âŠweâre an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.1
To wage war, become an anthropologist. Lose the fetish for Clausewitz, and embrace culture as the way to understand conflict. Or so argue strategists, intelligence analysts, historians, and officers on both sides of the Atlantic. From academia to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focussed on the value of knowing the enemy. Those who take this view assume that different ways of life produce different ways of war. They see the differences between civilisations reflected in the profound contrast between the opposing sides in todayâs âwar on terrorâ, between American-led forces on one hand, and jihadist warriors or tribal warlords on the other. To make sense of recent military failures in exotic places, they have turned back to cultural knowledge of the adversary. This also often influences their reading of history. They project the same themes back into the distant past. Todayâs military and counter-terrorism confrontations of âthe west vs. the restâ, they argue, replays ancient differences between strategic cultures.
This new anthropology has good intentions. It aims to foster greater cultural awareness and sophistication amongst military officers, intelligence officers and governments. And cultural agility is surely important. It matters at every levelâstrategic, operational, and tactical. It matters particularly in a time of volatile occupations of foreign soil, when soldiers are also being asked to act as policemen, nation-builders, and peace brokers and similarly in a time of home grown radicalisation. And todayâs Iraq war demonstrates the strategic costs of misunderstanding the enemy at the grand strategic level. Both President Bush and Saddam Hussein were victims of their own misperceptions. Declaring âmission accomplishedâ in May 2003, the Bush administration was misguided by its narrow conception of war. It assumed that its opponents shared its view that hostilities were terminated by the defeat of Iraqâs field army. It neglected post-invasion strategy as a second-order administrative task separate to war. And it refused for too long to admit the existence of an insurgency. For his part, Saddam Hussein wrongly calculated that America would never risk a full-scale ground invasion of Iraq, as the rich enemy was too casualty averse and timid. He saw this strategic worldview confirmed in Americaâs retreat from Mogadishu in 1993, and distributed the film Black Hawk Down to his generals.2 Overthrown, tried and executed, he had underestimated American political will, the same error that misled the ideologues of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.3 Both Bush and Hussein failed, in Clausewitzâs words, to grasp âthe kind of war on which they are embarking.â4
But when it comes to writing history and interpreting todayâs crises, the âcultural turnâ also has a down side. It comes often with an overly determinist view of the tangled relationship between war and culture. Paradoxically, while it aims to encourage greater sensitivity to the nuances that differentiate cultures, it actually encourages a crude view of ancient and fixed âways of war.â It risks replacing strategy with stereotypes. The theory of strategic culture in its many forms has much to offer, but particularly at critical moments in wartime, it becomes unsatisfactory as an interpretation. Instead of arguing that we need to abandon culture as an analytical tool, it is hoped this chapter will show how a more circumscribed approach, tempered by sober political awareness and a little creative scepticism, can enable us to refine it, and grasp the relationship between war and culture more effectively.
The Argument
This chapter makes five key arguments that are relevant to the way that western powers are conducting the war on terror. Firstly, it shows that there has been a âcultural turnâ towards an anthropological approach to warâin all its guisesâand that this often entails a particular view of both strategic texts and historical behaviour. Secondly, it argues that this drive to discover the cultural essence of the enemy, or to find intrinsic differences in the core texts of the âeastâ and âwestâ, is mistaken. It rests on a flawed concept of culture, and in its âmetacultural form, oversimplifies the âwesternâ strategic tradition and overstates its differences with âeasternâ conceptions of war. Thirdly, when it comes to understanding the actual behaviour of cultures at war, it is empirically unviable. There are too many exceptions and qualifications that must be made to the supposed picture of two conflicting eastern and western âways of war.â Fourth, by depicting culture as the driver of military history, it risks being politically naĂŻve, overlooking the many moments where strategic cultures do not control actors, but where actors control and instrumentalise their cultures, and where the differences between conflicting approaches to war are dictated less by traditions and more by the hard realities of power, weakness, and pragmatism. Finally, the chapter argues for a rethinking of the definition of culture in the strategic context and its relationship with war.
âCultureâ in the strategic context can be defined as âa distinct and lasting set of beliefs [and] valuesâ and preferences regarding the use of force, its role and effectiveness in political affairs.5 This includes an array of factors, such as prevailing attitudes, habits, and values of the military and in their parent societies, geopolitical position, historical experience and collective memory of war, and the professional ethos of the military and security agencies. But this definition itself is problematic. As we shall see, culture in its relationship to war turns out to be contested, highly politicised, and malleable.
The latest âculturalismâ, like its former versions, is a moving target. It has been articulated at different levels of magnitude and with varying sophistication. It has been given many alternative meanings. It varies from more nuanced attempts to isolate and define cultural traits and their impact on strategy, to overarching views of exotic warfare placed into âmetaculturalâ categories of east versus west, to cruder approaches, which treat culture in a deterministic manner. The argument should be met at its most sophisticated, but also in its most widespread and dogmatic form. To question crude culturalism is not to attack a convenient âstraw man.â In the UK and US, a zealous form of culturalism has taken hold within and outside security circles.
Any discussion of culture therefore risks degenerating into a sterile âdefinition debate.â To avoid this, here I question the core assumptions that these different culturalist approaches share. This is the simple but powerful idea that people fight as they do mainly because of the assumptions, memories, and values they have inherited, and that national strategies are primarily shaped or determined by geography, ethnicity, political development, and a heritage of received wisdom and historical narrative. Or in more crude versions, they fight as they do because they are Orientals, Muslims, or Americans.
The Cultural Turn
Do ânon-westernersâ approach war and conflict in fundamentally different ways? The question is more than academic. According to traditional wisdom both ancient and modern, one must know the enemy to succeed in war. Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu advised strategists to âKnow your enemy and know yourself.â6 Mastering war would require self-knowledge and an accurate reading of the enemy, a dialectical exercise that would reward the strategist with victory upon victory. And cultural illiteracy, the âanthropology deficitâ within the national-security establishment, is being blamed for current failures. America and its allies are confronted with the difficulties of negotiating cultural differences in alien environments. They face the implosion of Iraq, where a bloody insurgency mutates into a civil war, while NATO struggles to navigate the tribal world of Afghanistan and a resurgent Taliban.
American militaryâand indeed intelligenceâstrategy of the 1990s was marked by the technology-driven quest for a âRevolution in Military Affairsâ (RMA). The RMA envisaged a future in which the American colossus would prevail against armies in the field by exploiting its strengths, such as information and knowledge of the battlespace, precision munitions, rapid mobility, and decision-making.7 But the worldâs dominant superpower now faces a very different world. Neither the doctrine, training and tools designed to counter the Soviet threat, nor the revolution of the 1990s seemed capable of dealing with âlow-intensityâ counterinsurgency. Americaâs advantages have been offset by the indirect methods its enemies employ, who refuse to play to these strengths and fight as America would like them to; by the complex terrain and gangland of urban warfare, in which industrial might or superior firepower do not guarantee success; and by their enemiesâ different organisation, more a shadowy network than a traditional command structure. Prepared for conventional battles, surgical invasion and withdrawal, and swift, overwhelming strikes, Americaâs military was unprepared for the post-invasion disorder in Iraq, and for the intimacy of prolonged contact with a complex foreign society.
Given the shortcomings of the revolution in military technology, strategists argue now for a cultural counter-revolution.8 They claim that we should cultivate understanding of the intricacies of tribes, clans, customs, and traditions. We need a better grasp of the relationship between how people fight and their traditions, identities, religion, collective memory, preconceptions, and sheer force of habit. A return to an anthropological approach to war, it is hoped, âwill shed light on the grammar and logic of tribal warfareâ, and create the âconceptual weapons necessary to return fire.â9 To some, culture now seems the essence of strategy, even the key to strategic salvation.
This âcultural turnâ is driven by a number of forces. As well as a reaction to the failures of recent American military interventions, it is also part of a larger debate about whether the nature of war is fundamentally changing, in ways that make it obsolete to talk about universal principles of strategy. And it is i...