I first met insurgents when I taught at a school in a hill village in eastern Nepal in 2002. The Maoist insurgency was taking off in this part of the country. The ‘Maobadi’ arrived for the first time one night; I woke up to find a band of around platoon size sleeping in the house of the family I was staying with. There was mutual surprise in the morning! They were not expecting a Westerner to turn up at breakfast and nor was I expecting them. I got to know them as they came and went from the village over the next few months. What struck me was the need to understand insurgents on their own terms. Most were very young, between 13 and 18; many were girls; they were virtually all illiterate; they were mainly poor, low-caste Nepalis; few wore uniform; they were not from the local area; their weapons were a mix of old rifles, which they cleaned assiduously, and quite sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) manufactured from pressure cookers.
These were indeed real guerrillas who had left their families and were ideologically motivated: they were sworn to fight to the death, at least in their boasts to me. Their commander, not much older than me, even gave me a particularly enthusiastic and largely incorrect presentation on Marxism, including an eccentric and obsessive emphasis on the Paris Commune (which I must say was a rather bizarre, but entertaining, experience in this rural Himalayan village!). He felt that he was part of a wider and energetic historical movement. That his genuine idealism should have been channelled in this way was somewhat tragic.
The brief outline of circumstances described above indicates that any counter-insurgent would have to deal here with a very particular political problem. To have understood Nepal’s civil war in generic military terms as ‘insurgent’ versus ‘government’, in isolation of its actual political and social context, would have been overly simplistic. Yet fixation with these generic doctrinal categories has proved to be problematic in the coalition campaign in Afghanistan, particularly in the earlier phase of the campaign, as well as more broadly in the ‘Long War’, which the ‘War on Terror’ seems to have become. This is what happens when an operational approach is upscaled to the level of strategy, or policy: when operational ideas, which demand a political context, are not adequately provided with one, they move up to fill the vacuum. This in turn produces a danger that the campaign is not understood on its own terms, but rather aims at generic military metrics that are largely self-referencing, and distort comprehension of the conflict. In Afghanistan, this has led people to see counter-insurgency as a strategy in itself, which it is not, and to criticise it on that basis; the irony being that is a perfectly sensible operational approach.
The examination of war from an exclusively military perspective, isolated from its social and political context, leads to false conclusions and poor strategy. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War was partly a response to his experience of the Napoleonic Wars, which he saw as the product of the French Revolution: ‘very few of the manifestations in war can be ascribed to new inventions or new departures in ideas. They result mainly from the transformation of society and new social conditions’.1
War today is in the process of undergoing another evolution in response to social and political conditions, namely the speed and interconnectivity associated with contemporary globalisation and the information revolution. However, strategy, particularly in the West, still tends to be constructed with two basic assumptions which derive from interstate war, even for conflicts which are not inter-state: first, that competitors in war are essentially polarised; second, that the core strategic audiences of the conflict are to be found within the sides themselves.
The information revolution connects new audiences to contemporary conflicts, accelerating the proliferation of potential strategic audiences beyond the enemy (people against whom a conflict’s outcome is defined other than the enemy), and beyond the state (people who do not identify with one of the state parties to a conflict); these categories often overlap. Those beyond the enemy are out of range of force, the traditional, coercive means by which hostile audiences come to subscribe (by forced consent) to the legitimacy of one’s strategic narrative; they are more likely to interpret actions in directly political terms, outside the interpretive structure offered by war. Those beyond the state, ‘non-state audiences’ (who include citizens who refuse to identify with their ‘own’ state, or at least have strong multiple identities), are more likely than citizens of a state party to be persuaded through their emotional and moral responses, given that the state rationales of national interest may have less or no purchase on them.
Although audiences beyond the parties to a conflict have always been recognised, victory and defeat in the inter-state paradigm relate to effects upon these core audiences, who identify with their state to the extent that they are defeated or are victorious with it, typically as a result of the defeat of their army on the battlefield. This latent inter-state mentality often extends to circumstances in which the enemy is not a state, in the sense that the enemy is essentially considered unitary. The presentation of the 9/11 attacks in terms of an ‘act of war’ against the United States by President Bush in his 20 September 2001 address to Congress suggests such a default association of organised violence with the concept of war. He asserted that ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’; this reaches to the heart of a conception of war’s function as the resolution of an issue between polarised sides.2
This conception needs re-evaluation in the light of recent experience. In Afghanistan there is a central tension between the government and the insurgency. However, these sides are better characterised as franchises that do not clearly align many of the conflict’s actors. These actors tend to manoeuvre to gain political advantage vis-à-vis one another. This is significantly different from the polarised, two-way conflict of interstate war; although that conceptual premise is immediately suggested when people speak of the Afghan conflict in terms of ‘war’.
To speak about the actions of ‘the insurgency’ in Afghanistan is accurate only insofar as it is recognised that the insurgency is a franchise movement that comprehends many factions and interests, including some who are close to, or also part of, the government ‘franchise’. Moreover, the umbrella term is convenient because it is often not clear which part of the insurgency is responsible for an action. However, this should not be confused with the notion that ‘the Taliban’ are a unitary enemy whose leadership exerts direct control over the whole insurgency down to the tactical level.
What are the consequences in contemporary conflict of utilising as a default the inter-state paradigm of war, even for conflicts which are not inter-state? If that paradigm were merely a label to describe war, typically industrial war, between states, ‘conventional warfare’ would be merely an inaccurate qualification for it, since it has been the exception in terms of the conflicts fought by Western states since 1945. Yet the durability of conventional war as the basic analytical structure of war goes far beyond semantic inaccuracy; it frustrates the need to re-define conflicts which are not ‘conventional’, such as Afghanistan, so that they can be prosecuted successfully.
There is a contemporary requirement to be more precise about what we mean by military activity in terms of distinguishing between the use of force and the use of war. I have argued that the term ‘means’, in Clausewitz’s dictum that war is an extension of policy by other means, has a twofold signification, both meanings being intertwined. The first meaning refers to the actual use of force, the second to war as an interpretive structure which makes war ‘itself’ a particular political instrument. War offers an interpretive template which can be used by strategy to persuade audiences to understand actions in a conflict in a given ‘military’ way (just as the words of a barrister are understood through the interpretive context of court advocacy; outside of court, the same words might be interpreted in significantly different ways). Strategic thought, notably in popularised public debates preceding conflicts, tends to focus intensively on the former (the actual use of force) and to neglect the latter (war itself as a political instrument).
The question ‘should we intervene militarily in country X?’ is common, and rarely semantically challenged. Such phrasing would imply that the use of military means for military ends is indistinguishable. Yet the difference between military means and military ends corresponds to the distinction between the two significations available in Clausewitz’s dictum: the military apply armed force, but military ends are traditionally defined through the concept of war. While the two may well be inseparable in certain circumstances, especially in conventional war, military means can be, and are in many contemporary conflicts, used independently of military ends the more they directly seek a political goal.
The converse is a grey area: would a state on state attack without traditionally defined military means, using cyber alone for example (which has happened already: Russia’s three week cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007, which was described in the press as ‘cyberwar’, being the most notorious), be said to make use of the interpretive framework of war?3
When war fails clearly to separate the military and the political, organised violence in human affairs is not contained. Take the Long War for example. Such a redefinition of the ‘War on Terror’ exemplifies that, if a war’s mechanism cannot provide a military outcome, it does not end. The Long War may not be absolute war in the sense of huge armies clashing, but it clearly approaches an abstract conception of absolute war because the use of force is unrestrained by policy: how can policy regulate force if force is a direct extension of policy?
‘Absolute war’ in contemporary conflict can subvert Clausewitz’s own definition of the same term. For Clausewitz, ganze Krieg is the ultimate form of decisiveness, not war without end. Moreover, in contemporary conflict, combat is not, as it was for Clausewitz, the ‘only means of war’. In the Long War, force is used across whole regions of the world, and sometimes in minuscule quantities in terms of firepower, in conjunction with other means (economic, legal, cyber, media-related, for example), to achieve political results more directly. In the Long War, therefore, ‘war’ does not clearly contain violence within an interpretive structure. On the contrary, war is expanded to incorporate all means which deliver political effect: violence is mixed into other political activity, so that there is a severe erosion of the interpretive difference between military and political activity; war and peace.
In reality, the complete fusion of military and political activity is an abstract pole, which contemporary conflict may have moved towards, but elements of war as more traditionally defined remain in place. Indeed ‘military’ activity remains a useful and legitimate term in contemporary conflict. In terms of distinguishing means, it can describe the activity of armed forces—the military—as opposed to their civilian counterparts. Even in terms of the ends which armed forces seek to achieve, the boundary between when soldiers seek ‘military’ or ‘political’ objectives, especially at the tactical level, is blurred and subjective. There are many people trying to kill coalition soldiers in Afghanistan; they can legitimately be considered an enemy, at minimum in a temporary sense. The extent to which they can then be dealt with militarily is where the possibilities of defining military activity in terms of its means, ends, or both are blurred.
Military activity in the traditional inter-state paradigm sense of setting conditions for a political solution, in a sequential manner, is by no means redundant either. Enemies can be dealt with militarily by killing or capturing them, as in Sri Lanka’s recent destruction of the Tamil Tigers.4 If conventional war thinking is applied in this extreme sense in contemporary conflict, the military might well set military conditions for a political solution in a literal sense. Yet the West, to my mind entirely correctly, does not engage in such practices, because they normally represent an evacuation of the moral high ground, which exaggerate rather than resolve the conflict in the long-term. Contemporary globalisation challenges the idea of war as a compartmentalised military domain, where decisions are reached on the battlefield, is compromised in most situations other than those where unrestrained physical force is used.
Thus most strategic audiences, including most insurgents, need to be persuaded of a strategic narrative while often being beyond the range of armed force, so cannot be ‘forced’ to subscribe to a given narrative, as in the inter-state paradigm. Indeed the metrics that tend to be used to evaluate progress in the Long War are far more about global opinion than they are about any military balance, and as much about the control of political as physical space. General Stanley McChrystal, for example, attempted to reduce the use of indirect ordnance and air-delivered bombs in the Afghan War, not because they are not effective in military terms; they are. However, their political effect is often more harmful than their military value. As the use of force is often interpreted in direct political terms by audiences, the concept of ‘war’ struggles to bind its audiences into recognition of a military outcome that sets conditions for a political solution. War moves towards becoming a direct extension of political activity.
The dynamics of contemporary conflicts can often be clarified, by way of analogy, in terms of what liberal powers would understand as normal political activity in a domestic context. When liberal powers base their strategic narratives on the template of inter-state war, they define expectations (in the conventional military sense) in relation to an enemy (which implies more absolute expectations of victory or defeat) before political aims can be considered. In domestic politics, political aims are defined primarily against one’s political constituencies rather than the opposition party (the ‘enemy’). Hence whether success in domestic politics involves cooperation with, or defeat of, the opposition is secondary.
The enemy therefore plays a very different function in these two conceptions: in the first, he is an obstacle to be fought before any outcome can occur; in the second, he is an inconvenience who, one has to accept, will permanently frustrate one’s goals. Confusion of these two modes of understanding can encourage a belligerent to seek absolute outcomes to problems that might be better understood as part of the normal fabric of international politics. That is, in the context of domestic politics, nobody expects even the most successful government to persuade everyone, especially their opponents’ ‘home base’ political constituencies; that is unrealistic. Yet these false, decisive expectations are encouraged when a paradigm of ‘war’ is employed to conceptualise conflicts that actually are a lot closer functioning according to the dynamics of domestic politics.
This mismatch between expectation and possibility has placed huge strain on liberal powers to explain what they are doing, and drawn attention to the role of strategic narrative in contemporary conflict. Strategy is a two-way bridge between policy on one side and action on the other, both violent and non-violent. Strategic narrative expresses strategy as a story, to explain one’s actions. Different people may tell the story differently, to persuade different audiences, and perhaps place particular emphasis on different goals. That is fine, so long as the different versions of the story remain consistent.
A coherent strategic narrative not only enables one to convince different audiences according to the ends of policy, but also to bind together one’s team across levels of authority and function: the diplomatic head of mission, the army company commander, the aid specialist, the politician working from a domestic capital, for instance. Effective solutions in contemporary conflict emphasise pragmatic combinations of means synchronised in time and space to achieve common objectives. Conversely, the language of ‘the diplomatic solution…’ or ‘the military solution’ as strategic alternatives is increasingly frustrated.
Liberal democracies are today not particularly effective in the configuration of strategic narrative. Part of this is to do with the Cold War legacy of rigid civil-military relations, in which those executing policy on the ground are largely sealed off from those making it. This still makes constitutional sense, but no longer makes strategic sense.
In summary, the conception of war today is paradoxical. The West still understands war’s mechanism essentially in terms of a paradigm of inter-state war, conceptualised so influentially by Clausewitz; yet in another sense, war, in this paradigm as employed today, often subverts Clausewitz’s conception of war’s political utility. Clausewitzian war still works if its two prerequisites are generally satisfied: polarity and the containment of strategic audiences within the opposing sides. The irony today is that we blame the failure of the Clausewitzian inter-state paradigm on the mechanism itself rather than on the contemporary circumstances in which it is used, and in which these two prerequisites are typically compromised.
Strategy today can to an extent shape war to ensure that the preconditions which give Clausewitzian war political utility are sufficiently satisfied. War in its Clausewitzian conception regulates violence in the world by confining organised violence (the use of armed force) within an interpretive structure (the battlefield, where outcomes are defined in military terms) in which it is regulated by policy. This idea contributed to the Weinberger doctrine of 1984 (slightly adapted by General Colin Powell’s version of the doctrine before the First Gulf War) which rehabilitated US strategic thought after Vietnam. It worked. The limited and successful use of force in the 1991 Gulf War is a classic example.5
Conversely, twenty years on from the First Gulf War, one might argue whether any potential enemy will take on the US military in conventional battle in the near to medium term. Moreover, the inter-connectedness enhanced by contemporary globalisation has changed the world in the intervening two decades; strategic audiences beyond the polarised sides are likely to remain a key feature of future conflict. Reversion to a Weinberger-Powell type doctrine might be sensible for wider international stability, but such a reversion would also require refusal to intervene in many cases where genuine national interests were at stake.
This is a hard choice. The consequences of not paying attention to such a choice are essentially to get the worst of both possibilities: failure in the Long War and wider international instability. However, this book has argued for a pragmatic mentality in the formulation of strategy; part of this involves trying not to see strategic choices in absolute terms. Hence the choice outlined above offers a dialectic tool of strategic analysis, rather than an absolute prescription to choose one or the other. This tool is available to consider the consequences and opportunities available in each, unique, conflict situation; such consequences, positive and negative, will be less visible if both forms are confused within a single conception of war.
War in the Clausewitzian paradigm is not the use of force for directly political outcomes. Clausewitzian war contains violence in human affairs; it has clear limits. The relevant international law is constructed on the basis that one can define specific ‘military’ targets. Yet the idea that one can distinguish between ‘military’ and ‘political’ targets, when strategy uses force directly for political effect, is problematic: the definition of military activity in terms of its means rather than its ends is perhaps overly privileged.6
However, to challenge the practice of using force outside the paradigm of war for directly political ends on the basis of wider international stability raises its own concerns. Such practice is highly effective in operational terms, and the imperative to succeed in conflict obviously remains. Counter-insurgency opens up the operational option to use force for directly political advantage. If in a given conflict the policy choice has been to commit military forces to achieve an outcome in a country in which the enemy refuses conventional battle and lives among the people, counter-insurgency, properly resourced, and in a realistic political context, can be highly effective. There is a particular imperative to be operationally effective in less extreme forms of armed conflict: to avoid escalation to extreme forms that ‘work’. However, counter-insurgency should not be elevated to the level of global strategy. That would remove its limits, and compromise the boundary between war and peace.
Western liberal powers have genuine security concerns in many parts of the world, which are operationally most effectively addressed through the use of force more directly for political ends. However, the conflict generated when force is used more for directly political, rather than military, outcomes is not war in the Clausewitzian sense, but effectively a continuation of normal political activity, which is endless.
Clausewitzian war is brutal, decisive and finite. When liberal democracies fail to make such a distinction they contaminate the clear boundaries in which violence operates in Clausewitzian war. Because liberal democracies have generally failed to make such a distinction, the result has been a proliferation of violence in the world which has the potential to drag the West into endless conflicts that go beyond political utility, not least in terms of their human and financial cost. The use of force as a direct extension of policy may be operationally effective, but it is a very dangerous game when unbounded by a clear strategic construct, the risks of which are masked by the idea that it is war.
One danger of the way in which liberal powers deal with contemporary conflict is the failure to distinguish between what is temporary and what is permanent. In his seminal study of Soviet strategic culture in 1977, Jack Snyder argued that Soviet nuclear strategy had achieved a state of semi-permanence that could be understood now to represent a culturally informed position, rather than mere policy. The boundary between culture and policy is primarily one of choice, in that policy implies a deliberate, as opposed to a default, strategic option.7 To take another example, in republican Rome the citizens could elect a dictator to rule with absolute power for a specified period in order to deal with a military crisis. This system was effective, but it was a policy of choice, distinct from the culture of absolute authority that later characterised the imperial period.
If liberal democracies become intoxicated with the idea that their contemporary conflicts represent the future of war, the result will be a challenge to the liberal tradition: we seem to forget that war should ultimately be about peace. Conversely, as was indicated in earlier chapters, the conflicts of the first decade of this century do not seem anomalous, and may point to the future, because the information revolution is likely to make many of the characteristics they exhibit irreversible. The challenge for the West is therefore to deal with the inevitable aspects of change, but also to recognise where there is room to manoeuvre.8
To summarise, there is a basic strategic question apparent in contemporary conflict, specifically the West’s ‘Long War’. This question has two related parts: first, in strategic terms, should liberal powers aggregate their conflicts into one ‘global counter-insurgency’ or disaggregate them, treating each discretely and on its own terms; second, in operational terms, should liberal powers only fight conflicts in which they can defeat the enemy in conventional battle (which would often mean to refuse battle with an enemy who does not present himself, and so take risk on legitimate security concerns), or beat the enemy at his own game through armed political activity?
I have suggested here two responses. First, that the nature of contemporary globalisation blurs the line considerably between these choices at the strategic and operational levels; in contemporary conflicts short of absolute war there does not exist a sealed military domain. However, that does not mean that thinking in terms of such a choice is not an important tool of strategic analysis. The consequences of not thinking in such terms are clear: operational areas become ill defined, and there is a real risk that operational approaches are elevated to become strategies in themselves, which look inwardly to their own metrics rather than connecting to policy.
Second, counter-insurgency, understood as a broad and flexible set of doctrinal ideas underpinned by the idea of armed political activity, remains a highly effective operational approach when faced with insurgents. However, the relative operational effectiveness of armed political activity should as far as possible be boxed by clear strategic boundaries.
A failure to think in terms of such a choice, and raise what is an operational concept to a policy, which creates wider international instability, or not to engage at all, and not contest insurgencies, are two paths to the same destination anyway: a world full of insurgencies is unstable. So either way, proper attention to the question is needed.
To answer this strategic question adequately, and to facilitate the application of the two responses set out, this book has sought to draw attention to particular modes of strategic thought. This represents largely an effort to rehabilitate older traditions rather than anything new. These modes can be summarised as follows. At the policy level, genuine political choices, based on strategic dialogue that often needs to extend right down to the tactical level, are required to provide a workable political context for an operational approach to function. Operational approaches need to be constructed pragmatically, adapting doctrine to particular problems, not being its slave.
To enable these approaches to both policy and operational issues, liberal powers need to move on from thinking about military activity (and its civilian operational equivalent) as a one-way, unquestioning execution of policy, to incorporate it as part of a two-way dialogue; the aim of such an evolution is to produce sound strategy through continuous reconciliation of what is desired and what is possible. Finally, strategic narrative as an interpretive framework needs to establish its boundaries through vision, and its credibility through confidence. Only then can a narrative convince disparate strategic audiences in a fragmented political environment, and so avoid literalist debates with religious fundamentalists. In this context, the art of strategy can approximate by analogy to the classical art of rhetoric in its attempt to convince people of an idea through a combination of rational argument (logos), emotional appeal (pathos) and moral standing (ethos).
The interaction in war between policy and operational approaches, and the interpretive quality of war itself as a medium between military and political outcomes, are modes of strategic thought that originate from the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz. The notion that contemporary conflict has more to do with people, and their persuasion, as the boundaries between the political and military are blurred, may seem at odds with Clausewitzian thought, in which war does provide a clear military domain. However, people in war did matter to Clausewitz; the recognition that war is a human activity is essential to understanding his strategic ideas.
Clausewitz comprehended war in terms of the interactions between the three elements that make up the ‘one’ of his trinity of war: policy, passion and war itself. Clausewitz saw a tendency in the logic of war itself to encourage war to move to extremes: ‘war is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels his opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes’.9
Yet in reality, as opposed to in theory, human factors prevented war from operating in this manner: ‘concern, prudence and fear of excessive risks find reason to assert themselves and to tame the elemental fury of war’.10 So ‘the vast array of factors, forces and conditions in national affairs that are affected by war’ act as a ‘non-conducting medium’: ‘logic comes to a stop in this labyrinth’.11 Thus while the ‘grammar of war’ in theory, through reciprocal violence, would tend to drive war to extremes, in reality ‘war is not the kind that explodes in a single discharge… War is a pulsation of violence’. While war’s grammar is subordinate to policy, policy itself is, in the final analysis, dependent on passion. Human passion is the oxygen whose presence animates combat (or whose absence stifles it), be it for the soldier on the battlefield, the population at home, or the politician in government.
The human element was what differentiated real war, as Clausewitz had experienced it, from war in the abstract, played out on a map. He was keen that On War should aid strategists to prosecute the former, not the latter. Thus Clausewitz stressed the human, emotional, passionate aspect of war in the first chapter of On War:
It would be a fallacy to imagine war between civilised people as resulting merely from a rational act on behalf of their governments, and to conceive of war as gradually ridding itself of passion, so that in the end one would never have to use the physical impact of the fighting forces—comparative figures of their strength would be enough. This would be a kind of war by algebra…Theorists were already beginning to think along such lines when the recent wars [the Napoleonic Wars] taught them a lesson. If war is an act of force, the emotions cannot fail to be involved.12
Clausewitz’s recognition of the human aspect of war informs his understanding of war’s military domain in terms of its political and cultural context, which provides its overarching logic. He reminds us that as much as one may like to blame ‘war’ itself for its inhumanity, war is a human activity. For liberal powers to blame ‘war’ rather than themselves for the problems they are facing is illusory.
Clausewitz’s strategic ideas were based on his understanding of the nature of war. The titles of the first three books of On War reflect this supposition: ‘On the Nature of War’; ‘On the Theory of War’; ‘On Strategy in General’. Strategy had to balance the three elements of war’s trinity ‘like an object suspended between three magnets’.13 Policy, the rational component, had to be kept in line with human passion, the human component. Strategy also had to remain agile to keep its actions related to the aim of policy, and not allow war’s logic to drive itself, through escalation, beyond the point of political utility. The reason why Clausewitz frequently uses dialectics in On War is, to my mind, to stress the need for balance in strategy, as if strategic answers are never finite, but kept valid through perpetual motion, like a tightrope artist keeping steady. Today this balance can be understood in terms of strategic dialogue.
This conception of strategy is intimately associated with the dialogue between theory and experience which Clausewitz repeatedly stresses in On War. Theory is necessary in the sense that it transmits what has worked in the past in distilled form; it is a bridge to access historical experience vicariously. Yet theory is really only a springboard of ideas which should be grounded in the experience of a particular situation.
The dialectics proposed in On War between the abstract and the practical, reason and intuition, theory and experience, desire and possibility, history and the present day, are parallel tensions which run throughout the work; they go to the heart of the way in which Clausewitz thought about strategy in terms of balance.
Contemporary strategic thought is overly weighted towards one side of Clausewitz’s dialectic tightrope. The abstract is not sufficiently kept in check by the practical, reason by intuition, theory by experience, desire by possibility, and contemporary issues by history. Effective strategy is formed when these factors are kept in balance. To privilege one part of a pair over its counterpart is to over-emphasise a ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ approach. In reality, neither can work without being properly situated in the other. Clausewitz himself summarises this best:
Should theory [of war] go on elaborating absolute conclusions and prescriptions? Then it would be of no use at all in real life. No, it must also take the human factor into account, and find room for courage, boldness, and even foolhardiness. The art of war deals with living and moral forces. Consequently, it can never reach the absolute, or certainty.14
Clausewitz’s work offered a counter-argument to a tradition of overly rational and unrealistic strategic thought, in particular the eighteenth-century emphasis on mathematics and algebra in the study of strategy.15 Daniel Moran has argued that in this context ‘strategy would not merely organise the violence of war, it would replace it’. He notes the eighteenth-century connection between the ‘flourishing of strategic rationalism’ and a new literature on perpetual peace. Both of these themes were probably more idealistic than realistic given the expansion of war’s intensity that characterised the start of the nineteenth century in Europe.16
In contemporary conflict and public discussion in general, policy justifications which stress rationality are normal, and often make sense. However, preference for rational concepts which do not find resonance in the human, emotional reality of the world encourages policy to privilege overly abstract ideas. War is a human activity as much as an inanimate tool of policy. However, the abstractive process that rationalises reality can suck out its emotional content: when people are statistics, and soldiers are military formations, war can truly resemble the board game ‘Risk’. For Clausewitz, the human element is what gives theory (and policy) a broader base than just rational argument in the abstract, which prevents the abstract from the prescription of definite (and typically extreme) concepts: ‘the probabilities of real life replace the extreme and absolute required by theory’.17
The application of abstract doctrine is a prominent feature of contemporary conflict which typically occurs when operational ideas are confused with strategy and are scaled up to the level of policy. For those on the ground it can be clear that there is a disconnect between the strategic narrative and how people respond to it. If, for example, a commander in Helmand tells the local population that their opium crops will not be burned, he is going against Afghan government policy, but may need to do this to avoid totally alienating people.
In one personal example, typical of many others, an Afghan police commander was told to eradicate some opium fields. In front of an angry crowd protesting against the (legal) destruction of their livelihoods, he drove 5 metres into the field, in his red government-issued opium-crushing tractor, then stopped and lit up a cigarette. That was his opium eradication effort for that year. Neither is it uncommon for farmers to invite insurgents, whom they otherwise really tend to dislike, to place IEDs in their fields to deter opium eradication. Disconnections in strategic dialogue put commanders, both ISAF and Afghan, in such a position in the first place.
Strategies that are situated in the abstract encourage extreme prescriptions because they are not proscribed by the reality of human behaviour and the unpredictability of war. One cannot apply abstract templates of what has worked in the past and hope that they will produce the same results in wholly different social and political contexts. Yet that is what is done when counter-insurgency is thought to be a strategy in itself. Counter-insurgency is itself not the problem, indeed it is a legitimate and necessary set of conceptual tools which should be used in Afghanistan given current policy goals, but within a realistic political context. Problems arise when the political context, which any abstract doctrine has to assume as a hypothetical starting point (in this case: government versus insurgency), replaces the actual political context. This was in particular a problem with the earlier phase of the Afghan campaign. The campaign in Afghanistan has gone better since 2009, despite public perception, and part of this is due to a far more realistic association of policy goals and operational possibility. Whether this adjustment came too late remains to be seen.
Overly abstract thought can also distort national strategy. In the UK, for example, the 2010 UK National Security Strategy alludes to the ‘world of 2030’ and the security threats of the next 20 years.18 From one perspective this makes sense. To consider broad global trends is no doubt of value. However, any expectations situated so far into an abstract future should at least be tempered by today’s concerns. Abstract assumptions can be upset when the real world, with its human passions and uncertainties, such as the Arab Spring, comes to knock at the door. The UK Labour opposition at the time called for a revision to the Strategic Defence Review on this basis.19 A distant-horizon gazing approach to strategy can leave one reacting to distant and fragile shadows that may vanish as one approaches them: the fact that major world events, which change the course of history, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, to 9/11, to the financial crisis of 2008, are typically not anticipated by mainstream policy should be a warning about any attempts too prescriptively to game twenty years ahead.
The UK Parliament’s own report on UK National Strategy, published in October 2010, advances the proposition that: ‘we have found little evidence of sustained strategic thinking or a clear mechanism for analysis and assessment. This leads to a culture of fire-fighting rather than long-term planning’.20 The distinction between long-term planning and fire-fighting is important. The irony is that fire-fighting can be the consequence of overly abstract long-term planning: while looking into the distance too much, the realities of the present day can creep up and ambush you!
The point here is again not an absolute one. To deny the value of long-term planning, which is of obvious utility, would not make sense. The argument here is about balance: the correct identification of the UK’s strategy-making problems should not by default be solved by craning one’s neck to look even further ahead, which might exaggerate the problem identified. In other words, to gaze far into the future is usually an unreliable strategic guide, but staring even harder into the crystal ball is often the well-intentioned, but misguided, default reaction to a loss of strategic self-confidence. National strategy does require long-term planning, but primarily on the basis of analysis not of an abstract construction set far in the future, but of one’s present situation, and assessment of one’s vulnerabilities that others, it can safely be assumed, will exploit.
A pragmatic mentality can facilitate the association of abstract ideas and practical reality. However, pragmatism means little in itself, as it is a human quality that has to be expressed by a real person. A pragmatic mentality can, however, encourage the requirement for balance in strategy. It can also be an aid to resolve an apparent contradiction in strategy between the requirements for vision and agility. Vision is necessary to energise strategic narrative with a genuine sense of purpose. Yet agile adjustment of strategic narrative is necessary to maintain a balance between what is desired by policy and what is realistically possible on the ground.
The strategic dialogue which evaluates and adjusts the relationship between desire and possibility may well generate conclusions which significantly challenge the strategic vision. The question then arises as to which to privilege, and which audiences to satisfy. While such questions may be taken by military and civilian strategists alike, elected or unelected, at various levels of authority, the question is essentially of a political nature. The commander him-, or herself, and the human personalities of the audience, become critical at this point. Clausewitz emphasised the commander’s intuition as a key factor in war. The same is true today: the personality of the human decision-maker, and the ability to understand an audience in human terms, remain of fundamental importance. Clausewitz’s emphasis on balance in strategic dialogue, between people, policy and the play of probability and chance that war itself generates, still makes sense today.
The speed and extent of inter-connectivity brought about by the information revolution is fundamentally changing the world, and war too. People, individuals and communities, fragment in each other’s image: the intertwining of all kinds of cultures has huge power to unite people through common understanding; conversely, the endless disagreement over the meaning of an event becomes more common, as world audiences are so diverse.
War From The Ground Up has suggested a way to forge effective strategy in order to approach conflict in this contemporary environment. However, as liberal democracies seem to sleepwalk into the fusion of war and routine international politics, they do not seem not to grasp that, if encouraged, this profoundly unstable evolution of ‘war’ will challenge core aspects of the liberal tradition in its broad sense as the tradition which underpins liberal democracies. War is just as much the IED-mangled body, the icon of early twenty-first-century combat, as it is a tool of policy; its proliferation is undesirable. War as war serves a legitimate function and this is not an anti-war book. However, war is currently not compartmentalised as it should be. By increasingly merging it with regular political activity, and investing in operational ideas a policy-like quality, we are confronted with policy as an extension of war; that used to be the wrong way round.