Rethinking Security

Military Assistance and Strategy

There's a new article out in the Christian Science Monitor out on military assistance and its uncertain record. The gist of it is that assistance can have public relations blowback if regimes use US-trained militaries against their own people, strategic blowback if regimes (as they frequently do) use militaries in ways that contradict US national interests, and generally does not advance U.S. interests. To some degree, they are fair criticisms. Merely spending time in the US and being schooled in an American military system is not a guarantee that an officer will be sympathetic to US strategy or act in a manner that might undermine his home country's own national interests.

However, the article ignores several salient points about military assistance. First, there is something to be said about basic interopability issues. Turkey, an example cited as a failure of military assistance, is a member of NATO. It makes sense to familiarize Turkish officers with American military, political, and cultural mores in order to better cooperate with them on issues of mutual importance. Second, military assistance and training is often one small part of larger diplomatic package and cannot be viewed in isolation. Its political benefits or demerits must be judged within the totality of the larger relationship. While seemingly insignificant on its own, it may be more useful as a part of a larger patchwork of ties. Finally, assistance, if properly and narrowly targeted toward certain areas of policy, may have beneficial effects on larger US interests.

Indeed, the issue simply seems to be a matter of realistic expectations. No amount of time in Fort Leavenworth would convince the Turks to open their territory to a military operation they thought would severely undermine their national security. We are also perfectly aware of what Pakistan considers its primary interests to be and should not be surprised if they redirect our assistance to developing their forces towards fighting India. But just because we expected more than what we should have does not mean that assistance cannot be a useful tool when it is properly aligned with a fruitful policy objective.

Strategy and Political Communities

I've been wanting to blog on a Clausewitzian slept-on gem by Seydlitz89 of MilPub for a while, but haven't been sure (up until now) about how to approach it. Asked to define patriotism, Seydlitz points out that the concept is very complex: as it's something "more in the line of a complex concept/ideal type/'ideal' linked with another complex concept, that of 'community', hence the title." He goes on to make a point about the structure of the making of strategy that is very important:

The first concept is the distinction between individual and plurality. This comes up again and again in strategic theory since from a strategic theory perspective, such terms as "conflict", "war", "force", "coercion", "strategy", "tactics", "operations", "victory", "defeat" and a host of others refer to political communities, not to individuals. Too often students and practitioners think in terms of their own individual interests, but that is not what strategic theory is about, rather exactly what it is NOT about. Instead it is about the actions of political communities, either groups within those communities, or between separate communities. An individual who acts alone against the interests of a community is by definition an outcast, an outlaw or a tyrant.

This is something Machiavelli wrote about quite strongly. The purpose of The Prince was not to enable wannabe manipulators like Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia, it was to offer the Prince (hence the title) a guide to ruling a state justly and effectively. Machiavelli's Prince acts in a manner that will ultimately benefit the polity. There is a moral code the Prince must honor, even if the morality of the state is different from that that governs individual relationships. Seydlitz goes on to talk about the meaning of strategy itself:

The second concept goes back a long way, to ancient Greece, as does the origin of strategy itself. The Greeks were clear that self-interest was the flip side of justice, that is both were two sides of the same coin and required each other to make any sense. It is only in terms of a community that self-interest can be defined and justice is when the community accepts the claims of the individual as being in line with the interests of the group. This system in turn required a language, a means of communication within the group with terms that had distinct meanings which everyone understood. To this it is also necessary to remember that for the Greeks justice was only possible among equals (Nietzsche spoke a lot of this as well in his Genealogy of Morals btw)

Part of the genius of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is how well he describes how this very mechanism that I have described comes apart. Athens no longer considers herself one among equals, but above the rest with the power to do as she pleases. The citizenry starts to quarrel among themselves and to see democracy as a hindrance to the demands of Empire. Language itself starts to lose relevance as terms take on new meanings to cover and legitimize base actions. Individuals each seek their own advantage at the expense of the community, and the community itself eventually collapses into chaos and suffers defeat at the hands of Sparta and her allies.

And this brings us to the ever-running grand strategy debate. What conditions produce good grand strategy? I think Seydlitz89 lays it out very well. You cannot ultimately have good either the ideational (i.e containment) or emergent (i.e a set of practices) variant of grand strategy without a healthy political community. Now, let's take a step back for a minute. If you are a certain man who waxes poetic about McDonalds, Lexuses, and olive trees, you might identify "healthy political community" with "Western democracy." And if you did, you'd be wrong.

Democracy as we understand it is an extremely recent invention in human history. For a good deal of history, alternative forms of government tended to predominate. But yet there were plenty of Chinese and Roman emperors, British kings and queens (not to mention a certain Mongol) who history judges to have ruled in a just and effective manner. There were also political cultures that produced effective grand strategies that we would not want to emulate today (i.e ancient China). You don't need democracy to create good strategy, but I think Machivaelli (a humanist and a supporter of the idea of the Republic) would agree that the investment of the political community is necessary to producing sound strategy and protecting the realm.

And this brings us to the core issue that Bernard Finel, Zenpundit, T. Greer, and Gunslinger are talking about, even if it's not being explicitly addressed: would we meet the standard that Machiavelli lays out in The Prince? The answer to this question tends to break down along partisan, ideological, or policy-fighting lines. I will say, however, that in 200 years the U.S. has done pretty well given our youth and inexperience. We've survived threats that have crushed other revolutionary states--both internal and external--in the bud. We've managed to guide ourselves through the explosive coming of modernity, a process starting in the mid-19th century led to all kinds of horrible things across the world (especially in Europe)--prospering from it and making ourselves a superpower.

And judging from that, I think that the overall mood of declinism inherent in many new books about American power fundamentally misunderstands the resilience of our political system---and our potential for the future.

A Strategic Parable

The "AF-PAK" situation, in outline, is this: everyone now knows that the Pakistani government--in part or in whole--is supplying elements of the forces fighting us in Afghanistan and has a dramatically different geopolitical conception of a future Central Asia then we do. Everyone knows, in turn, that the Pakistanis tacitly allow us to carry out drone and special operations inside their borders, while using these unpopular actions to demonize us. It is also common knowledge that the United States, simply by virtue of what Pakistan represents, is dependent on Islamabad for a host of both technical and political services. Lastly, despite the geopolitical importance of Pakistan, a bipartisan grouping of defense intellectuals feel that the United States, allied partners, and major players in the broad region have not stepped up to the plate in terms of disaster relief for one of the most devastating floods in recent memory.

So what is to be done? A conventional idea might be to formulate a new, whole-government strategy for American engagement in Pakistan. Such a strategy might be worked out utilizing a cutting-edge political science or sociology method. But strategy exists to implement a policy. There is creativity within strategy, tactics, and the operational methodologies that join them but they are instrumental devices, and the broadest field of creativity lies within the policy realm. But the cognitive incoherence and contradiction in the second paragraph suggests that something might be wrong with the overall policy that forces us through these logical contortions.

When we talk about "strategy"--as in what kind of strategy does a candidate have for dealing with the terrorist threat, we're in reality really talking about policy. A threat exists (terrorism), and a policy is formulated as to what to do about it. The instruments of national power, in turn, carry out a strategy designed from policy. It's a bad linguistic tick, and I'm frequently guilty of conflating the two in my mind and in everyday speech and writing. If you believe in the concept of grand strategy, a grand strategy would be a set of practices effective at a given time for accomplishing basic policies such as surviving, making $$, or knocking the other dude off the pedestal to be the big kahuna.

What might this tendency to merge policy and strategy suggest, though? It means that we both don't want to dredge up the debates policy might bring (especially in a time of great political polarization), or that we see policy problems as essentially issues of engineering akin to building a bridge in structurally difficult conditions. With all of the talk of complexity, design, problem-framing, and adaptation, it seems lost to many that these methodologies are not just effective on tactical, operational, or even strategic levels. The idea of "wicked problems" is something that social scientists thought of originally in the policy context, and was later adapted for military practice.

Basil Liddell-Hart, Grand Strategy, and Modern Grand Strategy

Joseph Fouche writes in to comment about the confusion of grand strategy, looking at Basil Liddell-Hart's coining of the term. The story of how strategy turned into the very multifaceted term we see today is too great of a story to render here (although I recommend that anyone interested read this book by Michael Howard), but the term "grand strategy" and its evolution is very interesting.

In his book Strategy, Liddell-Hart coined the term "grand strategy" to describe choices pertaining to the overall conduct of great wars. He defines "grand strategy" on page 353 of my 1991 Meridian press version as "war policy." Now, the confusing aspect of this is that this is how we might define "strategy" today in the loose sense--e.g. when talking about Obama's strategy for Afghanistan or in a historical sense about Lincoln's strategy for winning the Civil War.

This, however, is not the understanding of "grand strategy" we have today. Starting with Edward Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Luttwak has written a new book about the Byzantine Empire), grand strategy has been used in books to refer to the overall method of a state for producing security for itself or making itself powerful. Paul Kennedy's edited compilation Grand Strategies in War and Peace and Rise and Fall of the Great Powers explicitly uses this framework. The William Murray and MacGregor Knox edited compilation The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War also pioneered it. And the Clausewitzian Colin S. Gray has written a great deal on grand strategy as well.

So, what to say? First, the better works on the subject do not treat grand strategies as linear plans but a coherent or at least related set of practices over a long period of time. This is a good approach to take, as it emphasizes that rulers did not instinctively seek to craft a Seldon Foundation-esque master plan for eternity but discovered, through trial and error, a set of practices, ideas, and concepts of operations that worked for a given period of time. Perhaps a very important question (and one that has been alluded to) is what kinds of political cultures tend to produce these sets of practices, and whether they are imposed top-down, generated in a mixed fashion, or come emergently from below.

The ironic thing about Liddell-Hart's narrow conceptualization of grand strategy is that some of his most well-known books such as The British Way in Warfare, Defense of the West, and Deterrent or Defense, all looked at what we might understand today as "grand strategy." Azar Gat also famously counterfactually argued that Liddell-Hart, not Kennan, was the true father of containment.

Strategy and "Strategy"

Diplomatic historian Walter McDougall recently wrote this:

The most a wise statesman can do is imagine his ship of state on an infinite sea, with no port behind and no destination ahead, his sole responsibility being to weather the storms certain to come, and keep the ship on an even keel so long as he has the bridge.

I write this after an interesting Twitter conversation with Gunslinger of Ink Spots, which he later excerpted in his own reflections on strategy in America. Gunslinger points out a recurring dynamic. The upper layer of policy and strategy is thin and operational art, the solid bottom foundation, is filling in the void. The problem, however, is that operational art provides a narrow viewpoint to see the world. It is good as a cognitive ordering device for some things, but poor for others. When we try to use it as a strategic device, it magnifies our confusion because the blurs outside of our finely tuned vision are all the more distressing, frightening, and alien to us.

Of course, grand strategy is difficult to formulate--both in a historical and contemporary sense. And it may be, in fact, chimerical. I don't want to get back into the very esoteric dialogue that Zenpundit, Joseph Fouche, Smitten Eagle, and I (as well as countless other bloggers) had last year, but there is a very real question whether grand strategy is possible--especially today. Have we evolved the cognitive instruments to handle modern policy problems? Some of the joys of talking to someone with a British historical training like Aaron Ellis is the feel he has for the mundane persistence of these issues.

In the long-term the minimum role of the statesman and the policy official/strategist is what McDougall described. To keep the ship going, without any clear destination beyond his or her own very limited field of vision. When it comes to the conduct of war itself, we might begin to revive "strategic art"--or strategy as it was known before World War II. The alternative is to cycle through ever more elaborate concepts of operation without the guidance and framing that strategy provides.

Weapons and Symbology

Aaron Ellis continues his winning streak with a look at the problem of the British Tory party and the trident missile system. To the Tories, apparently, the submarine-launched nuclear system is at the heart of the party's identity.

Benedict Brogan wrote a curious piece last week, which I didn’t manage to comment on at the time. He argues that Trident, our current nuclear capability, is a ‘sacred Tory cow’ that David Cameron risks meddling with at his peril. For some within the Party, Trident ‘goes to the heart of Tory identity and what the party stands for.’ If we not about ‘defence of the realm’, then what are we for? Questions about Trident also touch Thatcherite nerves, and triggers Old Right masturbation about the ‘golden age’ of the ‘80s. Personally, I think this kind of attitude is balls and whoever holds it doesn’t know much about the Party before 1975 and fails to appreciate Conservative traditions like realism, pragmatism and adaptability. First, Trident is not synonymous with nuclear capability; no one serious is questioning the need for the latter, but it is perfectly reasonable to debate whether there are alternative systems.

One can, of course, be cynical and suggest ulterior motives. But certain weapons and strategies do play to strategic cultures. There are a lot of analyses looking at the concept of Massive Retaliation and its tie to early Cold War hawkishness, as well as John F. Kennedy's liberal emphasis on special warfare and counterinsurgency fitting with the mood of the time that the United States had to win control of the developing world through a both violent and nonviolent idealogical challenge. Plus, as an American it is very interesting to me (and heartening, perhaps) to see that the dysfunctional defense debates here are by no means exceptional.

Decision Time in Tehran

One hitherto unexamined question about an potential Iranian response to a US or Israeli attack is about goals, motives, and strategy. Say you are an Iranian government national security official. You wake up to the shouts of your subordinates and the sound of bombs crashing into government buildings. You have been on high alert for a while, perhaps sleeping in a bunker, but the moment has finally come. Roused, you frantically escape the destruction of your command site and hurry to a safe and hardened area, stepping over the bodies of those who were caught in the initial strike. Your subordinates await your command. The shouting and screaming grows louder, and the acrid smell of burning fires outside more intense. What are the policy goals that will inform your response?

We have seen a baseline of technical analyses of the ability of Iranians to do harm in response to an attack. These range from conventional "high-end asymmetric threats" such as military action in the Strait of Hormuz to the use of sleeper cells, paramilitary operatives, and proxies worldwide. But few analyses really look at the overall policy goals and motives behind an Iranian response. What would Iran, in other words, be trying to achieve?

Several baseline objectives are obviously (1) preserving regime authority and (2) preventing further strikes. These, however, are not straightforward, as steps taken to preserve regime control at all costs may conflict with flexibility and risk-taking needed to conduct military operations and political warfare. Establishing deterrence, on the other hand, may entail measures that would set in motion events that could threaten regime control. Perhaps a third option may be to do nothing and exploit public sympathy to weaken the adversary, saving the response for a future time.

The larger question is whether a strike would also shift the basic Iranian regional grand strategy towards full-on confrontation, which may entail the use of "active measures"--proxies and agents directly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks the Iranian policy goals would be post-attack and what strategies Tehran would use to achieve them.

"The Undiscovered Country"

In 1806, the Prussian Army, having been outwitted by Napoleon's grand strategic shaping of the battlefield, were set up in the perfect place for him to exercise his operational art . The Prussians were totally annihilated on the fields of Jena, crushed like bugs under the foot of the master of an elusive style of warfare that European and American soldiers would spent a century trying to copy. No one could have predicted that Gerhard von Scharnhorst, a Prussian officer participating in the battle, would lay the ground for Germany's future rise to power and the annihilation of France barely sixty years later in a campaign of similar brilliance. Needless to say, predicting the future is a difficult business.

So this is a good jumpoff point to discuss both Gulf War I and FM 100-5 Operations, formulated and published two years after the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm. Adding to the discussion from last night, Crispin Burke makes this crucial point:

Critics of counterinsurgency doctrine often claim that a well-conceived foreign policy at the strategic level would preclude the use of American forces in counterinsurgency-style conflicts. Yet, as a wise man once said, "Always in motion, the future is". Few could have predicted that the defence of Saudi Arabia would kick-start a chain of events which would eventually give rise to a figure like Osama bin Laden.

Who wouldn't want to be like Sun Tzu and win without violence at all, or simply through the deterrent use of force?. Force is a very wasteful and unpredictable way of resolving disputes. But if that were all to the game of statecraft, Sun Tzu's The Art of War would have been a substantially shorter book, no? But if Sun Tzu saw a need for all of those lengthy chapters about marching and besieging castles, we should all take note of the difference between ideals and reality.

Questions of strategy and force weighed heavily on those who faced the task of building America's truly first post-Cold War operational doctrine. To those who have studied recent doctrine, TRADOC historian John Romjue should be a familiar name. He wrote a flurry of books and monographs about the evolution of AirLand Battle and the transition away from Active Defense. In his 1998 monograph American Army Doctrine for the Post-Cold War, Romjue retells the story of how the Army adapted to the challenge of a post-Cold War in doctrine. The challenge of doing so was perhaps the most momentous intellectual task the Army faced in decades.

The challenge of facing down the Soviet Union in Germany was over. Neither Presidents H.W. Bush or Clinton were really successful at imagining or executing a vision of the post-Cold War. For a military planner, this intellectual vacuum forced the doctrine team for FM 100-5 to largely work on their own. In a familiar story that is now approaching cliche, a visionary military intellectual (General Frederick Franks) gathered a group of wise men together and formulated a new doctrine through rigorous debate.

The technical details aren't really as interesting as the assumption of global deployability that Franks worked off of. The idea of an fast, smart Army that could rapidly deploy to put out brushfires as per the dictates of US foreign policy dictated force structure and doctrine. The idea of simultaneity, of striking the enemy simultaneously with deep and integrated fires (as opposed to AL-B's combination of the close and deep fight) also was a platform from which the "post-industrial" Army After Next would be built off of.

Did they get it right? It depends on your perspective about the future. From 1993 up until 2003, the force structure and doctrine that Franks and co developed served the direction of US foreign policy. Now, according to the Economist, NATO is dusting off plans to defend Europe from Russian military power. Only this time it is not necessarily tanks and BTRs but cyber-warfare and missiles that seem to be causing the biggest worry. Perhaps the correct answer is that we still haven't really figured out the post-Cold War, and that we are still adapting to a new reality: twenty years later. And from this perspective FM 100-5 was the first of many drafts to come.

Revolutionary Reflections

Crispin Burke, high up in the Alps searching for the men in the Ricola commercial, blogs about some of his new reading choices:

For a while, I've been heavily engaged in Piers Macksey's War for America, which delves into the strategic challenges facing Britain during the Revolutionary War. I'd argue that it has some significant parallels for the United States, as it fights two expensive counterinsurgency campaigns abroad, with threats still lurking about from much larger powers.

As I've already noted, my reading list is already sprawling and I have a horrible habit of jumping in between books. But this looks pretty awesome. Any other good books covering the Revolution from a British or European perspective?

The Shadow of Limited War

I have a new post looking at issues of both cultural and structural limitations on force in RTJ.