War From the Ground Up (7 page)

The coalition campaign in Afghanistan will focus on transition to Afghan security forces until, on current plans, the process is complete by 2015, even though a smaller coalition force will likely endure. This process will draw out any differences in the interpretive structures through which the government of Afghanistan and coalition forces understand the conflict. Geographically, there may well be areas on the periphery that the Afghan government are not overly concerned about securing, yet in which coalition forces have invested significant credibility, and lost many lives, to that end. The Afghan government is also likely to have a far more nuanced view of which entities, groups or individuals should be targeted on the basis of their affiliation to the insurgency. The powerful criminal patronage networks which operate in Afghanistan may be a coalition target, but unless they pose an existential threat to the Afghan state, they may well not bother the government, especially since these networks typically have strong government connections.

Many wars are not fought over the same political goal, which makes the notion that war provides a single ‘decision' redundant. Hew Strachan argues in an article on ‘Strategy and the Limitation of War' (2008) that in retrospect wars are often seen, mistakenly, as single units.
¹⁹
He uses the two World Wars as examples. The very term ‘First World War' implies a single phenomenon. Yet individual states understood the function of that war in particular terms. Japan seized the German colony of Tsingtao in China. This foothold on the Shantung peninsula was the start point for subsequent Japanese imperialism in China and the Pacific. Turkey also joined the war for regional objectives. The Young Turks saw an opportunity for the Ottoman Empire to throw off the yoke of Great Power domination. Strachan argues that ‘three Balkan states entered the war to advance local ambitions, not to promote the broader claims of the Great Powers, the values of German
Kultur
, the rule of law, or the rights of small nations'.
²⁰
Indeed, through the eyes of small powers, Strachan states that the First World War started as a Balkan war, the third since 1912, and it continued as one beyond 1918. As a war of Turkish independence, it continued until 1922. Therefore ‘to understand the First World War as a global war, we have first to disaggregate it into a series of regional conflicts'.
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Strachan's argument illustrates the concept that war does not provide a single, universal, interpretive structure. Each actor fought its own ‘war' for its own ends. This was primarily defined in terms of difference in political aims.

General Sir Rupert Smith identified this in his experience of coalition warfare in the late twentieth century: ‘the glue that holds a coalition together is a common enemy, not a common desired political outcome'.
²²
In the context of the ‘Long War' and the war in Afghanistan, the idea of a common enemy to hold together coalitions is so powerful that it distorts strategy, as insurgencies which are actually composed of a multitude of different actors tend incorrectly to be categorised as homogeneous enemies. Conversely, it also distorts the Taliban leadership's political agenda, as their superficial coherence with the wider insurgency is based partly on the presence of an enemy against whom they can unite; yet if that enemy does leave, they may well fracture and lose power. The label of war, when used to package a historical, or an ongoing phenomenon, can ignore critical nuances; the term ‘the First World War', like the ‘war in Afghanistan' are labels that suggest a degree of coherence to the war's spatial and chronological boundaries which were, or are, in fact unique to each participant.

Yet the time and space argument does not extend to all wars; some wars were essentially a single phenomenon in a physical sense. The Falklands War of 1982, for example, was for the most part the same in time and space for both sides.
²³
The time and space argument in itself is therefore insufficient to challenge the idea that war can provide a single, fixed, interpretive structure. In cases such as the Falklands, it is tempting to argue that war did, more or less, provide just that (although the tensions between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands at the time of writing this book in February 2012 indicate that even the well-defined period of actual fighting was only part of a broader and ongoing confrontation).

However, in any war, regardless of how close it comes to being understood as a single entity in time and space, ‘war' cannot be a single interpretive structure because war does not have independent authority to adjudicate its own outcome.

‘War' does not decide who wins and loses. The idea that ‘war' provides a verdict implies that both sides have relinquished authority to decide the war's verdict to ‘war' itself, as if ‘war' is an independent judge who lies beyond human agency. That ‘war' is such a judge is necessarily an (erroneously) implied proposition when military activity is incorrectly understood through the lens of a disconnected and self-referencing military domain, in which armed forces fight each other subject only to the verdict of ‘war'. Clausewitz's comparison of war with a legal trial
is ill-founded in the sense that in a court of law there is indeed an independent judge. The legal trial is a single, legally defined, interpretive structure into which both sides enter and receive an independent verdict. War is a contest, which may resemble a trial, but with a key difference: each side is its own judge. This can be taken to extremes, especially in a context in which international law is not upheld. Desperate measures in war are often proportional to perceived loss.

Clausewitz correctly described war as a ‘clash of wills'. If the military verdict of the battlefield is mutually recognised, this is not because both sides have accepted the verdict of some abstract God of War: one side has forced its will over the other. War is a competition to impose meaning on people, as much emotional as rational, in which one's enemy is usually the key target audience. Defeat is not a ‘verdict' handed out by an independent arbitrator of war; defeat is a perceived state which typically is violently forced (or successfully threatened) by one side upon the other. If a war is in progress, by logic neither side has yet given up: each side is still trying to impose its verdict, its judgement, on the other (or at least to mitigate the sentence of the other). Defeat occurs when one side accepts the verdict given by the other side, is destroyed, or becomes no longer relevant. The political compromises that have settled most wars are indicative of the difficulty of ever fully imposing a verdict on the other side.

The central deduction for strategic thought is that war is not a military ‘boxing ring' that both sides enter into with a fixed set of rules (a single interpretive structure), from which a verdict is independently adjudicated purely on the basis of the fighting. War is a street fight. Each party fights for its own reasons, and by its own rules. Any ‘verdict' from a street fight is entirely subjective beyond the physical impact, and possibly death; if one wants one's opponent to accept one's ‘verdict', that meaning needs to be forced upon them. There may be a crowd watching, in which case to be seen to ‘win', if one cares for their opinion, one's rules need broadly to align with theirs (we will deal with the issue of audiences in the next chapter).

The fact that each side plays by its own rules need not preclude a common interpretation of a particular action in war. Interpretation of international law may condition responses to the extent that they are similar. Moreover, several battles throughout history have been mutually acknowledged as a defeat for one and a victory for the other. For
instance in the year 9 CE, three Roman legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus were totally destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest in Germania (near present-day Osnabrück). This was hailed as a major victory by the Germanic chief Arminius, who sent Varus' head to other Germanic chiefs to try to form an anti-Roman alliance. The Emperor Augustus clearly acknowledged the defeat, reportedly shouting from his palace walls, ‘Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!' This definite identification of defeat was confirmed when Roman historians subsequently referred to the battle as the
clades Variana
(the Varian disaster).
²⁴
However, one must not confuse a mutual acknowledgement of a battle's meaning with the idea that war in these cases provides a single interpretive structure.

What we have in such cases is not both sides submitting to the ‘rules' of war in the abstract; instead both sides still have their own set of rules, but they are symmetrical. That is, when war does provide a common interpretive structure, it is because both sides are using an identical interpretive template of war. This can create an illusion that war is a single interpretive structure, but it is only an illusion. The exception to this is the concept of absolute war, which is rarely found in reality. In such a circumstance, where complete physical destruction of the enemy is the only goal, war is perhaps a universal cognitive concept (and nor should we lose sight of this possibility in an era of nuclear weapons).

In some situations the key variable is the extent to which the war is fought over the same issue. The more there is a disparity between the combatants' respective policy aims, the greater will be the degree of asymmetry in their application of the interpretive structure provided by war. However, strategy can also exploit asymmetry when the conflict is essentially fought over the same goal. In this latter case the emphasis will be primarily on having a flexible understanding of the military utility of armed force on the battlefield.

When symmetry is lost, what we have are asymmetric interpretive structures. The Vietnam War is perhaps the classic example of this in the twentieth century. In April 1975 in Hanoi, a week before the fall of Saigon, Colonel Harry Summers of the US army told his North Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tu, ‘You never beat us on the battlefield', to which Tu replied, ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant'. The North Vietnamese may have not beaten the United States ‘on the battlefield' in the sense of the physical destruction of the enemy, but a week later they did effectively beat the South Vietnamese by a conventional invasion,
having outlasted the US political will to fight. Interviewed in 1996 Colonel Summers stated: ‘We were caught up in this business of counter-insurgency, winning hearts and minds, the whole business of a social revolution rather than a war. North Vietnam was playing by the old rules. They saw it as the Second Indochina War'.
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This vignette exemplifies how war is a personalised interpretive structure for each actor (normally each ‘side') in war, but can also vary within an organisation, such as the US military in the case of Vietnam. The interpretive structure each side possesses will depend on how the template of war in the abstract is applied to reality. In cases where the meaning of battle is mutually recognised, both sides have effectively applied the same template. However, one side can deliberately move away from an interpretive structure that is symmetrical to the enemy's in order to achieve an advantage. This emphasises how the application and adjustment of the interpretive template of war when used in reality is as much an instrument of war as the use of force within it.

As war's most conspicuous feature is combat, it is easy to become preoccupied with the notion that battles define the meaning of wars, normally in terms of victory and defeat. Colonel Tu's response encapsulates the argument that battles are only what define wars and their outcomes if, for the participants, battles define wars and their outcomes. This idea becomes progressively more important the further one moves away from the battlefield and towards the strategic level (that is, one would not want to forget that for the soldier on the battlefield, the brutal exchange of violence will always be the central feature of combat experience, and will remain very influential in how he personally gauges a battle's outcome).

Colonel Summers, in his interview, highlights the fact that modes of understanding war as a cognitive unit can vary, and that this has profound strategic significance. In his analysis of Vietnam, while both sides in a physical sense fought the same war, their interpretive concepts of the war differed significantly, and allocated different meanings to the same actions. This is what is communicated by Colonel Summers' metaphor of the United States and the Vietnamese having played by different rules.

Vietnam is an example to show that strategy has to comprehend war as an interpretive construct. While there were tensions in US strategy making, and several actors who saw things differently, mainstream US strategy during the period of US escalation in Vietnam assumed that
war was an essentially stable interpretive construct. Indeed this assumption had not been significantly challenged in the Second World War or Korea, where many of the senior US officers in Vietnam had cut their teeth. General Westmoreland's emphasis on destruction of the enemy within a limited war context (a concept familiar in military theory associated with a traditional, Clausewitzian, paradigm of war) did not achieve sufficient purchase on the North Vietnamese political leadership during his tenure to give the apparent tactical victories political utility.

Strategy has the ability to define war itself as an interpretive template in its interests. This can be taken to extremes by the calculating political leader, who can totally invert the normal association between military victory and a successful political outcome. For example, in 1973 Egypt could be thought to have been militarily defeated by Israel in the Yom Kippur War. However, Anwar Sadat, from one perspective, very much achieved his intent, which was primarily a re-negotiation of the Suez Canal issue at the UN in his favour.

Asymmetric warfare has two connotations. It operates in a different sense within both of the instruments of war implied in the means of Clausewitz's dictum that war is an extension of policy by other means.