President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
What’s a budding young strategist to do? By all means, read the classics. Read them in full, cover-to-cover…or at least the portions written by the original authors. (I skip the hundreds of pages of forewords and afterwards.) Next thing you know, you’ll be far more adept at recognizing the obligatory gratuitous Clausewitz quote. It won’t be long before you find yourself groaning at the inevitable article which begins by invoking politics by other means.
In the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the 2003 Iraq invasion, strategic calculation, systematic probing of assumptions combined with multiple advocacy and creative thinking, and skilled implementation may have led to decisions not to commit U.S. power and prestige in the first place, or have led to better outcomes. There is no shortage of need to apply these lessons with discernment as the U.S. faces contemporary challenges including the Iranians’ suspected nuclear weapons program, North Korea’s nuclear program and periodic provocations, the Arab Spring, a rising China, terrorism and transnational crime, climate change, and potential pandemics. It is possible, by chance, to have a good outcome in these and other challenging situations without a good decision-making process, but those chances are not high. It is incumbent upon the president to lead his national security team wisely to stack the odds as best as possible in the U.S.’ favor.
In his latest article, Tom Ricks presents an interesting interpretation of a Rosa Brooks piece, describing it as an attempt to “smackdown” 19th century strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz and his modern disciples. This would be unsurprising as Mrs. Brooks can exhibit a disdain for the old. But the semantic debate is meant to serve a more significant argument about the expanding use of military force to address contemporary threats.
The U.S. Army currently tries to introduce the German command philosophy of Auftragstaktik — Mission Command — but still fails to understand the essentials of that system. One of them is empowered subordinates whose opinion is valued and who do not have to fear repercussions if they voice criticism against their superiors. The Prussian/German army struggled for 30 years with the introduction of this superior command philosophy and the U.S. Army seems to be determined to make every single mistake the Prussian army made and add some of their own.
The discussion of R2P thus far has been focused more on a "right" to protect than a "responsibility" to do so. The arguments indicate that a state has a responsibility to protect its people but takes for granted that third parties somehow inherit this responsibility when the state cannot fulfill it. There is a missing explanation here. The need to justify such efforts may seem callous, but a nation’s highest moral order is to serve its own citizens first.
It is said that Germans after World War II stated that they did not like to fight the Americans, as they never stuck to their own doctrine or tactics. Russian doctrine too stated that U.S. forces were unpredictable because all their plans went to hell once a battle had begun. Perhaps that is why one of the great U.S. Army maxims is “No plan survives first contact.” It is true that we tend to bring some “innovations” to war, intentional or not. This could be termed the “tactical” American Way of War. Scholars have spent a lot of time, ink, and breath arguing what the “American Way of War” is, or even if one exists. Russel Weigley has argued that the American Way of War is to bring overwhelming force to bear on the enemy and crush them in absolute and total victory. For myself, hardly daring to even call myself a scholar, I will leave that argument to others with more money and time, but I do have a theory on what I like to call the “American Penchant of War.”
The conventional thinking regarding counterinsurgencies is that they take 10 years to conclude. The inherent problem with the strategic approach used in Iraq and in Afghanistan is impatience to rebuild their societies by employ the concept of federalism to harness the established forms of political power in each country. Federalism would have placed the responsibility of governance, justice, security, and economic development at the lowest level possible, where it was desired by Iraqi society and had long been established in Afghan society.
Americans would make great suicide bombers. Just like young madrassa-educated men who chant Koran verses in a language they don’t even speak, the American public has blindly “supported the troops” without ever thinking critically about the necessity of continued military presence — and casualties — in Afghanistan.
Whether you call them drones, remotely piloted vehicles, or unmanned vehicles, they’re all just tools of warfare. And forgive the banality of the point, but tools of warfare are used by humans who seek to maximize violence against their adversary, and that requires complement rather than replacement. Most importantly, we should also recall that in non-linear positive-sum games, as combat is exhibited as, the interaction of people and weaponry leads to a cumulative advantage if used asymmetrically. As such, the vast balance of history teaches us that we will continue to perceive technological/tactical cycles as something of a progression of coordination (synchronization), to cooperation (integration), and then ultimately, to a combination for strategic effect (convergence). We’ve only just begun to conceive of drones in the proper terms of complement, and it is past time to do so.
Anti-intellectualism exists, as it always has in militaries since the rise of standing armies; so instead of focusing on the bureaucratic nature of military culture, we should be determining how to refocus seasoned troops on education so that we may hone our judgment in garrison as we prepare to meet the challenges of future battlefields. The issue is not one of merely having an intellect, but how an intellect is both grown and employed.
Trying to define “intellectual” is like walking in the world of Zoolander, a movie about a male model (Ben Stiller) who describes himself as “really, really, ridiculously good looking.” Academic definitions of “intellectual” (often themselves it would seem) paint a similar gushing picture about a “life of the mind” that values education, and appreciates critical thinking, history, philosophy, and science. After Matt Cavanaugh and Andy Rohrer’s recent blog exchange, I was left wondering how could anyone be against all these wonderful things?
If we desire to maintain our advantage over machines and drones, then this example from Libya is precisely what we do not want. The members of the Profession of Arms don’t simply “service targets,” just as they shouldn’t automatically put on a reflective belt. We ought to continually strive to be skilled and discriminate conductors of the symphony of violence — that also know why the orchestra has assembled for the performance. If we don’t live up to this ideal, then maybe it is time to start sending in the drones.
The Army may have an “anti-intellectual” bias, but the arguments set forth to support this claim are incomplete. These issues cannot be taken lightly. Anti-intellectualism is a serious issue and a heavy accusation. The causes cited for it are perhaps more frightening than the problem itself. The assertion may be true, but it requires much more analysis to confirm.
I, like most military service members, can be very critical of military based movies because of historical or technical inaccuracies; however, as I stated in my own take on Lone Survivor, I have come to realize that in some cases, the underlying themes and messages are more important than pure authenticity.
Bureaucracy creates incentives that perpetuate an existing bias toward anti-intellectualism among the people that are the institution. This is an important discussion to have, especially as the Army is now going to reduce its size to 420,000 soldiers on active duty, it is vitally important that intellectualism is reintroduced to the force. But, maintaining the status quo will not achieve this; the bureaucracy will need to be changed and will require bold leaders unafraid to take risks to make that happen.
No doubt there will be many executive functions in war, but wars are not over just because one side decides to capitulate, they are over when one side understands that it has lost and the other has won. The role of narrative is to develop that understanding. To that end, the narrative doesn’t have to appeal to our conscious, executive mind — it has to work on our unconscious learning mind. People who poo-poo narrative for want of something a little more calculable have deprived themselves of a powerful tool.
Clausewitz’s great contribution was to “build a snowmobile.” He took the philosophical epistemology of his era, which gave him a means of refining “truth.” He then directed that system to a study of war and availed himself of a Newtonian system to look at cause, effect and engagement. He further located war as a nexus between multiple independent but fused factions. I hope that this is a useful addition to your conception of CvC’s subjective, objective, and trinity.
