Strategic Studies

A Reader

Thomas Mahnken, Joseph Maiolo, Thomas G. Mahnken, Joseph A. Maiolo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317805588
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The second edition of Strategic Studies: A Reader brings together key essays on strategic theory by some of the leading contributors to the field. This revised volume contains several new essays and updated introductions to each section.

The volume comprises hard-to-find classics in the field as well as the latest scholarship. The aim is to provide students with a wide-ranging survey of the key issues in strategic studies, and to provide an introduction to the main ideas and themes in the field. The book contains six extensive sections, each of which is prefaced by a short introductory essay:

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• The Uses of Strategic Theory

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• Interpretation of the Classics

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• Instruments of War, Intelligence and Deception

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• Nuclear Strategy

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• Irregular Warfare and Small Wars

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• Future Warfare, Future Strategy

Overall, this volume strikes a balance between theoretical works, which seek to discover generalisations about the nature of modern strategy, and case studies, which attempt to ground the study of strategy in the realities of modern war.

This new edition will be essential reading for all students of strategic studies, security studies, military history and war studies, as well as for professional military college students.

Part I

The uses of strategic theory

Introduction

The three essays in Part I offer readers an important point of departure for the exploration of strategic studies. All three authors share the view that strategy is more than the practical application of a few common-sense rules of thumb about the use of military means to achieve political ends; that strategy should be studied methodically and that it has a place among the scholarly pursuits; and that useful strategic knowledge demands that present-day theorists think rigorously about “the lessons” of past wars and history more generally.

In the first essay reproduced in Part I, Sir Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London draws on insights from political science and sociology to examine the most fundamental underlying concept of strategic studies: namely, the concept of “power”. Although power is often measured in terms of assets (men, money, hardware, etc.), power should be understood as a relationship between opposing wills. As Freedman defines it, “power is the capacity to produce effects that are more advantageous than would otherwise have been the case”. To illustrate, Freedman turns to deterrence theory: A deters (or exercises power over) B, when B modifies its behaviour in response to A’s threats. As anyone familiar with international relations knows, however, deterrence relationships are in practice never straightforward. B may not perceive the threat or respond in the way intended by A. The complexities of politics and psychology conspire to frustrate the exercise of power, especially when it requires the continual application of force. Put simply, B will always seek ways to subvert A’s control. Although for these reasons any exercise of power is inherently unstable, power at its most stable is achieved when B accepts A’s will in the form of authority. What Freedman’s analysis suggests is that an understanding of power relevant to strategic studies must encompass more than “control” through “force”. Strategy, he writes, is “the art of creating power to obtain the maximum political objective using available military means”.

While Freedman offers insights into the methodology of strategic studies and the central concept of power, the second essay reproduced here examines the way in which strategic thinkers have used and abused history. William C. Fuller, Jr. of the US Naval War College disputes the accepted wisdom that armed forces routinely ignore the “lessons” of prior wars. Even the most cursory survey shows that nations and their armed forces have constantly striven to learn from past experience. The real problem, as Fuller sees it, is not a lack of interest in historical lessons, but instead the problem of knowing what “the lessons” are and how to embrace them. He sets out the typical styles of extracting military lessons and the pitfalls associated with them, specifically the fallacies of the “linear projection” and the “significant exception”. Strategists fall for the first of these by rigidly predicting future military outcomes from those of the immediate past; strategists fall for the second when they explain away prior military experiences that do not conform to the existing model of war as “significant exceptions”. These two fallacies occur because military organizations prefer steady incremental change to radical transformation, and because they often prefer to prepare for the wars they want to fight instead of the ones that they may actually be more likely to fight. What Fuller’s analysis shows is that the whole concept of a “military lesson” is dubious and potentially dangerous. Although military organizations can learn much from wars of the past, useful “military lessons” are short-lived because of the interactive nature of war. After all, future adversaries may find a way to creatively exploit a strategy based on prior experience, or may simply learn precisely the same lesson, and so produce a frustrating strategic stalemate.

The final essay takes strategic studies to the level of its application. As Colin S. Gray of the University of Reading points out, much of what appears to be wise and even prudent in theory is often unhelpful to the hapless military officer who is tasked with drawing up a feasible strategy and then executing it. Strategy is difficult to put into practice because it is neither policy making nor combat. Talent in one or the other field, as Gray writes, does not make one a good strategist. Good strategists, Gray suggests, are born rather than trained. Strategy is difficult because war itself is an extraordinarily complex activity in which everything that can go wrong will. Even the most high-tech communication and intelligence systems, for instance, cannot dispel what Clausewitz (see Michael Handel’s essay in Part II) called the fog and friction of war, or anticipate how a foe will act to frustrate even the most brilliantly conceived and executed strategy.

Study questions

1 What is strategy?

2 What is “power”? And how does the definition offered by Freedman shape your understanding of strategy?

3 Is strategy an “art” or a “social science”?

4 Are historical “lessons” a reliable guide for future strategy?

5 Why is strategy difficult?

Further reading

Betts, Richard K., “Is Strategy an Illusion?”, International Security 25, no. 2 (2000), 5–50.

Brodie, Bernard, “Strategy as a Science”, World Politics 1, no. 4 (1949), 467–488.

Brodie, Bernard, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).

Fearon, James, “Rationalist Explanations for War”, International Organization (summer 1995), 317–414.

Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies (London: Routledge, 1971).

Gat, Azar, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Gooch, John, “Clio and Mars: The Use and Abuse of History”, The Journal of Strategic Studies 3, no. 3 (1980), 21–36.

Howard, Michael, The Causes of War (London: Ashgate, 1983).

Lanir, Zvi, “The ‘Principles of War’ and Military Thinking”, The Journal of Strategic Studies 16, no. 1 (1992), 1–17.

McIvor, Anthony D., ed., Rethinking the Principles of War (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 2005).

1 Strategic studies and the problem of power

Lawrence Freedman

I

‘The strategic approach’ is … one which takes account of the part played by force, or the threat of force in the international system. It is descriptive in so far as it analyses the extent to which political units have the capacity to use, or to threaten the use of armed force to impose their will on other units; whether to compel them to do some things, to deter them from doing others, or if need be to destroy them as independent communities altogether. It is prescriptive in so far as it recommends policies which will enable such units to operate in an international system which is subject to such conditions and constraints.¹

Michael Howard has throughout his career served as one of the most eloquent and lucid exponents of the strategic approach. He was outlining his own creed when he described classical strategists as

the thinkers who assume that the element of force exists in international relations, that it can and must be intelligently controlled, but that it cannot be totally eliminated.²

In that essay, first published in 1968, he concluded by wondering whether classical strategy as a self-sufficient study still had any claim to exist. The field was then dominated by the inputs of political scientists, physical scientists, systems analysts, and mathematical economists and a grasp of modern military technology appeared, above all, to be of central importance for those seeking to make sense of the great—and largely nuclear—strategic issues of the day. During the next decade, as the costs of allowing a preoccupation with technology to crowd out the traditional themes of strategic thought and as the limitations of the sophisticated methodologies developed in the United States become painfully apparent, Howard’s confidence in a classical approach returned, suitably modified to take account of the rate of technological advance.³

It is only in recent decades that the study of strategy has become academically respectable. After the Great War, for many the only reason to study war was in order to design an international order in which disputes would be settled without resort to arms. It was only when Quincy Wright produced his monumental The Study of War, that the virtue of serious empirical analysis became acknowledged.⁴

Historians sustained the study of the ebb and flow of political life, with diplomatic historians undertaking this responsibility for international affairs. However, even here, until well into this century, the role of military force as a political instrument was studied only in the most general terms. Diplomatic historians were of course interested in the threat of force and its application in particular instances, but they rarely descended into issues of tactics and logistics.

Only those close to the military establishment saw virtue in the study of strategy. They produced campaign histories and tried to search for principles of strategy with which to educate the officer corps. At best, as with Clausewitz, practitioners understood the relationship between war and the character of the societies fighting them: at worst, there was little interest in anything other than tips on the conduct of battle. As Bernard Brodie observed, ‘Some modicum of theory there always had to be. But like much other military equipment, it had to be light in weight and easily packaged to be carried into the field.’⁵ Thus he noted the tendency to strip such theory as did emerge to its barest essentials and then convert it into maxims, or lists of the principles of war. Strategic theory, complained Brodie, thus became pragmatic and practical, unreflective of the framework in which the strategists were operating.

There was therefore prior to the start of the nuclear age no established framework for the academic study of military strategy. Diplomatic historians were aware of individual strategies; students of international relations understood why strategies were needed; military practitioners busied themselves with the design of strategies; political theorists and international lawyers sought to reorder the world so that strategy would be irrelevant.

The experience of the 1930s and 1940s knocked much of the idealism out of political and intellectual life. A world war followed so quickly by a cold war might have encouraged the study of strategy under any circumstances. The advent of nuclear weapons pushed questions of strategy right to the fore of political life, and once they were there it could not be long before the academic community would follow. Howard and Brodie were part of an emerging community of strategic thinkers who brought a variety of academic disciplines to bear on these great problems.

They, along with others generally drawn from the disciplines of history and politics, initially worried most as to the sense of nuclear strategy, doubting whether nuclear strength could be turned into a decisive military asset when faced with an adversary of some—even if inferior—nuclear strength. But East and West were acting and talking as if nuclear weapons had superseded all other types of weapons, and commitments to allies had been made on exactly this supposition. So the few classical strategists found themselves in a conundrum for which their intellectual traditions had left them unprepared. Into the breach stepped a new breed of strategists, often from schools of economics and engineering rather than politics and history, who sought to demonstrate how a wholly novel situation might be mastered by exploiting novel methodologies.⁶

Their approach derived its significance largely from their concentration on those features of the nuclear age which distinguished it from the exercise of military power in pre-nuclear times. This inevitably led to the neglect of the traditional sources of military power. In addition, because so much of the intellectual attraction of the new methodologies derived from their abstract nature, the scenarios of future conflict explored made only a slight attempt to relate decision-making to any recognizable social and political context.

Almost by definition, should anything remotely resembling these scenarios ever come to pass, the political and social context would be utterly transformed. But many of the new strategists argued that to the extent that social forces and human passions must inevitably be in play their role should be minimized, for there would be a premium on cool, rational decision-making if there was to be any satisfactory result to a nuclear confrontation. Formal rationality not mass emotion must govern decisions. At most, the prospect of mass emotion might be used by the calculating manager to persuade his opponent that the time had come to strike a bargain.

It was almost an attempt to transform the exercise of political power by making it subject to the managerial revolution and so turn states into rational decision-makers, maximizing utilities. This analytical approach illuminated aspects of strategy that had not always been appreciated in the classical approach but it lacked the broad, historically tuned insight of the classicist. Meanwhile the classical strategists lacked a theoretical framework to help integrate the new analyses. It is not surprising that there has been a constant return to Clausewitz.

Michael Howard has been unusual in his attention to the need for a conceptual framework if the study of strategy is to progress. My concern in this essay is to explore the possibility that strategic theory can be taken further by investigating what must be one of its central concepts—power.

The classical approach starts with the state as the central unit of the international system, reflecting sovereignty, a capacity for independent acti...