Karl von Clausewitz’s prime mover – and central node – in warfare is the political object, which may operate within a fluid context. Further, the context rides on Clausewitz’s trinitarian categorical dynamic within a state – i.e. military forces, country, and will of the enemy. In this way, the political object ought to be synergistic with the trinity for a state to be successful in war.
Excerpts:
“If we ask, first of all, what is the aim toward which the whole war must be directed so as to be the proper means for attaining the political object, we shall find that this is just as variable as are the political object and the particular circumstances of the war.
“In the plan of war, we shall consider more closely what disarming a state means, but we must here distinguish between three general categories which include everything else. They are the military forces, the country and the will of the enemy.
“But the disarming of the enemy – this object of war in the abstract, this final means of attaining the political object, in which all other means are included – does not always occur in practice and is not a necessary condition to peace. Therefore it cannot be set up in theory as a law.
“In wars in which the one side cannot completely disarm the other, the motives to peace will rise and fall on both sides according to the probability of success and the required expenditure of force.
“If we want to overcome the enemy by outlasting him in the struggle, we must content ourselves with small objects, for naturally a great object requires a greater expenditure of forces than a small one. However, the smallest object we can propose is pure resistance, a combat without any positive intention.
*All excerpts have been taken from War, Politics, and Power, Regnery Publishing, Inc.
According to Ardant du Picq, synthesis of moral and physical effects tends to advance the greatest strategic influence over international affairs vis-à-vis power-projection. In this way, moral effect harmonizes with material action via amplification of power-projection. Finally, as the material threshold increases, the moral effect correspondingly increases – but only insofar as the synthesis sustains credibility.
Excerpts:
“Material action on troops lies in destructive power, the moral effect lies in the fear it inspires.
“In battle, two moral actions, even more than two material actions, are opposed: the strongest wins. The winner often loses more by fire than the destruction.
“Armor, in reducing the material effect that one can suffer, reduces as well the dominating moral effect of fear… You feel that an armored enemy will succeed in reaching you.
“The great superiority of Roman tactics lay in their constant search for ways to combine physical and moral effects. Moral effect passes, physical effect does not. The Greeks searched for dominance. The Romans sought to kill, and kill they did, and followed the better path. Their moral action was supported by solid, deadly swords.
“In indecisive combat, he wins who can show, and merely show, battalions and squadrons in good order. The fear of the unknown.
*All excerpts have been taken from Battle Studies, University Press of Kansas.
According to Joseph Nye, soft power within a context of international affairs tends to define a competitive struggle – which advances an indirect approach. The indirect approach uses dispersion – or sometimes fusion – vis-à-vis the devices of co-option and attraction. Further, both devices sustain fluidity within international politics, which may increase – or decrease – competitive dynamics among states.
Excerpts:
“Power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants… You can coerce them with threats; you can induce them with payments; or you can attract and co-opt them to want what you want.
“Power always depends on the context in which the relationship exists.
“The indirect way to get what you want has sometimes been called ‘the second face of power.’ A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries – admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness – want to follow it.
“Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others.
“Soft power is not merely the same as influence. After all, influence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. And soft power is more than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument. It is also the ability to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence.
*All excerpts have been taken from Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, PublicAffairs.
In his analysis of French military institutions, Ardant du Picq advances a formula for institutional transformation which emphasizes a balance of pay, leisure, and “sociability.” According to du Picq, a synthesis of high pay and leisure may attract as well as retain higher quality officers. Likewise, increased sociability from top to bottom within units offers a disciplinary backstop vis-à-vis cohesion.
Excerpts:
“Armies are toys (in peace) in the hands of princes. If princes know nothing of them, which is the usual way, they disorganize them. If they do understand them, like Prussia, they prepare their armies for war.
“Man is merely a friend of equality but a lover of domination. He is easily persuaded to take the shadow for the substance.
“As the military spirit in France is waning, it must be replaced by well-paid noncommissioned and commissioned officers. Good pay establishes position in a democracy, and today no one turns to the army because it is poorly paid.
“The leisure of army life attracts three out of four officers, laziness if you like. This is the objective fact. If you make an officer into a schoolboy all his life he will send his profession to the devil if he can, and those who can will generally be those who have received the best education.
“French sociability creates cohesion more quickly than could be created among troops of other nations. Organization and discipline do the same, but with a proud people like the French, a rational organization united by French sociability can often obtain results without employing the coercion of discipline.
*All excerpts have been taken from Battle Studies, University Press of Kansas.
B.H. Liddell Hart’s examination of the German High Command in his book, The German Generals Talk, begins with Hans von Seeckt as the cultural prime mover of German military doctrine following World War One. Disturbed by the political/military fusion Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff exercised over the German Empire during World War One, Seeckt endorsed an unambiguous civil/military separation. The so-called Seeckt-pattern professional developed in Germany throughout the interwar era – and seemed to act as an enabling component for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.
Excerpts:
“The General Staff was essentially intended to form a collective substitute for genius, which no army can count on producing at need. Of its very nature it tended to cramp the growth of genius, being a bureaucracy as well as a hierarchy, but in compensation it sought to raise the general standard of competence to a high level.
“A newly-promoted general is always confident that the situation is better than it appeared to his predecessor, and that he can succeed where the latter failed. Such a disposition is a powerful lever in the hands of any ruler.
“When soldiers concentrate on the absolute military aim, and do not learn to think of grand strategy, they are more apt to accept political arguments that, while seeming right in pure strategy, commit policy beyond the point where it can halt. Extreme military ends are difficult to reconcile with moderation of policy.
“Technical science and tactical skill were the keys to the future. ‘A conscript mass, whose training has been brief and superficial, is cannon fodder in the worst sense of the word, if pitted against a small number of practiced technicians on the other side.’
“There was a wise warning, too, in another of his wider reflections – ‘the statement that war is a continuation of policy by other means has become a catch-phrase, and is therefore dangerous. We can say with equal truth – war is the bankruptcy of policy.’
*All excerpts have been taken from The German Generals Talk, Quill.
Colin Gray’s analysis of the so-called strategic dimension of conflict is a multilayered approach – which recognizes at least seventeen dimensions of strategy. According to Gray, the essentials of human culture animate the vital center of the strategic dimension. Further, Gray’s strategic dimension synthesizes with John Keegan’s cultural prime mover of strategy notion for a more refined recognition of how assumptions influence strategic thinking.
Excerpts:
“Politicians and their advisers are experts at crafting policy, just as soldiers have traditionally been viewed as the professionals in ‘the management of violence.’ Who is it, though, that patrols the no-man’s land between politics and military force? That is the realm where strategists should roam.
“Although it may appear unduly pessimistic, even uncharitable, to say it, the evidence of history strongly suggests that we will fail to anticipate the strategic ideas some of our enemies will employ. As a result, we will be embarrassed and, possibly, even defeated occasionally. Such is strategic history.
“Those theorists and officials who persistently confuse the character of war, which is always changing, with the nature of war, which cannot alter, are responsible for creating confusion and raising false expectations.
“Americans must be true to their culture. The conduct of a technological style of warfare is mandated by American circumstances and preferences: It is what Americans do well, and it is usually sensible to go with one’s strengths. The danger is that America’s romance with high technology might distort its understanding of war and strategy.
“In the twentieth century, Germany proved itself to be exceptionally good at fighting. But it repeatedly fell in its inability to translate that combat prowess into an ability to win wars. A world community uneasily dependent upon America’s strategic performance as sheriff has to hope that their guardian state will not reveal any like tendency to win battles but lose wars. That community must also hope that America will remember that the purpose of war is not victory, but the achievement of a condition of peace with security superior to the pre-war context.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order, The University Press of Kentucky.
In the afterword of his authoritative book on successful military strategies throughout history, Richard Hart Sinnreich synthesizes the most enduring lessons learned. He concludes the successful application of strategy to be most dependent on the identification of individual strategic genius, as well as what may be described as learning institutions – which are adaptive, and anticipatory of novel strategic thinking.
Excerpts:
“Not all strategic failures reflect overextension. They are equally likely – perhaps more likely – to reflect mistaken theories of success.
“Above all, strategic success is hostage to the willingness of political and military leaders to read and heed the evidence of the battlefield even at the price of jettisoning cherished assumptions.
“To be successful, long-term strategy requires both an accurate prompting diagnosis and the discipline to conform action to intention over time. Its greatest risk is target fixation – the failure to honor the evidence of the evolving environment when it begins to refute assumptions on which the strategy rested.
“Weak states, like weak armies, may prevail for a time over stronger but less clever adversaries. But unless cleverness can be translated into effective military power, a stronger contestant sooner or later will prevail absent a failure of political will.
“In the end, sustaining the nation’s determination to prevail is the crucial hallmark of any successful military strategy.
*All excerpts have been taken from Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge University Press.
The American institutional paradigm of strategic mediocrity at the highest levels of command became most recognized during the Vietnam War. Journalist Thomas E. Ricks believes the strategic incapacity is rooted in careerism, bureaucratization, byzantine promotion practices, institutional arrogance, and negligence at finding fault within the high command. According to Ricks, post-Vietnam American generalship has fared no better, because the military – particularly the Army – has focused on perfecting operational rather than strategic command.
Excerpts:
“A popular myth, persisting even in today’s military, is that senior civilians were too involved in the handling of the war. In fact, the problem was not that civilians participated too much in decision making but that the senior military leaders participated too little. President Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, and Robert McNamara treated the Joint Chiefs of Staff not as military advisers but as a political impediment, a hurdle to be overcome, through deception if necessary. They wanted to keep the Chiefs on board with policy without keeping them involved in making it or even necessarily informed about it.
“Unlike FDR, Johnson never really explained his war to the nation. ‘At no time that I was aware,’ wrote Joseph Alsop, who became almost the last ‘hawk’ among prominent journalists, ‘did President Johnson or his advisers seek to prepare the American people for the grim consequences of a protracted military battle, nor did they adequately explain to the public the reasons for the fight.’ Neither the president nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff did their duty during the Vietnam War.
“Pentagon analyst Thomas Thayer recalled being told by the French defense attaché in Saigon – a veteran of fighting in Vietnam who was chosen for the diplomatic post because of his excellent English – that during the first eighteen months of his assignment, only one American had visited him to inquire about the lessons the French might have to share. Even more strikingly, when Army Special Forces troops under a CIA program began training villagers to defend themselves, the program worked, with armed locals posting ‘a record of almost unbroken success’ against the Viet Cong… Maxwell Taylor, by then the American ambassador, directed the CIA to turn the program over to the U.S. military, resulting in a major drop in the effectiveness of the mission.
“Firing senior officers would have been seen as a confession of failure. Furthermore, in a hazy war with a muddled strategy, what constituted success was less clear, so rewarding it and punishing failure became even more difficult. The result was that by the arrival of the Vietnam War, firing a general officer amounted to an act of dissent, a public questioning of the way the Army worked, because it involved someone who had risen through a demanding process over two decades. To say that he was not fit for a position was tantamount to a rejection of the process that had produced him. So where relief was once a sign that the system was working as expected – rewarding success and punishing failure – it had become seen inside the Army as a hostile critique of the system.
“The relatively new technology of the helicopter might have enabled generals to try to escape their roles. Instead of trying to improve strategy, generals and colonels climbed into aircraft and became what one general called ‘squad leaders in the sky.’ They found themselves in a situation where the fundamental task of a general – to understand the nature of the fight and adjust his force to it – may have been all but undoable. When strategy becomes inexplicable, the natural tendency is to retreat into tactics.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, Penguin Group LLC.
Published near the end of his life Theory of Strategy presents Colin Gray’s general theory of strategy. The theory is split into four components involving ideas relevant to politics, order, complexity, and cohesion, as well as two sub-categories which survey the significance of history and what may be described as strategic intuition.
Excerpts:
“As a general rule, the armed forces need to be able and willing to do it – whatever ‘it’ is – tactically, if operational art, strategy, and high policy are to be feasible.
“Unfortunately, there has been only one long-term pattern in human affairs, and that is a perpetual readiness to resort to conflict. Regardless of the character of the political, religious, and pseudo-religious ideas that have inspired the human historical narrative, this has been its single, and therefore master, theme….A theory of strategy claiming to be general, as here, needs to be housed firmly and plausibly in a resilient basis of causal explanation.
“The search for security must lead inexorably to a quest for strategy. It is solely through strategy that military power can be translated into political influence. This influence is the currency in which security is valued.
“Strategy is in the currency-conversion business, turning military power into political influence. The general theory of strategy is entirely indifferent as to the means employed to achieve this conversion. In practice, of course, the ways in which chosen means are used are often critical to the success or otherwise of the whole conversion enterprise. It can be important to emphasize to an army that, although vitally necessary, it is only a means to an end that is political by definition.
“The theory of war needs to be nested richly within a context of broad understanding of the likely consequences of conflict.
*All excerpts have been taken from Theory of Strategy, Oxford University Press.
David Galula has long been considered the godfather of counterinsurgency warfare theory, and in his landmark book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice he highlights the requisite components for success in both insurgency as well as counterinsurgency operations. The second chapter of the book examines the prerequisites critical for a robust insurgency to take hold within a state.
Excerpts:
“It follows that any country where the power is invested in an oligarchy, whether indigenous or foreign, is potential ground for a revolutionary war.
“The problem becomes particularly dangerous when the society does not integrate those who, by the level of their education or by their achievements, have proved to belong to the true elite. For it is among this rejected elite that the insurgents can find the indispensable leaders.
“The insurgent is not restricted to the choice of a single cause. Unless he has found an over-all cause, like anticolonialism, which is sufficient in itself because it combines all the political, social, economic, racial, religious, and cultural causes described above, he has much to gain by selecting an assortment of causes especially tailored for the various groups in the society that he is seeking to attract.
“The police. The eye and the arm of the government in all matters pertaining to internal order, the police are obviously a key factor in the early stages of an insurgency; they are the first counterinsurgent organization that has to be infiltrated and neutralized. Their efficiency depends on their numerical strength, the competency of their members, their loyalty toward the government, and, last but not least, on the backing they get from the other branches of the government – particularly the judicial system.
“The border areas are a permanent source of weakness for the counterinsurgent whatever his administrative structures, and this advantage is usually exploited by the insurgent, especially in the initial violent stages of the insurgency. By moving from one side of the border to the other, the insurgent is often able to escape pressure or, at least, to complicate operations for his opponent.
*All excerpts have been taken from Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, David Galula, Praeger Security International.
Strategic Studies Book Club 