Contemporary Military Strategy and the Global War on Terror

Alastair Finlan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628929621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

Contemporary Military Strategy and the Global War on Terror offers an in-depth analysis of US/UK military strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to the present day. It explores the development of contemporary military strategy in the West in the modern age before interrogating its application in the Global War on Terror. The book provides detailed insights into the formulation of military plans by political and military elites in the United States and United Kingdom for Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Alastair Finlan highlights the challenges posed by each of these unique theatres of operation, the nature of the diverse enemies faced by coalition forces, and the shortcomings in strategic thinking about these campaigns. This fresh perspective on strategy in the West and how it has been applied in recent military campaigns facilitates a deep understanding of how wars have been and will be fought. Including key terms, concepts and discussion questions for each chapter, Contemporary Military Strategy and the Global War on Terror is a crucial text in strategic studies, and required reading for anyone interested in the new realities of transnational terrorism and twenty-first century warfare.

CHAPTER ONE

Contemporary military strategy

War is a social environment characterized by a state of armed conflict or sustained military action between nation-states/groups of people.

Warfare is a prominent feature of international relations in the twenty-first century. People continue to be killed in intense fighting, armies crushed in battle, and states overthrown. In this respect, notwithstanding the remarkable technological and social progress of humanity in the last 3,000 years, some long-standing characteristics of human development such as organized warfare stubbornly persist. From Ancient Egypt to contemporary America, societies still need effective military strategy in order to meet the challenge of the ever-present danger from war. The first decade of the new millennium has accented this trend and since the declaration of a Global War on Terror (GWOT) by President George Bush in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks in 2001, the United States and the United Kingdom have been engaged in continuous warfare to the present day. This study located within the field of strategic studies has been underpinned by two key research questions that are: to what extent has the US/UK imagination or thinking about warfare been out of sync with the new realities of transnational terrorism/twenty-first century warfare and why has these powerful state actors in world affairs failed to decisively defeat Al Qaeda and the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq? This research was conducted between 2005 and 2010 and so recent events such as the US withdrawal from Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden are covered to a degree, but the main focus of the book looks more closely at the formative stages of the GWOT and how Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom were fought, the lessons that can be learned for strategy and the wider consequences. The last decade of war has raised awkward questions and cast long shadows of doubt about the abilities of American and British civil and military elites to plan and win wars effectively that begs a number of pressing questions that are explored in some detail in subsequent chapters. For all the spin surrounding Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, the blunt audit of war will reveal campaigns that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars for little return of investment. The “freedom” campaigns stand out as being unusual in the sense that they were not wars of national survival in the same manner as World War II, but represented wars of choice that political administrations in Washington and London deemed necessary. The litmus test for a war of choice is very simple: if lost or abandoned will it matter greatly to the society engaged in it? The recent withdrawal of American and British troops from Iraq from 2009 to 2011 and their proposed departure from Afghanistan from 2014 onwards suggests that neither campaign possessed any tangible long-term benefit or core value to the states that fought them. This outcome in itself raises the broader questions of what is military strategy and how has its conception in the West developed over time.

The [Greek] idea of strategy

What is strategy? Strategy is a popular expression that is sadly everywhere and yet nowhere in the highly developed capitalist states of the West. It has become a conceptual gravity well within the popular lexicon that spans a wide variety of social action, from business to government and beyond. This is a point made by Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University who laments that “the word ‘strategy’ has acquired a universality which has robbed it of meaning, and left it only with banalities.”¹ Worryingly, the lack of precision about its meaning and use by policy makers has become a source of great confusion, not least of which, the mistaken belief that strategy and policy are the same thing.² Erudite clarity on this matter is offered by Elinor Sloan in an excellent recent book on modern military strategy who indicates that “the word ‘strategy’ is derived from the Greek strategos, normally translated as ‘general’.”³ In other words, it is intimately related in a definitional sense to a high-ranking officer with responsibility for commanding military forces in battle. As such, “the term itself remains fundamentally military in character”⁴ and this definitional foundation stone should really be the ideational jumping-off point for understanding. Process-tracing the idea of strategy from the Ancient Greeks to the modern age provides considerable conceptual clarity and helps to dispel the definitional fog surrounding this idea. Thousands of years ago warfare in time of the Ancient Greeks was sophisticated, complex, and demanded efficient coordination of effort. The centerpiece of the fighting was an infantry-based formation called a phalanx, protected by spears and later a long pike or sarissa (“13 or 14 feet long”).⁵ Individual warriors or hoplites, depending on the city-state, would wear heavy armor, helmets, a round shield and a sword. Other elements to be taken into account in Ancient Greek warfare, often against various Persian rulers, whose fighting technologies were occasionally adopted,⁶ included cavalry and stone throwers. Greek armies could range in size up to around 40,000–50,000 troops in many of the more notable battles such as Plataea in 479 BC that involved roughly 38,000 Greeks.⁷ These elements necessitated the development of superior levels of leadership and central direction on the field of battle. Sparta, perhaps the supreme military culture and society in human evolution to date, produced some of the best military leaders and as Plutarch records, “it was not ships or money or hoplites that these other Greeks would ask Sparta to send them, but just a single Spartiate commander.”⁸ It is almost impossible not to note that one of the finest military commanders in history, Alexander the Great, was also a product of Ancient Greek warfare and, in his short life, this Macedonian military genius conquered much of the known world from Greece, the Middle East, to vast parts of Asia as far as India.

According to the Greek interpretation of strategy, a general was the senior military officer with specialist knowledge of the art of war who determined the movements and engagements of armed forces in combat on a battlefield. There was, and remains however, a caveat with this interpretation that bears great relevance today because it actually encompassed two historically separated understandings that conditioned warfare in very different ways.⁹ The earlier understanding can best be described as a fission approach to strategy for it encompassed a distinct separation of politics and military affairs or the direction of military forces for the purpose of winning a battle. From this perspective, warfare and strategy was the exclusive realm of the general [military leadership] and hoplites fought under conditions of limited war with battles confined in time and space with strict rules of conduct.¹⁰ This was a very narrow conception and the scope of a general’s remit was confined to the field of battle so that the phalanxes could engage in restrained warfare with observed rules concerning prisoners of war and the outcome of the victory that could be decided within a matter of hours¹¹ of hostilities commencing. This pattern of waging war possessed numerous social, political and military implications that carry resonance over the ages, even to modern times, with regard to understandings about strategy. First, the decisive battle determined the outcome of the war and it became the central ideational and material mechanism through which victory or defeat was attained. Second, once political leaders had declared war, the battlefield became a military-dominated zone for the duration of the fighting.

The later understanding of strategy can be understood as a dynamic fusion [strategy] of political aims and military means under conditions of unlimited warfare best associated with Philip II of Macedon and, more so with his son, Alexander the Great. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it, “the Macedonians saw no reason to stop fighting at the collapse of their enemy on the battlefield when he could be demolished in toto, and his house and land looted, destroyed or annexed.”¹² Under Philip and Alexander, political and military leadership became fused and so too their aims and employment of military forces. Strategy became the direction of military forces for winning battle to directly facilitate political domination and conquest. As such, the concept and remit of strategy was broadened to become a synthesis of the political/military spheres with few limitations on the use of force against enemies. Married together with tactical innovations such as the redefinition of the phalanx with the introduction of pikes and a remarkably modern...