War From the Ground Up (12 page)

When strategy fails to unify the strategic audiences who are within one's own side, the state cannot act as a ‘judge' to provide a coherent verdict of war's outcome. During the Vietnam War there were massive differences in perceptions of success between the US administration on the one hand and large tranches of domestic public opinion; this is not to mention disillusion among sections of lower ranks of the military on the ground later on in the conflict. That is, if victory, or success, is only interpreted as such by one element of the state, it is compromised as a legitimate analysis.

This chapter started in Afghanistan, as an example of a contemporary conflict in which the implicit application of the conceptual structure of war in the Clausewitzian paradigm was inappropriate. The temptation is to indicate the redundancy of Clausewitzian thought to contemporary conflict. That would be incorrect. Clausewitz's analysis was not intended to describe circumstances in which armed force was used as a direct extension of political activity outside of war.

An astute evaluation of the conceptual framework of a conflict outside traditional war was presented by US army General Raymond Odierno, who had extensive command experience in Iraq 2006–10, including as overall coalition commander. When asked at a press conference in March 2010 if the war in Iraq was effectively over, he replied: ‘war is a very different concept… I call [Iraq] more of an operation, not a war'.
⁴⁵

The traditional, Clausewitzian, paradigm of war assumes that there is mutual understanding of war as an interpretive unit. This provides mutual recognition of the military outcome. Strategy can then focus on the application of military force itself (combat), which Clausewitz argued was the ‘only means of war'.
⁴⁶
Yet Clausewitz realised that war's interpretive structure would be revised if the military outcome were
not
mutually observed. This occurred when a more effective form of war made the previous one redundant.

For Clausewitz, who wrote
On War
between 1816 and 1830, after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, a more limited form of war would only have a function ‘so long as it is tacitly understood that the opponent follows suit. But is it possible to tell how long this condition will be observed? The French Revolution surprised us in the false security of our ancient skills, and drove us from Châlons to Moscow'. The function of war in the Napoleonic paradigm made war's previous function redundant; to enter into war with Napoleon with a mindset of limited political goals, and a corresponding limitation of the use of force, was not possible.
⁴⁷
The relevance of this observation today would be that the evolution of the use of force directly for political purposes, outside of war, on a large scale, is quite possibly irreversible: armed actors imitate what is effective in each other's practice, especially in response to the information revolution.

In Clausewitz's analysis, in the eighteenth century war was mutually understood by European powers in terms that did not make it ‘absolute': the enemy was out-manoeuvred rather than totally destroyed; this emphasised the perceived over the physical component of defeat.
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Yet in his own lifetime Clausewitz saw warfare expand beyond its eighteenth-century limitations to approach its absolute state: ‘we might doubt whether our notion of its [war's] absolute nature had any reality, if we had not seen real warfare make its appearance in this absolute completeness right in our own times'.
⁴⁹
The social forces of the French Revolution of 1789 led to a French force which in 1793 ‘beggared all imagination' because ‘suddenly war became the business of the people, all thirty million of them'. The massive perception shift in the scale of war that he directly experienced in his own lifetime is essential to understand what Clausewitz attempted intellectually to come to terms with in
On War
. In 1792 at the Battle of Valmy, towards the start of the Revolutionary Wars, 64,000 men on one side fought against 30,000 on the other in a
battle lasting one day. By 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, 365,000 men fought 195,000 in a battle lasting three days.
⁵⁰

The numbers were only one aspect of a massive evolution in how people understood war's basic form. What Clausewitz terms ‘strategic manoeuvre' did not work against Napoleon's asymmetric approach that emphasised physical, as opposed to perceived, superiority. Napoleon's emphasis on seeking victory in physical terms through the pursuit of decisive battle was taken to extremes by employment within an unrestrained political context. This approach was characterised by the concept of exploitation: the ruthless pursuit of the enemy to his total submission. War was now a fight for state survival, not a political game: ‘the sole aim of war was to overthrow the opponent'.
⁵¹

The concept of failure to identify a transformation in war informed Clausewitz's analysis of Prussia's crushing defeat at the Battle of Jena by Napoleon in 1806. Prussia entered still thinking in the eighteenth-century mode; this was the mode that saw war's objectives in terms of ‘a couple of fortresses and a medium-sized province'. Yet Napoleon, ‘the God of War himself', thought of war in terms of far greater objectives: ‘would Prussia…have risked war with France if she had suspected that the first shot would set off a mine that would blow her to the skies?'
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In Clausewitz's view, Prussia's strategists had not understood the significance of the novelty and asymmetry of Napoleon's concept of war:

In the eighteenth century…war was an affair of governments alone… At the onset of the nineteenth century, peoples themselves were in the scale on either side… Such a transformation might have led to new ways of thinking about it. In 1805, 1806, and 1809 they might have recognised that total ruin was a possibility—indeed it stared them right in the face… They did not however change their attitudes sufficiently… They failed because the transformations of war had not yet been fully revealed by history.
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The functionality of war in terms of its provision of a military decision has been constantly revised. The point Clausewitz makes is that military victory meant a very different thing at the time of his birth than after the Napoleonic Wars. The deliberate subversion of the interpretive unit provided by war can be understood in terms of asymmetric warfare in the strategic sense: Napoleon deliberately, and brutally, ignored the conventions of eighteenth-century warfare to gain an advantage. The interpretive evolution of war can therefore occur within the Clausewitzian paradigm, indeed it is normal.

Clausewitz's analysis of war's mechanism is flexible and does not resist change; it accounts for it. For Clausewitz war retained utility through reconfiguration, and evolved frequently. Napoleon may have changed the rules of war, but he still thought of victory in terms of the defeat of the enemy. In this paradigm military action sets conditions for a political solution, but two circumstances are presupposed: first is the principle of polarity; second is the notion that strategic audiences in war are primarily contained within the states at war. In short, war in its traditional form can work as a mechanism to deliver a political decision when there is an enemy, and one defines the outcome against him. Asymmetry within that paradigm drives war's evolution in terms of military innovation and the ends that policy seeks in war; war, however, remains distinct from peace.

Strategic asymmetry is therefore not what is distinctive about contemporary conflict. Clausewitz's paradigm of war accepts that it is a normal feature of war's evolution. The distinctive feature of contemporary conflict is the absence, or more typically the compromise, of the two prerequisites that bound the circumstance of war, and thus allow war's mechanism to function as a political instrument. Afghanistan is one example of the consequence of confusing Clausewitzian war with armed politics outside war. The next chapter deals with the subversion of the Clausewitzian paradigm of war that occurs when it is used to incorporate strategic audiences beyond the enemy.

For war in its Clausewitzian paradigm to function properly, two conditions are presupposed: polarity between sides (to define an enemy), and the association of strategic audiences with either side (to define the war's outcome against the enemy). In this traditional conception of war, the use of force provides a military outcome which sets conditions for a political solution. When these prerequisites are compromised, so too is war's ability to provide an outcome: if both sides can go to war and legitimately claim victory, war is largely redundant as a political instrument to achieve a decision.

Polarity, and the subsequent association of strategic audiences with either side, encourages a stable interpretive environment, which allows war's mechanism to function; when polarity gives way to politically kaleidoscopic, fragmentary conflict dynamics, which create unstable interpretive environments, war's functionality is compromised.

However, a clear distinction between polarised and non-polarised conflicts is simplistic. Strategic audiences beyond the enemy have always existed; concerns by a war's participants about the reactions of wider international audiences, or audiences within a state who do not identify with it, are not new. By ‘beyond the enemy' I mean that there exist audiences who are particularly relevant to the war's outcome (from a given strategic perspective) who are not part of either side. Globalisation,
which is strongly associated with such concerns, is not new either. Exclusively polarised, or non-polarised, conflicts are therefore abstract poles; they are rarely, if ever, attained in reality. All conflicts have some form of polarity, however weak; conversely, even the outcomes of the most polarised conflicts are rarely sealed off from the responses of audiences unaligned to either side.

However, the extent and speed of inter-connectivity associated with contemporary globalisation can unhinge classical strategy. Contemporary globalisation challenges the two prerequisites of war in the Clausewitzian paradigm: first, in the proliferation of strategic audiences beyond the enemy; second, in the tendency for conflicts in general to be drawn further away from the pole of ‘pure polarity' as strategy tends increasingly to be sensitive to the opinions of global audiences. The consequence is the erosion of the distinction between military and political activity.

War is not a single, fixed, interpretive construct because audiences can understand war in their own way. If we return to the metaphor of war as a street fight without any set rules, ‘victory' and ‘defeat' are often perceived states which are subjective, and have to be imposed on an opponent. War does not provide an independent ‘judge' to hand out a verdict mutually recognised by the fighters themselves and the crowd. Unlike in a boxing match, or a legal trial, each side is its own judge. War is a competition to violently force the opponent to agree with one's judgement. The street fight may have an audience. If one of the fighters wants to impose a verdict on them too, things become far more complex. First, the audience are not in the fight (even if they can accidentally be hurt), so one cannot literally force them to subscribe to one's verdict, which one can do with the enemy. Second, the members of the audience are judges in their own right.

Strategy has a problem when war is used by the strategist to influence a non-combatant audience who does not subscribe to the same conception of the conflict as war, and so do not interpret the use of force in the manner desired by the strategist. The first line of General Sir Rupert Smith's seminal book
The Utility of Force
(2005) is: ‘War no longer exists'.
¹
He goes on in the paragraph to qualify this: ‘War as cognitively
known to most non-combatants, as war in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists'. He suggests a paradigm of ‘war among the people' to replace the ‘paradigm of inter-state war' in terms of how the use of force should be understood to give it political utility. The main inference of the mode of thought posited by General Smith is that, if the audience does not understand an action in military terms, the action effectively has a direct, and possibly unintended, political effect. The argument that in war military force sets conditions for a political settlement which is exclusively reached on the basis of the war's military outcome is untenable in such circumstances.

Today even relatively conventional wars are not fought entirely within a sealed military domain. The means of war are not just combat. While this has always been the case to some extent, it is accentuated by contemporary globalisation. The Russian-Georgian War in 2009, for example, was fought in front of a global audience. Russia enjoyed overwhelming military superiority. The Russian offensive stopped for political reasons. Whether Russia achieved its aims is debatable. Russia may deliberately have stopped where it did, although it did not achieve its aim of forcing the anti-Russian Georgian President Saakashvili from power. Strategic audiences outside the Russian-Georgian states mattered to the war's outcome, and Russian strategy was influenced, to an extent, by audiences such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU).

While the concept of outside alliances influencing wars is not new, globalisation in its contemporary form catalyses the importance of strategic audiences who are external to one's state or the enemy's state (or ‘side' if the term state is inappropriate) in the definition of success in any war. Indeed there is a credible argument that Russia's main purpose was in fact to assert its displeasure over two issues: the NATO campaign in Kosovo, which Russia claimed had violated Serbian sovereignty without UN backing, and the eastwards expansion of NATO. The degree to which Russia effectively made this point to NATO countries is up for debate, and not our current subject. However, the fact that the war was for Russia broader than merely strategic audiences within Georgia is clear.