The Character of War in the 21st Century

Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsäter,Christopher Coker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135183554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume addresses the relationship between the essential nature of war and its character at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The focus is on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, situations that occupy a central role in international affairs and that have become highly influential in thinking about war in the widest sense. The intellectual foundation of the volume is Clausewitz's insight that though war has an enduring nature, its character changes with time, space, social structure and culture. The fact that war's character varies means that different actors may interpret, experience and, ultimately, wage war differently. The conflict between the ways that war is conceptualised in the prevailing Western and international discourse, and the manner in which it plays out on the ground is a key discussion point for scholars and practitioners in the field of international relations. Contributions combine insights from social theory, philosophy, sociology and strategic studies and ask directly what contemporary war is, and what the implications are for the future.

This book will be of much interest to students of war studies, strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsäter is currently completing a PhD in the conflation of war and policing in international conflicts at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of 11 books on war and security issues.

1
The character of war and the nature of combat

Rune Henriksen

Introduction

This chapter addresses the relationship between combat and war. Combat is a phenomenon that retains its essence in the twenty-first century. Whether experienced in Fallujah, Iraq or in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it is still a dramatic spectacle of danger, suffering, incomprehension, emotional climaxes, and a test of who can take it and who cannot. War, on the other hand, is subject to social, economic and technological change, and the focus is increasingly on the instrumentalization of war through technology rather than political reflections that lead to desired strategic end-states. War as an instrument of policy too often becomes war by instruments, where the focus is on the tactical means of weapons technology as war winners, rather than carefully thought out strategies. The instrumentalization of war has increased throughout the twentieth century to a point where lean professional armies of skilled specialized professionals have replaced the vast conscript armies of the World Wars and the Cold War. The Vietnam War was in many ways an intersection between the wars we have today, with their heavy reliance on special forces and airpower, intractable insurgency challenges with safe havens in neighbouring states, and a great power context lurking in the background. Pakistan and Iran have replaced Cambodia, Laos and China, and the ‘war on terror’ has replaced the Cold War.

Gauging the relationship between society, war and combat in different times depends greatly on time perspective. If we draw up too large a canvas the nuances disappear, yet too much proximity invites too much focus on detail. It is tempting to compare the current wars with World War II, which is clear in the minds even of generations that did not experience it, for its relative clarity of causes and participant motivations. Yet the comparison would be too crude, because it would ignore the profound social changes in Western society that happened in the meantime. The Vietnam War was a war at the crossroads between the twentieth century’s ideological total wars on one hand, and the complex dynamics of fluid insurgency-like wars of the twenty-first century. It featured both at the same time, which very few appreciated at the time, and like all wars it featured deadly combat. If we are to appreciate the relationship between the nature of combat and the character of war today, it is necessary to keep both these wars in mind, not least because of the critical impact they had on the United States, the foremost power to innovate and drive change in warfare. The role of the United States in shaping the character of war in the twenty first century should not be underestimated. At the same time, for all its power, the United States still struggles militarily in intractable conflicts where the opponents are, in Earl Tilford’s words, ‘light infantry,’ peasants with guns. While using examples from throughout the twentieth century I invite the reader to bear in mind the challenges found in Iraq and Afghanistan today, for they too testify to the perennial nature of combat.

War as instrument

Rationalism is a major constituent of Western modernity. Means-ends thinking defines the relationship between combat, war and politics in the modern state. As Clausewitz explained, strategy is the use of the engagement in war in relation to policy goals, whereas tactics is about the use of armed force in the engagement. Any combat action is thus part of the realm of tactics.¹ How one defines policy is a matter of semantics, but it is certainly collective action towards achieving goals. It is means-ends thinking. However, is all war subordinate to strategic thinking?

There are two major arguments in this debate. The first view is that war is about issues that are plausibly political.² Politics is about power, and power is the one property for which there is no substitute. Whatever agreements one enters with neighbours or enemies, it is easier to thwart peace than to enforce it: ‘In 1939 Hitler truly wanted war, that was a desire the international community was not well equipped to deny him.’³ Hitler’s rise to power illustrates the degree to which power effects unity in politics, whether domestic or international, or even simply tribal: power’s language is policy, but the grammar changes between peacetime policy, and policy supported by arms.

The other argument holds that strategy is only relevant to war up to a certain point. When the intensity of war becomes total – an all-out effort for sheer survival – strategy is less useful as a guiding tool, since the only relevant goal is survival through victory. Soviet and German defensive warfare on the Eastern Front in early and late parts of World War II respectively, and Israel’s fight for survival in the 1967 war, are examples of wars where strategy nearly ceases to offer guidance since the political options are very limited. War can transcend strategy, but this is not typical.

Throughout modernity and into the postmodern period, Western warfare has been strategic. It has been less than total and it has been about politics and power. Once war is not total, which is to say that it is purely about existential survival, it is within the realm of strategy. Strategy is instrumental because it cannot itself explain why wars are happening. War is not autonomous since features of cultural, social, economic and strategic context influence it. Contextual issues explain why there is war and what any given war is about. Strategy comes into its own as a defensive or offensive means to make sure the engagement takes place in the most favourable circumstances possible, and to translate combat into a political outcome.

Martin Van Creveld has argued war can never be a question of simply state or group interests, because dead men have no interests.⁴ This is a valid point, but strategic interest and combat motivation are two different things, despite sharing the currency of power. Colin Gray also asks ‘why it is that soldiers can fight so well in defence of a cause that they do not value highly.’ The reason is not hard to find: ‘War is about personal survival.’⁵ Nevertheless, this is imprecise. The reason soldiers keep fighting on is that combat is about personal survival. War is about policy and the reason why they are sent to fight. The two are qualitatively different realms, even though one is usually embedded in the other. Only in the rare cases when war becomes total is it about survival for the strategist and the soldier in equal measure. Short of total war, the concerns of the strategist are not the same as those of the soldier. The strategist’s job is to translate the causes of war, whatever they may be, to favourable circumstances for the soldier to do his (tactical) job. Neither strategy nor tactics are about motivation. Strategic thinking does not explain war’s occurrence, nor does tactical thinking explain combat motivation.

War pursued with technological instruments

At least since the American Civil War Western states have focused rather more on tactics and operational considerations than strategy.⁶ This has shaped a tradition where the discourse of war is largely focused on the means of war, rather than towards political goals. Indeed, one can easily focus on various means in war instead of the intractable challenges of politics. Among these, technological development is the easiest one to control; it is about manipulating mechanical matter, and the attendant frame of mind that this involves.

Today it is all but commonplace to equate the Western way of warfare almost exclusively with American warfare.⁷ Wars pursued by Western states since the Falklands War of 1982 have all been dominated by the United States. Grenada 1983, Panama 1988, Iraq 1991 and 2003, Somalia 1993, Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999 and Afghanistan 2001 are all examples of this. There are three major tenets to American warfare, all contributing to its instrumental character. It is apolitical, governed by a managerial ethos, and dominated by technology and particularly air-power.

Apolitical war

The American way of war is strategically virtually apolitical, typically relying on attrition, thus primarily fighting with tactics in mind rather than political goals, and governed by a managerial rather than strategic ethos.⁸ The main reason why American warfare has tended towards the apolitical is an insistence on a clear division between the military and political establishments, as is appropriate for a democracy.⁹ Politicians make decisions about military power and the military execute them. Unfortunately this sometimes leads the military to ‘eschew politics, and in practice to discount consideration of, and preparation for, the character of the context of peace that should follow. This is a classic example of an army having the vices of its virtues.’¹⁰ Retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers (2001–5) expressed this view in a typical way: ‘No military officer, even at the very top, can know all that is involved in the highest levels of decision-making, which is inherently political (in the generic, not partisan, sense).’¹¹

The main problem with deference from senior military leaders is at the strategic level, where there appears to be a shortage of debate about what the goals of a war are. This is illustrated for example by the failure to appreciate the political and strategic character of the Vietnam war by both civil and military leadership,¹² and the military’s acceptance of linking the Iraq war to September 11, and a general ‘global war on terror’.¹³ If the top military echelons could be excused for neglecting strategy (and they should not), there is certainly no such excuse for the civilian leadership. Secretary Rumsfeld’s focus on military transformation (which is essentially about the means of war rather than its ends) at the expense of strategic thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq was alluded to by former CENTCOM commander, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni:

There’s a difference between winning battles, or defeating the enemy in battle, and winning the war … What strikes me is that we are constantly redesigning the military to do something it already does pretty well … If we’re talking about the future, we need to talk about not how you win the peace as a separate part of the war, but you’ve got to look at this thing from start to finish … The military does a damn good job of killing people and breaking things … But that is not the problem.¹⁴

If managerial/technological transformation is the major preoccupation with the civilian military leadership, the question is who is going to do the imperative strategic thinking?

War by management

The American military has tended to focus heavily on managerial thinking, which is to say a systematization of the preparation and conduct of battle, rather than on what the war is to pursue. From the Civil War experience onwards, engineering and managerial thinking appear to have been more important to American military leaders than political reflections. Having consolidated her borders, the pressing geopolitical challenges faced by Europeans did not apply to the same extent in the United States. Two social developments accompanied this political reality: the mechanisation of labour and the introduction of management thinking to labour and war. A limited workforce generated the need for mechanical development, which in turn inspired Taylorist and Fordist managerial ideas, in industry as well as in war.

What the US witnessed from the 1870s was the growth of what the distinguished economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls a “techno-structure”: the application of science to production … What emerged was a technicist ideology promising a technological fix to every military problem.¹⁵

This technicist ideology was not contradicted by experience in either of the two world wars that were both decided by attrition, and even the Korean war (though it did not end because of it) was waged through attrition strategy.¹⁶ Indeed the American economy, production power and logistical skill contributed substantially at the strategic level to the outcome of the three wars; securing victory through production in the two world wars, and a draw through the threat of using the atom bomb in Korea. Only in Vietnam did ‘technowar’ run into serious trouble, where managerial models were used to calculate quantities of flight sorties and search-and-destroy patrols that would yield quantifiable results. This metric was not meaningful against a rural insurgency that relied on willpower and political indoctrination, and as such did not present viable airstrike targets. Nobody personified this misguided approach better than Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara. Henry Kissinger well summed up McNamara’s mindset when he argued that since 1945 US foreign policy was ‘based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave transformations in “emerging countries” ’.¹⁷ It was thought that the strength of the combination of technology and managerial thinking would be sufficient to solve the challenges faced in the third world.

The search and destroy tactic, for example, relied on a system of body counts, where enemy kills would outpace replacements. Aside from the many tactical problems, search-and-destroy generated operational concepts and promotion rewards that invariably led to inflated casualty numbers.¹⁸ Yet, even the inflated rates did not yield sufficient results. During the Tet offensive, which was a rare battle-type engagement where the Americans won decisively, the attrition of the enemy was far from sufficient. Even at Tet attrition rates:

The DRV could fight for up to thirty years before its manpower account w...

Table of contents

• Series: LSE International studies
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The character of war and the nature of combat
• 2 Insurgency and terrorism
• 3 Conflict characterization and the US military
• 4 Novelty is in the eye of the beholder
• 5 Waging war through surprise and terror
• 6 Metastrategy and the evolving character of war between the US and al-Q’aeda1
• 7 War as perpetual policing
• 8 Metrowar – the shape of future wars
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index