War as Risk Management

Strategy and Conflict in an Age of Globalised Risks

Yee-Kuang Heng

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415375894
• eBook ISBN: 9781134185603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This major new study shows how war can be thought of in terms of proactive risk management rather than in terms of conventional threat response.

It addresses why the study of 'risk management' has helped fields such as sociology and criminology conceptualize new policy challenges but has made limited impact on Strategic Studies with new case studies of recent Anglo-American military campaigns in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The author shows how 'risk' is now a key defining feature of our globalized era, encompassing issues from global financial meltdown, terrorism, infectious diseases, to environmental degradation and how its vocabulary, such as the Precautionary Principle, now permeates the way we think about war, and how it now appears in US and UK defence policy documents, and speeches from both civilian and military staff.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, war studies, international relations and globalization.

1

THE RECONFIGURING OF WAR

When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who the they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today we’re not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re out there somewhere.

George W. Bush, 2000¹

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands …… America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.

George W. Bush, January 2005 Inauguration Speech

To what extent is war itself becoming a risk management strategy? This book is a study of emerging patterns of contemporary warfare that have significant implications for grasping the changing character of war. After all, the West has ‘a real problem with the concept of war these days’.² While the modern era was characterised by war or the threat of war between Great Powers, contemporary conflict involved mostly failed, destabilised or rogue states and non-state actors. Overturning conventional logic and historical patterns, these relatively ‘weak’ entities, rather than powerful ones now posed primary strategic concerns to the West in an age of globalisation, contributing to what some see as a new American way of war.³ Addressing such conceptual issues as part of the ongoing ‘transformation of war’ debate, this book puts in broader perspective Anglo-American campaigns over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq from 1998 to 2005 that are in some important aspects not yet fully understood in their entirety.

To begin with, George W. Bush’s first set of sentiments quoted above encapsulated Washington’s strategic conundrum perfectly, despite his infamous tortured syntax. Bush and his predecessor Bill Clinton deployed the greatest military machine in history without the previous Cold War template to go by, yet myriad elusive enemies remained. The overhauling of doctrinal and strategic concepts seemed an especially urgent task after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (hereafter 9/11). Yet even before 9/11 fuzzy outlines of a reworked strategic template were already discernible to some extent, albeit in rudimentary form. In a sense, 9/11 only helped consolidate nascent strategic concepts that had previously been emerging. Even legal arguments for action against Iraq in March 2003 exhibited striking continuity with those suggested in December 1998. It did not seem to matter if US Administrations were Republican or Democrat.⁴ Throughout the late 1990s and arguably even more so after 9/11, the Clinton and Bush Administrations had in fact waged military campaigns against Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (1998, 2001) and Iraq (1998–2003) consistently employing the same strategic premise. Clinton’s last years in office were spent lobbing cruise missiles at these countries, causing great consternation at the UN – not unlike his successor. Globalised security ‘risks’ in all three cases had to be tackled proactively declared both Administrations, essentially echoing each other’s rationales. Interestingly, this implied continuity in strategic thinking where one might expect discontinuity given the different Administrations and strategic contexts involved.

Furthermore such ‘risks’ – even catastrophic terrorism – did not constitute existential survival threats equivalent to what the West faced before. The Cold War had generated well-established concepts such as containment, deterrence and ‘net assessment’ of quantifiable material threats in terms of capabilities and intentions. Bureaucratically, the Pentagon even had its very own Office of Net Assessment under the legendary Andrew Marshall; an indicator of how ingrained the concept was. In contrast, corresponding doctrinal and conceptual approaches to managing hard-to-quantify post-Cold War security risks remained relatively unexplored. This book’s main goal is thus to investigate contemporary warfare from a risk management perspective of proactively averting probabilistic scenarios, leading to preventive strategies. This is in contrast to a more orthodox understanding of war involving ‘net assessment’ and reacting to more ‘real’ or imminent material threats. This perspective will be illustrated through three case studies – Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq – of conflict and strategy in an age of globalised risks.

The second of Bush’s statements quoted above is a useful marker for illuminating the ideological development and solidification over four years of his Administration’s self-proclaimed mission. Ironically, candidate Bush on the 2000 campaign trail was sceptical of overseas crusades to spread democracy and nation-building, preferring a ‘humble’ foreign policy. The Bush Administration of 2005 seemed to exhibit exponentially greater clarity of purpose, strategic direction and possibly even suggested that US foreign policy now involved spreading democracy for its own sake, ‘unmoored’ from the war on terror.⁵ Others claim to discern broader political-religious traditions informing the Bush policy’s ‘utopian’ themes of perfecting human life and limiting evil.⁶ Nevertheless, closely intertwined with this clearly more messianic tone was a self-interested concern with amorphous dangers essentially akin to that espoused in his first statement about not knowing who the ‘they’ were now in a time of globalisation. Paradoxically, the more powerful America became the more paranoia and fear seemed to mark its relations with enemy ‘others’ in distant lands seeking to endanger it.⁷ More cynical observers would even suggest that renewed emphasis on freedom and democracy was simply a direct result of Washington’s failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction or terrorist links in Iraq, which were the primary justification for war.

Despite its renewed ideological zeal, it may be more accurate to characterise the Bush ‘vision’ as a blend of opportunities to spread democracy and dangers to manage which are not necessarily exclusive. Its almost Wilsonian ‘grand strategy’ arguably sees no contradiction between power and principles, tying the spread of democracy with security interests especially after 9/11 in a stable globalised world.⁸ These two crucial dimensions of American foreign policy – spreading democracy and managing globalised security risks – are unfolding simultaneously and affected by each other, creating both tensions and synergies. The exigencies of managing risks, for instance, required coddling undemocratic actors such as the Afghan Northern Alliance and Pakistan. Bush was also allergic to ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan in that campaign’s opening salvos. On the other hand over the longer-term, spreading democracy in the Middle East – ‘countries of great strategic importance’⁹ according to Bush – forged a synergistic relationship with managing risks by also undermining the political ‘tyranny’ that spawned Islamic fundamentalism. Advancing democratic ideals in distant lands had become an ‘urgent requirement of our nation’s security’, given the impact of globalisation.¹⁰ Notwithstanding lofty ‘freedom’ rhetoric, safety concerns arousing fear and anxiety about vague distant dangers in an age of globalisation remained a powerful undercurrent in 2005 – as they did throughout the 1990s. This book concentrates on these persistent negative undertones to Bush’s newfound idealism via a longer-term historical perspective tracing how the Clinton White House through to Bush’s second term militarily confronted such risks.

Additionally, conceptual notions in the West commonly associated with expectations of how and what war is supposed to be, appear out of sync with the ongoing transformation of war. The iconic image of US Marines victoriously raising the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima after titanic struggles is perhaps one. This public tendency and natural desire for closure mirrors some but fortunately not all military planners and officials. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the more discerning policy-makers who sidestep this conceptual pitfall, suggested that conventional notions of war such as massed armies fighting spectacular decisive battles do not apply to the war on terror and the campaign in Afghanistan. A new vocabulary was needed to reconceptualise war.¹¹ This was not uniquely a post-9/11 issue. Rumsfeld’s predecessor William Cohen noted the Kosovo campaign too fell short of a ‘classic definition of war’ and struggled to characterise what was actually happening.¹²

The murky realities of war are clearly more complex: there were certainly numerous ‘small wars’ such as counterinsurgency campaigns or brushfire wars in the past 200 years that did not satisfy such ideal-type criteria. Nonetheless the reification of ‘classic’ wars endures, explaining current analogies to Pearl Harbour and World War Two. This is of concern, as Rumsfeld noted, not only for simplifying the complex messy realities of wars past and present. Political and strategic ramifications also lurk in failing to come to grips with less than ideal features of contemporary warfare. For instance, public expectations of swift decisive visible successes might be unrealistically high. While there are always entirely valid lessons to be learnt from history, having done that we should jettison misleading historical analogies and comprehend things differently as Rumsfeld suggested.

Two closely related questions flow from these issues:

i

The primary focus of this study is, given the lack of existential survival threats, can Washington’s rather frequent campaigns against Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq from the late 1990s to 2005 be construed as risk management? Thus, the core hypothesis to be assessed is that, under specific parameters, these wars bore distinctive hallmarks consistent with risk management strategies in terms of impetus, manner and modes of implementation, and outcome evaluation.

ii

The secondary related hypothesis suggests that risk management features define contemporary wars rather than ideal-type notions.

If these claims are to be sustainable, recent wars ought to manifest indicators of risk management concepts and strategies intended to highlight and reduce security risks. Policy-makers should for instance display deep concern for uncertain globalised risk scenarios and adopt precautionary strategies over conventional ‘net assessment’. If so, we could then have viable explanations for the reconfiguration of war as risk management. Social science, in developing knowledge to understand important issues should be guided by precision, logical consistency, originality and empirical validity.¹³ This opening chapter, and indeed the book as a whole, aspires to these criteria. The task of this chapter is to set out the case for reconceptualising the age-old concern of war. Research parameters are signposted more precisely, to avoid analysis being misapplied where it is not suitable. Finally, I justify the selection and use of case studies that offer insights into the issue at hand.

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES?

For much of the twentieth century, major war between Great Powers was the central security concern most feared and analysed, culminating in worries about nuclear Armageddon. This type of war now appears obsolete.¹⁴ Great Powers apparently no longer war among themselves. The West was still in the ‘war’ business but the business at hand had changed significantly. Wary of the changing forms of war, respected military historian John Keegan refrained from defining war in his 1998 BBC Reith Lectures. He would only define it minimally as ‘collective killing for collective purposes’.¹⁵ The monumental challenge of defining war is beyond our purposes here. Our aim is more modest: simply to explore how war has changed for the West.

John Mueller postulates that the legitimacy and appeal of war in the conduct of relations by and between ‘war-averse’ Great Powers in the West is in freefall. This was due to a confluence of various trends: economic prosperity, shifting societal attitudes, democracy, new devastating technologies, international norms and institutions, not to mention peculiarities of the post-Cold War international structure.¹⁶ China and Russia were more interested in economic growth than posing existential threats. War for the West has become increasingly remote and distant to the extent of it becoming almost a ‘spectator-sport’.¹⁷ It was in the process of being revalued due to deeper shifts in society’s moral, philosophical and social basis in a post-metaphysical era.¹⁸

With the erosion of its romantic appeal and acceptability, the nature of war practised by the Western world became increasingly utilitarian and instrumental, rather than existential or expressive of one’s purpose. The idea of fighting for some ‘noble’ cause was also undermined.¹⁹ War, once a distinct component of modernity and even a proactive historical instrument to bring about human perfection, was no longer seen as such to the same degree.²⁰ In its day, Pearl Harbour was relished by some as ‘the hour for elation’, a chance for America to fight for creation of a better world.²¹ Although some neo-cons might now see the same opportunity, such self-confident sentiments seem rather alien to the contemporary zeitgeist. Pearl Harbour’s oft-cited contemporary equivalent 9/11 evoked instead huge doses of anxiety, uncertainty and worst-case risk scenarios.

Rather than major inter-state wars, what we have left, if Mueller is correct, are war’s remnants, ‘residual warfare’ and conflicts within states such as terrorism and ethnic instability.²² Not strictly speaking wars by Mueller’s narrow definition, they do pose policing problems for the West. Indeed, through globalisation, such apparently ‘internal’ conflicts can easily become internationalised through transnational mechanisms.²³ Given the relative lack of Great Power animosity and immediate survival threats, military action relabelled as ‘policing’ by the American ‘sheriff’ to rein in potentially disruptive elements in the international system might well become commonplace in the twenty-first century.²⁴ This is a significant departure from the past centuries’ overriding concern with Great Power rivalry and its consequences. Yet as Lawrence Freedman suggests, ‘the strategic language required to describe and analyse such new situations has only developed slowly’.²⁵ Since they no longer ‘do’ major wars among themselves, it is suggested in this book that Great Powers like Britain and the US now talk the language of risks and ‘do’ risk management instead against those entities who pose all the security risks today: destabilised/rogue states and terrorist networks. War is being regrounded in terms of managing risks. So should the appropriate strategic language of analysis.

Recent campaigns over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq certainly have raised issues going to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 The reconfiguring of war
• 2 The dawn of a risk age: From Cold Warriors to risk managers
• 3 Forging the link: Risk management goes to war
• 4 The Kosovo campaign: War as a risk management exercise
• 5 The Afghan campaign and the war on terrorism: Risk management vindicated?
• 6 War on Iraq: Textbook risk management or flawed strategy?
• 7 The rise and fall of war as risk management?
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index