Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century

Moving Beyond Clausewitz

George Lucas, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351745178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the importance of "military ethics" in the formulation and conduct of contemporary military strategy.

Clausewitz's original analysis of war relegated ethics to the side-lines in favor of political realism, interpreting the proper use of military power solely to further the political goals of the state, whatever those may be. This book demonstrates how such single-minded focus no longer suffices to secure the interest of states, for whom the nature of warfare has evolved to favor strategies that hold combatants themselves to the highest moral and professional standards in their conduct of hostilities. Waging war has thus been transformed in a manner that moves beyond Clausewitz's original conception, rendering political success wholly dependent upon the cultivation and exercise of discerning moral judgment by strategists and combatants in the field. This book utilizes a number of perspectives and case studies to demonstrate how ethics now plays a central role in strategy in modern armed conflict.

This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations.

1
On War (Zum Krieg)

War – conventionally understood as the opposite of peace, tranquility, security, and stability – represents a form of conflict among nations and peoples in which armed force, or the threat of armed force, is used by a nation’s political leadership and elites in order to further their nation’s (and perhaps also their allies’) interests in one or more of the areas cited earlier. War, in particular, is thought to represent a form of political conflict between adversaries in which everyday modes of conflict resolution – such as diplomacy, negotiation, economic sanctions, and compromise – have proven ineffective or futile. Armed force is finally resorted to instead, in order to compel the recalcitrant adversary to comply with a more powerful nation’s will or ambitions (Orend, 2006, 2008). The 19th-century Prussian military strategist, Karl von Clausewitz (1832: Bk I, Ch 1–2), provided the classic summative assessment of war as precisely such a “continuation of State policy by other means.” The goal of armed conflict in pursuit of a nation’s political objectives is, he argued, to defeat the enemy’s armies, occupy his cities, and break his will to fight or resist.

In broad-brush, Clausewitz portrays a nation’s armed forces as functioning according to the mechanistic laws of classical dynamics: in essence, much like the proverbial “well-oiled machine.” The individual warfighters, at land or at sea, function ideally as the “cogs and wheels” in this mechanized and hierarchical system. Each warfighter is called upon to subordinate his or her individuality within a larger mechanical and hierarchical organization that collectively and systematically exerts precise forces upon the enemy’s political and military center of gravity. Conventional kinetic force is applied through its military operations until that center of gravity moves into a new configuration, signifying that the desired political objectives have been attained. Importantly, for the sake of minimizing the destructive features of war, Clausewitz specifically stressed that it is necessary to exert the maximum force that can be brought to bear on the enemy efficiently and unrelentingly, so as to bring about the new political configuration as quickly as possible (and thus bring the war to a speedy conclusion).

Political realism and its state-centric presuppositions

This conventional or “classical” understanding of what warfare itself is, as well as when it might be expected to occur, is highly analytical, rationalistic, and heavily dependent upon the underlying paradigm of the nation-state. While I do not intend to engage in an in-depth exegesis of his work, it is plain to most military students of this great work that Clausewitz’s own treatment of the subject is most accurately characterized as a “Newtonian” conception, steeped in the metaphors of classical physical mechanics, in which the political interests of well-defined nation-states collide like billiard balls, and the competing “forces” of rival national armies are exerted like opposing vectors upon some political “center of gravity” in order to force political affairs into some final desired configuration.

Thus, in this conventional or classical understanding, conflict itself arises almost inevitably, due to the multiplicity and the frequent incompatibility of more-or-less reasonable state interests (e.g., in acquiring territory or natural resources, providing for their own individual safety and security, or expanding their prospects for profitable trade relations). Moreover, while an individual nation-state’s policies, predicated on the pursuit of these interests, may represent a perfectly rational or logical course of action for that particular nation (or coalition of allies), the multiplicity of such interests virtually guarantees incessant conflict between rival sets of interests and their competing policy objectives. Hence an occasional resort to armed force in order to resolve at least some of these conflicts appears all but inevitable.

This conventional conception of warfare as stemming inevitably from the perpetual rivalry among competing state interests is implicit in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1651) and is rendered explicit simply by substituting the condition of individual states in place of the condition of biological individuals in his account of the “State of Nature.” The implication of this conception was more clearly and fully articulated in essays on war and international relations by the Swiss political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755a, 1755b, 1756c), from where it is largely presupposed as incontrovertible fact by Clausewitz. In the contemporary era, this view of political realism or “international anarchy” has been championed by political scientists like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Kenneth Waltz (1954).

Realism (or “international anarchy”) has largely supplanted earlier rival theories regarding the origins of warfare, including conceptions grounded in the propensities of human behavior, or, alternatively, in the internal political structure of specific individual states and their governing elites. Those former rival conceptions of international conflict variously attempted to portray warfare as arising from factors such as the corrupt or misguided economic and social policies of defective or morally unjust states (e.g., Marx, 1844, 1845, 1848); from defects in the non-representative structure or internal political organization of authoritarian and non-rights respecting states (Kant, 1795); or, most enduringly, from the competitive, aggressive, or otherwise perverse and self-destructive nature of human beings themselves (ranging from Augustine [ca. 410 C.E.] to a host of 20th-century social psychologists and cultural anthropologists, notably Freud [1915, 1930], Gordon Allport [1937, 1954, 1960], Desmond Morris [1967], and Julian Jaynes [1976]). While popular in the middle of the last century, the conceptions of war that attribute its frequency and pervasiveness to features of human psychology or biology, or to the internal moral failings of reigning political elites, have largely fallen into disfavor.

In contrast to these rival theoretical accounts of the origins of war and armed conflict, the virtue of the conventional conception of international anarchy is that it both serves to explain the historical pervasiveness and ubiquity of warfare and offers a foundation for alternative strategies to avoid it through persistent recourse to less-violent management of competing state interests. Importantly, the classical conception scrupulously avoids offering a moral evaluation of the activity of warfare itself, or of the adversaries or enemies who resort to it. While not at all minimizing the propensity of armed conflict to inflict great human suffering, misery, or destruction, the theory of international anarchy does not seek to morally decry or condemn this feature of armed conflict, so much as it attempts to account for it. That is to say, it aims to be a descriptive, rather than a normative account of state relations.

Specifically, the classical conception of international anarchy presupposed in Clausewitz’s description of war, in particular, does not attribute the causes of armed conflict strongly to deviant state structure, nor does it rely implausibly on preventing war through forcing a single, uniform kind of political organization on all nations and societies, as both Marxism and democratic rights theories alternatively propose. Neither does the concept of “international anarchy” rest strongly upon monolithic, highly generalized, and somewhat suspect theories regarding “human nature,” nor otherwise propose (or desire) that individual human beings be other than what we chance to encounter in each of them. Instead, the structure and function of individual states, like the variant natures and interests of individual human beings themselves, is simply taken for granted as a random background feature of the international community.

Just as this feature of ungoverned or lawless individuals in a hypothetical State of Nature is a formula for ceaseless conflict in Hobbes (as mentioned earlier), so the actual fact of an ungoverned multiplicity of states in the international area is a formula for constant conflict in Rousseau. The formation of alliances and political coalitions, as well as the pursuit of modes of conflict resolution that can defuse the most extreme competition or bring competing interests into greater alignment or equilibrium, represent procedural approaches to the understanding of war and armed conflict that follow logically from the analysis of nation-state competition and conflict offered by the resulting “realist” model of the international system itself.

Alternatives to state-centric political theory

One glaring conceptual weakness of this theory is its reliance on the underlying paradigm of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of agency in the international arena. Yet humankind’s historical experience of war rather obviously antedates the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that gave rise to the nation-state system itself – a system that, indeed, was itself devised as a proposed “cure” for, or solution to, the perpetual wars of religious Reformation and counter-Reformation in Europe that predated it. The rational foundations of the theory in the collective or common pursuit of the self-interest of discrete states, in addition, runs afoul of the problems that plague similar rationalistic theories in other behavioral disciplines like economics: namely, that the beings whose behavior is hypothetically governed by supposed rational principles seem stubbornly to refuse to acknowledge or act in accordance with such principles in actual practice.

In particular, with respect to war, there seem to a variety of other, less “rational” causal factors that nonetheless play a powerful role in fomenting armed conflict, including contrasting moral or religious beliefs, collective or widely shared feelings of ethnic or national solidarity and pride (sometimes even in the absence of a formal state structure), coupled with lingering resentment over past experiences of cruelty or injustice (often inflicted during previous armed conflicts), or the present infliction of cruelty and injustice by one national or ethnic group on the members of other, rival groups, or societies. The classical conception of war as arising from the competition of rival nation-state interests, moreover, is not especially effective in explaining wars of insurgency and revolution, in which internal competition for control of the state itself and its cultural or political institutions and policies seem to constitute the paramount factors of conflict that lead to violence and the use of armed force (making it impossible to determine which of these, properly speaking, are “the State’s” interests).

World Wars I and II in the 20th century, along with the subsequent Korean War (1950–1953), certainly represent paradigmatic instances of conventional or classical warfare of the sort Clausewitz characterized, based upon his own experiences of the Napoleonic wars and the campaigns of Frederick the Great in Europe during the18th and 19th centuries. The American war of intervention in Vietnam, and likewise the intervention of the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan toward the end of the last century, however, constitute less clear-cut cases (although both were, at the time, thought to be conventional conflicts, or at least “proxy wars” for such interstate superpower rivalries during the Cold War).

Perhaps the paradigmatic case of classical or conventional war was the Falklands War of 1984. Two sovereign nation-states, Argentina and Great Britain, faced compelling domestic political unrest that led the leaders of each to focus their rival international interests on control of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). That is to say, a longstanding but fairly minor dispute over political control and ownership of this otherwise remote and relatively insignificant territory became hostage to the need for a newly elected female Prime Minister in the U.K. to demonstrate strength and resolve to her constituency. Simultaneously, the unpopular military junta controlling Argentina needed a unifying international threat to consolidate and maintain its political authority at home. These internal domestic concerns in each nation resulted in a highly choreographed and symmetric escalation of the use of armed force by Argentina and Great Britain against one another, until the stronger and more determined military power finally prevailed. In the final analysis, this conflict constituted nothing short of a perfectly choreographed Clausewitzian ballet (Regan, 2013), the perfect illustration of how political concerns may lead to armed conflict in an effort to pursue those concerns by nonpolitical means.

The armed conflict between the nation of Iraq under the leadership of President Saddam Hussein and a United Nations coalition force under the command of the United States in early 1991, however, may well have constituted the last instance of thoroughly conventional or “classical” warfare of the Clausewitzian sort for the foreseeable future. The clashing armies of the two powers initially appeared to be of comparable size, material constitution, and technological might. In practice, the combination of superior military technology, training, and tactical leadership exhibited by the ground forces under U.S. command led to so devastating a defeat and destruction of the opposing Iraqi army in the deserts of Kuwait as to raise serious questions, especially among competitors and adversaries of this coalition, regarding the continuing viability of conventional armed conflict for the resolution of any such political disputes in the future.

Two military strategists in the Peoples’ Liberation Army of China (PLA), for example, writing in the immediate aftermath of the (First) Persian Gulf War, all but prophesied the end of any future attempts at a full-scale conventional use of armed conflict, certainly if directed against the United States or its allies (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999). Their monograph, entitled “unrestricted warfare,” acknowledged that, for the foreseeable future, no nation could any longer plausibly expect to oppose the conventional or nuclear military power of the United States. Far from eschewing interstate conflict, however, the authors recommended that the only way forward for China (and, by implication, other adversaries) was to develop offensive and defensive capabilities in other areas, including economic and legal competition (or “lawfare;” see Dunlap, 2001), and especially in the new domain of cyberspace. All of these sectors, but particularly the cyber domain, were areas in which developed nations like the United States were themselves highly vulnerable and by no means dominant. Political adversaries of such nations, the Chinese military theorists argued, must be willing to use their own capabilities to exploit their opponents’ vulnerabilities in the pursuit of their national interests.

Thus were born the relentless, state-sponsored campaigns of cyber espionage, allegedly carried out by top-secret branches of the PLA. “Unit 61398,” based in Shanghai, for example, was accused of alleged covert actions, such as the planting of trap doors and logic bombs in vital civilian infrastructures, and five of its members were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice individually by name for having masterminded massive theft of industrial and classified military technologies from militaries and defense industries in many nations throughout the world (Lucas, 2014c). Meanwhile, in the summer of 2015, the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the U.S. tendered her resignation amid the discovery that another PLA contingent of cyber warriors, PLA Unit 78020 in Kunming, had purloined some 22 million personnel files on military and federal employees of the U.S. government, including fingerprints and security clearances. The motives behind this theft remain unclear to this day (Lucas, 2017).

During roughly the same period, armed attacks against civilian targets in the United States, Tanzania, Kenya, the Un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 On war (Zum Krieg)
• 2 Inconvenient truths
• 3 “This is not your father’s war”
• 4 What is “just war discourse”?
• 5 The principle of last resort
• 6 The case for preventive war
• 7 Jus ante and post bellum
• 8 Advice and dissent
• 9 Armed humanitarian intervention
• 10 “Forgetful warriors”
• Conclusion: moving beyond Clausewitz
• Annotated bibliography of warfare “beyond Clausewitz”
• Author’s biography
• Index