These aren't the ends you're looking for

When I wrote about austerity and how it will affect our definition of victory in conflict, I failed to make an important distinction related to this excellent post by Adam Elkus on R2P and the gap between policy and strategy/tactics. Contrary to how we've described our policy goals these past 10 years, I was trying to argue that our policy goals (ends) will be limited in the future and that winning (as Adam says: accomplishing your political object) can no longer be maximal statements of everything to everyone. Or even worse, interpreted in many ways to substantiate practically any military strategy imaginable. Clarity and focus should best describe our political objects in war since we seem unwilling to pay for much more than that. A change in how we perceive victory has to do with our ends, not in our ways. We are, in other words, going to take a much harder look at the first two questions of the Powell Doctrine before we intervene.

There are a few aspects of this that apply to R2P. First among these is the apparent lack of understanding of the military art and science by the policy proponents of R2P. Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent op-ed in the NY Times is a perfect case in point: she attempts to provide a military solution to end the violence that ostensibly uses minimalist objects. A "no-kill zone" sounds like a limited objective, but militarily it is not. Providing the Free Syrian Army with such materiel as "countersniper and anti-aircraft weapons" gives the impression that we'll give them a few tools and some advice and they can carry the fight. However, countersniper weapons are usually other snipers, tanks, artillery and airstrikes, according to U.S. military doctrine. These are weapons of offense, not defense. And they are weapons most effectively used by an intervening force, not a loose coalition of Syrian anti-regime forces. Also, please read Adam's discussion of stalemate and how it's not an end as well as Robert Caruso on the logistics of intervention and Spencer Ackerman on how Dr. Slaughter's plan could easily spin beyond our intended trajectory.

The point of all of this is that statements of ends cannot be "limited" if the ways and means required to affect them are not. Syria is a very good example that limited ends require ways and means that in reality create a new, maximal ends in order to achieve them. This is not to suggest that policy should be dictated by the military - such a path would be against our traditions, however often it actually happens - but policy should be informed by the military perspective to avoid a disconnect between policy and strategy. CvC himself hits on this point:

If policy is right, that is, if it succeeds in hitting the object, then it can only act with advantage on the War. If this influence of policy causes a divergence from the object, the cause is only to be looked for in a mistaken policy.

It is only when policy promises itself a wrong effect from certain military means and measures, an effect opposed to their nature, that it can exercise a prejudicial effect on War by the course it prescribes. Just as a person in a language with which he is not conversant sometimes says what he does not intend, so policy, when intending right, may often order things which do not tally with its own views.

This has happened times without end, and it shows that a certain knowledge of the nature of War is essential to the management of political intercourse.

Right on, Carl. The problem we're facing is that much of the policy world is calling for action to end the violence against civilians in Syria, yet these individuals - while brilliant in many things - have such little understanding of the mechanisms of war that they are unwittingly calling for things which do not tally with their own views. This is a difficult topic as their calls for action come from an honest place: their own humanity. But a full understanding of the military implications of their policies may require more killing that already exists and will very likely naturally expand their intended ends. This also puts those who better understand the required military strategy in the position of allowing the continued killing of civilians by opposing action. Do not confuse this with inhumanity. It (generally) comes from the calculus that intervening (i.e., waging war) will create a great humanitarian calamity and that the risks/benefits equation for the United States doesn't add up to force change to the status quo.

The situation in Syria is tragic, but there is no limited-ends policy to abate it. The military strategy required to affect limited ends create new, broader ends that are likely unpalatable to a nation that has been at war for 10 consecutive years.

Redefining victory doesn't mean not winning

It appears that I may have made a bit of a bloomer with my last post on how DoD's coming age of austerity will redefine how we think about "victory". The catalyst of that post was an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter from this fall - and this is where I went off the rails a bit - that I complimented. I was and am aware that her piece was actually an argument for more military interventions for R2P or other such operations and that warfare as we've known it is dead based on the lessons observed since 2001. I could not disagree more and we'll talk about that in a just a minute. I approved of the piece because of the idea that we'll be looking to influence others with our military force, not decisively defeat and occupy other nations - I thought the idea of influence vice victory interesting and that we should expect to use limited means towards limited ends in the near future, but not for her reasons and not the interventions she suggests. Anyone who has read my writing here for the past two plus years should know I never buy into the "War and warfare have fundamentally changed!" bunk. The reality is that Dr. Slaughter's piece suggests just that, so I admit I oversold it. There are some good ideas in it though, that I don't think Dr. Slaughter necessarily intended, that lay the foundation for what I see as a flawed thesis. But we shouldn't throw out the good ideas because of the rest.

So what did I mean in my post? Sometimes others say what you mean better than yourself, so please go read Adam Elkus on There is No Substitute for Victory and Part II to that post as well as Dan Trombly at Slouching Towards Columbia. These are excellent posts on what victory actually means and contribute significantly towards this conversation. When I talked about redefining victory, I didn't intend to suggest that we will no longer look to decisively win whatever engagements we embark upon. That would be stupid - as Adam asks correctly, why use force if you don't intend to win? I intended this redefinition, in the next 10 to 15 years marked by limited resources, to show that we will most likely strive towards more limited military goals than we have in the past 10 years. That we'll have to move away from "winning" as a goal in itself and instead need to define what winning means very specifically in each operation or campaign. The former use of the term, such as a candidate or politician saying "We should give the generals what they need to win in Afghanistan" having no idea what the generals' concept of winning in Afghanistan actually is, is vapid and useless and all too prevalent.

This is what needs to stop - winning is not a political or policy objective in itself nor is it a military objective. Winning is what happens when the military succeeds in its operational objectives such as: destroy or defeat this force, protect these people, defend this place, whatever. Winning or victory is simply the military achieving its ends and we need to stop using these terms in lieu of describing what the hell we actually mean - at both the political, policy, strategic and tactical levels. So yes, our military should look to win whenever it's put on the field, no doubts about that but we should instead say what winning means.

The other side to my post was that we need to examine limited objectives for the limited use of military force in the next decade and a half (or so) based on scarce resources. We'll need the type of constrained ends exhibited during the Gulf War, not the ones used during the Iraq War. Scarcity should always drive the focused application of resources. We'll have to narrow the scope of our national security interests. We should hedge our expectations on what we can and want to achieve with military force. Where we may have once put lots of troops on the ground to achieve rather nebulous objectives we should look more to strategic raids and precision strikes for very specific results. We shouldn't be looking to fight and win wars, we should be looking to influence our adversaries with more moderated means. That will mean we need to really specify what our objectives are - what it means to win. I should stress that I foresee this being for a limited time only. The three major reasons we'll return to less limited ends:

1. A better economy means we have more revenue to spend on defense resources;
2. We become engaged in an existential conflict or limited conflict with a near-peer competitor; or
3. Some other conflict pops up that we can't possibly fathom at the moment during which we can't achieve or don't want to use limited objectives and need to escalate.

While we should see a change in what winning means (limited objectives), that change will be short-lived in the grand scheme of history. This does not mean a fundamental change to war - this will be a temporary blip in how we do business. This is where Slaughter and I disagree. At some point in the future we'll engage in a large-scale ground war and probably with convoluted and poorly expressed objectives; to think otherwise is pure fantasy. Until then we should think of (decisively!) influencing those we need to and not defeating them in the sense we've been thinking of these past 10 years. If you're reading this and thinking to yourself "no shit we're going to have less resources and will rely on more limited objectives," I urge you to think about the implications of this as we look to extricate ourselves out of Afghanistan and what "winning" is going to look like there in the midst of a U.S. defense drawdown. Winning there in 2014 is going to require some hyper-contortionism to ISAF's mission statement between now and then. So yeah, we're going to have to redefine victory.

Grand enemies and grand strategy - Part II

Over a month ago I wrote a post asking the question: is a grand enemy necessary for a grand strategy? I had intended to get back to this since about a day after I posted and clarify and change some things, but alas here we are much later than that. In the meantime, Adam Elkus wrote a post on this topic which was followed by Zenpundit. They're both interesting reads, so check them out. I am especially interested by Adam's discussion of aggregating information and Mark's discussions on the impact of "systems" and that grand strategy is driven not by policy, but that it drives the development of policy. I will be drawing on these points later.

I will start this by saying that I worded the original post to ask a more fundamental question than I intended. I did not mean to pose the question so explicitly, but instead was trying (inelegantly) to ask the question: do those that develop grand strategy need to have a grand enemy, or the probability of a grand enemy forming, in order to focus their minds towards strategy development?

As Adam points out, the world is a highly complicated place with infinite data points and nearly as many networks. Without an enemy or adversary, how does a powerful nation mold its international activities to achieve its global ambitions? I don't know, because I'm not sure we've seen it done effectively. Yet. I get, and buy into, offshore balancing, but it is hardly something that permits the creation of coherent grand strategy. One need look no further than U.S. activities in South Asia as an example of incoherence that this type of strategy can lead to. The United States cannot, still, state whether it supports Pakistan or India in their conflict (that seems oh, so important to Afghanistan), whether or not Iran is being helpful or not with regard to Afghanistan (seems to be a bit of columns A and B), or if we prefer the company of the Central Asian states or cooperation of Russia. While the Afghan conflict is the biggest one we have at the moment, it has been a prime candidate for offshore balancing and a dismal failure in execution. The United States has no idea what regional powers to enable to assist itself without pissing off the other powers it may care about on other issues. (Let's face it, Afghanistan isn't the biggest strategic issue the U.S. faces at the moment, even if it is the biggest hot war going). This is one strategic problem that we have been thinking about for 10 years about one country and still haven't a clue on where to begin.

Mark is right that great powers seek to force their will upon rivals and others within a "system" defined by international norms and mores. What to do about Afghanistan is another example on how without a great rival, great powers don't know how to do this. In fact, offshore balancing is working the system - but we still don't know how to because we can't predict or understand 2d, 3d, Nth order effects of a system consisting of the aforementioned infinite data points and networks. We simply can't figure this out; a vestige our now-realized failed attempts at using the mujahideen to our own ends, ignorant of future threats of doing the same. I can't readily say I'm on the Boyd bandwagon (can't say I'm off either, I'm still trying to figure out the "so what" of it all), but if one were, with so many data points OODA loops for offshore balancing would be so numerous and of such short flash-to-bang intervals that the strategist would be overwhelmed by sensory overload.

I'm also with Mark on this business of grand strategy driving policy. But policy drives strategy (sans "grand"). Afghanistan is a strategic fight in my view, not grand. It is a war waged against an enemy that presents no existential threat to the U.S. or even significant threats to the national "interests" put forth in the National Security Strategy (talk about misnomers). It is, however, a case study in the failure of grand strategy development by powers with no real threats to itself. We can't tell up from down or whether we're coming or going. That's not the fault of the strategists - it is the realistic chaos of the world which I feel may be less than enough to focus the activities and expenditure of valuable resources of a powerful state with nebulous ambitions other than its own prosperity.

At this point I will cede that I have not yet made the case that a grand enemy can provide that focus that cuts through the information overload, but that there is a good case that the absence of one does not provide the focus necessary. So let's call this post one of at least a few on this topic, sequels to follow as time and brain waves allow.