I’ve been thinking some more about horses and tanks. Or, rather, about military transformation.
Is the British military really transforming? What about the US military – whose QDR looms? If they are, does that represent a transformation in our respective strategic cultures, or a less thoroughgoing adaptation of organizational practices? Are any changes, whether doctrinal, technological or organizational, the result of something profoundly new about the ways in which our societies seek to use violence instrumentally, or just a temporary aberration between bouts of more conventional warfighting?
David Richards and likeminded folk are betting that the character of war is changing fundamentally, in ways that reflect not just the tactics of the battlefield, but the deeper relationships between societies, their militaries and violence. That sort of profound change would challenge the widespread notion of a strategic culture – at least if strategic culture is conceived as a relatively static expression of collective attitudes which, in some measure, shapes the way in which societies seek to advance their aims through warfare.
Personally, I have some misgivings about the notion of a strategic culture – real cultures are too multifaceted for that, cross-cultural fertilization of ideas is too much evident, and cultural attitudes, manifestly, can shift rapidly – all of which undercuts the utility of culture as a means of explaining strategic behaviour. Nonetheless, the cultural (re)turn reminds us of the importance of Clausewitz’s most profound theme – the essential relationship between war and the societies who wage it.
All this came to mind while reading Peter Paret’s outstanding book, The Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806. The opening lines set the stage:
The components of war – mobilization of human resources, discipline, weapons, tactics, strategy, and much else, the issues they raise and the problems they pose – are timeless. But the forms they take and the social context that does much to shape them are always changing. How people react to change and innovation in war, or fail to react, is as meaningful as the changes themselves.
Patrick Porter recently cautioned against the tendency to anticipate radical cleavages in warfare while overlooking the continuities. That’s an important idea. The tank did not immediately displace the horse and, more generally, combined arms approaches remain important in waging war effectively across a spectrum of intensities. This, I think, is a valuable counterweight to the tendency of some analysts to see great novelty in modern war (often a surefire way of earning a wide, if shortlived, reputation as a deep strategic thinker).
But while the essentials remain unchanged – war is violent, political and foggy – the types of arms and, more broadly, the attitudes of belligerent societies are, in fact, particular to individual societies. The degree to which a society will inflict and endure violence is a product both of available technologies and prevailing attitudes – both of which are specific to given times and places.
Gian Gentile, in his sometimes lonely public rearguard against the rising tide of COIN advocates, is, like Patrick and Stephen Biddle, correct to point to the timeless virtues of combined arms, effectively marshaled, and also correct to note that not all wars will look like Afghanistan – future war may be a good deal bloodier and more of a threat to our societies. But without reflecting more explicitly on the sort of arms and the propensity of societies to employ them, I think something is underplayed in their analyses.
Concretely, Western societies today do not field armies like those of the World Wars, or of Korea, Vietnam or even the Falklands. A Britain trending towards social liberalism demands high standards of discrimination and proportionality even against its sworn enemies, and is highly sensitive to casualties among its own volunteer forces. These tendencies would be evident too in a struggle against more capable adversaries than the Taliban, even, I suspect, one with higher stakes. Yes to combined arms – but the types of arms combined today are not the combined arms of the Somme, the bocage, or the advance to the Yalu. Ditto the societies combining them and the nature of enemies they are combined against.
Times have changed, and will continue to do so: and, war being a relationship, that goes for us and our adversaries alike.
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you’re listening too much to that man Porter’s blather.
of course, Biddle acknowledges that the character and context can change (such as the arms we use, or even attitudes). What he rightly questions is whether these changes will fundamentally alter the nature of war.
So to take your examples, a risk-averse society with expensive weapons and sensitive attitudes might become fiercely aroused by a terrorist attack to dispense with niceties and wage war brutally, at least for a time.
On a more banal point, there are also remarkable continuities when it comes to the outward context. I would suggest that a Euro-centric concern loses sight of the return to tradition, great power confrontation and heavy arms build-up that is going on in the Asia Pacific. They are embracing new things too, like cyber war, but its a long way from Rupert Smith. We ignore these continuites and reversions at our peril.
Surely the point about the Somme or the Bocage isn’t that the armies that fought them were magnificently prepared for them but that they proved flexible enough to adapt to them and eventually to overcome. Where I agree utterly with Mr Gentile is on the marketing of COIN as the universal panacea. It is not so and there is a danger that overwhelming focus on COIN would/will come at the expense of that flexibility.
To a degree we’re already seeing this in the MoD where it looks increasingly likely that one or even both of the RN’s Aircraft Carriers might face the axe to provide more cash for the Army. Such a result would be disastrous.
Kenneth says:
“Personally, I have some misgivings about the notion of a strategic culture – real cultures are too multifaceted for that, cross-cultural fertilization of ideas is too much evident, and cultural attitudes, manifestly, can shift rapidly – all of which undercuts the utility of culture as a means of explaining strategic behaviour.”
I always like your work. But, come on: what does this sentence mean? What is a ‘real culture’? Come to that, what is ‘culture’? What is a ‘cultural attitude’? Where have we seen rapid shifts in these things?
I know that this stuff is really hard to measure, but I bet if we gave an American staff, a French staff and a British staff a similar problem to plan they would produce different plans. Would those differences not be evidence of their different strategic cultures? Wouldn’t we explain those differences by reference to culture? (whatever that means).
There is something going on in culture if only it was legible. Meantime lets all join the fat nazi and reach for our pistols.
Keep up the good work.
Tripper – thanks. I guess….
What is culture…. Well, exactly – try some Clifford Geertz for more on that poser. Rapid shifts in strategic culture? How about Germany after WW2 for one classic example. Or Japan after a brief visit from Commodore Perry. Or Prussia after 1806, for the one I mention in the post.
As for cross cultural fertilization, I’ve just finished wading through reams of jihadi strategic thought – an enlightening exercise for many reasons, but not least because of the heavy borrowing of ideas about guerrilla warfare from theorists including Giap, Guevara, Mao and Marighella. They take these ideas and make them their own, mixing them with interpretations from the Islamic literature. Paul Berman makes a similar argument about the Islamist ideology itself – pointing to the secular totalitarian strain in Qutb and Mawdudi’s writings.
Your last point is interesting – that there’s something going on in culture only if it’s legible. Well, indeed, one artefact of culture is writing, as in doctrine. There are others.
Also – I remembered the thought that was in my head when writing that cultural attitudes shift rapidly. I’d just been reading about the British Social Attitudes Survey, and our increasing social liberalism. Fascinating stuff.
Tripper,
on the culture point: I agree that those three souls might well produce different plans. But put them at war with one another, and they will have to start aping and adapting to one another. External pressure and changing material circumstances will count as much as internal cultural factors. Britain improvised a mass army to fight on the continent against Germany in world war one, against its custom; Germany broke its own traditions to wage a U-Boat campaign. Cultures under pressure reinvent themselves. That’s the kind of fluidity and flexibility Ken is getting at, I suspect.
This is good thought-provoking stuff: thank-you.
I am clearer on your cultural point (I think): the Prussian reaction to the disaster of Jena-Auerstadt being a great case study. People adapt, got it. But we still need to define ‘culture’, don’t we? Let’s take a punt: could you not argue that Prussia, analysing and reverse-engineering the Napoleonic art of war, produced something that was really a product of Prussian, rather than French culture? They didn’t break copyright. They applied all that good Hegelian/Kantian/Prussian cultural rigour to synthesise a system that was a good deal more intellectually grounded than what the French had been doing. After all Nappy was a genius, but a practical genius in the main, not really a great theory man. I know, I know: I will read the book!
I agree with you that the Islamists are borrowing concepts (Hegel again!) from the West. But if they are then they certainly aren’t applying them in any way that a western strategist would understand. Islamist terrorists don’t seem to be using violence to achieve policy goals in a concrete utility of force sense. You just have to look at UBL’s latest pronouncement on climate change etc to see the dreadful futility of his murderous cause. Now that is not to say that what he is doing doesn’t make ‘sense’ from his own cultural perspective – but doesn’t that show that he is following his own cultural path rather than adopting a western outlook?
Finally, having scraped over your cultural speed bump, you demand to be challenged over your combined arms assertion. I don’t get it: in Afghanistan today there are infantry, armour, artillery, and air all co-operating together. If there was any salt-water nearby then I’m pretty sure there would be naval gunfire too. In what way is this any different from 1918 onwards? Yes, yes, I know the kit is fancier, more expensive etc, but conceptually where/how do you see the break?
Scraping over?!
Is AQ strategic, then. Does it have goals? Yes. Does it have theories of violence. Yes. Can you have strategy with only limited C2. Answer, yes. See Dima Adamsky in the latest Studies in Conflict and Terrorism for a start to answering that question. Common doctrine and mission command allow for instrumental violence with limited structure.
Combined arms – I didn’t demand to be challenged.
Tripper,
you tend to treat cultures as primarily national in their scope. But there is decent evidence that modern militaries, not unlike those of the late 18th/early 19th centuries, are cosmopolitan. They are part of an international professional military class. They study each other, they attend each other’s staff colleges and academies, and now and again (as with Clausewitz in Russia) they hire foreign advisors into their militaries. You cannot understand the evolution of Japanese strategic culture without the role of the British navy and the Prussian army (not to mention the Wilhelmine constitution).
This might also apply to the Brit, French and German chaps you mentioned. They will differ -but they will also overlap mightily, I suggest.
On your Napoleonic point: isn’t it the case that the time and opportunity of that long war enabled N’s enemies to adapt and emulate his model? Wasn’t this factor just as important as Hegel?
So I would take a more cross-border definition of culture here.
‘Combined arms – I didn’t demand to be challenged.’
No, trust me, you did demand to be challenged. True you did not _ask_ to be challenged, as such. It’s a bit like going into a rough pub and engaging the resident cage-fighter’s girlfriend in suggestive banter. You are not, at that point, demanding a mano-e-mano fist-fight to the finish but, having set a particular course, one must not be surprised at the outcome…
Now come on: ‘the types of arms combined today are not the combined arms of the Somme, the bocage, or the advance to the Yalu.’ If you mean that there has been some paradigm shift (?) in the nature of combined operations then I would be interested in learning more. But if you simply mean that the tanks aren’t lozenge-shaped and the planes aren’t biplanes anymore then true enough – but somewhat a trite observation, non? Nothing wrong there, of course, everyone has a right to triteness. I seldom exhibit any other quality.
Thanks for clarifying the culture point: I’m only scraping along because I am slow. Recently I have got used to someone pointing to ‘cultural differences’ – then everyone nods wisely and drifts away from the problem. We do need to think more clearly about what we mean by culture and your post is a good start.
Respectfully,
T
Be sensible, be polite.
When you write that we need to think more clearly about culture – a good place to start is by reading more about it – there’d been a fair whack of thinking already done before I posted on it.
Combined arms. Most broad functions were established (aside from perhaps cyber and space weapons systems and doctrines) some time ago. So what did I mean when, having praised the timeless virtues of combined arms, I wrote that
‘the types of arms combined today are not the combined arms of the Somme, the bocage, or the advance to the Yalu. Ditto the societies combining them and the nature of enemies they are combined against.’?
I meant just that. The devil is in ‘type’, which you use broadly as synonymous with role, but I use more narrowly as referring to characteristics and capabilities. These have certainly changed, partly in response to advances in technology, partly in response to societal (or, whisper it, cultural) trends. For that reason, our armed forces must deploy violence in ways that they would not have done previously. The development of non-lethal munitions, bombs with smaller yields and unmanned weapons platforms are responses to some of these trends. That goes some way beyond ‘lozenge shaped tanks’, I suggest, into a qualitative transformation of what weapons can and should do.
For more on which try some Christopher Coker – especially his Humane War and War in an Age of Risk.
Interesting. I see where your argument is going but, being a fan of ‘deep historical continuities’ (tm Michael Semple), I am not certain how far I can follow it. I suspect that if you took a British company commander from the 3rd Afghan War to Helmand today he would have no difficulty in understanding the deployment of ‘combined arms’ violence there, and the policy restrictions on it too (see also John Masters’ complaints about policy restrictions in ‘Bugles and a Tiger’). And wasn’t it the inventor of the puckle gun (Mr Puckle?) who counselled the firing of square bullets at muslims and round bullets at christians? That looks like a societal/cultural outlook on technology to me.
But good provoking stuff nonetheless and thanks for the tip on Coker – I will check him out.
And apologies for having violated your pragmatic, necessary and welcome posting-policy (‘be sensible, be polite’) with my poor attempts at lame humour. As Jim Storr said somewhere recently: ‘doctrine is not inherently funny.’ I’ll try to be more thoughtful in future.
I am not a student of the King’s College, but I am interested to the strategy
Examining the war of counter insurgency and war on terrorism is possible to affirm that the idea of strategy is partly forgotten. Sun Tzu affirmed that the enemy could be defeated attacking its weakness and Machiavelli that is necessary to cut the resources that the adversary makes strong. These concepts are not applied for defeating the adversaries, because technology is considered a lot.
Paolo