This book explores force and what makes it effective when used by sovereign powers for internal security and external defense. We seek to understand how some powers use force with more impact than othersāand how the principles by which they do so remain remarkably consistent over time and across cultures. That consistency provides a framework that suggests how rulers have used force to shape societies (and vice versa), and how innovations in force will influence events in our ācyberā age.
The seed of our argument, as it were, is a common observation made by near-contemporaries roughly 2300 years ago. Sun Tzu and Aristotle both noted that successful commanders and rulers divide their foes, whether they are enemy armies or internal rivals. These classical theorists of politics and strategy, however, do more than urge kings and commanders to ādivide and conquer.ā Both Sun Tzu and Aristotle (and many other observers) suggest the way to keep enemies divided is to break their mutual trust.1 We also note similar notions across the ancient world and in modern times, including in works by several founders of modernity, such as Machiavelli (and even Shakespeare).
This commonality is echoed today by researchers seeking anthropological, psychological, and sociological explanations for persistent patterns of violence and force. We note in particular the ideas of Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, who observe in their influential Violence and Social Orders (2009) that how societies āsolve the ubiquitous threat of violence shapes and constrains the forms that human interaction can take, including the form of political and economic systems.ā North et al. thus echo Thomas Hobbesā Leviathan in viewing the control of violence as a foundational aspect of all social orders, and they accordingly derive a conceptual framework that seeks to explain the endurance of ānaturalā (i.e., authoritarian and exclusive elites that Hobbes would recognize) in most times and places.
With this allusion to Hobbesā state of nature, Violence and Social Orders explains that these ānaturalā structures unwittingly perpetuate ancient impositions that rulers undertook to create social orders in the beginning of history.2 In short, these ānatural statesā sustain exclusive (and sometimes cooperating) regimes by engendering mutual trust among actors possessing the power and the will to take human life. The actorsā mutual forbearance in this must always be wary, of course, while rivals remain armed; thus natural states face a constant risk of falling back into violence between mutually distrustful rivals. Social peace lasts only while āeach elite understands that other elites face similar incentivesā not to fight each other.3 These closed regimes or ānatural statesā represent the vast majority of all societies across history.
Violence and Social Orders explains that only in the last three centuries have natural states co-existed with a different form of social organization: the āopen access ordersā in the liberal West. North and his co-authors thus again follow Hobbes in suggesting that societies that respect rights are more stable, thus more free and more predictable, and thus more prosperous.4 Yet Violence and Social Orders does more than channel Hobbes.5 Its authors are describing events that Hobbes could only dimly envision in the seventeenth century, and it does so with evidence about the remarkable stability of the ways in which people interact across time, places, and cultures. The enduring stability of the salience of violenceāand thus forceāframes the social landscape that we describe in this book.
Explaining social structures as varying answers to the problem of taming violence is a powerful but insufficient insight. North et al. offer a āconceptual frameworkā in Violence and Social Orders rather than a formal theory that tests causal hypotheses. That makes sense given their studyās effort to understand the factors common to the origins and evolution of all societies; laboratory experiments, for example, cannot make much sense of ancient history. Yet the efforts presented in Violence and Social Orders (and indeed in Hobbesā Leviathan, for that matter) necessarily do not investigate two considerations that will inform our own conceptual framework for examining force.
First, while North, Wallis, and Weingast chart how and why societies control violence in consistent ways, they do not explore how novel technologies allow rulers to use the same principles of force to exert it in new and more effective manners. Indeed, military and political histories are replete with instances showing that the control of coercion and violence evolves with technological change, especially in the cyber revolution. The mechanisms by which rulers control and exert violence are never neutral, as Marshal McLuhan (āthe medium is the messageā) and two generations of military historians have helpfully explained. Such mechanisms are shaped by their societies, and they in turn shape societies.
Second, Violence and Social Orders compares how societies develop and function but says relatively little about how they interact. Peace has always been more the exception than the rule, as North et al. recognize. The disparities of power that emerged as growth took off in the āopen accessā societies during the modern age made it possible to create larger empires than ever before. This was quantitatively new, but it was soon followed by a new form of conflict: the ideological struggles of the twentieth century between open access states and other Western (but nonetheless totalitarian) natural statesāwhich were also new. The endurance and severity of that twilight conflict also makes the reader wonder how such ideological states could arise in the first place from ideologies that emerged in reaction to the ideas that had guided the open access orders.
Studying the properties of force and how they have worked together across cultures and technological conditions has given us insights into the similar strategies and tactics that rulers use to maintain control and guard their interests at home and abroad. These similarities, moreover, obtain in both the military and the internal security fields. In short, force gets wielded in remarkably similar ways, both in the ānatural statesā and in the āopen access societiesā alikeāas Aristotle and Sun Tzu suggested above. Its components are three-fold, and they fit together in predictable ways.
A Conceptual Framework of Force
Our conceptual framework re-examines the evidence from history, political theory, and social science in a way that suggests insights that in turn can prompt theory building or guide the proposal of hypotheses. We believe that force requires concentration, and concentration in turn depends upon three components: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. Like the engine, drive train, and steering in a racing car, cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension all work together to allow a ruler or commander to concentrate force at the right time and place. The framework we advance here matters in our day because digitally and globally networked capabilities are rapidly transforming the third of those variablesācomprehensionācausing a revolution in what governments can know about adversaries at-scale and in real-time.
We seek to show that mastering this three-part relationship of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension since ancient times has given rulers victory abroad and rest from enemies at home. Throughout military and political history, commanders and ministers have typically achieved disruptive and asymmetric advantages over their foes when by skill or chance they have been able to combine relative superiority in some or all of these three factors. Once again, we find ancient insights supported by modern research (as noted below). The factors that strengthen cooperation, of course, can also be attenuated in ways that impair cooperation among adversaries. These findings hintāas Sun Tzu and Aristotle long ago proposedāthat rulers and generals disrupt and vanquish their foes by impairing their willingness to collaborate.
We are guided in this quest by the synthesizing efforts of two modern scholars, William H. McNeill and Michel Foucault. McNeillās metahistory The Pursuit of Power (1982) showed the interaction between economic acumen, technological innovation, social organization, and the military art, finding that power over the last thousand years consistently flowed to states that could assemble and sustain these elements. Foucaultās Discipline and Punish gives us a complementary conceptāone that he called surveillanceāto explain how states use knowledge and coercive might against their own subjects not only to keep them in line but also to remove from the popular consciousness the possibility of struggling to live in some other way. Drawing from these insights into the power of technology and ideology, we gain confidence in our typology of force and its relevance to the fields of strategy, politics, and military history.
Definitions
Force and its varieties comprise the central subjects of this book. Any discussion of force, however, must proceed from an understanding of power. The Oxford Living Dictionary defines power and force this way:
- Power:
- The ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way.
- Force:
- Coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.6
Both power and force have intuitive meanings in many disciplines. Indeed, the Oxford Living Dictionary offers nineteen other definitions for power alone, and those include specialized usages in politics, physics, theology, and other fields. This plethora of meanings illustrates the difficulty of providing simple definitions to words with such wide applications. In some sense, power and force are twin foci for most political theorists, social scientists, and historiansānot to mention military strategistsāand a seemingly limitless literature treats them in similar but varied ways. Harold Lasswell even defined political science as the āshaping and sharing of power.ā7
Given the range of connotations for power and force, we use their common English meanings, with some qualifications. First involves the shadings between force and coercion, which were long used as synonyms (and in places still are).8 We recognize a certain distinction between them: coercion includes both the use and the threat of violence to compel its subject to change his...