America, Technology and Strategic Culture

A Clausewitzian Assessment

Brice Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415775847
• eBook ISBN: 9781135972455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book analyses the American way of war within the context of Clausewitzian theory. In doing so, it draws conclusions about the origins, viability, and technical feasibility of America's current strategic approach.The author argues that the situation in which America has found itself in Iraq is the direct result of a culturally predisposed incli

1 Introduction

Thus it is said that one who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes be victorious, sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement.

(Sun Tzu, sixth century BC)¹

Tools, or weapons, if only the right ones can be discovered, form 99 percent of victory…. [W]ar is primarily a matter of weapons, and … the side which can improve its weapons the more rapidly is the side which is going to win.

(J. F. C. Fuller, British Maj. Gen., 1919)²

War is an extremely complex activity, and is made all the more so by the continual advancement of technology. Throughout history, technological innovation has had the effect of producing new and more sophisticated instruments for the conduct of war. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in an era that has come to be known as the “Information Age,” technological advancement is again bearing its mark upon the most violent of human endeavours. In what has been characterised as an ongoing “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), many government officials, industry experts and academics have declared that rapid advances in information and communications technologies are changing the very nature of war.³ Increasingly, voices of opposition are rising to challenge those assumptions underlying the current American way of war. While varied in scale and pitch, the growing sentiment in America seems to be that in war generally—and in Iraq particularly—success cannot be achieved without reaching a political solution. Such an important discovery should also have been an obvious one. The condition of war remains today what it was yesterday and will persist through tomorrow—a human social institution. In fact, war has always been an essential part of man’s social existence. The very mention of the word “war” evokes fear and loathing, passion and excitement. Wars have been waged out of honour, anger, greed, and religious principle. They have resulted in empires being built or lost; peoples being freed or enslaved; and entire civilisations being protected, disrupted, or even destroyed.

While much has been written on the subject of war, this study fills a void in contemporary strategic and security studies literature by investigating the extent to which culture shapes how technology is used to develop and attain strategic objectives in the military domain and, conversely, how technology influences culture as expressed through strategic behaviour. In taking the position that Clausewitz’s conception of the nature of war and the meaning of strategy are both relevant and enduring, this study critiques the American “way of war” with a view to determining the theoretical viability and practical feasibility of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) and Effects-Based Operations (EBO)—the framework within which US defence transformation is currently unfolding.⁴ The strategic–cultural nexus is considered as it relates to the American strategic experience, with the roots of American strategic culture being traced to her national genesis. The results of this study are as telling as they are disturbing.

To be sure, this study finds that the situation in which America finds herself in Iraq is the direct result of America’s habit—culturally predisposed as it is—to substitute technology for strategy. This habit manifests itself most extremely in the form of the NCW/EBO construct, which by and large has failed to deliver on its many promises. Operation: Iraqi Freedom (OIF) is illustrative of these claims. As is revealed in the following pages, the fundamental problem with the NCW/EBO—and, indeed, with America’s defence transformation writ large—is that it centres on technology at the expense of strategy’s other dynamics, most noteworthy the human dynamic. This flaw persists, despite assertions to the contrary by senior American defence experts. In an era of persistent military conflict, I submit that the United States will continue to experience tactical difficulties—and risk strategic failure—unless she revises her current strategic paradigm. One implication of this thesis is that America must find ways to better integrate intangible human dynamics into her technical systems-based way of war. While achievable, this is a difficult proposition in light of America’s strategic cultural predispositions.

Theorising war and strategy

In Vom Kriege (or, On War, in English), Clausewitz formulated what has been the most widely accepted theory on the art and science of military competition—one that is considered by many to be of “universal and permanent validity in its essentials.”⁵ In the years following its initial publication in 1832, Vom Kriege came to influence the minds of some of the great strategists and military practitioners of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a well-renowned English translation of On War Michael Howard identifies Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Prussian General Staff and credited with monumental achievements during the German wars of unification, as having been a particularly strong proponent of Clausewitzian theory. Referring to a 1957 biography on Moltke, Howard wrote that the Prussian general once cited On War, together with Homer and the Christian Bible, as “the truly seminal works which had moulded his own thinking.”⁶ With the German army being the model for all others at the start of the nineteenth century, Howard noted that a legion of foreign militaries “absorbed the doctrines of Clausewitz as much unconsciously as consciously.”⁷ Among those armies were the French at the end of the nineteenth century; the Japanese in the lead-up to the 1904 Russo-Japanese War; and the British prior to the start of the First World War.

Notwithstanding the vast and expansive literature on the subject, there is no universally recognised definition of war. Nor is there consensus on what exactly constitutes war’s nature, irrespective of how war is generally conceived by students of classical strategic and war theory. To be sure, some contemporary experts—perhaps foremost among them being Martin van Creveld—now rebuff the lessons of such classical authors as Clausewitz, arguing as they do that the works of Clausewitz are inapplicable to the times. In The Transformation of War, for example, Creveld contends, “the Clausewitzian Universe is rapidly becoming out of date and can no longer provide us with a proper framework for understanding war.”⁸ Among other aspects of Clausewitzian theory, Creveld has specifically targeted the concept of Trinitarian warfare in his suggestion that “it is not self-evident that the trinity of government, army, and people is the best way to understand either ‘uncivilized’ war or the great wars of the 20th century.”⁹ In an earlier work, Technology and War, Creveld echoes the theme of J. F. C. Fuller’s Armament and History by claiming, contrary to Clausewitzian theory, that war is governed by technology, not politics.¹⁰ He is not alone in his views. Many others, among them military historian John Keegan, share Creveld’s sentiments. In A History of Warfare, Keegan begins his first chapter by rebutting what is perhaps Clausewitz’s most famous dictum. “War is not the continuation of policy by other means,”¹¹ asserts Keegan. Indeed, “it is at the cultural level” that Keegan finds Clausewitz’s exposition of war to be defective.¹² In this context, Keegan considers war an explicitly cultural phenomenon—one in which politics plays little, if any, role. Russell Weigley has explicitly shared this view in his contribution to the volume, Military Effectiveness, having begun his chapter with the following claim:

War … is no longer the extension of politics by other means. It is doubtful whether the aphorism affirming that war is such an extension of politics was ever true enough to warrant the frequency with which it has been repeated.¹³

While in his article, “A Wake for Clausewitz,” Steven Metz does not quite share the views of Creveld and Keegan, he does assert that Clausewitzian theory has become antiquated to the point of irrelevance. “The core of Clausewitz’s philosophy of war—that states wage wars using armies in pursuit of political objectives” is disappearing from contemporary warfare, Metz claims.¹⁴ With overt reference to Clausewitz, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler have written in their oftcited book, War and Anti-War, “much of what we know about both war and antiwar is dangerously out of date.”¹⁵ The Tofflers’ overriding contention is that remarkable changes in the world economy—whereby raw materials and physical labour are being supplanted by the ready availability of information—“is bringing with it a parallel revolution in the nature of war.” Even official United States defence policy speaks of the “changing nature of military competition,” which American defence officials link directly to rapid technological developments.¹⁶ Many others, including John Shephard, Jr., echo these contentions.¹⁷

Yet still, some cling to the view that the key dictums of Clausewitzian theory, in particular, transcend time and space, leaving them just as relevant today as they were in the time of the great Prussian master. For example, while in his article, “War, Politics, and RMA,” Antulio Echevarria concedes that “not all of Clausewitz’s military thinking remains relevant,” he maintains Clausewitz’s “conception of war, his remarkable trinity, and his grasp of the relationship between Politik and war” is enduring.¹⁸ Similarly, Bernard Brodie makes the point that Clausewitz’s famous treatise, Vom Kriege, is “basically timeless,” while at the same time recognising that “everyone is a child of his age and his culture, and he whose mind eagerly absorbs new ideas will be such in a quite special way.”¹⁹ This view seems a subtle reflection of Clausewitzian war theory, specifically that of war’s subjective nature. Defence strategist Colin Gray is perhaps the strongest proponent of Clausewitzian theory, having acknowledged that, throughout his career, “Clausewitz’s On War has been my constant companion and by far the most heavily used book in my library.”²⁰ Not surprisingly, Gray’s works on war and strategy consistently invoke a theme that is unmistakably Clausewitzian in its theoretical orientation. Barry Watts upholds many of the essential elements of Clausewitzian theory in his piece, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, and even laments in a closing passage, “The fact that deep disagreement still persists … as to whether technological advances can ‘lift the fog of war’ suggests how little military theory has advanced since Clausewitz’s death.”²¹ Williamson Murray and Robert Scales, Jr., reflect a clearly Clausewitzian viewpoint in their article, “Unconventional Combat,” most notably when they state, “[t]echnology may alter how wars are fought, but it will never change the fact that wars are conducted by human beings for political ends.”²²

As with one’s definition of war, the way in which strategy is conceived holds vast importance, not only to a research project of this sort, but to the manner in which the art (or science, depending on one’s viewpoint) of strategy is put into practice. Clausewitz’s definition holds that strategy is “the use of engagements for the object of war.”²³ Since the day of Clausewitz, there have been many well meaning, though generally unsuccessful attempts to improve upon the Prussian’s definition of strategy.²⁴ On this score, anti-Clausewitzian theorists, such as Martin van Creveld, have written that such factors as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and advancements in information technology have changed the meaning and function of strategy.²⁵ Colin Gray contests such attempts as Creveld’s, having characterised the latter’s definition as “rather casual and distinctly unhelpful.”²⁶ In his own attempt at giving meaning to the concept, Gray has taken a page from Clausewitz’s thesis by holding strategy to be “the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy.”²⁷ This definition embraces Clausewitz’s view of policy and war being what Antulio Echevarria has called a “logical continuum,”²⁸ whereby strategy serves as a bridge between the two. The present study adheres to the Clausewitzian school of thought.

A central tenet of American strategic approach—and, to a lesser extent, that of the West writ large—holds that Information Age warfare fundamentally is, and will be, different from that of previous eras. The American way of war in particular presumes that advanced technologies afford the US military sufficient capabilities “to create and secure an enduring peace.”²⁹ Economic pressures from America’s commercial and industrial sectors encourage adoption of this perspective by the national defence community, and promote diffusion of military technology to US allies and partners abroad.³⁰ America’s guiding strategic principles, which are encompassed by a co-evolution of technology and US cultural dependence thereupon, coincide with another tendency: the omission in, or de-emphasis by US strategy of the role of culture in the shaping of strategic behaviour. Hence, the present study seeks broadly:

1. to derive knowledge about the confluent relationship between technology and culture, and how that relationship finds expression through military strategy;
2. to apply that knowledge to specific strategic experiences, most explicitly that of the United States; and;
3. to obtain from the resulting knowledge an understanding of the importance of culture to the manifestation and resolution of strategic dilemmas.

Thesis

This book’s central thesis is that war’s outcome is arbitrated not by technology—which has its own unique place in conflict—but by the ideas of man, which in part stem from the cultural context in which technology is diffused and applied militarily. This supposition is predicated on my view of war as a fundamentally human institution,³¹ the outcome of which is always to be a function of the belligerents’ respective—and, in some ways, co-dependent—cognitive relationships to the physical world. In other words, wars are won or lost by people, generally on the basis of who’s understanding of the physical world—to include one’s opponent and oneself—is constructed and exploited most effectively. This perspective harkens back to the words of Sun Tzu, quoted at the start of this chapter, who more than two millennia ago advised that to know both oneself and one’s enemy is “the Way (Tao) to know victory”³² in war. In one (non-trivial) sense, to know one’s enemy and oneself, in part, requires cultural understanding—that is, understanding of the strategic cultural context in which all parties to a conflict are operating. This argument derives from the belief that culture filters and gives meaning to information absorbed by human ag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Introduction
• PART I On pursuing strategic excellence
• PART II On achieving strategic dissonance
• Notes
• Bibliography