'Just World News' with Helena Cobban: 'Survival' and how we think about war

'Survival' and how we think about war

Posted by Helena Cobban
March 7, 2008 9:36 PM EST | Link
Filed in Strategic studies

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which I've been a member for some 20 years, is this year celebrating its 50th birthday. To mark the occasion they've published a special issue of their quarterly journal Survival, under the title "The Bush Years and Beyond." It is a generally excellent edition, by a short and informative account by British strategic-studies grandee Michael Howard of the history of the IISS. Of special note there: that back in 1958, the IISS was founded to provide a specifically British kind of counterpart to pre-existing US think-tanks like the Rand Corporation; and that the British Council of Churches was one of the organizations that-- moved by the ethical concerns some of its leaders had over the whole question of Britain's nuclear arsenal-- participated in founding the IISS

Since 1958, the IIS has changed in many ways. It has tried hard to become much more international, even if with only mixed success. And it has become far less concerned with the big ethical/philosophical questions around nuclear war and warfare in genera, and far more in thrall to the big defense contractors who are well represented in the membership, and far less connected to any religious bodies or individuals. (Regarding Quakers, I know of only one other apart from myself who is an IISS member. And I confess that I am unaware if any other members of IISS bring any specifically religious sensibility to their engagement with it, though doubtless there are some who do.)

Be those broader fact as they may be, there are a number of excellent articles in this anniversary edition of Survival. Far and away the most thought-provoking, in my view, is "Strategy and the Limitation of War", by Hew Strachan of All Souls College, Oxford. Strachan's article is an excellent and much-needed exploration of how specialists, policymakers, and commentators think about different forms of war. He notes that the way wars are described almost inevitably frame the way that we think about them. He notes, in particular, that the rhetoric that members of the Bush administration have generated about the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) and about this being a "long war" is at one and the same time:

(1) actually unknowable, since no-one knows the length of a war going in (though I would add that inasmuch as people enter a "long war" mindset, the use of the term from the get-go might itself act as a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy); and

(2) an intellectually slovenly and in practice very counter-productive way of aggregating under the "long war/GWOT" rubric situations, clashes, and armed confrontations that in reality often have little to do with each other.

Strachan is particularly percipient when he describes how the legacies of the "total war" thinking of the Cold War shaped the way that most western strategic theorists approached the challenges posed by the attacks of September 11, 2001. He writes:

The stock of strategic ideas developed against the background of the Cold War ... continues to have greater purchase than perhaps we recognize. Pre-emption became a principle of strategy within the context of nuclear deterrence. Although aggressive in its effects, its employment was predicated on the evidence of an immediate and probable attack, which was never forthcoming... After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the term was given a different conceptual context as a free-standing element in the defence postures of the United States and the United Kingdom. It implied an early attack against threats that were latent, before they became imminent. A concept developed within one security structure was shoe-horned into another in order to give it a legitimating ledigree. Moreover, whereas in its earlier incarnation it was designed to prevent war, in its new iormat it was intended to provoke it.

The mutation of pre-emption was replicated for deterrence as a whole... (pp.39-40)

Strachan writes,

Bush responded to the 11 September attacks by declaring a 'global war on terror'. The vocabulary of major war kicked in almost immediately, and it has never gone away. Both Bush and UK rime Minister Tony Blair portrayed the struggle in which they were engaged as the defining conflict of the twenty-first century, a war for the values of civilisation and democracy. These were the rallying cries of the leaders of the Second World War...

The difference is that [in 2001] their publics did not believe them...

The speeches of Bush and Blair may have failed to rally their nations, but they became the basis for strategy. The rhetoric of the 'war on terror' stepped into the black hole created by the bankruptcy of strategic thought at the end of the Cold War... Those who had made careers through nuclear deterrence in the Cold War could shift to terrorist studies; the latter, from having been a fringe interest, moved to center stage, confident that it would be central to the understanding of future wars because the president and prime minister had said so.(pp.42-43)

He stresses quite correctly that,

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are first and foremost regional conflicts. By aggregating them within a wide conflict we make them bigger than they are, even less amenable to strategy in its pragmatic sense, and incomprehensible to the electorates of the democratic states waging them... [U]ntil the United States in Iraq and NATO in Afghanistan abandon the vocabulary of universalism for that of particularism, they will not begin to understand the nature of the wars in which they are engaged, and until they do so they will be unable to develop an appropriate strategy.(pp.43-44)

Strachan is scathing about the intellectual fuzziness of those civilian employees in the Bush administration who describe the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a "long war." Actually, he points out that back in 2002-03, when the Iraq war was being planned, it was not planned to be a long war; it was only later that, under the pressure of the evident lack of a decisive US victory there that the "long war" rhetoric was deployed. And he notes pointedly that in April 2007 Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon publicly disagreed with the use of the term, telling his people to focus on "the real war," instead.

He also notes the relevance of two key points that are are, he says, "derived from" Clausewitz:

First, time in war tends to the advantage of the defender. In operational terms, the United States and its allies, especially if they are waging expeditionary wars, are the attackers... The armies of the United States and Britain are close to being broken by the outcome, regardless of the outcome... Secondly, in long wars, the Clausewitzian norm that war is an instrument of policy is turned on its head. Short sharp wars, like the German wars of unification in 1864, 1866 and 1870, have the best chances of delivering the political objectives of those who initiate them. In long wars, war shapes and moulds policy... (46)

The whole of Strachan's text is really worth reading; and sadly, I don't have the time or space to engage with it all here. I will just note that, though I've never read any of his writings before, the clarity and theoretical deftness he demonstrates here make me want to read a lot more his work.

In particular, I think it is extremely useful for people outside of the-- sometimes very closed and inbred-- world of the "strategic studies community" to be able to use the work of someone like this, who so evidently understands the domains both of (practical) "strategy" and of "strategic theory", in order to question the whole way that policymakers, experts, and commentators tend so glibly to frame and then dominate the discussion of the security challenges that the United States and the rest of the world face today.

The next thought-provoking piece in Survival is a shorter and less wide-ranging article by U.S. Army colonel (and current IISS Senior Research Associate) H.R. McMaster. McMaster has gotten quite a bit of press in the US in recent years as a thinking man's soldier but also a practical one. Since all branches of the US military devote a lot of atention and money to attempts to do "outreach" to various portions of the citizenry-- but oh, most especially those portions that control the purse-strings!-- I tend to have a bit of an instinctive pushback reaction to any officers who get lauded in the MSM as "great military intellectuals," or showboats, or whatever. But based on the evidence of this article, McMaster is the real thing. The article was definitely informative and worth reading. He made several of the same points that Strachan made, though not at such a high level of theoretical sophistication. Also like Strachan, he made sure to incorporate into his analysis the lessons from Israel's 33-day war against Hizbullah in 2006, in addition to those from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were other points of clear overlap, too. McMaster also seems to be a committed and capable Clausewitzian. And he too, like Strachan, has strong criticisms of the way US military doctrine had developed after the end of the Cold War; though in his case, the criticism was couched differently. It was a criticism, primarily, of the theoretical conceit known in the US as the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA.)

One thing that's interesting about that term RMA, by the way, is that in the mid- to late 1990s the people in the US strategic-studies/policy community borrowed it, in the first instance very self-consciously, from the term the Soviet military had used to describe the technological upgrade they attempted-- to no ultimate effect -- in the early to mid-1980s. Perhaps now, in light of the disasters the American RMA has brought to the US military (and citizenry), the term should be retired altogether, once and for all, if not taken out and shot at dawn??

As McMaster wrote in clear reference to the American RMA, in the Abstract of his article: "Since 1991, thinking about defence [in the US] has been based on a fantastical theory about the character of future war rather than a clear vision of emerging threats to national and international security..."

In the text of his piece he writes,

[M]ilitary forces must abandon the dangerous and seductive illusion that technology can solve the problem of future conflict... Recent combat experiences confirm that war on land is fundamentally different from war in the air or at sea; military leaders ought to recognise that technologies that permit naval and air forces to dominate the fluid media of sea and air do not have a similar effect on land. Indeed, leaders must recognize that war on land will remain fundamentally in the realm of uncertainty due to the human, psychological, policial and cultural dimensions of conflict as well as the immanent interaction with adversaries able to use terrain, intermingle with the population, and adopt countermeasures to technological capabilities.(pp.26-27)

McMaster integrates in a very helpful way into his study some small portions of analysis of the disastrous way that Israel's long-proud, but more recently RMA-fixated, security forces performed during the 33-day war. He writes:

As the former chief of the Israeli Air Force recently observed, fixation with new technologies was 'addictive and obscured thinking'. War plans envisioned small skirmishes, not a large-scale, conventional military campaign. Prior to the war, only a small number of Israeli special forces received training geared to operations in southern Lebanon... The Israeli army was not prepared for the mission... (pp.23-24)

He concludes with this potent warning:

Leaders should understand how informal relationships between and among the 'iron triangle' of defence contractors, military establishments and governments can undermine the ability to think clearly about future conflicts. In particular, military professionals should be careful not to surrender their intellectual responsibility to think about war to contractors whose interests can easily corrupt their judgment.(p.28)

I have to say that after reading those two very knowledgeable and well-thought-through articles I found it quite disappointing to read the jingoistic and theoretically thin article from Joseph S. Nye, Jr., titled "Recovering American leadership." Nye is generally recognized as the father of the idea of "soft power" in international relations. But he doesn't really do anything new in this article. He cites no sources. He does refer (as I do in Ch.6 of my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush) to the fact that soft power has become more important in world affairs in recent years. But I think he seriously under-estimates the size and seriousness of the seismic shift that has occurred in international affairs due to the explosion of global connectedness in the past few years. For example, he concludes with this judgment: "The United States is well placed to remain the leading politics well into the twenty-first century... " But he provides no solid evidence to back up this claim.

Of the other contributions to the issue, a number are much more worthy of close attention than Nye's. These include:

Tom Pickering, writing on the need for the UN to assume much more of leading role in coordinating Iraq-related peace diplomacy at many levels;
Kishore Mahbubani on the net effects of Bush's wars;
Michael O'Hanlon, on the desirability of resurrecting the Comprehensive Test Bank Treaty; and
Mai Yamani on the changes and the limits on change inside Saudi Arabia: fascinating stuff!

I don't have time to comment on all those here. But altogether, this is a bumper issue of the IISS's venerable journal. Here's to another 50 years, with hopefully a lot more emphasis on returning to the Institute's original, broader and more intentionally ethics-based engagement with the world of strategic studies.

Comments

Comment from... Dominic, at March 8, 2008 01:07 AM:

You miight like to look at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd03072008.html

About Admiral Fallon and "crushing the ants".

Comment from... Dominic, at March 8, 2008 01:46 AM:

"... in long wars, the Clausewitzian norm that war is an instrument of policy is turned on its head"

This is gobbledygook. War is carried out for political means. There is no reversal of this. It has nothing to do with the length of the war, but with the authority in war and the inevitability of reversion to negotiation, no matter how long a war goes on. It is not a "norm". Does this guy know what a "norm" is?

Also, in 1864-1870, Clausewitz was not only long dead, but also out of fashion.

I smell disinformation. I smell a treasononous military doggy tail trying to wag the political master.

Comment from... John R, at March 8, 2008 02:02 AM:

Helena,

You reference details relevant to current issues, but how does this differ from recent 20th century thinking? War is peace, ignorance is strength and love is hate… so wrote George Orwell in “1984”.

Anyone want to comment on these fundamentals?
For that matter, given the above has merit- how can one argue vs. Bush is smart?

Comment from... johsua, at March 8, 2008 03:49 AM:

Charley Reese's piece - peace? - in antiwar.com is worth a read

Comment from... Alex, at March 8, 2008 04:20 AM:

"... in long wars, the Clausewitzian norm that war is an instrument of policy is turned on its head" This is gobbledygook. War is carried out for political means. There is no reversal of this.

No it is not gobbledygook. What Strachan means is that long wars are far less predictable in their consequences. And the consequences are almost certainly not what was intended by the politicians who launched the war. A country becomes engaged in the war, and the war continues to be fought for the war's sake, no longer for the projects the original politicos imagined.

Of course, no politician who launched a war ever intended it to be long. Precisely because of its uncontrollability, and risk to themselves. It is long normally because it was not won at the beginning, and the war continues.

The exception should be the permanent state of fear and war of '1984'. That is being experimented with now, in the GWOT. Personally I am not convinced that a GWOT-type state of permanent fear works as a political operation, as sooner or later, it will be appreciated that the terrorists are a couple of guys holed up in Afghanistan, while the trillions of tax dollars are not being spent on roads, health, employment, or whatever else seems important to the US public. Situations change.

The Cold War could be considered the equivalent of a long war, as the consequences were not at all what was expected.

Comment from... Dominic, at March 8, 2008 07:13 AM:

I still say it's gobbledygook, Alex. Mr Strachan is welcome to construct his own book "On War" but if he is claiming to reverse Clausewitz, and wants to get away with it, then he had better burn all the copies of Clausewitz and expunge it from the Internet.

It is absurd to write of a Clausewitzian norm. A short glance at Chapter 1 of "On War" will confirm this. Clausewitz is writing about the hazard of war, the reciprocity of it, the tendency towards inaction and delay, and why it comes about. All of the things that Strachan plods out like a laundry list are shown in Clausewitz in dynamic inter-relationship.

The longer a war goes on, the clearer it becomes that Clausewitz is correct, that there cannot be an absolute imposition by one side over the other, and therefore that the return to the negotiating table is inevitable.

The US political and military do not want to accept this, hence Fallon's remark: 'These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.'

If there is in any sense a departure from Clausewitz, it is only that there is a departure from war. The "GWOT" is not a war because "terror" is not an opponent, and is not even on the opposing side. The USA has degenerated to a point very much like 1984 as you say, but it is not properly war. It is terror as a pervasive condition, and the active terrorist is the USA.

As in 1984, the terror is continuously relayed from afar, to the home population. The action in the remote place is at the same time real and theatrical. People really do die, in very large numbers, and some of the US troops die, too. But the adversary is held not to exist, and is denied and even targetted exactly to the extent that it becomes coherent as a directing political entity.

This is war against war, because war does come to an end. This is war grown into terror. As terror, it does have a meaning, which is quite close to that of the Jacobin terror. Bush is the Robespierre.

Comment from... Don Bacon, at March 8, 2008 10:48 AM:

How we think about war?

How I think about war is how to avoid it.
It's like: How do we think about executions? What is the proper strategy for strapping an (often innocent) person into an electric chair, and what is the proper voltage so his head doesn't catch fire?

War isn't a strategy for survival, it's a proven method for endangering survival for those engaged in it. When I was a young whipper-snapper I was a professional soldier. I studied the strategy, tactics and logistics of war. I participated in it. Then I grew up and realized that war represents the failure of human relations, and not a strategy for anything worthwhile.

Now in the autumn of my years I started the Smedley Butler Society, dedicated to prolonging the memory of a soldier who was raised as a Quaker, saw the folly of war and realized that wars are a racket conducted only for profit.

"The big ethical/philosophical questions around nuclear war and warfare in general?" What question? Is it better to bomb a city 'back to the stone age' and kill its people during the week, or wait for the weekend? Should we use 80,000 volts in an electric chair or 60,000?

Current US policy is to conduct elective wars against those peoples our government doesn't like. If I did that in my town I'd properly be called a criminal, but our leading politicians think it's a fine idea so now we should discuss it, the story goes.

We don't need a "revolution in military affairs," we need a revolution FROM military affairs. General Butler said, back in the thirties: "Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." That was before AFRICOM.

As for personalities: Fallon's supposed remark merely states that the purpose of a soldier is to kill the enemy, and not to play patty-cake 'til the cows come home. The generals are now wishing we'd sent more troops to Iraq and killed more liberated Iraqis sooner. And Bush's proclivity for war is not exclusively his, if you'll notice. Some people even start institutes to study the best way to conduct war!

Apparently we need to study war some more because it's the proven remedy for all that ails us, which of course is not any other country, and not our personal justice, economic and health problems, but rather the statistically tiny chance that a terrorist might harm us. How stupid we are.

Comment from... Helena, at March 8, 2008 12:37 PM:

Don, thank you so much for the clarity of comments here. I agree completely with your sentiments but I do still consider it important to study war, primarily because I want to understand, analyze, and engage with the thinking of people who think that it has a utility.

I completely don't. One of the wisest things I heard from a curandeiro (traditional healer) in Mozambique when I was doing that research was when he said, "We humans sometimes think we can use violence. We can't. When we tangle with it it always ends up using us."

(In a sense I think that was a slightly altered version of what Strachan was also saying when he said that in a long war, the demands of the war itself end up increasingly determining policy, rather than the other way around.)

So anyway, in various Quaker gatherings I am happy to join in singing "I ain't gonna study war no more; I ain't gonna study war no more." No, certainly not, from the point of view of studying it with a view to practicing it. But I do still want to study it because-- seeing that of G-d in everyone-- I want to understand, connect with, and hopefully even start to change the thinking of people who practice or support the practice of war...

Comment from... Dominic, at March 8, 2008 12:56 PM:

"Fallon's supposed remark merely states that the purpose of a soldier is to kill the enemy, and not to play patty-cake 'til the cows come home."

No. Fallon was talking about Iran, a war that has not started yet.

Plus, your last paragraph helps people to think that your US wars are about terrorism inflicted by others on you, which is not true.

You do need to learn about wars. You need to learn that wars cannot be won unconditionally, not ever. War as such is not a strategy, it is a tactic, and a bad one. War is a useless interlude of madness between negotiations.

You also need to know the difference between war and state terrorism, which is not war.

Comment from... Don Bacon, at March 8, 2008 04:15 PM:

So, we're agreed that war is a crime against humanity, illegal under many international conventions and particularly hard on women and children, which may be in accord with some religious conventions but that doesn't make it right.

Then the goal is to understand the criminal mind. Why do some people advocate war?

Let's listen to the leading war criminal, George W. Bush -- perhaps he can bring some clarity to all this if we can understand, analyze, and engage with his thinking:

"They can't stand the thought of a free society in the midst of a part of the world that's just desperate for freedom. These people don't like freedom. You know why? Because it clashes with their ideology. We actually misnamed the war on terror, it ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world. (Laughter.)

"No, that's what they do. They use terror to -- and they use it effectively, because we've got good hearts. We're people of conscience, they aren't. They will cut off a person's head like that, and not even care about it. That's why I tell you, you can't talk sense to them. Maybe some think you can, I don't. I don't think you can negotiate with them."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040806-1.html

Well, cart him off to the loony bin, he's no help. Okay, no more -- my point is that we shouldn't reward these criminal warmongers with a cloak of respectability by trying to understand their positions. They have no legal and moral positions. They have no qualms about calling us weak pinko surrender monkeys, so why don't we take the high ground and demand that they admit the falsity of their positions? as Robert McNamara had the courage to say long after Vietnam: "We were wrong, terribly wrong." We need pre-emptive, corrective strikes on the wrongness that brings war, principally deriving from American Exceptionalism and the quest for monetary rewards.

"War is a racket . . . the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."--MajGen Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC, 1933

Comment from... Mark Pyruz, at March 8, 2008 08:16 PM:

Helena, thanks for directing my attention to the Hew Strachan article. I agree with his perspective.

Comment from... Dominic, at March 8, 2008 11:24 PM:

"So, we're agreed that war is a crime against humanity", you say, cheaply, Don.

But who exactly agrees about this? You, G W Bush and the late Smedley Butler? Count me out! Nor do I think it is correct to scapegoat "people [who] advocate war". Very few people advocate war.

It is useless to say that war is a crime against humanity because that means that peace is normal and war is something exceptional, which is not true. It is a foolish illusion. War is always there. The most powerful are the ones who make sure that it is always there. War is not brought to you by some barefoot person from a cave in Afghanistan. That is childish, racist colonialism.

It is you in the USA who are the warmongers and the terrorists. Can you say that, Don? If you study war you will have to say that, and then be morally bound to act, whether it is the autumn of your years or not.

What action do you now propose, without study? "We need pre-emptive, corrective strikes on the wrongness that brings war." How does that differ from G W Bush? It doesn't! It is loose, aimless, and ill-disciplined.

Are you trying to say that capitalist Imperialism must be brought to an end? If so, then you must say so directly.

Comment from... Dominic, at March 12, 2008 11:04 AM:

Fallon resigned!