Rethinking Security

From Schlieffen to Starcraft

It's winter 2007. I am rudely awoken from a pleasant dream about enjoying a delicious PF Changs Chang's Crispy Chicken by the percussive clunk of my then-roommate playing Starcraft on an ancient Microsoft computer. Though the game is contained by his headphones, the loud clatter of his fingers typing out commands to squads of Space Marines, Goliath mechs, and Wraith space air fighters keeps me awake for the remainder of the night. This was unfortunately far from unique during those months, as he would either be playing Starcraft or watching YouTube videos of Korean grandmasters playing championship matches.

I'm reminded of that time by the release of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first update to the tactical strategy game since the Brood War expansion pack ten years ago. In the late 19th century, Hajo Halborn notes that the German General Staff created the kriegspiel (wargame). Through a combination of table-top exercises and staff rides to evaluate old campaigns and plot out new sources of tactical advantage, the Germans pioneered the use of wargames for sound military decision. Commercial wargames are the offspring of the krigspiel system developed by the 19th century German warfighting system.

Would Moltke or Schlieffen be impressed by my roommate's Starcraft tactics? Probably not. Why? The type of command and battle that it depicts was already outdated by Napoleon's 1806 campaign at Jena. As Claus Telp notes in his monograph on Napoleonic warfare, structural political-economic conditions meant that campaigning in the time of Frederick the Great required a heavy degree of troop control. Battlefield commanders found themselves micromanaging even the smallest of units. Subordinate officers were not trusted to exercise independent thought or action and probably wouldn't be able to perform effectively even if they wanted to.

Antoine Bousqet likens the army in the Frederician era to the political concept of the state in the 18th century--of a giant mechanical device that is animated by the spirit or will of the sovereign. This "ghost in the machine" animates the clockwork machine, which like a rigid antiquarian device springs into action with clockwork precision. Elaborate drills practiced obsessively governed Frederician tactics.

In the Starcraft that I played, you must literally control and command every single unit. Unless they are attacked (in which they either fight back or flee), there is no independent action without the player. Thus, it is difficult to focus on the genuinely strategic aspects of the game (i.e choice of a base area, technological development of forces) because the player-commander is forced to micromanage even the smallest and most mundane of tactical operations and administrative difficulties. Most tactical strategy games share the flaw of player-as-godhead. That being said, I haven't really played much since Starcraft ten years ago, so maybe non-player AI has advanced sufficiently to allow more delegation of responsibility.

By the era of Napoleon, the distributed corps system allowed Napoleon---though still a micromanager and centralizer--to delegate responsibility to corps commanders who could fight independently. In the time between the end of the Napoleonic years and World War I the size and complexity of warfare exploded, necessitating a more advanced system of control. it was physically impossible for a commander to exercise cognitive dominion by sheer force of will over massive armies distributed across large theaters of operation. Those who grew preoccupied with techno-tactical details (like French commanders in 1870) were soundly beaten.

The purpose of the krigspiel was to game out alternate possibilities within this reality, allowing participation by many different actors within the General Staff. Today, a wide range of wargames--some involving human participants, others completely simulated, are used to test weapons, invasion plans, and other crucial factors. But whenever I hear about a tactical strategy commercial game, I think of those nights in winter 2007 and the clunking of my roommate's keyboard.

History and Memory

Joseph Fouche makes a very sad but true point:

When students of 2050 think of our time (making the massive assumption that they will bother to think about our time), their thoughts would be more along the line of why didn’t Grandpa push Future Hitler under a bus when Grandpa had the chance. Our time is merely a connector between one vaguely memorable event (the death of Elvis) to another (the death of Michael Jackson). Events of the following decades will cast larger shadows than these small times with their small wars, small trivia, and small men. We’ll be the people in the gaps and accordingly will fall through them. Our time and our actions will have an impact on the future but I doubt the future will bother to send a thank you note.

The past recedes further and further away with each passing decade. To the children of the last 20 years, Vietnam is as old and distant as World War II, World War II as ancient as World War I, and World War I as remote as the Napoleonic Wars were to young men of the early 1900s. The time in between tends to, as Fouche notes, fall through the historical gaps.

Perhaps future generations' interpretations of the Cold War will be that of a titanic struggle between dueling hair metal bands:

Politik

In all of the excitement over the various news threads of the week, I missed the opportunity to blog about an important new piece by Aaron Ellis on the strategy of Margaret Thatcher's Britain:

"The use of force in domestic and foreign affairs was indeed crucial to the then Prime Minister in establishing a free economy and a strong state, and she often spun the fruits of force into ‘myths’ of national resurgence that helped the country and the Conservative Party. With regard to the Falklands, Thatcher used force adeptly and with strategic purpose; gradually limiting the options open to the Argentineans by gradually maximising Britain’s capacity to apply force. This approach would be repeated in a domestic context against the miners’ union two years later. And although Thatcher worded the use of force in the Falklands in ‘high’ moral language, it also served ‘high political’ aims. Success abroad helped rehabilitate the state at home and gave it the confidence to use force against ‘enemies within’, like the NUM. The successes achieved by using force in both the domestic and international spheres was then exploited by the Prime Minister to consolidate the Conservatives’ electoral hegemony, allowing them to change the political consensus in Britain."

In Ellis's telling, Thatcher emerges as a rare politician whose external and internal agenda is relatively seamless. This is exactly what Clausewitz means when he says about war being "politics by other means." Yet the domestic sources of political power are somewhat underdrawn. Contrast this with Anthony Eden's bungling of the overseas and domestic 1956 Suez crisis, which set the tone for Britain's later decline in the Third World. One of the 20th century's most underrated leaders, in that area, is China's Deng Xiaopeng, for that very same reason. Deng not only almost single-handedly set the stage for China's meteoric rise today, but did so with internal factions nipping at his heels and civil unrest a possibility---in the aftermath of one of the most traumatic periods in modern Chinese history. A very strong record.

"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.

Twenty Years' War

Robert Haddick assesses US foreign policy towards Iraq on the anniversary of Operation Desert Shield (the beginning of Gulf War I). He, quite sensibly, notes that future historians will not really separate the two wars given the continuity of the policy problem. The First Gulf War, in a sense, never really ended either because low-level warfare with Iraq went on throughout the 90's, with 1998's "Operation Desert Fox" as the high point of the "low-intensity" war.

The roots of US policy towards Iraq, however, go back to the 1970s. Steven Metz's book Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, which is really the only comprehensive look at the conflict (right now, anyway), correctly assess the roots of war in the problem of Persian Gulf security. The threat of Soviet attack, Iranian encroachment, and later Hussein's Iraq deepened US military involvement into the region until direct intervention in Gulf War I cemented US involvement. The unresolved question of Hussein's regime laid the groundwork for 2003's conventional phase.

Perhaps the most intriguing comment Haddick has about the war is how the first President Bush's rhetoric minimized his postwar options. Haddick notes that a "Versailles" solution of isolating Hussein was adopted, when a "Congress of Vienna" solution of trying to rebuild the prewar regional order of an Iraq that balanced against Iran may have been a possibility. But prewar rhetoric foreclosed this option:

We have to assume that Bush, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, all experienced realists, were fully aware of the Congress of Vienna option. The obvious problem was that from a U.S. perspective, Saddam was simply too toxic to deal with. In order to generate public support for a military offensive to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait – which at the time many feared would become another Battle of the Somme – Bush had to amplify Saddam’s evil impression. That succeeded in generating support for the offensive. But it ruled out a Congress of Vienna after the war. In theory, the Clinton administration could have made a fresh diplomatic approach to Iraq. But the cost at the time of maintaining the Versailles settlement seemed low while the political risk of approaching Saddam was deemed too high.

Haddick points to a familiar problem of American strategy. The American public simply does not like limited wars. In order to bring the American public to war, absolutist rhetoric must be employed. Gulf War I, however, was not an absolute war. We stopped at the Iraqi border. Not only did the rhetoric set the American public up for disappointment once Hussein was allowed to stay in power, but it also put us in a corner.

A certain college professor turned statesman might sympathize with the bind that Bush, Baker, and Scowcraft faced.

Warning, Strategic Surprise, and Iran

After having been forecast for nearly four years, observers are again arguing that an Israeli or American strike on Iran may occur. The logical question many have regarding this possibility is how such a strike could occur given that the punch has been telegraphed for so long. Isn't three years enough warning to make an attack operationally impossible? History suggests that an attack would still be possible to mount with the element of surprise.

Frist, it is worth going over the literature on surprise in war. Most are familiar with Cynthia Grabo, Efraim Karsh, and Richard Betts' texts. But perhaps the most cogent comment comes from Robert Leonhard, normally a theorist on operational warfare. Surprise, Leonhard argued, is merely the delayed recognition of attack. The aim of surprise is simply to slow down a reaction to an attack as much as possible. Leonhard and William McRaven both observe that it is simply impossible for defenses to stay on full alert all the time, with no weaknesses in any sector of the defense. The aim of early warning systems and intelligence is to give sufficient warning of a strike to blunt the attack's impact at the point of the spear.

In 1941's Pearl Harbor attack and 1944's Normandy landing, the defenders both had an idea that either an attack was inevitable or at least highly likely. It is difficult to conceal large-scale mobilization or preparation for a strike, especially in an atmosphere of diplomatic tension. But sorting through the "noise" of rumor, misdirection, and deception is equally difficult, especially when defending hinges on learning the time, place, and method of attack. McRaven also notes that special operations attacks have succeeded even when the attacker understands the place and method of attack (and even a rough estimate of the time), due to the problem of maintaining constant readiness.

The 1973 Yom Kippur attack is probably the most relevant case study. The Israelis had endured years of low-level warfare with Egypt and Syria since 1967 and witnessed constant Egyptian saber-rattling and mobilization. Although the causes of the intelligence failure are complex, one major contributing factor was the fact that the Israelis had been dulled into complacency by the false alarms. They also mirror-imaged the Egyptians, thinking that the Egyptians would wait until they had developed the ability to contest Israeli airspace to launch an attack.

A prospective Iranian decisionmaker examining the constant false alarms, the relative strategic and cost and benefit of a strike, and adversary domestic politics could thus make an "israeli" mistake. Such an error, in turn, would enable a strike to occur with the element of surprise. How that surprise is employed, and whether or not the attack would be successful in accomplishing strategic aims is another matter entirely. But surprise is possible.

Intellectual Circles and Security

Bill Petti has an interesting post on how new discoveries and ideas come about:

"We tend to think of ideas as 1) creations of single, brilliant individuals, and 2) unique in history, rather than derivative. Narratives of great discoveries suggest that ideas are created de novo from individual minds. However, if we take the time to deeply explore many of the greatest breakthroughs in science, art, etc, we find that the greatest ideas are the result of communities of thinkers and their combination, in unique and creative ways, of pre-existing ideas. To use Ridley’s metaphor, communities take existing ideas and breed them. That reproduction results in mutations and recombinations, which create a new species of idea that is superior to existing populations of ideas that we all then benefit from. Knowledge creation has an evolutionary and communal character to it."

In defense history, this is often a good explanation for doctrinal advancement. For example, the 1920s debates that resulted in the creation of Soviet operational science (and the term "operational art") were the result of the reinterpretation of 19th century Imperial Russian operational thinking and practice, paired with the importation of German thinkers such as Schlichting and Clausewitz as well as British interwar theorists like JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell-Hart (although the Soviets did not think much of either Englishman). Also considered was the Russo-Japanese War, the 19th century German operational record in 1866 and 1870, the Russo-Turkish conflict, and seen somewhat distantly the American Civil War's distributed campaigns.

These ideas, paired with the experience of World War I's Eastern Front, the Soviet Civil War, and the Soviet campaign beyond the Vistula against Poland and the challenges of preparing a backward state for the next great war, created a fertile ground for debate. Stalinism had not quite set in yet, and there was still a space for the debate between supporters of attrition (Svechin) and younger thinkers more fixated on operational annihilation (Tukhachevskii and Triandfillov).

As numerous books and articles have pointed out, the current COIN movement in America is also a product of collaboration between serving military officers of a number of different branches, military historians, and interested civilian academics from a variety of different fields.

Science Fiction and Strategy, Continued

I have a new post looking at some interesting contrasts between Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, the Vietnam airmobility concept, and the Iran-Iraq war at RTJ.

And best of all, while writing it I rewatched parts of the awesomely bad 1997 film version. Hollywood, how about a reboot of this one, Iron Man style?

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?

COIN Debate: A Second Look

I have a new post about the politics and problems of the COIN debate in America at RTJ.