During my third tour in Iraq, as a staff officer, I spent the preponderance of my non-working time reading. It was an ideal situation to read if only because there was not much else to do. In my first tour, where we invaded Iraq and moved around quite a bit, with a deplorable mail delivery system, I read whatever I could get my hands on. My second tour in 2005 was more stable, with regard to location stability, and I read quite a bit. But it was really in this last tour that spanned from early 2007 until mid-2008 that I really became a voracious reader based on opportunity and intellectual growth that yearned for more.
I had been a reader from my earliest days, but school seemed to take up much of my reading time until adulthood. My mother works for the public library in my hometown in eastern Pennsylvania, forcing me to spend much of my time among many and varied volumes. In this last tour of note, she was assigned the task of ensuring I had plenty to read (my father, bless him, was tasked with keeping my humidor stocked). I sent my mother lists before and during deployment and received in return large boxes of books, through our markedly improved post. Initially, my reading interests were varied. Already well steeped in the books of my profession - Clausewitz's On War, Jomini's The Art of War, works by Galula and Tranquier, and a seemingly infinite suite of Army doctrine - I took interest in the books of the war of which I was a participant. Michael Gordon's Cobra II and particularly Tom Ricks' Fiasco became influential in my thinking of the war and how I addressed my small part of it. Possibly because of this mono-topical study or possibly in spite of it, I felt I needed to widen my reading (and beyond my exhaustive collection of Hemingway that dominated my fiction shelves).
In my first major package of books of that deployment (thanks, Mum!), I received the last Harry Potter, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kateb, Dickens, Hobbes, Thucydides, Dante, de Tocqueville, Hiaasen, Adam Smith, Arendt, Huxley, Bryson, Isaacson's biography of Einstein, a few non-fiction adventure books (I recommend from these Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy and The Last Expedition by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson), and most prominently Joyce's Ulysses. These were the books I felt necessary to begin a study of the human condition beyond war (except the adventure books, which were wisely the purview of my mother, and the Harry Potter, which I merely enjoyed). Except for the Joyce, which I read every day and still took the entire deployment to finish, this was 6 months of reading material. When this package of knowledge was delivered to me during duty in my brigade's operations center south of Baghdad, another captain on the staff expressed to me, "I love books!" Meanly, I thought, "Of course you do; who doesn't?" At the time, I thought it a stupid thing to say.
In retrospect, I disagree with my moderately younger self and declare that I, too, love books. It is not obvious. Not everyone does. And while I may love books in a different way than our maligned captain (my agape vice her philia, if you will excuse both the probably unnecessary distinction and probable blasphemy), her sentiment is one which I have come to embrace entirely and tirelessly. I do not just love reading, I love books. I love to hold a book in my hands, to feel the binding and the paper, to smell the ink. I love the plates and pictures. I love the font and the layout of the pages, even if they include irregularities (such as my nth-hand copy of Joyce's Dubliners, where the printing is partially smudged throughout the middle third). I suspect that many of you do as well, the military scholar being a peculiar subset of the bibliophile that tends towards bookishness and book collecting, even if said collecting extends beyond the typical cast of characters that have contributed to the art of war and warfare. My personal interactions indicate that you are a well-read and erudite community that reads compulsively on topics for which we are paid to read and topics for which we enjoy and topics we read because we believe that it makes us a better person.
Which is why I am writing this non-security specific post on books to recommend to you two book I have read this year on the topic of book collecting: Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves and Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night. What I love about these books and what I predict you will as well, is that Bonnet and Manguel provide a quasi-philosophy to the condition present in so many of our community that requires us to not just read, but to amass those books we read. To have them on hand. To organize them according to our whims. To thumb through them and scribble in their margins. To place markers in them for quick reference in the future. To display them proudly in the most intimate corners of our homes and offices like the trophies of big game hunters.
Phantoms and The Library provide intellectual rigor to these habits, nay, necessities. Bonnet and Manguel elegantly provide reason to our need to have books and have them just so. Both men are men of letters and consumers of primarily fiction books, but they both show their desire for philosophy and sciences to help them contemplate and understand the world that underpins their fiction. They explore why we collect books, why read: mainly to understand our world. A world in which our existence is so limited and so short that we cannot possibly experience it all. We therefore attempt to experience it through the experiences of others. Books provide this surrogate experience in a very personal and intimate way. Both books explore how our intimate curiosities drive the nature of our own libraries and how the books we collect in our libraries drive the nature of our curiosities. That our libraries are ourselves by other means.
We have written a number of times on these pages on the topic of books, mainly in the vein of reading lists and reviews. Some of these posts have been our most popular posts, indicative of your interest in reading. Even for a profession that values reading (of course, by Huntington's constructs all professions inherently value reading), this post is a bit off the beaten path. But I suspect that many of you who do read these books, or have, will be as touched by them as I was. If only to help you grasp how and why you habitually buy and love these rectangular cuboids of pulped wood waste upon which the human condition itself is imprinted.
As we move into a new year, Ink Spots may move in a more focused direction. I believe that my interactions here will be dominated by book reviews more so than discussions of the day. This is partially due to time available (these books aren't going to read themselves) and partially to what it is that I wish to gain out of this experience. My next post, in 2013, will most likely be a review of Neville Bolt's The Violent Image, a book that is so far excellent, topical for this audience, and timely. Until and beyond then, I hope that you have wonderful things to read. I also hope that you have a very Merry Christmas (if that's your thing) and a very Happy New Year. We here at Ink Spots look forward to talking with you in 2013.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Military reading lists, take 1,000,000
On Monday, John Arquilla published a critique of the U.S. Military Academy's "top ten military classics" – content and title both sourced to Tom Ricks – in which he proposed a "supplement" to the West Point list covering "the unequal struggles that have seen guerrillas, bandits, and commandos waging 'wars of the knife' against empires and nations." Arquilla's piece ran under the ridiculous and desultory sub-hed "Ten books that are better than The Art of War."
As I mentioned on Twitter* this afternoon, the West Point list is unimpeachable. The books that comprise it are so canonical as to be easily identifiable by just the name of the author: Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, Corbett, Mahan, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Delbrück, du Picq, Douhet. They are the very definition of "military classics," spanning thousands of years of the best thinking on strategic theory, the relationship between war and politics, and human factors in war.
The only inclusions that are even remotely controversial are the two I've listed last: Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies is widely misunderstood and unfairly blamed for the offensive à l'outrance and the horrors of the First World War, while Giulio Douhet's The Command of the Air is rather more fairly criticized as the discredited theoretical foundation for strategic bombing—the paradoxically-titled, empirically barren, and almost wholly speculative warfighting doctrine in which bombing civilians produces decisive strategic effect.
But du Picq was (with Clausewitz) among the first modern military analysts to grapple with the reality that war and battle are fundamentally human endeavors, and to try to develop doctrinal concepts that were based solidly on a consideration of the fighting man's morale, mindset, and natural aversion to danger. (In this way he anticipated the later work of men like S.L.A. Marshall and Dave Grossman.) The real du Picq is almost unrecognizable in Arquilla's caricature:
More than anything else, though, du Picq's importance can be best summed up by Michael Howard's poignant observation:
Douhet is yet more controversial, largely because he is more well-known. The original airpower theorist is easy to criticize. He wrote at a time when the air weapon was novel, when some believed effective countermeasures in three-dimensional space were an impossibility. We should also remember how his contemporaries had been chastened by the destruction of the Great War, and it was widely held that mass armies, modern weapons, and restricted mobility had rendered landpower incapable of strategic decision. Douhet's theory of war – which made no distinction between combatant and civilian and held that overwhelming firepower concentrated on the sources of the enemy's moral and material power could achieve rapid, decisive effects – seems both more plausible and more moral through the lens of 1921. Indeed, David MacIsaac reminds us that Douhet's significance "resides less in his originality than in his being the first to pull together, in one place and in a structured order, ideas widely shared at the time" (MMS, p. 631).
But efficacy aside, the lasting influence of Douhet's ideas is enough to merit his inclusion among the "classics." The consensus view may hold that strategic bombing is theoretically implausible and empirically fraudulent, but the original airpower theorists have at the very least an extremely prominent thumbprint on the history of Air Force doctrine and concepts. While the U.S. air arm eventually moved away from Douhetian bomber-centric doctrine and toward the "anything that flies" conception of airpower elaborated by Billy Mitchell (MMS, p. 635), strategic bombing shares with modern concepts like rapid decisive operations and "strategic paralysis" an interest in identifying and targeting "critical nodes" on which the enemy's entire war effort rests:
Having dutifully defended the inclusion of two "classics" Arquilla did not directly attack, I'll reveal the ultimate irony of his complaint that the USMA list is unduly focused on "the 'horizontal' dynamic of clashes of roughly equal great powers armed with the most advanced weapons" (as if this sounds quite like what Corbett was concerned with, or Sun Tzu or Clausewitz!): he didn't look at the whole list.
That's right, the "Top Ten Military Classics" are the first ten volumes listed... on the Officer's Professional Reading Guide Top 100 (auto-downloading .doc) issued by the West Point history department. Among the remaining 90 we find Asprey on guerillas, Galula on counterinsurgency, Linn on the pacification of the Phillipines, Bowden on Somalia, Bellavia and Fick and Junger on the post-9/11 wars, Herrington on the Vietcong and Moore and Galloway on the NVA, Grimsley on the Union Army and Southern civilians and Royster on Sherman and Sheridan. And Bernard Fall, Alistair Horne, Lester Grau, and Dexter Filkins. And Larteguy. And Marlantes. And O'Brien.
And some dude named Mao...?
(Oh yeah, and even Anton sodding Myrer.)
*Thanks to Kelsey Atherton for collecting those tweets and creating the Storify page I've linked above.
As I mentioned on Twitter* this afternoon, the West Point list is unimpeachable. The books that comprise it are so canonical as to be easily identifiable by just the name of the author: Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, Corbett, Mahan, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Delbrück, du Picq, Douhet. They are the very definition of "military classics," spanning thousands of years of the best thinking on strategic theory, the relationship between war and politics, and human factors in war.
The only inclusions that are even remotely controversial are the two I've listed last: Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies is widely misunderstood and unfairly blamed for the offensive à l'outrance and the horrors of the First World War, while Giulio Douhet's The Command of the Air is rather more fairly criticized as the discredited theoretical foundation for strategic bombing—the paradoxically-titled, empirically barren, and almost wholly speculative warfighting doctrine in which bombing civilians produces decisive strategic effect.
But du Picq was (with Clausewitz) among the first modern military analysts to grapple with the reality that war and battle are fundamentally human endeavors, and to try to develop doctrinal concepts that were based solidly on a consideration of the fighting man's morale, mindset, and natural aversion to danger. (In this way he anticipated the later work of men like S.L.A. Marshall and Dave Grossman.) The real du Picq is almost unrecognizable in Arquilla's caricature:
For a more operationally oriented study of land battles, West Point chose Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies. This is a curious choice. Col. du Picq was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, but his belief that good morale could overcome concentrated firepower animated French strategic thought up to and during World War I—with near-catastrophic results.This seems almost certainly to be an example of judging a book by its cover, as Battle Studies is hardly an "operationally oriented study of land battles." (It's instructive to note that a better translation of the title, Etudes sur le combat, would be something more like "studies on fighting" or "studies in combat"; the book is most definitely not a catalog of battles.) While historical cases are obviously included, the volume is far more accurately read as a meditation on the influence of changing technology and the evolving character of warfare on the army's raw materials: the men who fight and die. The very first paragraph of the book reads like this:
Battle is the final objective of armies and man is the fundamental instrument in battle. Nothing can be wisely prescribed in an army—its personnel, organization, discipline and tactics, things which are connected like the fingers of a hand—without exact knowledge of the fundamental instrument, man, and his state of mind, his morale, at the instant of combat.And what of du Picq's juxtaposition of the ancient combatant's mindset with the soldier of his own era?
But let us look at man himself in ancient combat and in modern. In ancient combat:—I am strong, apt, vigorous, trained, full of calmness, presence of mind; I have good offensive and defensive weapons and trustworthy companions of long standing. They do not let me be overwhelmed without aiding me. I with them, they with me, we are invincible, even invulnerable. We have fought twenty battles and not one of us remained on the field. It is necessary to support each other in time; we see it clearly; we are quick to replace ourselves, to put a fresh combatant in front of a fatigued adversary. We are the legions of Marius, fifty thousand who have held out against the furious avalanches of the Cimbri. We have killed one hundred and forty thousand, taken prisoner sixty thousand, while losing but two or three hundred of our inexperienced soldiers.
To-day, as strong, firm, trained, and courageous as I am, I can never say: I shall return. I have no longer to do with men, whom I do not fear, I have to do with fate in the form of iron and lead. Death is in the air, invisible and blind, whispering, whistling. As brave, good, trustworthy, and devoted as my companions may be, they do not shield me. Only,—and this is abstract and less immediately intelligible to all than the material support of ancient combat,—only I imagine that the more numerous we are who run a dangerous risk, the greater is the chance for each to escape therefrom.Does this man sound like one who believed that "good morale could overcome concentrated firepower"—this man who argued that "to insure success in the rude test of conflict, it is not sufficient to have a mass composed of valiant men," but that those men must have "good arms" and "methods of fighting suitable to these arms and those of the enemy and which do not overtax the physical and moral forces of man"? Arquilla's evident unfamiliarity with this text underlines its case for inclusion.
More than anything else, though, du Picq's importance can be best summed up by Michael Howard's poignant observation:
La solidarité n'à plus la sanction d'une surveillance mutuelle: that has been the problem of morale on the battlefield ever since (MMS, p. 513).The French is a direct quotation from Etudes: "cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation." Dispersion – necessary for survival in the face of fearsome modern weapons – challenges a man's courage, and cohesion through confidence in mutual support is the only way to bolster it. Howard, writing in 1984, recognized the endurance of this challenge.
Douhet is yet more controversial, largely because he is more well-known. The original airpower theorist is easy to criticize. He wrote at a time when the air weapon was novel, when some believed effective countermeasures in three-dimensional space were an impossibility. We should also remember how his contemporaries had been chastened by the destruction of the Great War, and it was widely held that mass armies, modern weapons, and restricted mobility had rendered landpower incapable of strategic decision. Douhet's theory of war – which made no distinction between combatant and civilian and held that overwhelming firepower concentrated on the sources of the enemy's moral and material power could achieve rapid, decisive effects – seems both more plausible and more moral through the lens of 1921. Indeed, David MacIsaac reminds us that Douhet's significance "resides less in his originality than in his being the first to pull together, in one place and in a structured order, ideas widely shared at the time" (MMS, p. 631).
But efficacy aside, the lasting influence of Douhet's ideas is enough to merit his inclusion among the "classics." The consensus view may hold that strategic bombing is theoretically implausible and empirically fraudulent, but the original airpower theorists have at the very least an extremely prominent thumbprint on the history of Air Force doctrine and concepts. While the U.S. air arm eventually moved away from Douhetian bomber-centric doctrine and toward the "anything that flies" conception of airpower elaborated by Billy Mitchell (MMS, p. 635), strategic bombing shares with modern concepts like rapid decisive operations and "strategic paralysis" an interest in identifying and targeting "critical nodes" on which the enemy's entire war effort rests:
Perhaps because they found it impossible to envisage bomber fleets of the size implied by Douhet, some of the instructors [at the Army Air Corps Tactical School] began to wonder whether it might be possible, through careful, scientific study of a nation's industry, to single out particular targets whose destruction would of itself bring to a halt an entire industry or series of industries. If a number of such 'bottleneck' targets could be identified and destroyed, it might be possible, with a relatively small force, to bring an enemy's war production to a halt with almost surgical precision, thereby rendering the enemy incapable of further resistance (MMS, p. 634).One need only reference the ideas of Liddell Hart, Fuller, Leonhard, Boyd, Rumsfeld, Naveh, et al to see why such plainly fantastical thinking is still noteworthy in the modern day. Whether Douhet was right or wrong – and I do feel quite certain that he was wrong – the unfortunate lasting influence of his ideas about strategic directness through the indirect application of violence means those ideas simply cannot be willfully ignored.
Having dutifully defended the inclusion of two "classics" Arquilla did not directly attack, I'll reveal the ultimate irony of his complaint that the USMA list is unduly focused on "the 'horizontal' dynamic of clashes of roughly equal great powers armed with the most advanced weapons" (as if this sounds quite like what Corbett was concerned with, or Sun Tzu or Clausewitz!): he didn't look at the whole list.
That's right, the "Top Ten Military Classics" are the first ten volumes listed... on the Officer's Professional Reading Guide Top 100 (auto-downloading .doc) issued by the West Point history department. Among the remaining 90 we find Asprey on guerillas, Galula on counterinsurgency, Linn on the pacification of the Phillipines, Bowden on Somalia, Bellavia and Fick and Junger on the post-9/11 wars, Herrington on the Vietcong and Moore and Galloway on the NVA, Grimsley on the Union Army and Southern civilians and Royster on Sherman and Sheridan. And Bernard Fall, Alistair Horne, Lester Grau, and Dexter Filkins. And Larteguy. And Marlantes. And O'Brien.
And some dude named Mao...?
(Oh yeah, and even Anton sodding Myrer.)
*Thanks to Kelsey Atherton for collecting those tweets and creating the Storify page I've linked above.
Monday, April 9, 2012
The real threat of hybrid conflict
Talk to ten different military analysts about the meaning of the term "hybrid war," and you'll probably get 20 different answers. Some folks like to talk about hybrid threats, others about hybrid warfare; some talk up hybrid adversaries, and still others worry about hybrid conflict. Usually what they're getting at falls into the grey area between irregular warfare conducted by poorly-armed non-state militants and the purportedly more traditional, "conventional" conflict waged by high-tech, capital-intensive state militaries. In the hybrid future, we're told, irregular adversaries will employ high-tech weapons while sophisticated state enemies are likely to adopt guerilla-style tactics—avoiding American strengths while maximizing their own.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
The driver of the hybrid threat, for Johnson, is the spread of long-range weapons: anti-tank guided missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons (called "man-portable air defense systems," or MANPADS), even relatively unsophisticated long-range rockets like those used by Hezbollah in 2006. When Israeli airstrikes alone couldn't find and destroy the well-hidden rocket launchers, Israel sent in ground troops, only to be bloodied by unexpectedly fierce resistance.Here we see the bankruptcy of the hybrid idea as a tactical construct laid bare: what's just been described as "the driver of the hybrid threat" is in fact the driver of nearly all tactical adaptation over the last century or so: the problem of the offensive in the face of overwhelming firepower—increasing weapons range and rate of fire, the deepening of the battlefield, and the consequent limitations on tactical and operational maneuver.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
So how can the US prepare for hybrid threats? In part by going back to the future, said Johnson, whose books include a history of how the US learned to use tanks and airpower in World War II. "It is a problem that can't be solved by a single service," he said. The Air Force and Army today work together more closely than ever before in providing air support to ground troops in Afghanistan, but air-ground cooperation has gotten good in past conflicts as well, only to break down post-war when bureaucratic and budgetary battles between the services start to matter more. Hybrid threats will impose serious limits on helicopter operations – as the Soviets found out in Afghanistan after the CIA provided the mujahideen with Stinger missiles – so support from higher, faster, and harder-to-hit fixed-wing aircraft will be essential. Conversely, the Air Force will need the ground troops to root out hybrid enemies from their hiding places, he argued, just as the Israeli Air Force proved unable to spot Hezbollah's rocket launchers from overhead. "Ground maneuver is the only thing that will make him visible because he's hiding from everything overhead," said Johnson.The challenge of so-called hybrid war is that it's reminded us of the need to consider these two questions together: firepower and maneuver, attack and defense, target identification and force protection. The excerpt above is like a billboard for Biddle's modern system (miraculously, Johnson doesn't cite Military Power in his recent study, though he does take lessons from a recent monograph Biddle co-authored about the Lebanon war): artillery and air power are used in close combination with ground forces to pin down the enemy, force him to keep his head down and allow friendly ground forces to maneuver on his position. But how to separate him from the population, to force him to come out and fight? Well-trained infantry must be capable of meeting the enemy in his sanctuaries – whether forests or mountains or urban areas – to identify, isolate, and fix him for destruction. These are the fundamentals of combined-arms land warfare, as useful for Americans in 2018 as for Germans in 1918.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
strong states select themselves into armed conflicts only when their pre-war estimate of the cost of attaining their political objectives through the use of force falls below the threshold of their tolerance for costs. The more the actual costs of victory exceed a state's prewar expectations, the greater the risk that it will be pushed beyond its cost-tolerance threshold and forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces before it attains its war aims. (497)She goes on to make a compelling case about the difference between wars of coercion and wars of destruction, but that's less germane to our point here. What I'm getting at is this: because we don't expect irregular adversaries to fight in conventional ways and with conventional weapons, we're not prepared for the sort of casualties that are normally associated even with wildly successful conventional ground combat. (This expectation is exaggerated yet further by the experiences of Desert Storm and OIF I, when U.S. forces inflicted historically unprecedented casualty ratios on conventional enemies due to a remarkable confluence of American technological edge, extraordinarily poor Iraqi force employment, and good fortune. Our recent opponents have been irregulars who mostly lack the capacity to engage our forces using the modern system and regulars who proved unwilling or incapable of doing so.) In short, we have forgotten that land warfare has significant costs in men and materiel, even when waged successfully.
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Let's just be up front with each other: this is a really long rant about strategy
PRE-CLAIMER: Seriously, just don't even try. tl;dr
I've been thinking quite a lot about Jason's post from Monday night, though I feel reasonably confident that I still don't understand it completely. I've decided to carry the conversation forward with a post of my own rather than simply taking it up the subject in the comment thread, both because I'm hoping (in vain?) it will spur me to return to posting and because it gives me the opportunity to get into a couple of loosely-related ideas I've been kicking around for some time now.
Having read through Jason's post three or four times, I'm still trying to put my finger on just what exactly the problem is that he describes. I take it that he basically agrees with Mark Safranski, whose diagnosis seems reasonably straightforward to me. Here's how I read it: in a democratic society, decision-makers will often select policy options that are reflective of an approval-seeking need to do something—to signal a certain position or preference to a domestic audience rather than to accomplish a considered aim and effect a new reality. This can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the simple reason that the decision-maker's calculus is largely indifferent to outcomes: his incentive structure rewards superficially correct action more than it does substantively beneficial results.
If this isn't what Mark meant to say, then I'll stand corrected. But if it is, then I agree with him.
But here's the part where I get confused: even if civilian policymakers are prone to this sort of error (and I agree that they are), and even if, as Jason writes, "our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process" (and I agree that it is)... I still don't understand how or why those two conditions should be causally related. Let me put it this way: the fact that our campaign planning in Afghanistan is process-focused seems to me largely disconnected from the fact that our politicians care more about doing right-looking things than right-ending things, because campaign plans and operational concepts aren't the purview of those politicians.
I'm willing to concede that the line between civilian and military reponsibilities in strategy formation and the associated operational planning is a blurry and unstable one, and that what I've laid out as the normative standard isn't always the way things play out in reality. You certainly shouldn't take anything I've written above as an exculpatory argument for our elected officials. But more on this a bit later.
As for our man Carl: Jason's choice of Clausewitz quote is simultaneously interesting and surprising to me. Committed students of the sage will recognize it from perhaps the most remarked-upon pages of On War: Book Eight, Chapter 6B. (If it were an episode of "Friends," they'd call it The One With the Politics By Other Means.) The language Jason excerpted is from the 19th-century Graham translation; just for the purpose of clarity, let's look at the somewhat more fluent Paret/Howard version:
The "high degree of uncertainty" that Clausewitz concedes is introduced "into the whole business" is produced by divergence between the things we do in war and the things they are meant to achieve. In limited war, our actions are conceived as violent but discrete and purposive acts of policy, while as war moves toward its absolute form our actions are increasingly divorced from discrete political objectives short of the destruction of our enemy. To put it simply, shit gets crazy in war.
But "policy converts the overwhelmingly destructive element of war into a mere instrument," Clausewitz continues.
In the Kings of War post that Jason referenced, Kenneth Payne talks about what behavioral economists and psychologists call "choice-supportive bias"—our tendency to feel a preference more strongly after we've made a choice in its favor than we did when considering the whole range of options. (Payne incorrectly labels this as the "endowment effect," which describes a different cognitive bias – our tendency to value more highly those things that we already possess and stand to lose than those things we might gain – that's closely related to loss-aversion, but that small error is not germane to his point.)
What I take from Payne's brief post is that modern discoveries in behavioral psychology and neuroscience are highlighting just exactly how difficult it is for individuals to behave "rationally," which has a complicating effect on strategy—the method we use to plan and undertake purposive action to achieve our goals. I very much agree with this, but I suppose it's worth including a reminder that while the science may be new, the behaviors that it observes and seeks to explain are not. Strategy has always been complicated by our flawed rationality; it's only now that we're beginning to achieve a more granular understanding of the biases impacting it than the somewhat more homespun generalizations Clausewitz offered on the subject.
That said, I very much disagree with what seems to be Payne's prescription: that we should give up on efforts at "balancing ends ways and means, or even discerning them," and instead conceive of strategy as a sort of elevated form of reactive planning.
The problem of modern strategy isn't that we make so many miscalculations—that's to be expected, and it's the very reason that strategy formation and adaptive planning are meant to be iterative processes. The main issue is that the so-called "strategy bridge" is still absent: we are failing to adequately specify – even to ourselves! – how successful operations will create the political effects we seek. When we pretend to do so, we speak in buzzwords, cliches, and generalities.
This is a failing on both sides of the political-military divide. Our elected leaders are responsible for ensuring that we undertake wars that have meaning—wars that can plausibly achieve the objectives set out in policy. And our uniformed leaders must ensure that those meaningful wars are executed sensibly, in a manner that maps military action to intended effect—whether that's the wholesale destruction of the enemy, conquering and holding a sliver of territory, deterring an adversarial regime, or whatever. I feel like I say this a lot, but this is the essence of strategy: developing a theory of victory, a reasonable concept of how the actions you take with the resources at your disposal can combine to achieve the objectives you seek.
The "strategy bridge" is the causal, conceptual link between the accomplishment of military objectives and the creation of political effects, something that is all too often missing in today's strategic thought. We fill that chasm only with bromides, wishful thinking, and specious "plans," then wonder why no one can walk across.
I suppose this is where I come to my issue with Jason's post, which I understand to be saying that the main problem with our strategy in Afghanistan is a failure to recognize that we've met our initial objectives.
The problem in Afghanistan isn't strategy—it's policy. (The more I think about it, the more Jason seems to agree.)
Even if U.S. military operations over, say, a five-year period actually did achieve what the president hoped to – if al-Qaeda were effectively denied a safe haven in Afghanistan for so long as U.S. forces actively operated there; if the Taliban were held off or even decisively defeated over that time period; and if the GIRoA and ANSF were made capable and effective in the maintenance of the country's own internal security – there simply wasn't any plausible explanation presented for how the creation of those conditions would conclusively produce the end states we desired: al-Qaeda's disruption, dismantling, and defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the prevention of its return to either country in the future.
The only conceivable justification for our continued refusal to do this is that winning just isn't all that important to us. And so we've come full-circle back to what Mark Safranski wrote: "the net result becomes burning money and soldiers' lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." As long as we're doing something, maybe something good will happen. The same logic animates a great deal of the anti-authoritarian interventionist sentiment we've seen in recent months, but that's a whole separate conversation.
I read a paper recently with the extremely lede-burying title, "The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam," by Jonathan Caverley. The thesis can be boiled down to this: those who argue that the military lost Vietnam through the application of flawed doctrine generally fail to recognize that the adoption of militarily sub-optimal courses of action was in fact a result of a rational policy determination by the country's political leadership.
Caverley oversimplifies quite a bit in his assumptions about optimal strategy, but the basic idea is that because the average voter cared far less about the financial cost of war than about the human cost (including not only casualties, but the possible expansion of the draft, etc.), politicians were incentivized to "substitute capital for labor"; i.e. to fight a technology-intensive style of war that was sensitive to the electorate's preference for limiting human costs, even while it was more expensive and less militarily effective. In short, politicians cared less about losing the war than they did about doing what the average voter seemed to want. (Which is, of corse, sort of what democracy is about.) I have some significant problems with the paper and am not sure the conclusions are all that sturdy, but it's an interesting hypothesis.
It's even more interesting if you read it in tandem with Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," which is one of the most thought-provoking papers I've read in a really, really long time. Sullivan argues that the primary determinant of success for powerful states in small wars is the degree to which prewar expectations about the cost of victory match with reality: a state is most likely to pack up and quit when a war proves more difficult than expected. This often happens with limited wars because of the difficulty of accurately assessing the probability of victory (and associated casualties, duration, etc.) when accomplishment of war aims depends on concessions or lack of resolve on the part of the enemy rather than his wholesale defeat—in short, it's easier to predict how difficult it will be to destroy an army and conquer a state than to accurately project how many sorties are required to compel the enemy to make different political choices. I'm not doing the paper justice, and you ought to read it yourself.
What the hell does any of this have to do with what we were talking about earlier?, you're wondering. Surely I've just gone off on some stream-of-consciousness rant, spilling all the lost blog posts of the last two months into one text box. Well, there's a little bit of that. But try this one on for size: what Sullivan's and Caverley's papers both show is that powerful states often engage in wars that are not particularly important either to the government or to the electorate, and that they often wage them ineffectively and quit early as a result. In other words, states quite literally waste lives, money, and materiel on impulsive trifles, undertakings designed to send a message or show hardness or keep a campaign promise or give the appearance of doing the right thing.
And all of these things are perfectly acceptable uses of military force, perfectly acceptable instrumentalizations of policy... if you can show how the means you've chosen have even the faintest hope of accomplishing those political ends! I'm not at all suggesting that violence should only be used to conquer territory, or to destroy the enemy—not at all. What I am suggesting is that we cease to use military force in an unconsidered fashion. This isn't even an argument for choosing the right wars, but for figuring out whether the things we can do in war have any hope of creating meaning from war. If not, then we really are wasting lives—and those of us who fancy ourselves strategists are wasting our own. It's our job to build the damned bridge.
P.S. I am completely in love with the Kelly-Brennan monograph (pdf) MK mentioned in his comment on Jason's post—I have been since I first read it. I had hoped to discuss it here, but let's be serious: you can't take any more of this right now.
I've been thinking quite a lot about Jason's post from Monday night, though I feel reasonably confident that I still don't understand it completely. I've decided to carry the conversation forward with a post of my own rather than simply taking it up the subject in the comment thread, both because I'm hoping (in vain?) it will spur me to return to posting and because it gives me the opportunity to get into a couple of loosely-related ideas I've been kicking around for some time now.
Having read through Jason's post three or four times, I'm still trying to put my finger on just what exactly the problem is that he describes. I take it that he basically agrees with Mark Safranski, whose diagnosis seems reasonably straightforward to me. Here's how I read it: in a democratic society, decision-makers will often select policy options that are reflective of an approval-seeking need to do something—to signal a certain position or preference to a domestic audience rather than to accomplish a considered aim and effect a new reality. This can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the simple reason that the decision-maker's calculus is largely indifferent to outcomes: his incentive structure rewards superficially correct action more than it does substantively beneficial results.
If this isn't what Mark meant to say, then I'll stand corrected. But if it is, then I agree with him.
But here's the part where I get confused: even if civilian policymakers are prone to this sort of error (and I agree that they are), and even if, as Jason writes, "our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process" (and I agree that it is)... I still don't understand how or why those two conditions should be causally related. Let me put it this way: the fact that our campaign planning in Afghanistan is process-focused seems to me largely disconnected from the fact that our politicians care more about doing right-looking things than right-ending things, because campaign plans and operational concepts aren't the purview of those politicians.
I'm willing to concede that the line between civilian and military reponsibilities in strategy formation and the associated operational planning is a blurry and unstable one, and that what I've laid out as the normative standard isn't always the way things play out in reality. You certainly shouldn't take anything I've written above as an exculpatory argument for our elected officials. But more on this a bit later.
As for our man Carl: Jason's choice of Clausewitz quote is simultaneously interesting and surprising to me. Committed students of the sage will recognize it from perhaps the most remarked-upon pages of On War: Book Eight, Chapter 6B. (If it were an episode of "Friends," they'd call it The One With the Politics By Other Means.) The language Jason excerpted is from the 19th-century Graham translation; just for the purpose of clarity, let's look at the somewhat more fluent Paret/Howard version:
In making use of war, policy evades all rigorous conclusions proceeding from the nature of war, bothers little about ultimate possibilities, and concerns itself only with immediate probabilities. Although this introduces a high degree of uncertainty into the whole business, turning it into a kind of game, each government is confident that it can outdo its opponent in skill and acumen. (606)This is a pretty difficult passage (especially as I present it here, mostly out of context) but I take it to mean that governments are little interested in ruminations on war's escalatory momentum in the direction of its absolute form, but rather in how violence may be used to achieve concrete political goals. But the paradoxical reality is that addition of violence to politics – violence that is fueled in part by hatred and enmity, violence that is fundamental to war's nature and sets it off as distinct from all other human activity – actually re-shapes the character of the political contest. War's essential violence pressures the political contest to take on the character of a duel or a sporting event; without the harness of policy, war risks becoming a self-contained competition conducted according to its own rules, one where victory is not the mere accomplishment of political objectives but rather a revision of the relationship between the two competitors such that the victor is free to enact his preferences.
The "high degree of uncertainty" that Clausewitz concedes is introduced "into the whole business" is produced by divergence between the things we do in war and the things they are meant to achieve. In limited war, our actions are conceived as violent but discrete and purposive acts of policy, while as war moves toward its absolute form our actions are increasingly divorced from discrete political objectives short of the destruction of our enemy. To put it simply, shit gets crazy in war.
But "policy converts the overwhelmingly destructive element of war into a mere instrument," Clausewitz continues.
It changes the terrible battle-sword that a man needs both hands and his entire strength to wield, and with which he strikes home once and no more, into a light, handy rapier—sometimes just a foil for the exchange of thrusts, feints and parries. (606)Of course, for the military instrument to be used effectively, its employment must be strategic—that is to say, it must be reasoned.
In the Kings of War post that Jason referenced, Kenneth Payne talks about what behavioral economists and psychologists call "choice-supportive bias"—our tendency to feel a preference more strongly after we've made a choice in its favor than we did when considering the whole range of options. (Payne incorrectly labels this as the "endowment effect," which describes a different cognitive bias – our tendency to value more highly those things that we already possess and stand to lose than those things we might gain – that's closely related to loss-aversion, but that small error is not germane to his point.)
Preferences are not revealed by choices, so much as created by them. That's particularly true if the choice we make is emotionally engaging, as war is—passionately so, ofttimes.I feel a bit like a broken record, but Clausewitz talked about this, too: war's violent nature and appeal to primal hatred and enmity give it a tendency to escalate toward the absolute, to break free of its harness to policy, to unbalance "the remarkable trinity" that ensures it is purposive and endows it with meaning.
What I take from Payne's brief post is that modern discoveries in behavioral psychology and neuroscience are highlighting just exactly how difficult it is for individuals to behave "rationally," which has a complicating effect on strategy—the method we use to plan and undertake purposive action to achieve our goals. I very much agree with this, but I suppose it's worth including a reminder that while the science may be new, the behaviors that it observes and seeks to explain are not. Strategy has always been complicated by our flawed rationality; it's only now that we're beginning to achieve a more granular understanding of the biases impacting it than the somewhat more homespun generalizations Clausewitz offered on the subject.
That said, I very much disagree with what seems to be Payne's prescription: that we should give up on efforts at "balancing ends ways and means, or even discerning them," and instead conceive of strategy as a sort of elevated form of reactive planning.
Instead it's perhaps better to think about strategy in its less 'grand strategic' sense—and instead to conceptualise it as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies. Stop trying to anticipate the future so much, because, as Philip Tetlock has shown, we are rather bad at it.Stipulated! But this form of "strategy" is an exercise in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, conceding initiative to our enemies and foregoing even the possibility of imposing our own preferences on the environment. Strategic thinking will not always be effective, even when the inputs are perceived correctly. But it beats the alternative, doesn't it? And how does Payne's model escape the very same pitfalls of bounded rationality? Even if we "conceptualise [strategy] as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies," are we not dogged by the same cognitive biases and flawed rationality that impinge on our ability to plan over the longer term?
The problem of modern strategy isn't that we make so many miscalculations—that's to be expected, and it's the very reason that strategy formation and adaptive planning are meant to be iterative processes. The main issue is that the so-called "strategy bridge" is still absent: we are failing to adequately specify – even to ourselves! – how successful operations will create the political effects we seek. When we pretend to do so, we speak in buzzwords, cliches, and generalities.
This is a failing on both sides of the political-military divide. Our elected leaders are responsible for ensuring that we undertake wars that have meaning—wars that can plausibly achieve the objectives set out in policy. And our uniformed leaders must ensure that those meaningful wars are executed sensibly, in a manner that maps military action to intended effect—whether that's the wholesale destruction of the enemy, conquering and holding a sliver of territory, deterring an adversarial regime, or whatever. I feel like I say this a lot, but this is the essence of strategy: developing a theory of victory, a reasonable concept of how the actions you take with the resources at your disposal can combine to achieve the objectives you seek.
The "strategy bridge" is the causal, conceptual link between the accomplishment of military objectives and the creation of political effects, something that is all too often missing in today's strategic thought. We fill that chasm only with bromides, wishful thinking, and specious "plans," then wonder why no one can walk across.
I suppose this is where I come to my issue with Jason's post, which I understand to be saying that the main problem with our strategy in Afghanistan is a failure to recognize that we've met our initial objectives.
We're still fighting a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though they're no longer there because the policy has not adapted. So the military has experimented with various ways (as the means have been dominated by policy-makers) to achieve ends that have effectively been achieved. But we can't say that we've won because there is still so much violence in Afghanistan, so we toil longer and talk about 'winning'—and yet the original policy's ends still have not changed.The policy objective in Afghanistan is, and presumably always has been, the one the president identified at the completion of the Af-Pak strategy review in March of 2009: "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." He further articulated the component parts of that overall objective several months later in the West Point speech announcing the escalation:
To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take the lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.Looking at those intermediate objectives and at the overall policy goal, isn't it obvious that the crippling and fundamental issue has nothing to do with a failure to revise ends in line with progress and change in conditions and everything to do with the government's determination to pursue political aims that were almost certainly unachievable and inaccessible to military action?
The problem in Afghanistan isn't strategy—it's policy. (The more I think about it, the more Jason seems to agree.)
Even if U.S. military operations over, say, a five-year period actually did achieve what the president hoped to – if al-Qaeda were effectively denied a safe haven in Afghanistan for so long as U.S. forces actively operated there; if the Taliban were held off or even decisively defeated over that time period; and if the GIRoA and ANSF were made capable and effective in the maintenance of the country's own internal security – there simply wasn't any plausible explanation presented for how the creation of those conditions would conclusively produce the end states we desired: al-Qaeda's disruption, dismantling, and defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the prevention of its return to either country in the future.
The only conceivable justification for our continued refusal to do this is that winning just isn't all that important to us. And so we've come full-circle back to what Mark Safranski wrote: "the net result becomes burning money and soldiers' lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." As long as we're doing something, maybe something good will happen. The same logic animates a great deal of the anti-authoritarian interventionist sentiment we've seen in recent months, but that's a whole separate conversation.
I read a paper recently with the extremely lede-burying title, "The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam," by Jonathan Caverley. The thesis can be boiled down to this: those who argue that the military lost Vietnam through the application of flawed doctrine generally fail to recognize that the adoption of militarily sub-optimal courses of action was in fact a result of a rational policy determination by the country's political leadership.
Caverley oversimplifies quite a bit in his assumptions about optimal strategy, but the basic idea is that because the average voter cared far less about the financial cost of war than about the human cost (including not only casualties, but the possible expansion of the draft, etc.), politicians were incentivized to "substitute capital for labor"; i.e. to fight a technology-intensive style of war that was sensitive to the electorate's preference for limiting human costs, even while it was more expensive and less militarily effective. In short, politicians cared less about losing the war than they did about doing what the average voter seemed to want. (Which is, of corse, sort of what democracy is about.) I have some significant problems with the paper and am not sure the conclusions are all that sturdy, but it's an interesting hypothesis.
It's even more interesting if you read it in tandem with Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," which is one of the most thought-provoking papers I've read in a really, really long time. Sullivan argues that the primary determinant of success for powerful states in small wars is the degree to which prewar expectations about the cost of victory match with reality: a state is most likely to pack up and quit when a war proves more difficult than expected. This often happens with limited wars because of the difficulty of accurately assessing the probability of victory (and associated casualties, duration, etc.) when accomplishment of war aims depends on concessions or lack of resolve on the part of the enemy rather than his wholesale defeat—in short, it's easier to predict how difficult it will be to destroy an army and conquer a state than to accurately project how many sorties are required to compel the enemy to make different political choices. I'm not doing the paper justice, and you ought to read it yourself.
What the hell does any of this have to do with what we were talking about earlier?, you're wondering. Surely I've just gone off on some stream-of-consciousness rant, spilling all the lost blog posts of the last two months into one text box. Well, there's a little bit of that. But try this one on for size: what Sullivan's and Caverley's papers both show is that powerful states often engage in wars that are not particularly important either to the government or to the electorate, and that they often wage them ineffectively and quit early as a result. In other words, states quite literally waste lives, money, and materiel on impulsive trifles, undertakings designed to send a message or show hardness or keep a campaign promise or give the appearance of doing the right thing.
And all of these things are perfectly acceptable uses of military force, perfectly acceptable instrumentalizations of policy... if you can show how the means you've chosen have even the faintest hope of accomplishing those political ends! I'm not at all suggesting that violence should only be used to conquer territory, or to destroy the enemy—not at all. What I am suggesting is that we cease to use military force in an unconsidered fashion. This isn't even an argument for choosing the right wars, but for figuring out whether the things we can do in war have any hope of creating meaning from war. If not, then we really are wasting lives—and those of us who fancy ourselves strategists are wasting our own. It's our job to build the damned bridge.
P.S. I am completely in love with the Kelly-Brennan monograph (pdf) MK mentioned in his comment on Jason's post—I have been since I first read it. I had hoped to discuss it here, but let's be serious: you can't take any more of this right now.
Monday, June 13, 2011
It doesn't take a library: TTPs for pre-deployment reading
If there's one thing the military blogosphere loves, it's reading lists. Pre-deployment reading lists. Commander's reading lists. Professional reading lists. Lists of reading lists. This post is going to focus on the first. All of the pre-deployment lists out there provide for some good, interesting, and useful reading. But let's face it - you only have so much time when you're getting ready to deploy. You don't need to read 10 books on counterinsurgency, for instance, when one or two will do. So here are some recommendations on how to focus your reading in that limited time for those of you getting ready to go anywhere for any reason. It's not so much a list, per se, but a guide to manage all of that reading by genre.
Books on the country/region. Don't get bogged down in this too much. Pick two or three from the reading lists that already exist. Try to find those that are at the top of most lists. I say don't get too bogged down, because it's important to get the top view of the country, its culture, and its history. But once you have that, it's important to remember that no book will give you the feel and taste of a place - you can get that on the ground once you've done your basic homework - and you have a lot to read.
The latest doctrine. Military types need to make sure they're up on their doctrine. If you know what your mission is generally going to be, bone up on it. Re-read those manuals you haven't touched since your basic course, read the latest updates, SOPs and AARs from units who have just left where you're going, and articles that talk about doctrine. Since this is work-related, feel free to do this on company time (it worked for me at least). [If your boss gives you a rash about doing this, tell him/her you're doing it for an OPD/NCOPD - and then do the PD.] Spend plenty of time on this.
Technical/User Manuals. If you think you're going to go outside the wire at all, read your dash 10s on your vehicles, radios, and weapon systems. You never know when this refreshed knowledge will come in handy and save your life or the life of someone else - this may be one of the most important things you can do and it's often the most neglected because it's bloody boring. Know how to take care of your stuff and keep it working. And don't forget gunnery and weapons manuals. [Run out of smoke grenades? There's a great section in the M240 manual on starting brush fires with tracer rounds.] This is probably reading best done during your time enroute to your destination (such as in Kuwait) when you have ready access to your equipment.
Military History. Most military types do this anyway. My recommendation is to read a couple of books in this genre that are about the country you are going to and/or within two echelons of your rank (on both sides). You know what doesn't help you prepare that much for a deployment as a platoon leader in Iraq? Reading Patton's memoirs. Officers should already have a bunch of these great captains histories under their belt - focus on books that you can relate to.
Books that increase your understanding of the world. Other than field manuals and TMs, the books I got the most out of before a deployment were not specifically related to my upcoming deployment. I was big on reading philosophy: Nietzsche, Plato, Hobbes, Saint Augustine, etc. I doubt that these are everyone's cup tea, but reading anything that expands how you see and understand the world will do. Psychology, politics, non-military history, religion, or novels. Whatever it is that you would enjoy and would still learn from. Spend plenty of time on these - and I'd recommend bringing plenty of these along with you to read during the deployment.
If things haven't changed much in the past couple of years and unless you're an exceptionally voracious reader, I assume you have time for about 12 books in the 8 months to a year between deployment notification and getting on a plane. Assuming your boss will let you read FMs and TMs on the clock, I'd divvy these up as follows: 3 books on the country you're going to, 3 books on military history, and 6 about the world at large. This is where those reading lists come in handy - to help you determine how to whittle down to those dozen books you actually have time for. If you read that fast that you can get through 3 or 4 book lists, then great. But for the rest of us mortals who also have other things to do before going away for year, prioritization is key. And this is how I did it.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
We haven't retired or died, and other things to be excited about in 2011!
Just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that we're not dead, we were just on vacation. And/or lazy. (And/or dead. Not totally clear on the facts here, as it's been a while since I've heard from MK.) But now we're back, and lemme tell you: it is time to blog the hell out of 2011. Starting January 4th. Like, January 4th at 1000, not 0045. Or maybe January 5th. But seriously, soon!
Really, though, thanks for having the patience and commitment and interest level to keep coming back here every day or week or month or however often you check in. We do very much appreciate everyone who stops by, and we especially appreciate those of you who contribute to the conversation. I'm looking forward to a great year for the blog, a year of renewed commitment and energy and blah blah blah, and I really hope we can reward your persistent presence. If anyone's even reading this, that is.
But in all honesty, there are about two dozen topics floating around in my little pea brain right now, and some of them have even been committed to text streams of various lengths. I've drifted away from frequent low-content updates over the last several weeks and end up getting trapped beneath the idea of some massive essay, so you'll have to excuse the virtual silence. I've still got to spit out my criticism of Michael Cohen's recent COINtra piece in The Nation, and I've been promising Matt Gallagher a smackdown of his pro-draft goofiness for about six months now. (Seriously, I've got like 3,000 words on that one.) So I hope you'll stick around with us as we try to move this thing in a more content-intensive direction. One of these days.
In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to an outstanding essay/speech that Ex linked to earlier today: "Solitude and Leadership," by literary critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, as delivered in October 2009 to the U.S. Military Academy's plebes of the class of '13. It's a really excellent elaboration of why independence, genuine thoughtfulness, moral courage, and true conviction are such important traits for leaders of men (and particularly modern military officers). I've seldom read something so meaningful and thought-provoking in the last few years, and that's no exaggeration. I hope you'll enjoy it.
So, there. That's just a taste. Keep coming back in 2011, and I promise you won't be disappointed. Thanks for reading, and happy new year, wesolych swiat, feliz ano nuevo, bonne annee, blwyddyn newydd dda, and so on.
Really, though, thanks for having the patience and commitment and interest level to keep coming back here every day or week or month or however often you check in. We do very much appreciate everyone who stops by, and we especially appreciate those of you who contribute to the conversation. I'm looking forward to a great year for the blog, a year of renewed commitment and energy and blah blah blah, and I really hope we can reward your persistent presence. If anyone's even reading this, that is.
But in all honesty, there are about two dozen topics floating around in my little pea brain right now, and some of them have even been committed to text streams of various lengths. I've drifted away from frequent low-content updates over the last several weeks and end up getting trapped beneath the idea of some massive essay, so you'll have to excuse the virtual silence. I've still got to spit out my criticism of Michael Cohen's recent COINtra piece in The Nation, and I've been promising Matt Gallagher a smackdown of his pro-draft goofiness for about six months now. (Seriously, I've got like 3,000 words on that one.) So I hope you'll stick around with us as we try to move this thing in a more content-intensive direction. One of these days.
In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to an outstanding essay/speech that Ex linked to earlier today: "Solitude and Leadership," by literary critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, as delivered in October 2009 to the U.S. Military Academy's plebes of the class of '13. It's a really excellent elaboration of why independence, genuine thoughtfulness, moral courage, and true conviction are such important traits for leaders of men (and particularly modern military officers). I've seldom read something so meaningful and thought-provoking in the last few years, and that's no exaggeration. I hope you'll enjoy it.
So, there. That's just a taste. Keep coming back in 2011, and I promise you won't be disappointed. Thanks for reading, and happy new year, wesolych swiat, feliz ano nuevo, bonne annee, blwyddyn newydd dda, and so on.
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