of organised violence in time and space is identified. Clausewitz himself understood the essence of war to be the violent clash: ‘essentially war is fighting'.
⁶
Ultimately wars are phenomena which are external to everyone; that is, wars go beyond the boundaries of any individual experience because they are defined by the aggregated activity of a multitude of people. However, what unifies individual experiences into ‘war' is their association with the clash of organised violence. In this sense, while policy intentions of either side will shape war, war has its own independent existence, formed through reciprocal violent clash.

Even within a war, soldiers may feel well removed from ‘the war', when pulled back from the line, where the violence is. There is a striking moment of self-realisation in
Quartered Safe Out Here
(1992) by George MacDonald Fraser, his autobiographical account of his experience as a soldier in the Burma campaign during the Second World War.
⁷
He is told by his Platoon Sergeant that he is the point man of his Platoon, which is at the head of the Battalion, which is itself the point Battalion of the point Division leading the 14
^th
Army on its advance towards Rangoon; at this point the war seems far more immediate to Fraser than it would to a soldier marching in a column to the rear! Indeed for soldiers it is the experience of violence which tends to be the aspect of war most firmly imprinted on the mind.

Even for civilian leaders, who usually do not experience actual violence, the responsibility of the direction of violence through war invests war with a particular significance. While military preparations and diplomatic activity may anticipate a conflict, a war is typically understood
to have ‘started' when troops cross their line of departure in the expectation of combat. The opening stage of the Second World War for Britain illustrates the popular association of war and violence; it has come to be known as the ‘Phoney War' because of the absence of serious violence.

The ‘means' referred to in Clausewitz's dictum that war is an extension of policy by other means can therefore be understood in this first sense as the organised violence itself, typically the use of armed force.

The second sense in which the ‘means' in Clausewitz's dictum can be understood is less obvious, but equally important. It relates to the notion that war itself as a phenomenon is a political instrument, not just the actual use of force within war. For example, British strategy in 1939–40 envisaged a long-haul strategy in which maritime economic blockade would play a central role, which was the policy adopted from the outset. To see the early period of Britain's part in the war as ‘phoney' thus exemplifies both the fixation of associating war with violence on land and the analytical limitations of such a narrow conception of war.
⁸

The limitations of a concept that only recognises war to be the actual use of organised violence—armed force—suggests a requirement for a broader analysis. War as an analytical unit can comprehend long periods of non-violence. The Napoleonic Wars, for example, actually involved relatively long periods of peace. At the time, it was uncertain if that peace would last, but it was not war. Retrospectively to impose the term ‘Napoleonic Wars' suggests a broader analytical understanding, but that was not necessarily available at the time.

War's logic can to an extent operate in times of peace too, typically when there is a possibility of war if violence is threatened: arms races, for example, are driven by an anticipation of violence. Moreover, the political, social and economic dynamics that precede wars, and cause them, continue to operate in war; any analysis which only recognises periods of actual violence as ‘war' will be limited in its conceptual boundaries. The proxy wars of the Cold War, for instance, cannot be understood outside the context of the possibility of an escalation to nuclear war.
⁹
War therefore needs to be understood as an analytical framework as much as an empirical phenomenon. Where to draw the line will vary in each case.