The Transformation of Strategic Affairs

Lawrence Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781136747182
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book analyzes the strategic implications of the shift in focus for the US Armed Forces from regular to irregular war. Lawrence Freedman closely examines the difficulty the US Armed Forces face in shifting their focus from preparing for regular wars, in which combat is separated from civil society, to irregular wars, in which combat is integrat

CHAPTER ONE

Networks, Culture and Narratives

Since Carl von Clausewitz borrowed the concept of the ‘centre of gravity’ from Newtonian physics, referring to the point in a body about which it will balance, it has served as a metaphor for ways in which a well-aimed offensive thrust might knock the enemy sideways.¹ Clausewitz, considering regular war, wondered not only about the centre of gravity of an army in battle but of a whole nation. He could claim that if a nation depends on its army for protection, then the army is the nation’s centre of gravity. But what if the nation were as dependent upon an alliance or on suppressing insurrectionists? Might these not also be centres of gravity? Clausewitz thought that indeed they could be and so extended the metaphor to the point where it became critically misleading and far too mechanically applied – especially by his later imitators. The term has now become used as a synonym for any potentially decisive vulnerability. Because every body must have a centre of gravity so then, it is assumed, must every army or every society. All that has to be done is to identify and to attack this centre.

In the 1980s air forces were taken up with the metaphor and spent much time discussing where the centre might be found and how it could then be targeted accurately, as if the centre of gravity of a state, and even a whole society, might be found in a collection of buildings or key facilities. Since then the vital centre has come to be identified in terms of information networks and, more recently, culture. This chapter first describes the recent development of official American strategic thinking and then considers the influence of ideas of ‘network-centric’ and ‘culture-centric’ warfare. It concludes by identifying the concept of a strategic narrative as an analytical device.

The revolution in military affairs

To understand the transformation that has taken place in military thinking a useful starting point is the 1991 Gulf War. This appeared to be a classic of manoeuvre warfare, confirming the validity of military preferences by being fought successfully along wholly conventional lines. The enemy was disoriented by means of highly mobile firepower, made possible by technical superiority and skilful orchestration of professional forces. It reflected ideas that had been under development since the late 1970s, marked in 1982 by the adoption of the doctrine of AirLand Battle, in preparation for the great confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The renewed emphasis on manoeuvre was an explicit criticism of what was said to have been an excessive prior preoccupation with attrition. Reviving the operational arts also meant reviving ideas, going back to the aftermath of First World War, of how warfare might be rescued from the terrible consequences of attrition, in which victory required staying power above all else, as the opposing forces slogged it out, with casualties accumulating, treasury reserves depleted, industry pushed to full stretch and society becoming more fragile. The new approach was to consider the battlefield in the round. The critical attributes of successful operations were stressed as ‘initiative, depth, agility and sychronization’.²

In 1991 the coalition, led by the United States, and including strong British and some French participation, fought along NATO lines against an opponent that had been prepared, though not very well, to fight along Warsaw Pact lines. The success of Operation Desert Storm convinced the military that they were thinking along the right lines. Indeed, up to this point the operational possibilities of improvements in sensors, smart weapons and systems integration were untested hypotheses. There had been talk of a renaissance in conventional strategy in the early 1970s when these new technologies first made themselves felt and this continued until the last years of the Cold War as strategies were sought that could reduce dependence on nuclear deterrence. It remained hard to imagine the scenarios, however, in which the efficacity of these strategies could be proven. Under Cold War conditions, there would always be the possibility, if a conventional battle were being lost, of escalation to nuclear exchange. Little in American military practice, up to 1991, gave cause for great confidence. The best arguments seemed to be with the sceptics, who warned of how the most conceptually brilliant systems would be brought down low by their own exceedingly complex designs, inept maintenance, incompetent operators or simply employment in climactic or topographical settings for which they were not intended. The pre-Desert Storm debate in the US featured many worries about the effects of sand and desert sun on equipment, predictions of high casualties in ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks and malfunctioning indicators leading coalition units to inflict as much damage on each other as on the enemy. These negative expectations, which may well have encouraged Saddam Hussein to risk a war with the United States, underestimated the seriousness with which the American military leadership had addressed the deficiencies exhibited in Vietnam and the promise offered by the new technologies.

First and foremost, therefore, the revolution resulting from the Gulf War was one of expectations. Up to 1991, the Americans seemed to have lost their grip on the art of warfare; after Desert Storm they appeared to be unbeatable – at least when fighting on their own terms. For this reason, one of the most impressive aspects of Desert Storm was that sufficient equipment worked as advertised to bamboozle Iraqi forces. There were compelling demonstrations of precision guidance – most dramatically in the images of ‘smart’ bombs entering command centres or of the Tomahawk cruise missile, fired from an old battleship converted for the purpose 1,000 kilometres away, navigating its way through the streets of Baghdad, entering its target by the front door and then exploding. Targets were, generally, chosen with care and, generally, attacked with confidence and minimal civilian casualties.³

Because the Gulf War was so one-sided, it displayed the potential of modern military systems in a most flattering light. It was as if Saddam Hussein had been asked to organise his forces in such a way as to offer coalition countries the opportunity to show off their own forces to their best advantage. A battle plan unfolded that followed the essential principles of Western military practice against a totally out-classed and out-gunned enemy who had conceded command of the air. There were no chronic deficiencies in either resources or logistics – only some unseasonable weather. The result, as noted in the Gulf War Air Power Survey, was not ‘merely … a conducive environment for the successful application of Western-style air power’ but ‘circumstances … so ideal as to approach being the best that could be reasonably hoped for in any future conflict’.⁴ This limited the extent to which formal doctrines, staff training, procurement policies and so on were truly validated, though not the extent to which they were deemed to have been so.

Proposals for future force structure built on what had worked well in ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. This was the origin of the RMA, which had a number of influential proponents in the Pentagon. This assumed a technological dynamic that promised the eventual domination of the ‘information environment’ and thereby the ‘battlespace’, a term upgraded from the earlier ‘battlefield’ to capture the idea of combat in three dimensions. The RMA would involve a marriage of information and communications systems with those that apply military force. The potential fruits of this marriage would reflect the quality of the information that it was increasingly possible to collect, assess and transmit virtually instantaneously. The resulting combination of speed and accuracy with which force could then be applied, was described as the ‘system of systems’, making it possible to attack discrete though distant targets with ever greater care and precision under ever more reliable command and control.⁵ While enemy commanders were still attempting to mobilise their resources and to develop their plans, they would be rudely interrupted by decisive and lethal blows inflicted by American forces for whom time and space were no longer serious constraints, leaving the enemy shocked and disabled. There was thus a move away from the crude elimination of enemy forces to more subtle notions of putting them in a position where resistance would be futile, by being able to act more quickly and to move more deftly.

The promise was particularly great for land forces. While navies and air forces had long shown how they could operate in this way, armies had traditionally sought to occupy territory and not just to eliminate items upon it. For those concerned about casualties and long-term commitments, however, ground forces are key. Infantrymen make up around 80% of US combat deaths in recent conflicts, even though they account for just 4% of the total force.⁶ For some time, US military thinking has been devoted to finding ways of prevailing on land without excessive risk. RMA advocacy argued that as they took ground, the armies could manage without having their own firepower beside them, even when on the defensive, and instead rely on artillery and aircraft deployed well to their rear. Relieved of the need to travel accompanied by heavy armour and artillery, they should then be far lighter and more mobile and able to dispense with a long logistic tail. With more manpower kept to the rear, less would be at risk. In this way, warfare would move away from mass slaughter to something more contained and discriminate, geared towards disabling an enemy’s military establishment with the minimum necessary force. No more resources should be expended, assets ruined or blood be shed than absolutely necessary to achieve specified political goals.

Transformation and the QDR

During the administration of President George W. Bush the theme of revolution was displaced by that of ‘transformation’, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acting as its champion. Rumsfeld’s convinction that the armed forces had become too cumbersome, geared to fighting an enemy that was unlikely to materialise while increasingly unsuited to fighting those who might, came to be reflected more in operational than budgetary terms. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provided an opportunity to demonstrate what could be achieved by relatively small and light forces enjoying air superiority. Given the prevailing balance of forces it was possible for American commanders to fight somewhat ad hoc campaigns, taking advantage of opportunities for breakthroughs as they arose. The ease with which the conventional stages of the battle were passed reinforced Rumsfeld’s view that speed and flexibility were key to effective combat. Unfortunately, however, this method worked far less well with the next stage of bringing security to the country and defeating the various forms of resistance to the occupying powers that soon emerged.

The impact of both bureaucratic inertia and operational experience on transformation efforts is evident in the February 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR).⁷ It has become a common complaint that the term ‘transformation’ describes a process rather than a destination and that the QDR’s meditations on the implications of an age of uncertainty and surprises and calls for flexibility and adaptability indeed suggest disorientation more than a strategy. A further complaint is that despite Rumsfeld’s own bold talk of major structural changes in the defence budget (now coming in at $500 billion), more than a decade of discussion of a less platform-centred approach to warfare, and a stress on lighter forces more appropriate to contemporary conditions, the US defence budget is still dominated by platforms. Rumsfeld has been no more successful than his predecessors in turning the armed services away from the ‘big ticket’ systems of aircraft, warships and armoured vehicles that would only really be necessary in the event of a major war against a far more substantial enemy than can currently be identified. Recognition of new strategic challenges is indicated in the pledges to ‘beef up’ Special Forces, to increase by a third the number of personnel specialising in psychological operations and civil affairs and to spend more on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

Nonetheless, the 2006 QDR demonstrates considerable movement in US thinking since 2001. While no mistakes are acknowledged, there is an implicit recognition that the US military, and particularly the army, must make a greater effort to come to terms with irregular warfare, especially in the face of ‘dispersed, global terrorist networks that exploit Islam to advance radical political aims’. The talk now is of a ‘long war’.⁸ The thrust of the QDR is the extent of the transformation required of US forces in response to the new strategic environment. Instead of worrying about a single, predictable and therefore deferrable state it is now necessary to address complex and unpredictable challenges, some of the most dangerous emanating from non-state actors who may well be found, and thus engaged, within countries with which the US is not actually at war. The QDR presumes the need to act before rather than after situations have reached crisis point and with ‘a wartime sense of urgency’. So the option of pre-emption, highlighted so boldly in the president’s 2002 National Security Strategy,⁹ is still implied but there is now less confidence in the idea that a developing threat can be eliminated in anticipation by a bold stroke. Instead the talk is of the need of a surge capacity to meet the different types of threat as they arise.

The QDR describes four categories of problems and suggests that they require distinctive types of forces. Defeating terrorist networks thus demands Special Forces; defending the homeland in depth involves better forms of detection and protection; shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads will be helped by traditional mixes of conventional and nuclear forces to remind them of the wisdom of avoiding the path of confrontation; and preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction may require complex packages of military and non-military capabilities. The underlying theme of the document, however, is less a matter of gearing capabilities to specific problems but a fundamental shift in attitude. Planning cannot be a leisurely process geared to possible threats, but must instead be fast moving and adaptive, geared to real threats. Forces can no longer be allowed simply to reflect the distinctive institutional preferences of the single services and be maintained in a static, hollow form, only to be filled should a need arise. Instead they should be complete, integrated and ready to move, but also flexible and tailored to the crisis at hand, with powerful operational teeth and the shortest possible logistical tail. Instead of a dominant focus on major conventional combat operations it is now necessary to prepare for ‘multiple irregular, asymmetric operations’. Although one might not guess from the actual budgetary commitments, these require less of an ‘emphasis on ships, guns, tanks and planes’ and less concern about amassing forces to engage in set-piece manoeuvres, judged by their kinetic impact. There must be more of an emphasis on ‘massing effects’, drawing more on ‘information, knowledge and timely, actionable intelligence’.

War: ‘network-centred’ or ‘culture-centred’?

Arguably the most important single proposition influencing contemporary American strategic thought in both official and unofficial circles is the identification of information as the key factor in military operations. It derives from a conviction that a new stage in some historically defined, and often technologically determined, sequence has been reached. The information age has been identified as the successor to the agricultural and industrial ages, bringing with it fundamental changes in the organisation of all human affairs, including the use of purposive violence.¹⁰

Information, once in electronic form, is unlike any other commodity: it is easy to generate, to transmit, to collect and to store. Incalculable amounts are now pumped out daily on to the internet to a near-infinite number of potential recipients with no expectation of payment and only occasional requests for user registration. ‘Blogs’, message boards and email contacts bring together individuals with at least one thing in common, despite many other differences. The problems this creates are those of superfluity and overload, of sorting information, identifying what is needed and distinguishing the important from the trivial and the background noise.

The tradition of worrying about information as a scarce commodity led strategists to address its growing wider importance in similar terms to other vital commodities, such as fuel and food. If information of high quality can be acquired and protected it is possible to stay ahead of opponents and competitors. Such information might include intellectual property, sensitive financial data and the plans and capabilities of government agencies and private corporations. Considerable effort goes into protecting this information from disruption or tampering and assuring its integrity. The concern ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One Networks, Culture and Narratives
• Chapter Two The Transformation of Grand Strategy
• Chapter Three Asymmetric War
• Chapter Four The Transformation of Military Strategy
• Chapter Five Strategic Communications
• Notes