Reimagining War in the 21st Century

From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare

Manabrata Guha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136949791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the 'political'.

In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, social theory, war studies and political theory/IR.

Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor (ISSSP) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India.

1
Prelude to Clausewitz

The etymological roots of the word “war” – said to have evolved from the late Old English (c.1050) words wyrre and were; from the Frankish word *werra; from the Proto-Germanic word, *werso (cf. O.S. werran, O.H.G. werran, Ger. Verwirren) – convey a sense of confusion, strife, discord, struggle, and violence. It is important to recognize this because, when considered in its modern sense, the word “war” appears to perform both a descriptive function and a conceptual one. Thus, the question arises: How, when, and for what reasons did a phenomenon – marked by violence, strife, discord, belligerence, and defiance – become a concept?

As we will see, the modern concept of war emerged in the late seventeenth century and was marked by a very specific set of philosophico-historical conditions that emerged with the decline of the Age of Religion. From this point onwards, among other things, war, as a concept, became inextricably associated – in a primarily subservient role – with the State. Thus, what follows is an account of how the phenomenon of war – characterized by confusion, strife, discord, struggle and, violence – gradually came to be circumscribed within the purview of Reason thereby allowing for it to be, in the first instance, rationalized, controlled, and regulated. Further, as our review of the more prominent military theories of the Age of Reason will show, this rationalization, control, and regulation of war was equally reflected on the battlefield. In the process, we will see how the jurists, political theorists, and military theorists of the time strove – with varying degrees of intensity – to rationalize the conduct of war – both juridico-politically and operationally. Taken together, this analysis will highlight how the project to “bring war to Reason” evolved. At the same time, this account will also gesture, albeit subtly, to the hidden tensions that wracked this project, as it struggled to contain what we have previously referred to the intensiveness of war within the circumscription of Reason.

A historico-philosphical background

“No medieval thinker, no matter how adventurous, could have undertaken Kant’s construction of a religion within the limits of reason alone – he could have hardly imagined it.”¹ But this should not suggest that medieval philosophers were any less partial to Reason. As Gay points out, “there were many subjects, especially in logic and ontology, which (the medieval) philosophers treated philosophically – that is by the sole right of reason.”² What distinguished them, however, from their Enlightenment successors was their conviction that, as Gay puts it, “nothing but the divine could penetrate everywhere.”³ For those who dared to deny the absolute transcendence of the Divine, Dante’s Inferno – particularly the sixth circle of hell – awaited them. Thus, not many could keep the divine in abeyance for too long. Indeed, as Gay suggests, “Dante’s journey from the Convivio to the Divine Comedy mirrors the retreat from critical thinking …”⁴ that marked the Age of Religion. This hierarchy of values – this subordination of Reason to the Divine – was inconceivable to the Enlightenment philosophers for, as Gay highlights, “philosophy (for the Age of Enlightenment) was autonomous and omnipotent, or it was nothing.”⁵

The Age of Enlightenment was thus characterized by “a decline in mysticism, of growing hope for life and trust in effort, in commitment to inquiry and criticism, of interest in social reform, of increased secularism, and a growing willingness to take risks.”⁶ This marked the clear ambition of the Age of Enlightenment: an ambition which, in Descartes’ words, was nothing less than to make men the “masters and possessors of Nature.”⁷ Thus, while for the medieval philosophers the limit-horizon of Reason was the Divine, for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Reason itself was the “tribunal before which all disputes, all differences, were to be resolved”⁸

Gay suggests that:

the Enlightenment was not [necessarily] an Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism … [and that the Enlightenment’s claim] … was in no way a claim for the omnipotence of reason … [contrarily, it was] … a political demand for the right to question everything, rather than the assertion that all could be known or mastered by rationality.⁹

But there are other analyses which contend that while there is some evidence to support Gay’s assessment, it nevertheless “fails to recognize that the talk of ‘omnicompetence of criticism’ is itself a manifestation of the ‘omnipotence of reason’, at least in its analytic function.”¹⁰ The Cartesian methodology – premised on the Cartesian understanding of the Self – which was essentially schematic in nature in so far as it enabled the creation, maintenance and expansion of a tabular form of representation – a universal mathesis – is a case in point.

The key element that empowered the rationalistic Cartesian methodology was the Cartesian conception of the Self and the implicit, but radical, reflexivity that was operative within it. This reflexivity was based on a dualism which was very distinct from the dualism proposed by Plato.¹¹ It worked by taking a disenchanted/aenchanted or “objective” view of the body by affirming the immaterial nature of the soul.¹² Thus, as Taylor puts it, by repudiating a Cosmic order of things, as Plato had done, which enabled the realization that an individual’s “true nature was a supersensible soul … [by turning to] … supersensible, eternal, immutable things … [thus] seeing and understanding the things which surround [the individual] as participating in the Ideas which give them being,”¹³ the Cartesian conception began from the premise that there was no pre-ordained a priori “order of Ideas” and maintained that “understanding physical reality in terms of such is precisely the … confusion between the soul and the material.”¹⁴ Postulating in this way the separateness of the body from the soul enabled Descartes to provide a radically new and different understanding of Reason and its hegemony over (bodily) passions.¹⁵ This understanding of Reason – premised on a specific understanding of the Self – which enabled seeing the world from a disenchanted point of view, in turn, allowed for an understanding of the world as a domain of potential instrumental control.¹⁶ It is at this point that Reason also began to be understood procedurally and in terms of the standards by which the orders of science and life were constructed.¹⁷ Taylor makes the point well when he says:

[F]or Plato, to be rational we have to be right about the order of things. For Descartes rationality means thinking according to certain canons. The judgment now turns on properties of the activity of thinking rather than on substantive beliefs which emerge from it.¹⁸

By the eighteenth century, however, there was another transformation underway and this involved extending the concept of truth and philosophy and “[t]he attempt to solve the central problem of [the] philosophic method” which, according to Cassirer, “ [involved] recourse to Newton’s ‘Rules of Philosophizing’”¹⁹ Contra the Cartesian method of beginning with a set of principles, the Newtonian method relied heavily on, what Cassirer calls, “the data of experience.”²⁰ Then, by following the method of rigorous analysis, a set of principles was arrived at whose applicability was deemed universal. It is curious to note that while Cassirer marks the difference in orientation between the Cartesian and the Newtonian models of methodology, he also points to the commonality of the goals and basic presuppositions of the Cartesian and Newtonian methods, namely, the presence of universal order and law in the world. This universality of order – both as a premise and as the goal of the Cartesian and Newtonian systems – also implied that facts were not merely a “jumble of discrete elements,” contrarily, they exhibited an all pervasive form.²¹ Thus, between the Cartesian and the Newtonian systems, the core difference was one of methodology, though the aim remained the same. While the Cartesian system took as its premise a universal order and proceeded to reinforce that premise by the methods of rigorous induction, the Newtonian system began by examining phenomena and then proceeded to establish the general principles which, like the a priori stance of the Cartesian method, also resulted in the affirmation of a universal order.²² This methodological shift was critical in the sense that it based the notion of a universal order within a framework which, while being critical of the implied dogmatism of the Cartesian system and sharply distinguishing between the Cartesian “love of the system” from the Newtonian “value of the system,” nevertheless served, perhaps unwittingly, to treat thinking in terms of a system as a dogma itself.²³ In effect, therefore,

[t]he advance of knowledge … meant the advance of reason. In the course of the eighteenth century, the world … was being emptied of mystery. Pseudo science was giving way to science, credence in the miraculous intervention of divine forces was being corroded by the acid of skepticism and overpowered by scientific cosmology. The sacred was being hollowed out from within by the drying up of religious fervor, the call for good sense, the retreat from Augustinian theology … and the advance of rationalism.²⁴

As a result, increasingly, emphasis began to be laid on the “agenticity” of the human in moral conduct, economic activity, and politics and from this to draw conclusions about human nature.²⁵ This paralleled “the shift towards a representation of the soul and its activities in terms structured by thought about the material world and sometimes even in material terms.”²⁶ This was quite explicitly evident in the juridical domain.

Roger Smith suggests that there were two general approaches to the question of “laws.” The first held law to be intrinsic to the divine order of things, while the second held that it was a human construction. In the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian drew up what is considered to be the greatest contribution of Rome to western civilization – Roman Law – embodied in the Digest and the Institutes, which he decreed were not to be commented on. Yet, according to Smith, medieval scholars proceeded to do just that. By the sixteenth century, “the techniques and ethos of humanist scholarship created a vast amount of jurisprudence to accompany these inherited laws.”²⁷ Simultaneously, the tradition of English Common Law (i.e., custom) not only affected this development of jurisprudence, it also influenced the question of whether or not jurisprudence should be understood in terms of a rational discipline. By the seventeenth century, however, the emerging categories of the person, of things, and of actions, brought about a profound transformation within the theory and practice of medieval jurisprudence. It is in this way that the concept of the human-individual (that is, an agent with a body, property, and free will) assumed a position of central importance. This assemblage of body, property, and free will – the human-individual – in turn, found its equivalent in the notion of the State, which was considered to also possess a body, property, and free will. This resulted in the great debates that began from the seventeenth century which had, as their central feature, the question of the identity of that which formed the “body politic” (consisting of three poles – the monarch, the prince, and the representation of people). This is how the search for “causes in jurisprudence and natural philosophy led to … [the] attempts to rationally understand history and nature and empirically to discover historical and physical agencies.”²⁸

Though not strictly falling within the time frame commonly ascribed to the Enlightenment, for our purposes, Hugo Grotius remains an influential jurist and scholar, especially when investigating questions pertaining to war.²⁹ The chaotic and savage Thirty Years’ War provided the background against which Grotius wrote his The Rights of War and Peace (1625). Grotius considered the effects of the Thirty Years’ War – civil anarchy, military stalemates, and the potential for widespread unending wars – as being damaging and sought to establish some common grounds on which humanity could agree upon. Deeply influenced by Galileo’s geometry (as Descartes was), Grotius reacted against the political uncertainty of his times and affirmed the ideal of moral philosophy as being logical, consistent, and systematic. His bid to create the common ground of humanity began with his attempt to give an account of human nature. Grotius posited that regardless of all else that may divide Man, there was one common link that linked all of humanity – the principle of self-preservation.³⁰ This common link, Grotius suggested, was highlighted by the fact that Man could not, if acting within Reason, violate. In other words, Man could not imperil his own self. Certainly there could be actions undertaken that would or could undermine self-preservation, however, they would be, according to Grotius, irrational acts.³¹ This allowed Grotius to further suggest that the common link of humanity was not simply self-preservation, but self-preservation informed by Reason, which he glossed by asserting that “[l]ove, whose primary force and action are directed to self-interest, is the first principle of the whole natural order.”³² This, for Grotius, was the universal human reality. It is important to note that knowledge of this reality was the cornerstone of conduct, not only of Man but also of States.³³

Further, Grotius, using the argument of self-preservation (informed by Reason) being the universal human reality, was able to suggest that the individual had the right to pursue his/her self-interest provided it did not impinge on the self-interest of others. In this manner, he was able to turn the theory of natural law from its medieval focus on duty, which was based on a conception of the divine construct of nature (including Man) to one of rights.³⁴ By stating this, Grotius was also making a significant comment on a particular attribute of Man – his inherent sociability. Taken together, Grotius’ observations set the agenda for the just war concept, which would play a critical role in defining the modern concept of war. Post Grotius, therefore, war came to be increasingly understood as the means by which self-interest was served and the self was preserved. The significant caveat, however, which served to check the wanton-ness of war, as witnessed by Grotius himself, was the underlying presence of Reason, which would inform self-interest and self-preservation.

This sentiment was also echoed by the Swiss diplomat and lawyer, Vattel, the author of The Law of Nations (1758), who “offered a guide to two critical que...

Table of contents

• Routledge critical security studies series
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Prelude to Clausewitz
• 2 Clausewitz and the architectonic of war
• 3 Machining (network-centric) war
• 4 Theorizing war in the Age of Networks
• 5 Concept-war
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index