War From the Ground Up (23 page)

History has certainly not guided us to any recurrent forms … it is plain that circumstances exert an influence that cuts across all general principles… A critic has no right to rank the various styles and methods that emerge as if they were stages of excellence, subordinating one to the other. They exist side by side, and their use must be judged on its merits in each individual case.
¹⁵

While Clausewitz's emphasis on pragmatism in the application of military principles makes sense, such an approach is at odds with the endurance, and prevalence, of a tradition of military theory which argues that universal military principles do exist. The most influential military theorist of the nineteenth century was not Clausewitz but Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869), a French officer from Switzerland who served under Napoleon.
¹⁶
Jomini's work, which also took Napoleonic warfare as a model, presented an approach based on universal scientific and geometric principles.
¹⁷
Peter Paret, the American military historian, cites the opening of Jomini's
Résumé des principes généraux de l'art de la guerre
(1806): ‘at all times there have been fundamental principles on which good results in warfare depend … these principles are immutable, independent of types of weapon, time, and country'.
¹⁸
Jomini's essential conception of strategy involved the application of these principles, namely to operate on ‘interior lines' to the enemy, and to strike the enemy through concentration at a decisive point.
¹⁹

The actual principles that Jomini advanced were in many respects very similar to Clausewitz's, particularly the idea of concentration on the decisive point. The principles themselves made sense in a post-Napoleonic context. The conceptual difference with Clausewitz is therefore not so much the actual principles as the idea that they can be applied indiscriminately and without reference to a political context.
²⁰
However, Paret emphasises that the difference in authorial intentions between Jomini and Clausewitz is important to any comparison: ‘Jomini, we might say, writes about warfare rather than war. Clausewitz, on the other contrary, writes to explain war, shaped by society and politics, as it functions according to means and ends'.
²¹
Hence while Jomini's work takes the general's perspective and looks down onto the battlefield, Clausewitz examines war as a whole and its interaction with its political context. Moreover, as John Shy has argued, Jomini writes about ‘conventional' war; his principles may be universal, but within a particular context. He was clearly aware that war among the people was a different phenomenon.
²²

While an objective comparison of Jomini and Clausewitz indicates how many of their ideas were similar, there is nonetheless a tradition of strategic thought premised on the validity of universal military principles which has taken Jomini as its origin.
²³
As Daniel Moran has argued, Jomini has only been the most prominent representative of a tradition of military thought that conceptualises the use of force outside a political context:

Jomini detached Napoleon's achievements from their Revolutionary roots and infused military theory with a political and social naivety from which it still struggles to free itself. Jomini's work purported to show that the essence of military success lay in rational decision-making, designed to bring opposing armies together in a sequence of violent clashes whose political implications would be readily apparent.
²⁴

This tradition of military thought endures. The British Army teaches the ‘10 principles of war' in the first week at Sandhurst. While these make sense in conventional, high-intensity warfare at the operational level, they are not universal military principles to apply in all circumstances
of armed conflict, although this is sometimes how they are interpreted. ‘Concentration of force', for example, is often cited as an enduring military principle at the operational level. This analysis is inaccurate outside its legitimising context, which could be seen as the experience of Western conventional armies. Most successful insurgencies have succeeded because they have avoided concentration. ‘Selection and maintenance of the aim' is the holy grail of military principles. Bold strokes and tenacious pursuit of an objective have been the hallmark of several successful campaigns in conventional war. Yet in conflicts which are highly politicised at the tactical level, to have an aim which cannot be adjusted in light of practical reality because it is an immutable principle not to do so can become problematic.

An operational approach must connect back to its political purpose, or risk that self-referencing military logic drive a war much further than its political utility. Karl-Heinz Frieser argues in
The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West
(2005) that the German army's invasion of France was not based on any preconceived notion of
Blitzkrieg
, but was a series of actions developed by pragmatic responses to the situation on the ground.
²⁵
The German army had itself expected the invasion of France to take longer. The formalisation of
Blitzkrieg
as doctrine came later in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It did not link back at this later stage to a political goal, because operational thought had been elevated to the level of policy and become an end in itself. The politically indiscriminate application of
Blitzkrieg
left the German army massively over-extended on the Eastern Front.
²⁶

Germany's response to its experience in the First World War provides clues to its strategic experience in the Second World War, and emphasises the importance of distinguishing operational principles from policy. Hew Strachan argues that ‘the German army entered the First World War convinced that there was only one way to fight a war, and that was a strategy of annihilation resulting in complete German victory: its operational thought was scaled up to the level of policy'.
²⁷
Yet the physical destruction of the First World War was not taken into the heart of German territory because the war was (ultimately) regulated by policy. The outcome for Germany in 1945 was far more destructive. Germany's experience in the Second World War can be linked, Strachan argues, to the fusion of war and policy, with the
Führer
as the head of state and the military. It was General Ludendorff, among others, who suggested in
1922 that a
Führer
should unite policy and
Kriegführung
.
²⁸
This idea contributed not only to the confusion of operational thought and policy but to the exaggeration of the war's consequences.

The necessity to distinguish between operational principles according to political context is a theme which can be detected more widely than the two World Wars. The Vietnam War provides a case study of how the failure to understand a conflict on its own terms encouraged military objectives to become disconnected from political purpose. General Victor Krulak of the US Marine Corps understood that military action had to link into a political outcome. He endorsed the pacification approach that was adopted by the US Marines in I Corps, the northern part of South Vietnam, in 1966. This was an approach which recognised the local political dimension of the conflict, and sought to link villagers to the authority of the South Vietnamese government.

General Krulak was dismayed, however, at the military metrics that General Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were using to evaluate campaign progress. These metrics were most obviously symbolised by the body-count, but also emphasised geographical control relative to the enemy as opposed to political measures. Hence for Krulak the question of ‘who held what in the mountains was meaningless because there was nothing of value there'; this was in the context of much military effort being expended in contesting remote areas.

In 1966 General Krulak wrote a private letter to another US marine general in response to a remark by a US army general that the US was ‘winning militarily' in Vietnam, stating that this was ‘meaningless': ‘you have to win totally, or you are not winning at all'.
²⁹
The possibility that one can ‘win militarily' but lose a war is indeed perverse logic; it totally unhinges strategic theory, as it disconnects the use of force from political purpose.

Part of the problem seems to have been an institutional culture which saw the army primarily as a tool of conventional war. A RAND Corporation study of 1970 cited a senior US officer in Saigon so as to illustrate the problem of an organisation characterised by inward-looking, self-justifying principles: ‘I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war'.
³⁰
This view encapsulates the problem of military thought which is focused inwards on itself, privileging the satisfaction of military
principles—principles that may not be wrong in themselves but that have been inappropriately configured in relation to the nature of the conflict—above the need to adapt and win a conflict.

There is an argument that the US had achieved its aims by 1972: the defeat of the North Vietnamese Easter offensive in that year would support this view. The application of mass US air power prevented a rout of the South Vietnamese armed forces (although this equally suggests a South Vietnamese dependence on extensive US military support, which would indicate that the conflict was not over, especially in terms of the resources and political will required to sustain it). There is a counter-factual argument that if the US had provided the same support in 1975, South Vietnam could have survived. The outcome of the surge in Iraq in 2007 may plausibly lend more credence to such a revision of the historiography of the Vietnam War. This would depend on the evolution of the situation in Iraq, which is unclear at the time of writing.

However, the cost of war to both the Vietnamese and Iraqi peoples, and the costs to the US, must be considered in order to ground such revisionist arguments in the actual political, human and financial realities of what such strategy involves: was it worth it? That question is not the subject of this book; however, it is critical for our actual subject; strategy. Strategy must be clear that it serves policy (even if strategy can adjust policy if necessary, strategy should never be self-serving), and must consider the application of force in relation to the policy objective. Strategy must not allow military ‘metrics' to become inward-looking and self-referencing.

Military thought today sometimes makes a helpful distinction between ‘measures of performance' (measurements of actions being taken) and ‘measures of effect' (measurements of the outcome of those actions). By linking measures of performance to measures of effect the former is not allowed to become self-referencing. Night raids, for example, can be very effective at making the insurgent feel insecure, but may make other people feel anxious. The number of night raids would be a measure of performance, but the number of people coming to the market, responding to improved security, could be a measure of effect. The point is that the purpose is to make the community feel more secure, which depends on how they react to attempts to secure them. If they respond positively, do more of the same; if not, actions need to be
adjusted. This is more sophisticated than just measuring performance, such as the ‘body-count' in Vietnam, which locates a measure against an arbitrary and generic standard that may well not relate to the actual nature of the conflict. The dual measure system is better because it links internal military actions into their broader purpose as defined in real life.

The proposition that the military realm is autonomous from its political context has been encouraged historically by the cultural associations of the verdict of battle with honour. Because the idea of the ‘fair fight' is culturally conditioned, the degree to which one can gain the moral victory in military terms despite losing the war in general terms depends on the audience. In Afghanistan the coalition characterises the Taliban as dishonourable in their use of roadside bombs and guerrilla tactics. The default Taliban response, which is frequently encountered in banter between the Taliban and the Afghan police on unsecure radio traffic (along with the trading of colourful and amusing insults), is that they would prefer gun-fights but are denied the opportunity for a ‘manly' fight by the coalition's unfair use of air power. This would seem fairly sensible from their point of view. (At one point in 2010 an insurgent in our area, who may well have been smoking something, was known to claim that ‘the ISAF have captured a giant milk-fish', which was in fact a reference to our use of a white Zeppelin-like surveillance balloon that floated above the base tied down by a rope: whether the reader accepts the insurgent's opinion or mine, this asset was clearly unfair!)

The argument against the ‘fair fight' idea in relation to tactical methods can be summarised in a saying coined by Conrad Crane of the US Army War College: ‘there are two types of warfare: asymmetric and stupid'. Abstract cultural conditions which allocate military victory or defeat are subjective criteria and are as powerful, or irrelevant, as the audience's prejudices. That is not to say that there are no boundaries. Certain practices are deemed to be so universally distasteful, such as the use of poisoned gas, or torture, as to have been banned by international law.

War, and armed conflict more broadly, is subject not just to its political context, but also to its cultural context. For an operational approach to locate itself within a military realm separated from its political and cultural context is misguided. The extent to which an operational approach is governed by abstract military principles is a tension that lies at the heart of strategic thought today.