Military Strategy in the 21st Century

Kersti Larsdotter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032084053
• eBook ISBN: 9781000764154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Military Strategy in the 21st Century explores military strategy and the new challenges facing Western democracies in the twenty- first century, including strategy in cyber operations and peacekeeping, challenges for civil-military relations, and the strategic choices of great powers and small states.

The volume contributes to a better understanding of military strategy in the twenty- first century, through exploring strategy from three perspectives: first, the study of strategy, and how our understanding of strategy has changed over time; second, new areas for strategic theory, such as peacekeeping and cyberspace; and third, the makers of strategy, and why states choose suboptimal strategies.

With the increasing number of threats challenging strategy makers, such as great power rivalry, terrorism, intrastate wars, and transnational criminal organisations, Military Strategy in the 21st Century will be of great value to scholars of IR, Security Studies, Strategic Studies, and War Studies as well as policymakers and practitioners working with military strategy in particular and international security and war in general. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Military strategy in the 21st century

Kersti Larsdotter iD

ABSTRACT
This special issue explores military strategy in the twenty-first century. The articles scrutinise strategy from three perspectives: the study of strategy, and how our understanding of strategy has changed over time; new areas for strategic theory, i.e., areas where the development of war has made strategy become more important, such as peacekeeping operations and cyberspace; and the makers of strategy, more specifically why states choses suboptimal strategies and how wars in the twenty-first century influence strategy makers.

The development of international security and the conduct of war in the twenty-first century has proven highly problematic for strategy makers. The increasing number of nonstate threats, such as terrorism, intrastate wars, and transnational criminal organisations, the changing norms of intervention, as well as the blurring of lines between war and peace, have challenged strategy, both in theory and practice. Western democracies intervening in intrastate conflicts have received sharp criticism. Not only have they been criticised for pursuing the wrong strategies in contemporary conflicts, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have also repeatedly been accused of not having a strategy at all, or at least not clearly stated political goals, for the use of military force in these interventions.¹

The aim of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of military strategy and the challenges facing Western democracies in the twenty-first century. We will do that by exploring strategy from three perspectives. The first focuses on the study of strategy, and on how our understanding of strategy has changed over time. The second perspective focuses on new areas for strategic theory, i.e., areas where the development of war has made military strategy more important, such as peacekeeping operations and cyberspace. Finally, the last perspective focuses on the makers of strategy, more specifically, on why states choses suboptimal strategies, and how wars in the twenty-first century influence strategy makers.

This special issue contains the papers of the conference on ‘Military Strategy in the 21st Century’ at the Norwegian Defence Command and Staff College in Oslo 13th–14th June 2017. The conference is the fourth since the first Doctrine Conference in Oslo in 2014, the papers from which were published in the Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 39, 2016 Issue 2. The second conference ‘Mission Command—Wishful Thinking?’ explored historical and contemporary issues of mission command. The papers are part of an edited volume published by the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences.

The study of strategy

Strategic Studies is a multidisciplinary and rather young academic discipline, but with roots in a long tradition of the study of strategy in military academies. Although relatively well established today,² fundamental questions about the development and identity of the discipline are continuously debated, some of which are particularly pertinent to the development of wars in the twenty-first century.

Although strategy is usually understood as the relationship between ends and means, the nature of this relationship is frequently debated.³ One of the main questions concerns the relation between the military and political levels. At one end of the scale is Carl von Clausewitz with his understanding of strategy as ‘the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war’.⁴ This is usually contrasted with an understanding of strategy as the use of war for the purposes of policy, i.e., that battle is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. The tension between the military and political levels has resulted in the development of different concepts of strategy, such as ‘military strategy’, focusing on the military level of war, as well as ‘grand strategy’ and ‘national strategy’, focusing on the political level, including other means than military.

Another important question is whether strategy should be understood as the ‘instrumental link between military means and political ends’ or as the ‘process by which military objectives and force levels are set’.⁵ Both understandings have merit. Understanding strategy as the former makes us focus on how military force can be used to achieve political or military objectives. Richard K. Betts, for example, defines strategy as ‘a plan for using military means to achieve political ends’.⁶ Other scholars understand strategy more in terms of a ‘theory of victory’ or ‘theory of success’, emphasising the causal mechanism between ends and means.⁷ By understanding strategy as a link between ends and means, the discussion about levels mentioned above becomes less important. It is possible to include several levels of analysis, ‘from maneuvers of units in specific engagements through larger campaigns, whole wars, grand strategies, and foreign policies’, Betts argues, as long as focus is on ‘the linkages in the hierarchy of policy, strategy and operations, where the logic at each level is supposed to govern the one below and serve the one above’.⁸

Instead, by understanding strategy as a process, the focus is turned to the actors conducting strategy and the relationship between them. Basil Liddell Hart, for example, defines strategy as ‘the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy’.⁹ Who the strategy makers are, how they develop strategies and what influence their decision-making processes, are all significant questions. Here, the levels discussed above become more important. If one understands strategy as the use of the battle for the purposes of war, or ‘the art of military command’, military commanders are the main actors. However, if understanding strategy as the use of the war for the purposes of policy, or ‘the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation’, politicians become the object of study.¹⁰

A third important question concerns the relationship between strategy in theory and strategy in practice. Strategic Studies has developed in close relationship to practice. Indeed, one of the founders of Strategic Studies as an academic discipline, Bernard Brodie, called strategic theory ‘a theory for action’.¹¹ However, with the development of strategy as a field of study outside of the military academies, the division between strategy in theory and strategy in practice has become larger. Already by the mid-1960s, Brodie admitted that strategic theory had drifted too far from the practice of strategy.¹² Several scholars have expressed similar concerns, and at the turn of the century, Betts noted that many academics do not ‘grasp how hard it is to implement strategic plans’. Rationalist models of strategy, he argued, could only provide ‘heuristic beginnings for real strategies which, by definition, must be demonstrably practical’.¹³

In the first article of this special issue, ‘Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice’, Hew Strachan contributes to this debate. According to Strachan, our understanding of strategy has changed over time. Indeed, he argues that the development of war since the end of the Cold War has left us especially uncertain of what strategy means, unclear about who makes strategy, and confused about the relationship between strategy in theory and strategy in practice.

In the days of Napoleon and Clausewitz, the focus of strategy was on how to win wars. But, when wars became more complex, strategy became increasingly connected to policy. In the seminal work, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, Edward Mead Earle argues that ‘as war and society have become more complicated […] strategy has of necessity required increasing consideration of nonmilitary factors, economic, psychological, moral, political, and technological’.¹⁴ With the introduction of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, and the increasing focus on deterrence during the Cold War, strategy became about preventing war rather than waging it. In the event of nuclear war, experiences of traditional wars were not considered important, and the use of the battle for the purposes of war became all the more distant.

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, Strachan argues that ‘the actual experience of war has required us to re-integrate [war and strategy] in ways that had not been necessary when war was more a threat than an actuality’.¹⁵ This has made us confused. In the absence of strategy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has presented counterinsurgency doctrine as strategy, rather than the tactical method it is. At the same time, politicians have become all the more involved in tactical solutions to strategic problems, for example, through the use of drones for targeting enemy leaders. As a solution, Strachan suggests that the debate needs to ‘be informed by the recognition of the distinction between strategy in theory and strategy in practice’.¹⁶ He argues that both perspectives are required, but needs to be related to each other. He concludes by stressing the more pragmatic aspects of strategy. Strategy, he argues, ‘needs to be modest about itself and about what it can deliver. It is, after all, more of an art than a science, and it behoves those who think about it and those who practice it not to be too brazen about its status’.¹⁷

Strategic theory

Apart from questions about the discipline itself, one of the most central questions in Strategic Studies is how to use force or the threat of force to achieve desired ends. Different strategies of coercion, such as deterrence, compellence and coercive diplomacy, have been especially scrutinised.¹⁸ While traditional strategic theory has primarily focused on the military strategy of states,¹⁹ changes in international security and the conduct of war over the last decades have opened up new areas for the study of strategy.

One such area is peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping is rarely considered a military endeavour. But, while traditional peacekeeping operations were only deploying a few number of troops with a limited mandate to use force, contemporary operations are usually large, with up to 20,000 troops, and with much more forceful mandates than before. These developments have made peacekeeping an increasingly important area for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Military strategy in the 21st century
• 2 Strategy in theory; strategy in practice
• 3 Military strategy and peacekeeping: An unholy alliance?
• 4 Fancy bears and digital trolls: Cyber strategy with a Russian twist
• 5 The political-military dynamic in the conduct of strategy
• 6 Trigger happy: The foundations of US military interventions
• 7 Weak party escalation: An underestimated strategy for small states?
• Index