Conflict Termination And Military Strategy

Coercion, Persuasion, And War

Stephen J. Cimbala

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although considerable attention has been paid to deterrence theory and crisis management, the equally important topic of ending wars has been virtually ignored. Conflict termination is the stepchild of U.S. strategy for a number of reasons. Thinking about how wars should end presupposes acceptance of the fact that war—especially nuclear war— is possible. Further, analyzing options for ending conflicts implies less-than-total victory, a concept that not only runs counter to the U.S. approach to warfare but also raises the specter of "limited war, †an approach that fell into disfavor following Korea and Vietnam. Finally, defining conflict termination objectives assumes that we think more about ends than means, that we know what is important to us and why, and thus understand the risks we will accept to defend specific interests and objectives. The contributors examine a wide variety of topics, ranging from Soviet and U.S. views on conflict termination to past, present, and future U.S. military service contributions. Their aim is to demonstrate the importance of careful evaluation of conflict termination goals during peacetime because when war begins passions and emotions will cloud decisionmaking.

1
The Endgame and War

Stephen J. Cimbala

Wars, like chess matches, have both structured and unstructured features. Much can be predicted given reliable knowledge about the combatants’ dispositions in men, material and weapons. Reputations of the commanders may be well established. Commitment, of the various policymakers to the objectives for which the conflict is presumably fought, can be established. But the element of unpredictability remains. This is fortuna as Machiavelli knew it, or chance. Great captains know how to take advantage of chance when it goes their way, and how to minimize its effects when it does not.

The elements of chance and determinism are nowhere more confounded than in efforts to end wars. The term “wars” is used here to avoid having to discuss certain kinds of conflicts in which we are not interested (such as the inter-personal kind). Rather, we are interested in those conflicts of state policy (or reactions to it) involving regular and/or irregular armed forces. This includes wars across the breadth of the deterrent “spectrum” from nuclear conflict between superpowers through “low intensity” conflicts and state sponsored terrorism.¹ Ending wars in this sense is harder than beginning them. Or, rather with more precision in terminology, we might say that terminating wars is difficult although sooner or later they must end, if only in the mutual exhaustion of the participants.²

The generic ways in which wars might be ended are well known, if not always intended. They can be ended first of all by attrition of the participants, which is compatible with a postwar political solution more favorable to one side than to another if attrition approaches exhaustion. World War I provides an illustration. Second, a rapid disruption of the opponent’s command and control and confusion of his decision making process may bring about a prompt collapse of resistance despite essential equivalence in capabilities. This took place in the German attack on France through the Ardennes in 1940. Third, a settlement may be imposed by outside parties or strongly suggested by them with the understanding that those outside parties may involve themselves, to the subsequent detriment of the combatants, unless the latter find the proposed terms acceptable. Periodic Arab-Israeli wars have involved the superpowers in just this fashion. It is also the case that wars between states or within states can be exacerbated by the involvement of external parties, thus prolonging the conflict and making it more difficult to find acceptable terms of settlement. The involvement of Greece and Turkey in disputes over Cyprus fits all too comfortably into this category. Finally, inter-state wars may be ended by intra-state dissolution of the regime or regimes in power and their transformation into governments with antiwar objectives. The replacement of Czarist Russia by (ultimately) the Soviet Union of Lenin resulted in a drastic change in the order of battle for the final year of World War I. Short of dissolving the regime, intra-state forces can bring pressure to bear to discontinue its perseverance in a war without popular support or clear policy objectives, which happened in the case of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

War termination implies something specific about the ending of war. Termination is the result of intention to limit the scope or duration of the war because that limitation accomplishes some desirable policy objective. Since there is no free lunch, terminating a war rather than ending it results in some trade-offs which might not appeal to all belligerents. War termination implies, ceteris paribus, that fewer casualties might be inflicted upon the loser by the winner; that revenge might give way to calculation; that wars waged in hot blood would be dampened in progress with the cooling of passions imposed by bargained peace agreements or armistices. Of course, termination need not be as explicit as written agreements. Tacit bargains can sometimes be struck by “dead reckoning” between or among contestants. Salient points emerge during the war which might not have been obvious before it began.³

Termination of wars as preferable to merely ending them thus implies something premeditated, although perhaps flexibly adapted to time and circumstances. That is to say: the policy maker who is determined to terminate a war according to criteria derived from policy objectives must impose the outline of a war termination plan on a fluid diplomatic and military field. Although this can be done on maps and sand tables with high fidelity, imposing war termination under the constraints of actual combat calls for a combination of skill and luck. Especially under modern conditions of wars between the superpowers or their principal allies, high levels of destruction and velocities of movement create incentives for conflicts to spin away from centralized control.

Few major wars are begun with plausible conflict termination stories. World War I is perhaps the hallmark example of one which proved grossly counterproductive for all the belligerents, although perhaps not equally. No actor’s postattack position improved upon its prewar status. Although World War II provided outcomes which were more asymmetrical, it also illustrates the vacuity of war termination objectives: presumably Hitler’s were Eurasian conquest and enslavement, the Allies sought “unconditional surrender,” and the Japanese story has yet to be written convincingly. Recent memories of America’s misinvolvement in the Vietnam war oífer another illustration. The U.S. intervention was marked by confusion at the highest policy levels about our objectives, including our objectives for war termination. In the end “Vietnamization” becme a synonym for neither winning nor losing, but merely degrading gracefully.

The last example is exemplary of the difficulties with war termination as a concept. While the U.S. phase of the Vietnam war ended with our withdrawal of combat forces, it did not end the war. Only the conquest of South Vietnam by the North did that. Thus, when we talk of war termination we must keep our eye on the objective for which the war is being fought in its most fundamental sense. It might be misconstrued, for example, that allied resistance to Hitler or the Kaiser was “about” German aggression against Poland (in the first case) or against Belgium (in the earlier period). But in fact it was neither. Allied resistance was “about” preserving the balance of power in Europe. Other war aims were given public expression and served to motivate the participants, and often with validity. But the geopolitics of resistance to German expansion were almost deterministic for all but the most altruistic of statesmen. It might be said, with only slight exaggeration, that the Germans and the French fought a single “war” with in-between pauses from 1870 to 1945.⁴ Similarly, the “Indochina war” might be dated as beginning with the Vietminh attacks against the Japanese and ending with the extinction of South Vietnam in 1975. Or perhaps the war continues even now, until Cambodia is subjected.

It is perhaps unfair to task scholars with discussion of war termination in the context of conflicts so unorthodox as low intensity conflicts. But more “orthodox” conflicts are not necessarily easier to analyse from a war termination perspective. War termination scenarios for a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict on the Central Front in Europe beg for questions about credibility. Various writers have suggested that the USSR might sweep to the English Channel within days (and then what?); others argue for stalemate between NATO and Pact conventional forces in the middle of West Germany; others suggest immediate retaliatory offensives into Eastern Europe by NATO forces; and, others recommend deep attack strategies against Soviet/Pact second echelon forces.⁵ Scenarios for war in Europe not only lack endgames in many instances; they also lack convincing rationales for why the war began at all. School solutions to improbable wars provide for stalemate or exhaustion of conventional forces with no or minimal escalation to nuclear use. This criticism is not directed at the skills of individual authors, but rather at the intractability of the situationally dependent character of large wars in areas as vital as Central Europe. But, and nontrivially, if we cannot see how to end them, how can we agree to begin them?

The answer to this for American statesmen, if not for scholars, is often that the Russians can be counted on to begin them. Our task is deterrence and, if deterrence fails, denying victory to the adversary or achieving our policy objectives. But the Russians cannot always fill in the missing gaps. First, they may not be so obliging as to launch an attack “out of the blue” against Western defenses. They might be confounded enough to attack from a situation of desperation (for them) or ambiguity. This might be especially compelling for Soviet planners who have undoubtedly noted that, when the United States is the unmistaken victim of aggression, the moral force of public opinion creates hurricanes in the direction of our adversaries. They have also undoubtedly noticed that when public opinion is divided in Ameica, its opponents do better.

The second reason why the Russians might not save us from our own policy relevant ignorance is that they are no better at war termination, as opposed to war ending, than we are. This seems a controversial assertion to readers who have been persuaded that the connection between war and policy in Soviet planning is as precise as the textbook connection found in Clausewitz. Soviet experience suggests otherwise, from Berlin to Afghanistan. The Soviets know how to get into imbroglios without always having a clear roadmap of how they are going to get out of them. It might be argued with some credibility that they are less likely to blunder into major wars than their Western antagonists, at least for accidental rather than deliberate reasons. Chessmasters though they are, Soviet planners are also caught in the situation dependency and cognitive uncertainty of real warmaking.

No better illustration is provided, of the superpowers common entrapment in absurd war termination scripts, than their excursions in strategic nuclear declaratory policy. One side intends to exercise flexible targeting, escalation control and “withholds” of weapons against certain targets, even during protracted nuclear war.⁶ The other contends that under certain favorable conditions (including preemption) it can obtain war survival and victory.⁷ This is not to join the camp of those who oppose trying to construct strategems for terminating superpower nuclear conflicts before they become holocausts. Instead, the foregoing statements recognize that strategic nuclear war has the endgame with maximum potential “disutilities” or costs compared to any conceivable policy objective. The superpowers have conceded as much in their actual behavior, if not always in their rhetoric. Their forces conventional or nuclear have not been permitted to confront one another on the field of battle since the atomic age began.

War termination stories for nuclear, conventional and “irregular” wars are difficult to come by for another reason. Traditional military thinking regards discussion of war termination as a “cop out” from seeking something more honorable: victory. Now victory plausibly defined may be an appropriate objective for a military campaign, properly understood, but rarely so for a war.⁸ Campaigns are the constellations of tactical and operational engagements between forces at theater or lower levels. Wars are clashes over policy and can be resolved only when the policy issues that resulted in war are settled.

Sometimes they cannot be. Sometimes policymakers (and policy analysts) must settle for “half a loaf.” The Korean war illustrates the dilemma for U.S. leaders who might be tempted toward unlimited war aims, were it not for limited means (especially for fighting an anticipated war in Europe simultaneously). More contemporary dilemmas are similar. The United States does not have and will not have in the foreseeable future, for example, sufficient airlift and sealift to carry on conventional wars of any magnitude in Europe and the Persian Gulf simultaneously. While declaratory policy has evolved toward recognition of the need to fight in these theaters sequentially rather than simultaneously, operational war plans move more slowly.⁹ The United States may be half capable of sustaining combat in either theater without being fully capable of commitment to either. Moreover, this possible shortfall of capabilities rests heavily upon any effort to terminate either war before escalation or surrender seems imperative. If the United States were “stalemated” with the USSR halfway across West Germany or in control of Iranian oil fields, policy would be hard put to get us out without getting us in deeper.

The international chessboard in a bipolar system is also less flexible for war termination under some conditions than was a balance of power system. With five or six major actors, flexibility of alignment and coalition adjustment provided some lubrication against the friction which characterizes even the brush-ups among superpower surrogates in the nuclear bipolar system. Wars between Israel and its Arab opponents are dangerous for world peace precisely because of the possibility of direct superpower engagement. The rapid war termination of Arab-Israeli conflict has thus become an unspoken but partially convergent tacit objective of U.S. and Soviet leaders after those wars have begun. Kissinger’s underestimate of the difficulty of obtaining war termination in 1973, on terms excluding decisive victory and direct superpower conflict, cost Israel considerably on the battlefield. Although Israeli and Arab combatants are not altogether surrogates for superpower objectives, they fight with superpower onlookers and the onlooking is framed in hostile global aspirations. If there is a single issue which neither U.S. nor Soviet leaders can be said to have thought through successfully, it is the issue of how to terminate a conflict in the Middle East after they have joined in directly, but before nuclear weapons have been introduced. U.S. strategies for rapid deployment of forces into Iran partake of the same policy void. How to get them out if they began shooting at Soviet opponents would be a much more difficult problem than getting them there in the first place, not to minimize the first problem.

Thus, war termination has the character of art and science, of will to negotiate through tacit and overt measures, of ability to adapt to the unforeseen and unforeseeable. Nor is this all. War termination also requires a certain degree of empathy. One must be able to understand the perspective of the opponent if one is to conceive of terms to which he might be agreeable short of Carthaginian pece. Decision makers are not noted for their ability to empathize with their opponents, and in democracies they have often gotten into wars by whipping public opinion into a suitable frenzy. The inability to empathize (which is not tantamount to sympathizing) with the war aims and perspective of the opponent is a necessary, although insufficient, condition for any war termination worthy of the name. Empathy is in turn conditioned by the objectives for which we are fighting and the costs we have already paid. These last may be considerable. Thus war termination imposes upon statesmen and strategists the highest burden of understanding the opponent in order to defeat him rather than to annihilate him. That this line between defeat and annihilation cannot always be drawn is clear. That statesmen are obligated to try is not as established a tradition as it ought to be. The imperative for war termination in the nuclear age is both normative and empirical. Wars which cannot be terminated should not be fought if they can be avoided. Wars which cannot be terminated are often not wars at all, but excursions in meaningless bloodshed.

* * *

Contributors to this volume have addressed both conceptual and practical difficulties with war termination. At the most inclusive level, William O. Staudenmaier considers war termination from the perspective of social conflict. The modern strategist must be concerned with all kinds of social conflicts instead of limiting his/her focus to “wars” in the traditional sense. This makes the universe of observations more heterogeneous. Despite this heterogeneity, a strategic perspective on war termination has a particular focus: strategy has to do with the relations between means and ends, between war and policy. Thus conflict models relevant to war termination must be based on a conceptual foundation which includes purpose, rationality, realism and civilian control of the military. Major elements of such a model, according to Staudenmaier, are: the decision to use force; the dynamics of the battlefield; and conflict termination. The first component of the model examines the structure of situations which lead to the use of armed force. In the second stage, the battlefield is analogous to a marketplace in which winners and losers are determined by the clash of arms. Staudenmaier argues that since World War II, many conflicts display a pattern that involves the stabilization of the battlefield with armies still intact, followed by negotiations for limited objectives. The final stage of the model deals with policy makers’ assessments of how well the war is going, possible means to end the fighting, and the differences between conflict termination and conflict resolution.

Other contributors deal with more specific, although not necessarily more manageable, pieces of the problem. Classical Western concepts, according to Max G. Manwaring, have biased our expectations toward large scale conventional wars comparable to World War II experiences. Instead, Western planners now begin to recognize that they are confronted with a more diverse and problematical set of challenges in the form of low and mid-intensity conflicts. Most of these will occur in so-called “Third World” settings and be complicated by cultural and social pluralism with which U.S. and other Western military strategists may not be familiar. Manwaring selects cases of low and mid-intensity conflict which covered all major regions of the world, provided comparative perspective among cultures and political system types, and which included all phases of low intensity conflicts. The author concludes that the outcomes of these kinds of conflicts are not determined exclusively or primarily by the results of battlefield clashes. Instead, winning these wars depends on prewar preparation for the struggle to control a society and its political system on a comprehensive basis. The struggle for legitimacy on the part of the existing regimes and their insurgent opponents are most fundamentally moral rather than military: they involve competition for political allegiance rooted in mass and individual psychology. Thus, the perceived stakes in these wars may be total from the standpoint of both the eventual winners and losers.

Geoffrey Kemp studied nine mid-intensity wars in which the United States has had some leverage or interest during the past thirty years. In six of the cases—Suez/1956; Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973; India-Pakistan/1965; and Falklands and Lebanon, 1982—U.S. involvement was very high. War outcomes were directly influenced by American behavior. In these wars, positive involvements can be distinguished from negative involvements. Positive involvements are actions taken by the United States during the war in order to help one of the parties win the war, or otherwise terminate the war rapidly. Negative involvements are actions taken by the United States to inhibit the effectiveness of military operations, for one or both parties, during the war. U.S. interventions in these conflicts can be further classified as military, economic or diplomatic. Thus, according to Kemp, the United States intervened diplomatically in a positive manner ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 The Endgame and War
• PART ONE Superpower Perspectives
• PART TWO The Conflict Spectrum
• PART THREE U.S. Military Service Contributions
• PART FOUR Conclusion
• About the Contributors